Let's Make God More Palatable

A strange thing has been happening, lately – or maybe not so lately. I was first clued in a week or so ago when my wife pointed out to me that modern translations of the Bible had removed John 5:4. Christians condemn Jehovah’s Witnesses to eternal damnation for taking out verses, but no one has ever mentioned this to me. The verse so disagreeable that it was removed without a whimper? “—and they waited for the moving of the waters. ⁴From time to time an angel of the Lord would come down and stir up the waters. The first one into the pool after each such disturbance would be cured of whatever disease they had.”

It’s in the story of Jesus healing the crippled man at the pool of Bethesda. I thought I remembered reading that bit when I was younger (I read in the KJV to be like my mother) but thought maybe that was somewhere else I’d heard it.

The second time was at church last week, when our pastor pointed out that Jesus, hanging on the cross, cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But in the original Greek, the word translated “cried out” was closer to “shrieked.”

Then, last Thursday, I was looking up a verse for a post I was going to do, and it ended up putting me in mind to write this post. Romans 8:28 is a much-loved verse among Christians as a means to comfort those suffering hardship. “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him.” How wonderful to know that whatever might be going on, it will end up for our good.

Then I saw the footnote: “Or that in all things God works together with those who love him to bring about what is good—with those who have been called according to His purpose.”

“Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady” I hear Bono sing. And I hear many other things, most of them just frustrating sounds that aren’t really words. We claim and assume that God’s Word cannot be tampered with, that it is just as perfect now as it was when it was first penned. And yet we have the glaring example of the Jehovah’s Witnesses who have removed whole verses with no fire, brimstone, or lightning to strike them down and correct Scripture to its original perfection. It can be done. It has been done. Writers are doing it now.

God will work in, around, or through us according to His purposes. But everything we do to resist Him will rebound onto us – even if we’re softening His Word to make it just a little more palatable. And in case you’re wondering what a hypocrite I am writing fantasy – I’m trying to bring people to His Word, that they might find Him in there. My fiction is primarily meant to move people off of whatever La-Z-Boy they’re on, and not onto anything else more specific than Scripture.

Now I wonder if they’ll even find Him there. Christians are not immune to the effects of sin, not yet; Satan’s first and last ploy is to take God’s words and twist them to our eternal destruction. And as a Christian, my only foundation outside prayer is His Scripture, and now that is beginning to shake because of the arrogant pride that we know better how to give His message to the world.

And the Western church is getting it wrong. People are leaving it in droves.

I’m wondering why less and less.