They Alone are Correct

We all think we're correct about certain things we're quite familiar with, like things we've been doing for decades. Like my family's Almon Bigas recipe. I can't go wrong with it because I've been cooking it for years. Even decades. We insist on our correctness in things we're absolutely sure of. It's normal. 

Photo by Medienstürmer on Unsplash.

But it's a different thing when we start going around telling everybody else they're wrong and we're right, especially just because they see things differently from our "correct" and "established" thinking, which we learned from some school or seminary or university and which we earned a certificate or diploma on. We think holding some papers or credentials makes us authorities knowing everything there is about a subject matter.

We forget that life and creation is so huge and even real experts have not yet fully explored their possibilities. Even if you live to a hundred or a thousand, you can never fully know everything there is to know.

What is "correct" anyway? They say there's a correct way of doing things, or correct knowledge we all should subscribe to. Really? Says who? Who else but the guy we look up to (we think this person we idolize knows everything). He said it and we allow him or her to decide for us, thinking this guy knows everything about the subject matter and has the authority to tell us what is correct. 

We let him do that because he spent years studying about it, and earned titles and degrees. (In some cases, we idolize him and believe everything he says because he's made a lot of money. We often equate riches with truth, money with success). He who holds the gold holds the scepter--and this rule is often true even in church (or especially in church). 

We believe that years of study make a person a god, especially if he gets titles and degrees out of that. Then everything he says becomes bible truth. We bow to him and his teachings or ideas. These things easily blind us. We believe everything the titled and degreed (and moneyed) say.

The bible does say there's a right time and procedure which the wise heart will know about [Ecclesiastes 8.5-6], but it is quick to remind us, too, that no one really knows the entirety of things.

Since no one knows the future, who can tell someone else what is to come?

Smart guys thought the earth was the center of the universe, and they backed that up with years of studies. In the 1960s, they told us fatty food made us gain weight resulting in heart problems and blood sugar woes. So these health experts urged us to eat more carbs in lieu of fats. And they supported this with years of study. Later, it was found that carbs and sugar were the real culprits, making us obese and susceptible to heart diseases and diabetes--and this, too, was supported with years of study. Old school health experts still stick with carbs as better replacements for fat and meat, and many believe them because of their years of study and titles and degrees.

Another group of experts told us how houses and cars are "assets" and quality education is key to high-paying jobs that lead to riches. They made us believe for years that houses and cars were not liabilities until people started seeing how these things ate away at their income instead of made money for them--and that they often decreased in value. And employment very seldom (if any) brought good returns for the investments people made on quality education. 

But people who believe in jobs will never admit that. They'd insist that they've been happy employees all their lives and have made quite a bit of money from it and back it all up with years of study--even if their retirement pension is not enough for their basics and maintenance meds. They'd still tell the younger generation how a job is better than starting a small business.

Titles, degrees and years of study make us cling to lies all our lives and give us deadly scare if we even think of venturing out of the box they cramp us in to keep us from exploring other possibilities. They liken it to going out of the will of God, or how Adam and Eve bit into the bad fruit, or something like that. So we're kept in their invented paradigms, thinking it's safe and sound doctrine to stay there.

A lot of "correct" things turned out incorrect later. They thought that bread was better than rice. Or, every vegetable gives you nothing but health benefits, until the recent findings about nightshade veggies that cause inflammation. In church, we were told that using Coke or powdered grape juice for communion was more righteous than using real wine, or that wine was downright evil, period.

Even when applying math in real life, we're not always sure if one plus one is always equals two. If we start one more business aside from the one we already have, does it always mean we'd have two businesses? The Covid pandemic taught us otherwise. Lots of new businesses closed during the Covid pandemic, the owners having thought that it was a good idea to open another one since the first one had been a success. But then the pandemic happened and both businesses were hit hard. They saw how one plus one sometimes equaled zero in real life.

Another surprising thing happened in the pandemic. Some folks learned that zero plus one equaled to 5 (0 + 1 = 5). Their dying business picked up 5 times during the pandemic and made them millions when they opted to do it online. Other smart, traditional business folks had advised against it and said pandemic was the wrong time to try experiments. Wait-and-see, or holding on to your cash instead of investing, was the correct thing to do, they added, and backed that up with years of study by titled and degreed business experts.

Correct is always subjective. Only God can be absolutely correct, though this truth changes in the minds of theology "experts" (they want to be seen as experts) who try to be authorities at explaining God's absolutes with their systematic theology backed with years of study. How they see truth is subject to the theological background that molded (or deceived) them. So, in this sense, nothing is really correct, since their idea of correctness depends on a thinking norm they have decided among themselves to be the correct one, and every church group or denomination has a different thinking norm.

Thus, churches have their own correctness norms. The funny thing is, they really believe the correctness they made up or formulated is really correct and there can be no other. Pastors are often trapped into this false thinking pattern, especially with the way their hermeneutics have imprisoned their minds to their formula--or the formula imposed by their idolized theologians. 

Their hermeneutical dos and don'ts (formulas their smart thinkers invented) decide what they can believe and how they'd understand God's Word. And if you see God's Word any other way, you're automatically in grave error (the favorite accusation is you're out of context--because, according to them, context is king 😆, as years of studies show).

GOD has long established the correct thing here, but nobody is listening. He has established that only the Holy Spirit---HIS very own Spirit---has the authority to explain HIS Word, ever---and HIS explanation alone is correct. His Spirit is the final interpreter of any part of Scripture. Nothing is mentioned about some correct hermeneutics or contextualization. 

...no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 

[1 Corinthians 2.11] 

That should be clear enough. But here's more.

12 What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. 13 This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. 14 The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.

Even Scripture that says we have to show ourselves approved unto God, a workman that need not be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth, does NOT mean the use of hermeneutics (there's no indication whatsoever that this refers to human theology). It means getting supernatural guidance and revelation from the Holy Spirit to "divide" or handle God's Word, that is, if we're going to pursue what Jesus says about the Holy Spirit teaching us "all things," and how he alone enables genuine understanding of God's Word. 

Is anybody in church really listening to this? 

But what if you're really correct? I mean, there are times when people are really correct about what they believe, like how Jesus (no doubt) was correct about everything he thought was the truth. Are you going to watch out what everybody says and lecture them about their errors? Does possessing correctness necessarily mean bigotry and dogmatism? 

Jesus, being my favorite Nonjoiner (he never joins world trends or fads), serves as model here. He held absolute truths and yet never went to the Pharisees and law teachers to check and challenge their beliefs or correct their errors. He never went after people to lecture them or watch out for their errors. Instead, they desperately went to him and asked or begged for the truth. Then he taught them (though a lot of them were just after the blessings that came with the teachings). 

Jesus knew that he alone was correct, but he wasn't an insufferable solipsist.