Why Are There So Many Different Churches?
If Christians have the truth, why can’t they agree on anything?
Objective Truth / Subjective Interpretation
These are two principles that once understood, will help us to understand how two Christians can disagree on what the Bible says.
Objective Truth
Objective truth is that which is absolutely true regardless of our opinion about it.
The Bible records objective truth and the Bible is the standard of objective truth, because it is directly inspired by God. God inspired the 40 different writers in 66 different books with the truths and principles that they recorded.
How Does Inspiration Work?
The writer would receive inspiration from God and in his own way, with his own abilities and mannerisms and linguistic ability, the writer would express what God had inspired them to write, using his own words and mannerisms.
God did not take possession of the individual and get them to write like a robot, He guided them through the process and they communicated what He had shown them with their own personality and abilities.
Subjective Interpretation
So here you have this book, containing objective truth, but men come to the bible and will often have preconceived ideas or pre-suppositions, that they hold to be true and interpret the Bible with those consciously or subconsciously in the back of their minds.
So they try and get the Bible to support their ideas, placing their ideas as the primary authority and looking in the Bible to get support for their ideas.
They hold themselves up as the absolute authority on truth, this is often how cults are formed, that idolise the leader in some way, when this happens we will see this behaviour taken to its absolute extreme.
So How Do We Avoid Private Interpretation Of The Bible?
Does the Bible tell us how to study it?
God has shown us and taught us in many places, how to study the Bible and if we do that, then we are on safe ground.
The Bible guides us, with some texts, here is a paraphrase of two of them: Here a little, there a little, line upon line, precept upon precept.
Here is another: No scripture is of private interpretation.
The key to interpreting the scriptures is in the Bible itself, the scriptures must be used to explain the other scriptures.
So if we are stuck understanding something, we should not try to ‘guess’ what it means or impose our ideas on something, we should look at what is said about the subject in other parts of the bible.
The Bible unlocks itself.
Finding The Truth
If you want to understand what the Bible is saying on a specific subject, you can compare all the texts on the subject and arrive at a correct conclusion as long as you have surrendered your presuppositions and have accepted that God's inspired word is the authority and not your own imaginings.
And that is where many go wrong, they do not let the Bible interpret itself, rather they bring their preconceived ideas to the bible, sometimes consciously and other times subconsciously, and come up with all sorts of ideas that just do not make any sense.
The Enemy:
We have to also understand that Satan desires this scenario, he desires a situation where there is confusion and conflict, disagreements and arguments, so will often stir men up and mislead them to create that confusion.
Even to the point where he will appear in an angelic form and tell men that the Bible has become corrupted or that the Bible needs some additional content, to improve things.
This new information is never consistent with the bible itself and will nearly always attack the concept of Jesus’ divinity.
Many religions and cults have started in this very way, an angel appears, gives someone special light and the Bible is challenged as a source of God's revelation and now we have to filter our study of the Bible through this new pair of spectacles.
The Reformation
1517 (Martin Luther writes his 95 Theses - challenging the Catholic Church's’ teachings on many points) to present.
During the early part of the reformation, when protestantism was rising up and the Bible was once again lifted up as the authority on Christian thought, after centuries of being hidden and denied to the common man during the dark ages, men seeking truth came forward, presenting those things they had discovered in the scriptures.
What would often happen however, is that churches would rise up around the teachings of these men and then when the men like Martin Luther passed away, those followers committed to his teachings and would move no further forward.
No Further!
This was repeated time and time again, churches would spring up around the teachings of individuals, who had discovered something in the Bible that had been lost and now you see the birth of the modern denominations.
The churches would draw a line in the sand and say, we go no further!
A Line In The Sand
So this carried on and continues to this very day, men drawing lines in the sand and refusing to accept anything that was not explicitly taught by their forefathers, making the denomination or the religion the absolute standard of truth.
Sadly, when it is the teachings of the church and the traditions of men, rather than the Bible itself that is held up as the standard, Christianity falls into disrepute and confusion.
William Miller
In 1844 Jesus’ Second Coming was expected throughout America and many parts of the world.
For many years before, Christians all over the world, including the very prominent figure of William Miller predicted that the cleansing of the sanctuary (a prophetic event described in the Bible) was about to happen and they spread this belief throughout the world.
They had looked at prophecy, a specific time prophecy that pointed to the cleansing of the sanctuary in the year 1844, an event that did indeed happen, but they mistakenly pointed to earth as being the sanctuary as they did not have a thorough knowledge of the sanctuary service described in the Old Testament.
It was only afterwards that they realised their reasoning had been faulty and the ‘great disappointment’, which was prophesied in scripture happened, Jesus did not return.
Out Of The Ashes
Many Christians after that event were deeply disappointed and discouraged, mocked and ridiculed, some leaving the faith, but many returning to their original churches, never again to step out of the safety of the doctrinal trappings of their church.
But a small group started studying the scriptures even deeper, comparing scripture with scripture in a way they had never done before, trying to figure out what they had done wrong.
Out of the ashes of the disappointment, many Christians from many denominations, rose up with a commitment to the principle of sola scriptura, the Bible as the definer of doctrine and truth and formed the 7th Day Adventist Church.
The Three Angels Message
The key to their rising up was the discovery and biblical interpretation of the 3 Angels Message of Revelation 18, explaining that they were living in the last days and a message had to go to the world to restore mankind to relationship with the Creator, before it was too late.
Also, they realised that the Sabbath had been lost, that Sunday was not the Sabbath day of the Bible, that it was indeed Friday sunset to Saturday sunset, as taught in the Bible, commanded in the 4th Commandment and practiced by Jesus and the early apostles.
They discovered it had slowly been introduced from the pagan religions into the church during the second and third centuries bc, until it was all but forgotten in modern times.
They also realised that it was foundational to celebrating God as our Creator and was a sign that they should honour Him by abstaining from our day to day activities for one day and commit that day to Him in worship and service and that it’s importance was to be announced as part of the 3 Angels Message to the world, the last great message before Jesus returns.
The Message
To this day, the Adventist church continues to share the message of the 3 Angels to the world, resting on the principles that the Bible interprets itself and that scripture is of no private interpretation and that there is still much light to discover in the Bible that has been lost.
Carrying on the final great work of the Reformation, standing on the shoulders of giants, like Wycliffe, Luther and Calvin and telling the world that Jesus is about to return very very soon.
The work of the reformation is still going forward, we are to find and practice the early Christianity that Jesus and the disciples taught, removing all the baggage that has been added over the centuries so that the truth can be taken to a dying world before it is too late...