The Authority of Scripture -- Part One

This will be a multi-part posting. The subject is large. On Facebook, a posting of the article shown above brought about a difficult discussion regarding scripture. The article itself isn't particularly controversial, but in the article, Ken Pagaard mentioned his Friday morning Bible study. This brought to my mind the following story:

Reading about Ken's Friday Bible study brought to mind an incident that happened a couple of years later. Ken seemed to relish putting people like me in awkward situations. I was not very Biblically literate and about 5 minutes after that Bible study should have started, Ken stepped out of the office and said that he couldn't go -- why didn't I go and teach the class. He gave me the scriptures -- the section in Timothy telling the women to keep quiet. I went forth to meet a group of around 30 women and began to teach. In ones and twos women began to leave. I think that there were only two who remained until the bitter end. This was not one of my best moments.

After several responses about teaching the Bible, the following response was posted:

Dick, do you really think the tribal god of the desert Hebrews was telling them to righteously kill everybody (except the hot babes) and to take their land? Damned convenient if so. Of course we have to take the word of the land-n-babe-grabbers for it, the ones who wrote those obscene books.

Either we reject much of the bible as obscene cultural nonsense or we accept it as true--and are thus compelled to reject the demon they worshipped. Ain't no two ways about it.

In this posting and a few which will follow, I want to put forward my understanding of the truth of scripture and why I chose to follow scriptural precepts. But first let me say that I do trust the Bible. I believe that the Bible teaches me the ways of God and, of course, teaches me about Jesus. Certainly there are some things that are hard to understand. Many of these aren't hard to understand factually, the hard part is to put the facts into a line with any kind of God that we want to worship. I think that the effort expended to understand these sections of scripture are worth while. My future posts may not convince anyone who disagrees with scripture, but they are my attempts at understanding difficult truth. I welcome contrary comments.