The Old Paths

NOTE: I discovered this while going through some old journal notes. I wrote this in December 06, but never got around to posting it. I thought I'd share it. Reading through this again today I think I may have missed an important point. Perhaps the old godly paths are not so much our doctrines, but our godly lifestyle - again being over knowledge.


This is what the Lord says:
“Stop at the crossroads and look around.
Ask for the old, godly way, and walk in it.
Travel its path, and you will find rest for your souls.
But you reply, ‘No, that’s not the road we want!’
Jerimiah 6:16 NLT


The sermon last night was an exhortation for us to return to the "old ways." I found myself being somewhat conflicted by it. For my pastor, returning to the old ways meant staying true to the doctrines you have been taught, and trusting in the wisdom of the pastorate.

My difficulty began when I realized that some of those doctrines I have been taught (and have taught others) have no Bilbical support, and in some cases even contradict the clear teaching of scripture. Once the Biblical foundation beneath these doctrinal pillars was shown to be lacking, I began to wonder what other doctrines I had been taught were in error. Everything became suspect. This was a very uncomfortable position to be in.

It occured to me during the sermon that each denomination would interpret the "old paths" differently. For Pentecostals it may mean repentance, baptism in Jesus name and receiving the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in tongues. For Catholics it might be the rosery, confession, and faith in the Pope or apostalic succession. Perhaps we all need to reach a little further back when returning to the old godly paths. Perhaps we should reach clear back to Jesus himself and the teachings of his apostles - that is, perhaps we should reach back to the Bible, which testifies of Jesus.

We study the Bible and then build doctrines based on scripture. We then teach those doctrines, boldly proclaim them, defend them and debate them. Those that follow our teaching then believe those doctrines based primariy on our own authority and their faith in us. Sure, we quote select scriptures that demonstrate the validity of our doctrine, but many skip over or explain away scriptures that don't fit our doctrine very well. Since students only remember a small percentage of what they are taught, what are they likely to remember - our oft repeated doctrine, or the scriptures we use to support it. The result is that we believe a whole number of things and repeat them to each other without really knowing what the Bible actually has to say about the subject. This makes us rigid, defensive and fragile.

I believe this was one of the primary weakness of the Pharasees. They had an entire "church culture," an entire series of beliefs spawned from the scriptures, but were not the scriptures themselves. Their doctrines were far more rigid than the scripture itself, and it lacked the scripture's power and purpose. Thus they would allow a priest to minister on the sabbath, but would stone a prophet for performing a miraculous healing on the sabboth. They would pull an ox out of a pit on the sabbath, but not suffer a lame man to be healed.

What would happen if we taught the Bible instead of our doctrines? What would happen if we maximized the authority of Jesus and the scripture and minimized our own authority? What would happen if we taught those parts of scripture that we really don't understand and admitted as much instead of teaching our best guess as if its the authoritative explanation?

I'm actually trying this out in two different settings., and the results are interesting. The first group is a weekly meeting consisting mostly of high school students. I asked the class to read through a book of the Bible at the rate of five chapters a week. During class I would encourage the class to share insights they discovered and to ask questions. I asked them to purchase a New Living Translation to make this reading easier. Reading rates were at first quite high, but then dropped off. Students were not as comfortable sharing insights as they were asking questions, though they sometimes had profound answers to each other's questions.

Student questions tended to gravitate toward the most difficult passages of scripture that even scholars only suggest possible interpretations. They probably gravitated toward these passages because they are normally completely ignored by pastors and teachers. It was totally new to them. To this I offered both a short and a long answer. The short answer was that I didn't know the answer. The long answer was a discussion of the possible explanations that scholars, pastors and teachers have suggested. This clearly frustrated some students who wanted to be told the right answer to memorize, and who considered it a waste of time to think about the meaning and implications of something you cannot conclusively answer.


So why would this lesson trouble me? Having seen that some of the old ways I had been taught are false, I know I can never go back to them. Yet the path that I am to take now is not entirely clear. It's probably the same old uncertainty of the future and fear of making a mistake. There is also a certain danger and fear when questioning the foundations you are standing on. This lesson effectively warned me of the perils of leaving the foundations that I now know to be faulty. This resonated with my fear.