The World and the Word

        The Inerrant and Infallible Word of God

God gave His Holy Word to humans in such an ingenious way that any interpretation of any scripture that glorifies God's Love and Mercy can only be a correct interpretation. For example, the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15:12-32 can be interpreted as meaning that God saves lost sinners. It can also be interpreted as meaning that God forgives backslidden believers when they repent. Both interpretations are correct because they both glorify God's Love. Jesus' invitation to fellowship with Him in Revelation 4:20 can be preached either as the Holy Spirit's invitation to lost sinners to become saved by grace or as Christ's desire to enter the Church at the time of worship to fill the hearts of each believer. Both interpretations are correct because they both glorify God's Love.

Christ has Infinite and Almighty Power over all sin and evil. All through the Bible (JKB) God displays compassion and patience with sins of weakness. God knows that sins of weakness are unavoidable. God's punishments for sins of weakness were usually light when He punished at all. In Acts 17:30, the Apostle Paul preached that God ignored the sins of weakness of the heathen that had never heard of the Ten Commandments.

But all through the Bible (KJB), God severely punished deliberate, evil sins of defiance and rebellion against Himself. Even the heathen can commit such deliberate evils when they reject God's revelation of His existence in His creations, and they begin to worship idols. Romans 1:18-23. In their consciousness of their image of God that He put into them, even the idolatrous heathen knew that their sacrifices of their children to idols was a cruel and coldblooded act. Psalm 34:16. Because of deliberate evil, God drowned all of humanity in a great flood except for Noah and his family, destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah with a fiery blast, and commanded the Israelite army at times to kill every man, woman, and child in places given over to total evil. But God will recover and recreate His good image in every evil human. Roman 11:36; Psalm 107:10-14; Revelation 5:11-14. God means to purge all evil from all of His creations so that He can recreate it all to be wholly righteous. II Peter 3:10-13; Revelation 21:5.

Even God's people sometimes committed evil acts of defiance and rebellion against God. When they did so, God usually severely punished them, but always He had the aim of bringing them to repentance and back to reconciliation with Him. God, for the most part, ignored Samson's sins of weakness until Samson allowed his hair to be cut. God severely punished Samson for his defiance, but God brought him back to repentance and faith. God severely punished Jonah for his rebellion by having him swallowed by a whale, but in the end, Jonah repented and God had the whale spit him out on a beach so that he could obey God's command to preach to the Ninevites. God severely punished King David for his sins of adultery and murder which were partly caused by weakness and partly by defiance. Even so, God's punishment of King David was not as severe as it could have been. David's abject repentance probably mitigated his punishment.

However, God has given the righteousness of Christ and the fruits of the Holy Spirit to every believer in the Church Age. This fact means that every believer in the Church Age should hate sin and avoid it as much as possible. For this reason, God will often punish Christian believers severely for sins of weakness, and He will sometimes kill Christian believers for sins of defiance. I Corinthians 1:30; Galatians 5:22-24; I John 5:16; Luke 12:48.