Bible twisters

as also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures. – 2 Peter 3.16

The context for this verse goes back to the previous one. Peter is writing about Paul and his teachings. I love the relationship between Peter and Paul. They love each other. They support each other. But still they have their differences. Their example would suit us well in a day when we have learned to fight and battle over the pettiest of issues and divide over the tiniest things. They teach us how to disagree and still honour God and bring unity to the church.  

Here Peter writes about Paul’s writings and how sometimes they can be hard to figure out. But he says to apply ourselves to the study of the writings because there is going to be a problem. We need to be ready to defend the scriptures because there are those who are going to try and twist the scriptures to suit themselves. 

Untaught and unstable people are going to twist the scriptures to suit their own ends. 

We must beware of scripture twisters. Sadly, it is not only the heretics and Christ rejecters who twist scripture. There are plenty of times when Christians twist the scriptures to suit their own purposes or to support their own agenda. Sadly, I can think of times early in my own preaching where I decided what I wanted to preach on then found a passage of scripture that I could use to support what I wanted to say. 

I think a lot of folks do that without evil intentions. The problem is when we know better and still twist scripture to support what we want to say and to promote our own agenda. 

The answer is not to twist Scripture to support what we want to say. The answer is that we change our view to fit scripture. 

Let’s all beware of Bible twisters – but even more important let’s be sure that we never twist God’s word to suit our own agenda.