Is it okay to agree with some aspects of the bible and disagree with some?
Femi Osunnuyi: First of all, let me say it is possible to do this, in fact, it’s hard not to but I don’t know whether you are married, I am. When I got married to my wife, what I was trying to do with my wife is to accept her for who she is. I do that by taking both her flaws as I perceive them, and her good parts too. Now, what if I said to my wife, ‘You know those things that you do that annoy me which quite frankly are not moral issues, just things I don’t like and I say, never exhibit them in front of me, just hide them’
Now, she could do that, but you know what while we are having a relationship, we won’t have a real loving relationship because I’ll be having a relationship with somebody who is not my wife, I’ll be having a relationship with an image of my wife that I have created. Now, I want to apply this to our relationship with God and our understanding of who God is in terms of his commandments in the bible, because although the bible is not God, it reveals God. If we say we don’t want to keep certain commandments of the bible, but we want to pick the ones that we want, then essentially, what we are doing is acting as ‘God’ ourselves because we are then creating a new revelation of God. We either have to decide to allow God to reveal himself for who he is or we recreate the revelation of the God that we really want and let me ask you this, ‘Do you really want a God who cannot tell you when you are wrong?’, ‘Do you really want a God that always agrees with you on every point?’ I don’t think so, if we had that, we would never grow but only remain in the place we want because at the end of the day, we are the ones that are sovereign. However, the difference between God and my wife is that God is not flawed, we, you and I are the ones that have flaws, so we need God’s commandments, His thinking to be able to shape us.
I want to put one question to you though, sometimes what we think is the commandment of God is not the commandment of God, whether by ourselves or what people say. For instance, when you read certain passages in the Old Testament, where God said, ‘go and destroy these people’ and so you say, ‘Oh, should we be against certain nations?’, the answer is no. Then somebody else says, ‘We have to sometimes correct the bible, so since Jesus says forgive your enemy, we can go back to that Old Testament passage and conclude that it couldn’t have been God and then correct’ No, please don’t do that. The fact that something was true at a certain period doesn’t mean it is always true, or the fact that God commanded something to be done at a certain period doesn’t always mean that it has to be obeyed.
This is why we say that the bible is a progressive revelation. The way God dealt with God’s people in the Old Testament was within this tribal warfare thing and God was preserving that nation. Warfare in that regard mattered but now, as the revelation of God was progressing, it got to a point where the promise of Abraham was now fulfilled, which was that God is going to have a people of all nations, so God’s people are no longer divided among different nations anymore, so it is not that we are correcting the word of God, it’s not a correction, it’s a progression, so everything that God says in the old testament was true but there are some things that were for that particular time. Some things revealed the character of God; God said, ‘Don’t commit adultery’ in in the Old Testament, he said, ‘Don’t steal’, we still don’t steal nor commit adultery but for instance, God also says, ‘Go to the temple and worship me’ in the Old Testament but now, because of who Christ is, as the meeting place between God and man, Christ is the fulfilment of the temple, so we don’t go to a physical temple anymore, now we go to the temple of the people of God.
Finally, I’ll like to encourage you, if you are having difficulty with some commandments in the Bible, before you say, ‘I don’t want to obey it’ or before you go ahead to obey something that is not necessarily being asked of you, why don’t you take those commandments to people that you trust God has gifted with the knowledge of the word of God, to help you interpret it? Why don’t you do some research? Why don’t you buy a book about it or listen to a seminary, a message or teaching about it to be sure that that commandment still holds in the right way, but it’s never an option and should never be an option for us to want to cherry-pick things that are actual commandments of God.
Answered by Femi Osunnuyi is lead pastor of City Church, a gospel-centred urban church in the city of Lagos. Because of his passion for church planting and leadership development he also serves on the Lead Team of Acts29 and the Advisory Team of City to City Africa. He is happily married to Tosin and is father to Tofunmi and Timilehin.