Rodent Regatta

Imagine with me for a few moments that you are traveling across the USA in a covered wagon. It’s the early 1800’s. There are six other families with you who are also traveling in wagons.

Your little band of adventurers is traveling with some cattlemen moving a small herd westward. They’ve got two covered wagons with them. At dusk, these nine wagons pull into a clearing near a stream and set up camp for the evening. There are nine children in this group – six ranging in age from four to nine, one infant and two toddlers. All together there are twenty-one adults.

You’ll be at this camp until dawn, when you’ll be ready to travel again. What do you do with the evening?

Here’s a thought…

Many of the people that crossed and populated this country were people of faith. A Bible was one of the only books that they might have owned. In those years, protestants read the 1611 translation of the King James Version(KJV) of the Bible.

Traveling across the country was fearsome business. Threats were plentiful and prayers for safe passage were far more than lip service.

OK…I’ll get on with it. This isn’t really about pioneers; it’s about Bibles, theologies and how our thinking gets muddled. How does a weary man or woman crossing the country with only a Bible to read in the evening get to theology like this or this?

I’m not personally capable of reading a KJV version of the Bible and concocting some new, man-made theology from it. Who does this stuff? Why do they do this stuff? Where do the distortions creep into truth?

I’m well aware of how complex the ancient Biblical manuscripts can be. I’m also aware of how simple the Gospel message really is. Those kids and other adults traveling with that group of pioneers had all they needed to understand the saving grace of God’s Free Gift. They were not impeded by all of the twentieth century ”scholarship” which clouded that simple, but powerful message.

Clearly, we wouldn’t have Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, Catholics, etc., were it not for historical disputes over what the Bible is telling us. Yet, isn’t the simplicity of that original message of salvation all that we really need?

Who decided it needed to be more complex than that?