If You Are Reading This, You Are Tough!

Now how would I know that? Maybe because I know how hard it is to hear about such topics as I send to you. They have been in my experience, too--believing in them, then, sometimes painfully, getting away from them. To do this I was forced to fight with some troubling scriptures, many of them fatally flawed translations.

I am aware that some refuse to even look at scriptures that put their beliefs in jeopardy. Did I tell you how I was rescued from doing that?

It was by reading a delightful book on plants, by Donald Culross Peaty, called This Flowering Earth. The author, studying to be a botanist at Harvard, was told to test his favorite ideas by doing his best to destroy them! If they were false they would be found so. Only the true ones would survive.

It seems revolutionary, but the Bible said it first: "Prove all things, hold fast that which is good." (1 Thessalonians 5:21). I understand that the word "prove" here means "test", as in "proving grounds".

So, timidly, I learned to try my ideas for falseness. I had inherited the standard ideas that the Catholics had retained from the Babylonians and passed on to the Protestants. I began to find out if they were true to the Bible. Using the Bible, in pure form, as a guide, I found the Old Ideas (the ones that everyone "knows" are true) fell away.

There is a Viking story about a boat builder who had completed a craft along traditional lines. The next morning he found that someone had cut deep notches in the gunwales. Outraged he said "Find the one who cut up my boat! Another builder confessed that he had done it. "Trim your boat along the lines of those notches and you will find your boat, once fat as a cow, to be a beautiful swift horse." When this was done, the beautiful and swift Viking Boat was born.

So when we cut away the doctrines that man, guided by the Devil, has invented, our doctrines become beautiful and true. This of course, is done only by the tough, like you are.