A Conservative
Jul 28 2023 - Eric Buresh
If you haven’t picked up on it yet from my history of posts here, I am what many would call a religious conservative. To quickly deescalate the trigger my previous sentence may have caused, definitions are so important. First, my conservative status has nothing to do with politics. If you want to know my political leanings on various issues, you would need to ask me issue by issue. I don’t belong to any political “team” or “tribe.” On any and every issue, my personal stance is guided by what the Holy Spirit has taught me from Scripture. Sometimes that falls in line with one political team and sometimes another.
The second definitional question is what it means to be conservative in terms of faith? When I think of the term, conservative, I go to it’s root word – one who conserves. One who conserves, holds onto, keeps, or maintains a resource. One who conserves does not throw away or squander that resource. It is in this way that I am a conservative. Or perhaps a conservationist.
A key resource God has given us in this life is His Word where He reveals Himself in Christ and reveals the Way of Life by Faith. When it comes to the Word, I will not squander, throw away, water down, dismiss, or diminish one word of this valuable resource. I will not say that some of it no longer applies. I will not say that one color of text (red) is more important than other colors (black). I will not use our own social decay to justify new interpretations of its ancient text. No, I will conserve the Word to the best of my ability and strength in Christ. Why am I so passionate about this conservation effort?
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God a may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17) The Word is the very breath of God. What He breathed out through human authors, we breathe in for our very Life. How can we possibly justify marginalizing or dismissing any part of God’s very breath to us? Only if we reject the belief that the Word is God-breathed can we even begin to justify any manipulations to it, and if we don’t believe that the Word is God-breathed, then why in the world are we wasting time on it in the first place? If it’s not God-breathed, it’s just another book.
Some agree that it is God-breathed but say that man got in the way when physically transcribing God’s words and so we can take into account the human authors times and imputed prejudices. To this predictable argument, the Word responds that the “holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.” (2 Peter 1:21) So, no. Man did not get in the way. God gave them exactly the Word He was breathing out by the Holy Spirit. It is God’s Word – not man’s! God stands outside of time. His Words have no beginning or end. They apply equally across all time because God is not even constrained in time to begin with. Time is a construct that God attached to the finiteness of His creation, and it is no limitation on His own timeless Words.
Yes, it is my goal to conserve God’s Word in the most pristine and precise way possible. In this, I am a conservative. The God-breathed nature of the Bible is an absolute and firm foundation. If you are not standing on this firm foundation, or if you are putting cracks in it because you don’t agree with some part of God’s breathed out revelation, you are building your faith on shifting sand. Your house of cards will eventually fall. Confess your doubt about the Scriptures to the Lord, ask Him to give you faith in His Word as the absolute and firm foundation. Ask one of our pastors to talk with you specifically about your faith in the Word (they can give you way more answers than I can in a short post). Then, by the Spirit, restart the building project of faith on that firm foundation.