Who are we to believe: the Word or John?

Is it possible for God to make a mistake? Would he ever deceive anyone?

Snoqualmie Falls, and the lodge, Washington

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I won't make you wait to the end. The answer is no.

If it is possible to God to say the smallest untruth or make the teeniest mistake, then he is not God. The problem is this:

John 7:8-10

Go to the festival yourselves. I am not going to this festival, for my time has not yet fully come.” After his brothers had gone to the festival, he also went, not publicly but in secret.

and this:

John 7:22

Because of this Moses gave you circumcision (it is, of course, not from Moses but from the patriarchs), and you circumcise a man on the Sabbath.

In one chapter of John's Gospel, Jesus is untruthful and then wrong.

The common solution to Jesus saying he was not going and then going is to insert "yet". Even if we can find a text that supports that, why would Jesus say it? Is he also afraid to go? Is he annoyed by his brother's pestering that he says this to stop the nagging? Is the One who spent 40 days in the wilderness (but not according to John) able to become so weary that he says something (anything!) to get them to stop? Does he excuse himself from being true to his word by saying it was okay to deceive them because they were trying to deceive him? What is the explanation?

Jesus cannot be afraid to go to Jerusalem, he cannot be wearied by people who pester him so much that he creates a deception to get them to stop talking, and he cannot say no and then yes. If the word of God means anything, none of these can be true. Adding "yet" solves the problem with the language but it does not solve what happened.

Then in verse 22 Jesus makes a mistake that John corrects, because it's important to John that we know the truth. But knowing the truth is irrelevant if the Truth can be mistaken.

I am not (please read that in the largest letters you can imagine) saying the word of God contains errors. I am saying it does not! That is why these two verses must be explained, not explained away.

If we say that the word of God is true, then there is no danger at looking at it under the strongest light possible. It is always right to look more closely. It is never right to look less closely. There is always an explanation. The explanation might not be what we want to see, but seeing what we want is never the solution.

The claims of John are either completely true or completely not true:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

Those who do what is true come to the light.

God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.

I am the Light of the World.

Which of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me?

What I speak, I speak just as the Father has told me.

I am the Way and the Truth and the Life.

Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.

If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong.

For this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.

and:

When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

In love with the Word

The word of God is more important that any of our desires or preferences. The debate over the King James version is nothing in comparison to a debate over canonicity. We all prefer a certain version of the Bible. Even if we change versions later in life we still prefer the versions of verses we memorized or fell in love with. I want the 23rd Psalm in the version I learned as a child, and the Lord's Prayer, and the Beatitudes, and Isaiah 7:14, and Isaiah 53.

I learned James 3:18 from the original NASB: "The seed whose fruit is righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace". Beautiful. It rolls off the tongue with a good cadence and is so poetic it's musical. The NIV version (Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness) just doesn't do it for me. Even though the new version is more accurate, I still like the old one better.

The problem is: personal preference has nothing to do with the Word of God. 2 Tim 3:16-17:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

There is only one purpose of Scripture: to equip the people of God so they can do the work of God the way he wants it. We can love it, but we cannot only love it. God is not impressed that we have a preferred version or that we have memorized Scripture. God is impressed when he do it. Paul says that you can win the race only if you follow the rules. Here are our rules. And rule #1 is: We have to do it!

When we were working in the children's hospital I developed a workplace policy that everyone had to read as part of their employment. When it was just 3 or 4 of us, the rules weren't so important because we were always together. But when we grew and were working 7 days a week on 5 floors, a policy was need to keep everyone on course. I tried to make it readable and as understandable as possible, but a person telling me how much they enjoyed reading it and then showing up for work would be fired.

There is no reason for the people of God being the people of God except to do what God has given them to do. His word as the workplace policy statement on how that is to be done. Loving his word but caring nothing for his work is not loving him.

Bottom line: If we insist on a version, fine, so long as we do it. If we like the King James version then obey the King James version. If we like the NIV and not the NRSV, then obey the NIV. It doesn't matter. Just do it.

I'll tell you a secret

I don't think John should be in Scripture. I know this will shock you and you won't want to keep reading, but say this is to defend the word of God, not belittle it.

When the letters were being gathered by the committees who decided upon what should be in the New Testament canon, a letter from Matthew or John or Peter was gold. They were chosen by Christ to be in the original Twelve and so they had an authority that frankly, was greater than anyone on the committee. No one was willing to say they were the judges of Matthew and John and Peter. The writings of the brothers of Jesus, James and Jude, were also considered to have high value. Silver.

That might have been a mistake. These people wrote for a variety of reasons, but probably none of them wrote with the thought that they would become Scripture. They were normal, not very important, men who wrote to small churches to encourage small groups and answer questions and problems. No one knew their writings would be printed in every language and in distributed in the billions of copies.

These men all knew they were flawed. John and his brother James had asked for the seat of honor next to Christ. Peter had denied Christ three times. They all went home after the crucifixion defeated and ready to go back to their prior lives. They had bad breath, got angry at times, were afraid at times, said stupid things, did stupid things... they were just like us.

The same attitude that makes the King James Bible the Holy Bible is the attitude that makes the authors of Scripture saints. They weren't. They knew they weren't.

It was the job of the committee to examine the writings to make sure they were also the word of God. They should have added John to the apocrypha, not the New Testament. There are a lot of good writings from the first century that are not Scripture. I'm not disputing the authorship. But I am saying that the word of God cannot contain even the hint of an untruth, and John includes two in one chapter. It doesn't belong.

How do we live without it?

Possibly the better question is: how to we live with it? Is there one thing in the Gospel of John that is the only reason you do the work of God? If it was not in the Canon, would you be unable to obey?

I have taught John and have enjoyed it. John 15 especially was one of my early favorites. But the fact is, there is nothing in John that has bothered me so much that I had to change my life in order to find the answer. The rich young ruler in Luke 18 made me change. The Beatitudes made me change. Paul? Absolutely. John? No. Not because there is anything wrong with John, but because there are no demands in it.

Sorry, but the commandment in John 15:12 that we love one another is not the first commandment: it's the second one. The first commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind. The fact is, there is nothing in the Gospel of John that requires anyone to do anything for God. "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends" is not the greatest love. The greatest love is to lay down your life for God.

People say that John gives a different perspective. They say the Church already had the other Gospels and the letters, so John didn't have to repeat all these things and could fill in the blanks. I don't agree. John didn't fill in the blanks: he removed all the requirements. The only ones he left were to believe and to love. That is a very modern belief system but it is not Scripture.

There is nothing in John that is going to make you quit your job, sell everything, and work for God.

According to John there is no requirement to love your enemy, give to anyone who asks, take up your cross, or sell your possessions and follow Christ. Jesus says you cannot serve both God and money; John says to love one another. Jesus says whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple; John says to love one another. Jesus says do not worry about your life, what you will eat; John says to love one another.

This is not filling in the gaps. This is removing every demand of God upon us and replacing it with a comforting word: love one another.

John wrote but he did not write Scripture. Paul wrote letters to Corinth that are not in Scripture. If Paul didn't always write Scripture, then nobody did. If God made sure that the committee chose only the letters that were actually Scripture, why did God not preserve Paul's other letters if they were Scripture? If we are certain that all the letters included in the Canon are Scripture, are we certain that all the letters not included weren't? If the Spirit guided the writers to insure there were no errors and guarded the preservation of those letters so they were available to the committee, and oversaw the committee so they chose only the letters that were Scripture, then we know that not everything Paul wrote was Scripture because we must then admit the word of God was lost.

Paul wrote letters that were truth but were not included in Scripture. John wrote letters that were included in Scripture but were not truth. Not fraudulent: human: not the word of God. God is perfect. We are not. Anything not completely true is not the word of God.

If you have a strong reaction against this, my reply is "why?". Are you saying the committee was guided by the Spirit so that all the writings were included or excluded exactly as God wants? Are you saying it's okay for Scripture to contain errors because it's the Scripture you know and you don't want anyone messing with it? Are you saying I have nothing to say about this because it's way above my pay grade?

My reply is: you're right. Absolutely. Writing this has been difficult. It bothers me a lot to say things like this. So why do it? Because it bothers me to not do it.

Experts are hesitant to touch these problems because they know what happens when someone looks too strongly. What they can't explain they explain away. But there is always the possibility, as frightening as it is, that if we must create explanations it's not Scripture. There are certainly many things in Scripture that we need help understanding, but when the expert obfuscates there is a chance the expert doesn't understand either, but must explain because he's expected to know. In that case, there is a possibility that the confusion is understandable: it's not the word of God. God cannot be not wrong. John can.