When I was growing up, I sat under teachers who often impressed upon me the importance of sound hermeneutics in reading and interpreting God’s Word. His Word is Truth, but when Truth is mixed with any untruth, it becomes a lie. We live in a world full of lies, but often the most dangerous lies come from the places where we have heard truth before. There is an old story about how to properly boil a frog. If you take a frog and try to plop it down into a pot of boiling water, the frog will feel the heat and immediately jump out of the pot. If, however, you put the frog in the pot while the water is still at a nice, comfortable, room temperature, then slowly heat the water around it, the frog may boil to death without ever realizing the danger.
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her[.]” Ephesians 5:25 (NASB95)
This interesting verse comes in the middle of an interesting, and often misused passage of Scripture. By way of example, if anyone doubts such a misuse exists, I believe we can likely agree that anyone who thinks that, based on the surrounding verses, it is appropriate for a husband to ask his wife to call him “lord” should check his hermeneutics. While I have not personally sat under that particular fallacious teaching, I know others who have. For the sake of our readers who have been hurt in abusive situations where the full passage around this verse has been weaponized and wielded blasphemously in service to selfish, earthly philosophies, I will not quote the whole thing here. For those who have by God’s grace not suffered such wounds, I encourage you to go read the rest. Ephesians 5:25 is a verse about how a Christian husband is to imitate Christ’s love in his relationship with his wife.
“…Christ… loved the church and gave Himself up for her[.]” Ephesians 5:25b
Normally, when a Scripture verse is quoted (or when any other important word is quoted, for that matter), any changes made to the text, even just for the sake of clarity, are indicated in some way. When cutting out a less relevant portion to reduce the length, one uses an ellipsis (…), or when changing a verb tense or a mark of punctuation or inserting a name in place of a pronoun, one puts brackets around the word that was changed. This is common practice in secular documents, and it is even more important when we are making an effort to rightly handle the word of truth. That also assumes that the quote is being edited in a way that attempts to faithfully capture the essence of the meaning presented in the full version of the passage.
What I see in the image above is a Scripture being twisted to mean something that was obviously not the primary intent of the verse when taken in context. It is given in a way that one unfamiliar with the passage would not have any indication that this text has been altered. This picture makes me wonder, “Was the person doing the decorating unable to find any other verse in the New Testament that actually conveyed what they wanted to say here?” Why choose a verse that must be altered to say something the text did not originally mean? The fact that this egregious mishandling of Scripture remains in a prominent position in the GCC building (at the time of this writing) indicates at the very least tacit approval by the leadership, which has allowed this pseudodoxy to go uncorrected. When we have tested the water’s temperature to see that it is safe, we are less likely to notice that safety evaporating around us. When we have heard Truth that can be trusted, we may continue to trust the voice that spoke it even when that voice begins to lie.
It is easy to be caught up in a bad situation when it develops around you. In such circumstances, it can be hard to see things changing for the worse until one day it all catches up to you. I do not blame anyone who is trapped, unable to see the problems boiling the water around them, because I was in that same situation. I was not able to see that the water was boiling until the edges of the pot burned me when I tried to climb out. Some things may seem innocuous at the time. “Of course, Christ loves the church!” one might say. “Why is it such a big deal that we are using this verse to say that?” My primary concern when I see this is (among other things) the lack of faithfulness it represents in accurately handling God’s Word.
“He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much.” Luke 16:10 (NASB95) [emphasis mine]
The word that is translated “unrighteous” here has also been translated as “dishonest” or “unjust.” Those who are faithful in little things can be trusted to be faithful with more, but those who are dishonest in a very little thing are dishonest with greater things also.
Be on the alert.