What is the Standard for your Faith?
What is the basis for your faith?
What is your faith built upon?
A Standard is something established for use as a rule or basis of comparison and is something generally accepted as reliable or authoritative.
Is the standard for your faith what your church teaches, the doctrines established to be the tenet of one’s faith, the belief held to be the truth by a person or some group? Is this standard that guides your faith established by your church and can you depend upon it to be the ultimate truth?
If the standard of your faith is based upon the teaching of the church, then which church? Since we all know that all churches do not adhere to the same doctrines, then which church should we allow to establish the basis of our faith? Should it be the Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, Pentecostal etc, etc? They all can’t be right because they all don’t hold to the same identical set of beliefs.
What if we let the Bible be the standard of our faith? If so, then which bible? There are literally hundreds of different bible translations available.
Shouldn’t we accept as the basis or standard of our faith those things that Jehovah our God has set forth for us to believe, since He is the creator of all things and has established us in this World for His own pleasure? That is what the scripture tells us.
Revelations 4:11 “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for you have created all things, and for your pleasure they are and were created.
The scriptures also support this tenet as follows:
Deuteronomy 8:3: “man does not live by bread only, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of Jehovah does man live.
Matthew 4:4: Jesus said, “It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.”
Now that the baseline for our faith should be determined by whatever God has spoken and passed down to all people by those He has used to be His spokespersons, shouldn’t we then try to determine who was authorized to speak for Him? As we do this another scripture must be kept in mind, as follows:
2 Peter 1:20-21: “no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.
Yes Peter tells us that certain men were ordained by God to pass His words on to the people. Although, Peter warns us about false teachers coming along that would in fact misinterpret and put their own interpretation to God’s Word.
2 Peter 2:1: “But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who surreptitiously shall bring in damnable heresies.
So the bottom line that we should be able to depend on to pass along the truth of God’s Word to us was in the hands of those who were in times past, ordained to do so by Jehovah. These men were then responsible to see that the scriptures were written for the people. Finally we get to the point where our Bible is being developed in written form that we can be assured of is without error.
Here stands our baseline for the future, a written Bible that can be used to base our faith upon, knowing that these men who were appointed by God will insure that the inerrant word of God is preserved for us.
Now in modern times our church leaders proclaim that the bible they use to teach the people from is God’s Word, the inerrant Word of God that contains no errors, but that is not true. Why isn’t it true? It’s not true because they don’t have the original, or an errorless copy of the original that was put in writing under the direction of those men who God spoke to.
The original inerrant set of scriptures were written in ancient languages and needed to be translated into our modern languages for everyone to read and understand. This created a problem for us as those who performed the translations introduced errors into their final product, which are our bibles. Then to top it off, our bible teachers and preachers developed their doctrines from those translations which were imperfect.
So, where does that leave us? Now we have all of the different types of churches that have developed church doctrines which do not resemble the original inerrant scriptures that those chosen men of God originally wrote for us. Again, what do we use for the standard? Do we use one of the poor translations or one of the misguided churches? Take your choice and never know what the complete truth of God’s Word really is.
Fortunately there have been some learned men who produced works that would help us to determine what the scriptures actually said before the multitude of translations were made. Two notable men who devoted their lives to produce works to aid in the detailed study of scripture were Desiderius Erasmus and James Strong. Erasmus in the 1500’s produced a work called the Textus Receptus and Strong produced a Greek Hebrew Dictionary in the 1800’s. The Textus Receptus was used in the development of the Authorized King James Version of the Bible. The Strong’s Greek Hebrew Dictionary was produced to aid in a word for word study of the AKJV.
If only our bible teachers and preachers would have prepared themselves adequately by studying the bible in comparison to the original scriptures, using these two works to aid them to accurately understand the Bible text; we could have had a standard for our beliefs that was according to God’s Word in the beginning.
If it was necessary for God to anoint certain men to pass His Word on to us, then it still must be necessary for God ordained men to glean the truth for us and produce some kind of work that we can depend on to be the standard for our set of beliefs and basis for our faith.
During my lifetime of Bible study, by performing a word study of every word in the Bible, I have determined that the Authorized King James Version of the Bible is the most accurate one in existence. Although even this version has errors in it, it behooves every Bible Teacher to perform a detailed study of this work before endeavoring to teach the general public the correct meaning of scripture. If any Bible Teacher cannot demonstrate that this type of detailed study has been performed, then I suggest that everyone should either attempt to find a Bible Teacher that has, or every individual should do this for themselves.
Finally it’s up to you to decide. What are you going to accept as the basis of your beliefs? Are you going to accept the doctrines of your church or what your preacher teaches? If you do, the chances are that you have accepted false teaching. Remember that Jesus said: “There will be false teachers among you”.
I recommend that you put your trust in the unadulterated Word of God as He gave it to us in the beginning.
Luke 11:9-10 says:
“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asks receives; and he that seeks finds; and to him that knocks it shall be opened.”
1 comment:
Thank you Visitor for your comments/questions
It doesn’t take a true prophet to have a vision and speak “thus saith the Lord”, God can give the gift of prophecy to any person He wants to use to edify the church. What constitutes a prophecy that came from God is when it comes to pass. I was not a witness to any prophesies that he made before the fact and saw them come to pass after the fact, were you?
It has been widely promoted that William Branham was a prophet of God, but William Branham denied that. So did William Branham lie about not being a God sent prophet, or did God not tell him?
I don’t believe that it takes a Prophet of God to glean out the truths contained in the Bible, which is why God ordains certain people to be Teachers in the Church.
Here is what William Branham said: “I'm not a seer; I'm not a prophet; but I--I'm just a poor Gentile that the Lord lets me be used to help the Gentile people in these days. You see? I believe it's regarded somewhere in the Bible as some sort of a gift, but whatever it is, that's--it's a small and that ain't the significance of it. It's what we can do to help somebody to get closer to God.”
William Branham referred to a gift of the Spirit, the gift of prophecy that can be bestowed upon whoever God needs to use for a certain work. (Rom 12:6-10) He said many times that he was not a prophet, that he was called by God to be an Evangelist with the gift of Divine Healing.
If William Branham was a Prophet, then he would have known that the Bible was not the inerrant Word of God and would not have insistently proclaimed that it was. With so many errors introduced into the Bible by man during the translation of it, which has been proven many times, a Prophet or a God sent Teacher would recognize them.
Everyone wants to use the gifts that God gave William Branham as a pattern that other men should demonstrate in order to be accepted as a servant of God. God gives gifts of the Spirit to whomever He wants to fulfill His own purposes.
If you believe that his messages, if you’re talking about what he taught, came from God, then God must have contradicted Himself. Since William Branham taught things contrary to scripture
His teaching could not have been from God. On at least one occasion he told other people that he was not sent to be a teacher of the bible, but he was insistent to teach anyway.
He was a great Evangelist with many gifts of the Spirit, but he got out of his calling when he started teaching.
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