An Overlooked Cause of Biblical Ignorance

Lets recap. Biblical Ignorance is "where Christians are unaware of what is contained in the Bible and think that anyone or anything that comes in the name of God is Biblical." We have looked at three cause of Biblical Ignorance which are lack of Bible reading, lack of Biblical preaching, and lack of Biblical teaching. As I was thinking about the effects of Biblical Ignorance, I began to realize that there is an overlooked effect that many do not think about. What is it? Simply: Not testing everything.

In The Apostle John's first epistle, he writes, "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world" (1 John 4:1). Many false teachers have infiltrated the church in the first century and many believers are being deceived in believing false teachings. John was telling his readers, do not believe every teaching but test them. Even the Apostle Paul told the Thessalonian church, "Do not despise prophecies, but test everything" (1 Thessalonians 5:20-21). In Acts 17, Paul and Silas were teaching in Berea and the people were checking out the Scriptures to see if what they said was true.

How many people in your church do that? When your pastor preaches, do you read the Bible as he preaches to see if he is preaching the Bible? One of the great downfalls of the church is that we do not test everything. Whether is it from something we read, or heard from a preacher. If the people of Joel Osteen's church would actually read their Bibles, they would see he is not preaching a true gospel and the same thing goes with any false teacher.

This problem is not just in churches where a false gospel is preached but it could be in a Baptist church. Baptists are known as people of the book but sometime some of them do not preach the word and the people of the church do not check what the preachers says. This does not apply only to preaching but in reading Christian books, listening to Christian music (Amy Grant's "Better Than A Hallelujah" is a good example), and even watching Christian television/movies.

We should also test what Hollywood says about the Bible. Years ago, NBC had a mini-series on Noah, nothing like the Russell Crowe movie. It got ridiculed by a lot of people including Pastors because of its inaccuracies. Probably the biggest one is this Noah was set during the time of Abraham. Lot was in the movie. God was going to wipe out Sodom and Gomorrah. I do not remember any rock monsters though.

You see what I am getting at. We need to test everything. If we do not, we will be deceived by any teaching that comes our way. We will believe everything we read and see.