The Bible on Trial - Twisting the Truth: When Scripture Becomes a Weapon

Scripture misuse has been a persistent challenge since biblical times, with religious leaders often distorting God's word for personal agendas. Common misuses include cherry-picking verses, ignoring context, and weaponizing text for condemnation. Jesus demonstrated proper scriptural interpretation by teaching in full context, emphasizing mercy, and using it for healing rather than harm. Understanding historical context, studying complete passages, and applying scripture with love and mercy are essential for proper biblical interpretation.

Transcript

The courtroom was packed. The air crackled with tension as the judge took his seat, his heavy robes flowing around him. He was an experienced man, hardened by years of legal battles. But even he could feel that this trial was different. The outcome had already been decided before the accused, ever foot set.

Ever set foot in the room. The prosecutor stood confidently before the jury, his voice smooth and commanding. Ladies and gentlemen, the case before you is clear. The accused is a danger to our way of life. He claims authority he does not have.

He speaks in riddles, twisting the minds of the people. He stirs division under the guise of peace. And worst of all, he dares to claim equality with God. Murmurs rippled through the crowd. The defense attorney, a man with kind eyes and steady composure, rose to speak.

Your Honor, the prosecution relies not on evidence, but on fear. My client has harmed no one. He has raised no rebellion. He has done nothing but speak the truth. A truth that some find inconvenient.

The prosecutor smirked and lifted a scroll high into the air. The law is clear. The scriptures say anyone who claims to be God must die. You, the jury, are the upholders of justice. The law is on our side.

The defense attorney folded his hands, his voice calm but firm. The same scriptures also say he will be called a wonderful counselor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace. You cannot pick and choose what fits your case while ignoring what does not. The crowd in the galley shifted uncomfortably. Someone coughed, others whispered.

The tension in the room thickened. The prosecutor's voice turned cold. The people have already decided. They know the truth. He gestured toward the galley, and suddenly voices began to rise.

A few at first, then many. Guilty. He must be punished. Crucify him.

The judge pounded his gavel. Enough. I find no fault in this man. His voice wavered, though the weight of the moment pressed upon him. The prosecutor then stepped closer to the bench, lowering his voice so that only the judge could hear.

You. Your Honor, if you let him go, you are no friend of the Emperor. You know what that means. The judge swallowed hard. The he had seen trials like this before.

He knew the cost of standing against the tide. Slowly he exhaled and straightened in his chair. Very well. His voice was heavy. The court finds the accused guilty.

A cheer erupted from the crowd. The prosecutor smiled, satisfied. The defense attorney closed his eyes, sorrow seen in every line of his face. And the accused? He said nothing.

He did not argue. He did not beg. He did not cry. He stood silently, resolute as they took him away. Truth has been condemned not because truth was false, but because those in power had twisted the evidence to fit a verdict that they wanted.

I hope that you understand that the retelling of this trial of Jesus should remind us that Jesus Christ, the son of the living God, who only spoke in truth, was killed for sharing that truth because it threatened the status quo. Those who condemned Jesus, they knew the scriptures, they knew the truth of God. They had no doubt that they knew what God wanted for them. They knew all the rules of Deuteronomy, they knew the requirements of the law found in Leviticus, they could easily recite the ten Commandments. They had them all memorized.

But in that moment, Jesus goes before pirate Pilate. They cherry pick scripture and they were able to accuse Jesus, who we know is the son of God. So just as the religious leaders twisted scripture to condemn Jesus, people today, I fully believe, still manipulate God's word to justify oppression, selfishness and power. When people cherry pick scriptures to serve their own agendas, we're not seeking the truth in those moments, we're shaping a verdict that serves our own desires. But today we gather in this place to celebrate that no matter how the world tries to twist it, the truth of God remains just that truth, unshaken.

So I don't know if you guys have ever had an experience like this before, but have you ever heard anybody quote a scripture and they quote it just. And you're like, I don't know if that's really what it says. Has that ever happened to you? In our world today, so many Christians know just enough scripture to get them in trouble. How many times have you heard somebody call themselves a Christian and quote part of a scripture to condemn somebody else or to, you know, justify disagreeing with somebody else?

And then the, the quote was not right. And I bet for all of us in here, it wasn't. Was. It's not just happened one time. I bet for many of us in here, we've heard it repeatedly.

Maybe you heard a Christian quote, something that they thought was in the Bible, but you know for sure what they said was not the word of God, right? Instead it was probably something they read on a fortune cookie and then, oh, that sounds like Jesus. Maybe you've heard people who call themselves Christians start quoting the scripture, but then midway through the scripture, they just give up because they've forgotten what it said. I've done that like a lot in my life, right?

I say all this because the world is currently putting the Bible on trial. The Christian world treats the Bible as if it's infallible, uneditable, perfectly written, unmistakably translated, incorruptibly transliterated English word of God. Right. But the problems arise when people critique the Bible and find places that might be understood to be contradictory. When we as believers in Jesus Christ don't know enough scripture to quote a single verse when all we can recite from memory is John 3:16.

I think there's a problem in our world today. There are Christians who struggle to quote a single scripture outside of that. And there are non believers who know the Bible better than we do.

Those are the people who put us as believers in that holy sacred word of God on trial. Because the things that we say and the way that we live don't look like the scriptures that we say we believe in.

The Bible currently is translated into thousands of languages. I didn't know we had thousands of languages. But currently YouVersion, which is one of the most popular downloaded apps for your phone where you can read Scripture, has 3023 different versions of the Bible online in 2005 languages. They also have 1490 audio Bible versions. And the English language alone has more than 100 different English translated versions.

So which one's the right one?

Yeah, Chuck will choose for us. Oh, okay.

The white. Excuse me. Wycliffe Bible translators report that at least one book of the Bible is available in close to 3,600 languages. The entire Bible is accessible in 724.

Can they all be infallible? Can they all be perfectly written by the hand of God himself? This is tough.

So this week I turned to social media as I always do, because it's the most reliable source. But I asked if some of the people who are on social media could help me with my sermon series because I wanted to see if anybody had any experiences with anything relating to the topic of mistranslated scripture or quoting scripture wrongly. And I didn't get a ton of help, but I did get some folks who offered a couple stories about times that they've heard people using scripture to justify their own beliefs, even though others didn't believe the same thing. That might be why we have 40,000 different denominations in the Christian world. But I also got people who were questioning what I was doing.

Why in the world are you questioning the authority of the Bible? First of all, that's not what I'm doing. I may have been called a false prophet this week, so there's that. But I want to be absolutely clear when we talk about the Bible. I love scripture.

I do this every week because I love God's word. I love the stories in the Bible. I love the characters. I love the redemptive arc of history that it seeks to prove. I love that the Bible proves God's love for us and is found in in no other book in all of human worlds.

I love that God becomes incarnate According to the Book of John, chapter one, the Word of God literally becomes flesh and dwells among us. Right? The Word of God is more than just words on a page. I have the utmost respect for our scriptures and that's why whenever I try to read scriptures in here, I don't just pull out one verse. So you can, like, agree with what I want you to agree with.

I try to make sure that you have context. Right? And as a United Methodist pastor, I fully agree with our theological guidelines from the Book of Discipline that express it like this. You can follow along the Bible is sacred canon for Christian people, formally acknowledged as such by historic ecumenical councils of the church. Our doctrinal standards identify as canonical 39 books of the Old Testament and 27 books of the New Testament.

Our standards affirm the Bible as a source of all that is necessary and sufficient unto salvation that comes from our articles of religion, and it is to be received through the Holy Spirit as the true rule and guide for faith and for practice. And that comes from our confession of faith unity. We interpret and by the way, when we interpret and we should all be interpreters of Scripture when we interpret. We have to be cautious when we interpret these individual texts in light of their place in the Bible as a whole. We are aided by scholarly inquiry and personal insight under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

As we work with each text, we take into account what we have been able to learn about the original context and intention of that text. In this understanding, we draw upon the careful historical, literary and textual studies of recent years, which have enriched our understanding of the Bible. Through this faithful reading of Scripture, we may come to know the truth of the biblical message in its bearing on our own lives and the life of the world. Thus, the Bible serves both as a source of our faith and as the basic criterion by which the truth and fidelity of any interpretation of faith is measured. While we acknowledge the primacy of Scripture in theological reflection, our attempts to grasp its meaning always involve tradition, experience, reason.

That's the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. You might have heard that phrase before. Like Scripture, these may become creative vehicles of the Holy Spirit as they function within the church. They quicken our faith, open our eyes to the wonder of God's love, and clarify our understanding. I align with how our Book of Discipline describes Scripture.

We Base our understanding of Scripture on Scripture itself, right? In The Book of Second Timothy, chapter three, verses 10 through 17, it says this. You, however, know about all my teachings, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings. What kind of things happen to me in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, the persecutions I've endured. By the way, this is Paul writing to Timothy, encouraging him.

He goes on to say, yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Jesus Christ will be persecuted, while evildoers and imposters will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from who you learned it. You know the people who are preaching to you and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. And here's what I want you to focus on.

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. I hope I don't have to convince you in here that I love the Scriptures. Right? I think you know. But what about you in your daily life?

Do you think about Scripture? Do you read scripture very much? How about this? Would you recognize it if you heard it? That sounds like a fun game.

We might do that next week. Jesus or some famous person. Right? Like that. I'll do that.

All right. But do you know when Scripture's being used out of context, when it's twisted to say or mean something that it wasn't supposed to mean originally? Do you know when people use scripture to justify something that you're doing or to condemn something that somebody else is doing that they don't agree with? Do you recognize when people use Scripture as a way to oppress people or diminish a person's value?

My hope for us is that over the next few weeks, we have an opportunity to dive deeper into God's Word so that we can better recognize when people use scripture for inappropriate purposes. Because I fully believe that Scripture is meant to set people free, not to put people on trial.

But far too often that's how we use God's Word. So I want to read some scripture to you that I hope will shed some light on how I think we're supposed to use God's Word. I bet many of you, if you've been in the church for A long time. You've probably heard the scripture. But I want you to dive in a little bit deeper today and hear what the words are saying intentionally.

Comes from the book of Hebrews, chapter 4, verses 12 through 13. And here's what it says for the word of the Lord. Sorry. The word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double edged sword.

It penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit joints and morrow. It judges the thoughts and the attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him who we must give account. So if you're anything like me when you hear this, the word that sticks out in my mind is sword.

Because I'm a boy and I like swords. Okay? So if you're reading through this scripture, you might get the idea that we're talking about God's word as if it were a sword. And if we do that, we're missing something deeper. Right.

I 3D printed this. It's pretty cool. So this is a 3D printed sword. But I want to ask you a question. Who uses a sword?

A knight. Who? Who does? Link. Oh, yeah, look at that, from Zelda.

Yeah. Warriors. What did you say, Mike? A ninja. Not this one, but yeah, they use much cooler ones.

Who uses a sword? A swordsman. Right. A fighter. A barbarian.

A mercenary. A paladin. You know, if you're playing D and D. Right. Like all the coolest classes in Dungeons and Dragons.

No. Nobody? Okay. All right. But we're not playing a board game when we're reading scripture.

Right. And I want to remind you, we are not called to be warriors for our faith. That is a weird translation. That is a weird misunderstanding of God's word.

Scripture tells us here that it's sharper than a double edged sword. Doesn't say it is a double edged sword. It's sharper than a double edged sword. What's sharper than a double edged sword?

Come on. A razor.

Triple edged sword. All right. I've never heard of that, but could be cool.

A scalpel. Right? What? Obsidian? That's absolutely right.

So who uses an instrument that is sharper than a sword? Who uses a scalpel? A surgeon. A doctor. Have you guys seen like.

And I'm gonna pull out my surgical kit here because I'm also a doctor. It's not true. I'm not. But like you, you would probably all recognize this, right? These are all scalpel blades.

This is just. Don't step on that. But these are all double edged Blades that are used for very minute crafting. If you're a doctor, these are, you know, like sanitized. And then we use them to work on you.

Not we, I don't actually ever do that. But there's a difference between who uses a sword and who uses a scalpel. Because one is meant for destruction and the other is meant for healing. Double edged swords are supposed to be sharp and sturdy. They're meant to be able to fight and to wound, to stab, to cut, to gouge.

They're also made thick to block attacks. Right. The sword came into existence in the Bronze Age. The earliest swords that we have are about 1600 BC. We found some from about 1600 BC but they believe that the, the weapons that are now described as swords originated around 3300 BC.

Bronze Age swords are believed to have evolved from daggers. They eventually got longer and they originated in Turkey. If you've ever watched a movie like Braveheart, you know exactly how sharp double edged swords can be.

But scripture says that God's word is sharper than a double edged sword. And that I think is the key to our better understanding. Does anybody know what the best scale is? B E S S. Anybody sharpen knives at all?

You do. But you know what the scale is? No. So, okay, so the B E S S scale is called the Bess scale and it means the Brubaker Edge Sharpness Scale. You got that?

This scale was developed by a man named Mike Brubaker and he has a background in sensor and test development for various industries. In 2012 he started this Bess scale and it quickly caught on. Everybody who is a knife sharpener wanted to get involved in this particular scale because they wanted to prove to the whole wide world that they can make the sharpest knives ever. Right? It became a competition for knife sharpeners, which sounds like a very man thing to do.

The result now is this Bess standard that became quickly adopted. This scale determines the sharpness of a blade by pressing it into a fixed medium. That measures how much pressure it takes to slice an object in two.

So this is a Bess certified scale. You can see that it's got like a fulcrum there and as you press the blade down, it cuts this little piece of media right there and every one of them is exactly the same. That's the standard.

The scale as you can see goes from 2000, which shows you as a common butter knife, all the way down to zero, which is like atomic level of sharpness. It is hard to fathom what that even means on this scale, the higher the number, the worse your blade will perform. So if you have like blades, they don't have a scale like this for swords because swords are not able to fit on this particular scale. But like your best kitchen knife, imagine your best kitchen knife, okay, that one is probably somewhere in the range of about 250 to 350 on the best scale. Okay.

If you've ever eaten an airline dinner on an airline plane, you've used those plastic knives and some of them guys, I have almost cut myself on a plastic knife before. I feel a little dumb saying that out loud now that I say it. But I mean, those are some of the lowest sharpness. And you can still cause damage with a butter knife. Right.

Brand new high end cutlery that you have in your kitchen, if you bought something that is high end. 250, 350 range. The sharpest commercially available professional butcher knives like that they use in slaughterhouses to cut up and process cattle. The sharpest blades that come from the Factory are about 110Bess. Right?

At around 100. Bess is considered to be the realm of what's called shaving sharp and the ability to not just cut, but to whittle hair. Happens between 25 and 30 Bess. Did you know you could whittle hair? I've never held a.

Yeah, never held a knife that sharp. Sharpness can be determined also by taking your blade and then taking a silk scarf and lowering it over your blade if it cuts by itself.

That is what we're talking about in the level of sharpness of a scalpel. Okay.

Scalpels made out of obsidian have been used since about 2100 BC. Blades, sorry. Modern scalpel blades are usually made of hardened steel, tempered steel, stainless steel, or high end carbon steel. But there are some times when doctors have to perform surgeries and they have to do it under the supervision of an mri. And so at that point, you can't use a magnetic tool.

So they still use obsidian blades as scalpels.

A blade as sharp as a scalpel can cut something so thin that you can see through it. Have you ever seen those, like the Japanese woodworkers who take their planes and they get the longest strip of wood, right? And you can see through it. You can literally read words on a paper through how thin that wood is. That's how sharp these blades are.

And when you can see through something, you can reveal what its insides are. You can put it on a slide and put it under a microscope. You can see through it. Right? That's how sharp we need to be to divide spirit and soul, joints and marrow.

Only the word of God can judge the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. It's a different kind of sharp than I've always thought of. Right, Because I think of a sword. Wielding a sword is like a fighting thing, and this is very much more intricate. God is calling us to look closely at his word.

But far too often, people who think they know the Bible use God's word as a weapon like a sword. Christians in all ages and all times have used the Bible as a weapon to justify their actions, to force their understanding of God's word onto other people. Right? The Bible has become weaponized all throughout human history to do some pretty awful things. I think we know this, but many of you remember that the Bible is used to justify things like the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the American understanding of Manifest Destiny, the worldwide slave trade, the Holocaust, and so much more.

Because of the terrible use of context, we have also seen a rise in awful religious movements that have caused harm. Like the, the purity movement that happened in the 1990s, the prosperity gospel movement that we're still feeling today. But based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, it is clear that Scripture should be a tool for healing, not a tool for harm. All we have to do is look at the life of Jesus to better understand what God wants for each one of us. Jesus is God incarnate, God made flesh.

He lived out a life that God wants for all of us.

And you know, the only people that Jesus really ever reprimanded were the religious people that thought they always had it right. I think the reason that Jesus reprimanded those people was because these were the men, and they were all men who had access to the Torah, the scriptures of the Jewish people. They were the rabbis, the teachers of the law. They were the only ones who could read it and then interpret it and give those interpretations to the people. But the problem was that many of those rabbis and the teachers of the law taught in such a way as to misrepresent the word of God to benefit themselves.

Now, this wasn't all rabbis. This is not all teachers. It's not all priests and prophets. It's not all pastors, but there are people who do sometimes. Their practice was to teach people the parts of the law that benefited them.

Those who had wealth and power. They taught the people to tithe, to make sacrifices, to show respect and honor to the religious authorities. They taught the people to respect the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees and to invite them to their homes, to their banquets. Anytime there's a celebration, anytime wine was given, anytime there was a big feast, those people were invited. They never had to purchase food on their own.

They were the welcome guests of the poor.

They took full advantage of their position in society to oppress others and to ascribe more authority to themselves. The religious leaders of Jesus Day preached a message to keep the lower class subjugated, that often focused on the scriptures that encouraged slaves to be faithful to their masters and told the common folk that they needed to obey those in offices of authority. God put them there. You listen, don't question. And if we read scripture, that's not what it says.

They selectively told people what they wanted people to know. And I believe that the same has happened all throughout history and is currently happening still to this day. I believe that selective reading equals selective righteousness. When we pick and choose verses to justify our own actions or those that we agree with, we ignore the fullness of God's word.

So this week, Alan Wallace text me. And he reminded me of a quote that I had never heard in my whole life until about two weeks ago. The quote was this. Any text without a context is a pretext for a proof text. You ever heard that?

I'm gonna. I'm read it to you again. Any text without a context is a pretext for a proof text. That means any biblical text without its historical, grammatical, canonical, literary and relevant past, I.e. context is a pretext or an opportunity to be falsely taken for a proof text.

That is a text abused by a preacher, a Sunday school teacher, political leader, podcaster, televangelist, or any other person to make a point that is not actually being made by, by the text itself. We could literally take one scripture out of its place in the Bible and we can make it fit any context we want. And I've seen it, and friends in my past, I've done it. And I think all of us have at one point or another.

But I hate when people do that. And I regret times in my life when I was younger and fiery and wanted to do that, I'll prove a point. I hate that I never want anyone to ever question whether or not I'm twisting scripture to fit an agenda. But many pastors and Christian churches across America do. Now, I want to remind you that sometimes it's not intentional.

Sometimes we have this beautiful point that we're trying to make, and this one great scripture fits perfectly and we're just going to throw it up there, pulling it out of its context. And we make it say something that isn't quite really saying, but sometimes that is intentionally done by pastors who want to make a point.

And I believe that this twisting of scripture has played a role in changing what religion in our country looks like. And I bet for this reason, if Jesus showed up today and went to almost any church in America, he'd probably be disappointed by what some of us pastors are saying, because we don't get it right.

And I can know that based on the context of Jesus. Right? Because in Jesus own time, he got pretty upset at the religious leaders and the teachers of his day who did the same things. There's this beautiful section in Scripture, and by beautiful, I mean it's pretty condemning. It comes from the Book of Matthew, chapter 23.

If you've got your Bibles, I'll invite you to pull those out and look at those now. But Matthew 23, we're gonna start at the beginning and skip around a little bit. But in this book, in this moment in Jesus life, it really fascinates me because Jesus does some pretty significant teaching. And in the middle of this teaching, in the book of Matthew, there's stories about how the Pharisees come and they try to trick Jesus and they fail. And then the Sadducees, they come and try to trap Jesus and then they fail.

And then the Pharisees are like, well, maybe we could do something worse. And so the Pharisees come back and they try to trap Jesus again. Then Jesus says, enough. And then Jesus starts to point right at those religious leaders and starts to really call them out. In Matthew, chapter 23, verses 1 through 7, we're going to skip a little bit and then come back in 13 and go to 32.

It says this. Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, the teachers of the law. And the Pharisees sit in Moses seat, means they sit in the seat of judgment. So you must be careful to do every single thing they tell you to do. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach.

They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people's shoulders. But they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them. Everything they do is done for people to see. They make their phylacteries. Do you know what a phylactery is?

So a phylactery is like a little tiny box. And inside that box is the Shema, which is the Lord your God is one. Love the Lord with All your heart, right? Like, it's this beautiful scripture. In Deuteronomy they were called to, like, wear them.

If you are an Orthodox Jew, oftentimes you wear them strapped to your head, underneath a hat or on your wrist. And then sometimes you tie them up on your doorposts. Because Scripture says, write it. Keep it always on your head, always on your heart. Write it on your doorpost, right?

So they've taken this into a literal sense. So their phylacteries are wide and the tassels on their garments are long, because they want. The tassels were reserved for the religious leaders, right? They wanted to be seen. When my tassels are long, people know that I am a religious leader.

They love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues. They love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to be called rabbis by others. Verse 13 says this. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people's faces.

You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those who enter who you are trying to. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You travel over land and sea to win a single convert. And when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are. Woe to you, blind guides.

You say if anyone swears by the temple, it means nothing. But anyone who swears by the gold of the temple is bound by that oath. You blind fools. Which is greater, the gold or the temple that makes the gold sacred? You also say, if anyone swears by the altar, it means nothing.

But anyone who swears by the gift on the altar is bound by that oath. You blind men. Which is great or the gift or the altar? That makes it the gift. Sorry, that makes the gift sacred.

Therefore, anyone who swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. And anyone who swears by the temple swears by it and by the one who dwells in it. And anyone who swears by heaven swears by God's throne and by the one who sits on it. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You give a tenth of your spices, your mint, dill and cumin.

But you have neglected the more important matters of the law, justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter without neglecting the former. You blind guides. You strain out a gnat, but swallow a camel.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self indulgence. Blind Pharisee. First you clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside will also be clean. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites.

You are like whitewashed tombs which look beautiful on the outside, but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous, but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You build tombs for the prophets and declare the graves to be righteous. And you say, if we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.

So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Go ahead then, and complete what your ancestors have started.

Who? Okay, I'm just going to tell you. If somebody came into the church today and was like, matt, you blind guide, you hypocrite, you brood of vipers. And I would probably cry right in front of you guys. And Jesus is calling these people out to their faces because they've done an injustice to the text.

And the reality is, pastors, politicians, church leaders, they use the scriptures in the same way today. When some parts of scripture are left out or taught without the full context, any person can make you believe something that isn't right. A pastor who doesn't tell the full story, who doesn't understand the socioeconomic and political climate of biblical texts, can preach a message that sounds pretty amazing but could be based on a false reality. We have to remember that the Word of the Bible is vastly different from our own, the world that the Bible is written in, and for it's not the world we experience today. Right?

And that's not to say that truth is relative, that the world, the word of God doesn't apply today. It simply means that we have to be honest with how we present the Word of God so that we don't do an injustice to the text. Think about it like this. If you're putting together a puzzle and you don't have all the pieces, you get an incomplete picture, right? If we present the Word of God and don't present it with all the right pieces, we're showing you an incomplete picture of Who God is a half truth used as a whole truth is a whole lie.

God's word was meant to restore, not to destroy. We've all talked about the story of the woman caught in adultery, right? In John, chapter eight.

It's a story that has some pretty interesting moments in it, right? So we know this woman is caught in adultery, and she's brought before Jesus. And who did they not bring with the woman, right? The man that she was committing adultery with. And then the Pharisees, when they brought this woman to Jesus, they quote the law incorrectly.

They say, jesus, we've caught her in adultery. The law demands that she be put to death. And the real law is in Leviticus, chapter 20, verse 10. And here's what it says. If a man commits adultery with another man's wife, with the wife of his neighbor, both adulterer and the adulteress are to be put to death.

So the Pharisees don't even complete the whole scenario. They bring the woman to Jesus and say, let's kill her, Jesus. What do you say? The law says we have to do it. No, no, no.

Your twisted version of the law says we have to do it. It's not right. It's not complete. And so Jesus sits there and he says. He stoops down, he takes a minute to think about it, and then he stands back up and says, all right, perfect people.

The most perfect of you can throw the first stone. Hallelujah.

And scripture says that they all began to drop their stones and walk away, starting with the oldest first. Because, man, when you were young, you. You were perfect, right? Like you just never did anything wrong. You were stubborn.

You always said the right thing. You knew all the right details. But as you get older, you come to find out we don't know as much as we thought we did when we were younger. And so they recognize, well, I've sinned too. I'm not perfect.

So they all dropped their stones and left. And eventually, Jesus is left one on one with this sinner, this heathen, this harlot, this woman of the evening. And he asked this woman, are you condemned? I don't see anybody here to stone you to death. No one's here to stone me, Jesus.

They've all. They've all left. Jesus said, all right, go from this place and sin no more. And because Jesus is a prophet and son of God, the Almighty made flesh, we know that he recognizes she's not going to sin no more, right?

But he encourages her in that moment. Change your life. Do something different.

And this story tells us the same thing today. When we think we've got it right, when we think we know everything there is to know, when we think that we're doing all the right things and saying all the right things, there's always something different and bigger and more that we don't have. There's a context that maybe we don't fully get. None of us is perfect. The story proves it.

And even in the moments when we mess up, Jesus tells us the same thing. Hey dummy, go and leave your life of sin. Go and sin no more.

Jesus, when the law used correctly, meant death. Jesus, the law. The word of God made flesh shows grace and mercy. And those are the people that he's calling us to be.

There's this beautiful story of a young man. He's a 19 year old and he's brought into court because he was caught stealing a car. He didn't steal it to sell it or to destroy it or to strip it of its parts. He did it because his mother collapsed at home. He didn't have a car of his own.

Their family was pretty poor. And with no time to wait for an ambulance, he went out and stole the first car he could find. And. And he had taken desperate action in that moment, threw his mom in the car and rushed her to the hospital. She survived.

It was a near fatal heart attack. But remember, friends, the law is the law. This young man is guilty of grand theft auto.

It's a felony. He should be doing time. So the prosecutor makes his case. Your Honor, there is no dispute. The facts are facts.

The evidence is here. His fingerprints. He was found in it. He left it at the hospital. He's guilty.

And the defense attorney stood up to justify what had happened, You, Honor. My client acted in a moment of desperation. He had no record, no history of crime. He returned the vehicle voluntarily. This is not a case of criminal intent, but a boy who wants to save his mother's life.

So the judge, who had years of experience, sat back and had to think.

Justice always demands consequences.

But mercy calls for understanding. So the judge spoke. What you did was against the law. The law is meant to uphold justice. And justice requires you be held accountable for the mistake that you've made.

However, justice without mercy is not true justice. It's just plain punishment.

The young man is trying to figure out what's going to happen. He swallows hard and the judge says, you're not going to jail. And he gave him community service instead. And he sentenced him to the same hospital to serve that community service sentence. In so that he could serve others in need.

He didn't have charges on his record. And in this moment, Mercy spoke not by ignoring the crime, the crime didn't go away, but by shaping the consequence into something redemptive rather than punitive.

Friends, Jesus didn't weaponize scripture. Jesus used Scripture to set people free. And because that's what Jesus did, that's what we have to do also.

So church, we've seen today how God's Word is meant to bring life, freedom and hope. But it's been twisted throughout human history to justify oppression, division and harm. Even from the time of Jesus. Religious leaders in those moments manipulated Scripture for their own gain. And we see the same thing happening today, that there are distortions in Scripture to justify injustice.

We recognize this is not a new thing, but we also recognize this is not right. That's why it's crucial for us as followers of Jesus to truly know the Word of God. Not just to take bits and pieces, not just to believe what's convenient, but we have to know the full life giving truth of Scripture. Psalm 119, 105 says this. Your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.

But everybody knows that a light misused, it doesn't guide people, it blinds people.

A sword that is misused doesn't defend, it destroys.

Jesus himself repeatedly shows us the right way to handle Scripture. When tempted in the wilderness, he didn't twist God's word so that he could eat or to serve himself. He stood firm on the true meaning of God's scriptures. When the Pharisees tried to use the law to condemn Jesus revealed the heart of God, justice, mercy and faithfulness. So what do we do?

How do we respond when we hear Scripture being twisted? First again, we have to know the Word so that we can recognize a counterfeit when we hear it.

We have to know the Word of God. Not just us Sunday Christians, but every single day. We have to become disciples who seek God's truth for ourselves. Next, we have to call out the misuse of Scripture not with arrogance, but with courage and with love. Jesus was never silent in the face of the religious manipulation.

Neither should we be. When we see our teachers, our preachers, when we see our political leaders quoting scripture, it's good idea for us to question those things. And we have to figure out if it aligns with who Jesus is. And if it doesn't, you can bet it's being misused.

We have to be willing to say to people, that's not the heart of God. And finally, we have to live out the truth in our own lives. The best way to combat distorted scripture is to embody in ourselves rightly applied Scripture. Jesus didn't come to quote the Word, he lived the Word. And we're called to do the same thing today.

So, church over the next few weeks, I want us to learn better. To handle the Word of God with integrity, with wisdom, and with love. Let us be people who stand for the truth in a world that often distorts it. And let us never forget that the Bible was never meant to be a weapon against people. It was meant to be a light in our world.

Let's pray.