Larry Kirkpatrick

A Positive Place on the Web for the Third Angel's Message

Most Important Next to Jesus

What is the most important topic for God's Church next to the topic of Jesus? After all, Jesus is Lord. And exactly how do we know this? How do we know about Jesus? From the Bible.

The most important topic next to Jesus in 2018 is how we interpret the Bible. The Bible is God's revelation to us. It cuts through human pretension and nonsense, and reveals truth unadorned.

The trouble with truth is not that it is hard to come by or difficult to figure out. The trouble with truth is that when we are confronted with it, we often prefer it were not so.

But it is so.

God knows we need His truth. He knows we have our own cordless power drill and that we think we can construct truth however we want. But contrary to our self-perception of competence, we are not wonderful morality engineers. He is Creator, we are creatures. We do not legislate truth to Him, but He informs us what truth is.

One thing I've always sought to do with GreatControversy.org is to make it a resource for people who want to follow Jesus and know God's present truth. To that end, I wanted, in this short post, to put in links to various presentations I've made addressing hermeneutics from recent years. Here are some of these collected into one place for your convenience:

12 Affirmations about Scripture, part 1

plugin:embed

12 Affirmations about Scripture, part 2

plugin:embed

NAD's New PBHC Hermeneutic

plugin:embed

NAD's Trajectory Hermenutic Examined

plugin:embed

Go Deeper

For those ready to go deeper, here are links tocamp meeting presentations I gave in 2013 about the history of biblical interpretation (Be sure to download the handouts by clicking the link near the top of several of these presentations):

Rightly Dividing the Word, part 1: God Will Have a People

Rightly Dividing the Word, part 2: Historical Critical or Historical-Grammatical?

Rightly Dividing the Word, part 3: Interpretation and the Present Emergency

Rightly Dividing the Word, part 4: Scripture and the Emerging Church

You will find additional treatments of hermeneutics in several videos you will find inthe year 2014 archive for videos on this site. Those videos are also linked on another site called Ordinationtruth.com.