Random Thoughts

Whether you want to believe it or not, every single person who reads the Bible participates in Biblical Interpretation. When you read the Bible you are either intentionally or unintentionally interpreting what it is saying. The question is, are you interpreting the Bible correctly? Correctly interpreting the Bible is extremely important, especially today when there are all kinds of wild theories and opinions about the times that we are living in. Too often people want to have "revelations" or "special insights" into the Scripture that fundamentally changes the original meaning of the text.   Lots of people are running to the Book of Revelation to find answers to the news stories of today, questions like, “Could the COVID Vaccine be the Mark of the Beast?” I just stumbled upon a YouTube video that had almost 200,000 views where the guy was making that exact argument.   In the book "How To Read The Bible For All It's Worth" by Gordon Fee, it has this hel

Righteousness is defined by the dictionary as, “behavior that is morally justifiable or right.” The Bible’s standard for human righteousness is God’s own perfection in every attribute, every attitude, every behavior, and every word.   Sometimes in our zeal to be pleasing to God, we can get a warped idea of righteousness. Sometimes we look at other believers and we measure ourselves against each other, and because we are human we tend to judge or measure their righteousness, or what we consider their lack of righteousness, against ourselves and tell ourselves that we are doing better than we actually are. This is exactly what Jesus told us in Luke 18 about the Pharisee and tax collector. Luke 18:10-14 “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week,; I give tithes of