It’s funny to watch religion, and religious people, and how they construe God, the word of God, and their own form of godliness to fit their own needs, how they twist, turn, invent, and recycle their particular flavors of righteousness to fit into a certain box and then call it “the Word of God”. How God got divided into all these self-proclaimed denominations is beyond the reach of this country backwoods boy.
When certain things or phrases are spoken and elevated as the Word of God, and done sometimes for centuries, and even sometimes with a fleshly authority, many of them are taken to come straight from God’s Word. ‘God helps them that help themselves’, where did that come from? Answer: straight from the carnal mind that was exchanged at the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It certainly ain’t scripture. If it weren’t for God intervening with the helpless, I’d hate to think where I’d be, we can’t earn His help, any more than we can earn His trust. Psalm says God will spare the poor and needy. If you’d like we can look at a few more of these man-made quotes that are pure nonsense.
‘Spare the rod and spoil the child’, although this may be one of those saying that ring true to some extent, it’s not in the Bible. Proverbs says that he that spares the rod hates his son, which might be close to the saying, but still twisted into another direction. ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’; who could create such a saying unless it was some high and mighty do-gooder? Not a lick of resemblance to our loving God does this one smack of Truth.
As an adulterer one focuses their attention in the wrong direction, such as what God calls a harlot when we love another in His stead. Money is not the root of all evil, nor does the Bible say it is, but the love of it is; we then become a whore. I really can’t say how much God will put on any one person, and I really don’t know how much each can bear, but I do know that God will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able.
Many such sayings are accredited to scripture, and many, if not most, are believed to be so, but as man tries to reinvent God with his uneducated fleshly ways, it is not only man that suffers.
If it looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, and walks like a duck-what is it? It might be a coot, and a coot is not a duck. Religion may have a form of godliness, and it may even seem right, but man’s forms and righteous are not to be based on his carnal flesh. It’s all in our relationship with HIM that matters, not with this thing called ‘church’.