Is the Bible Still Relevant Today?
Part 1 of 3
The Bible is so backwards!
The Bible is filled with obsolete commands!
It’s an old book, written thousands of years ago. It can’t be relevant in our modern world today!
These are common assertions we often hear today when the subject of the Bible comes up. However, I take a high view of Scripture, and as a Christian I believe the Bible is God’s word. And as God’s word, I believe it is relevant today, and will always remain relevant into the future.
And I will even take this farther: it’s not the Bible that’s backwards, but us! It’s today’s society and culture that’s backwards and getting it wrong, not the Bible.
Now, having said that, it doesn’t mean everything in the Bible is meant as a universal command for all believers for all times. It is an old Book, after all - and some of the stuff written in it was meant for the original audience who lived in the Iron Age who faced a host of issues we no longer face. This is a huge topic all on its own, and is discussed at length in Paul Copan’s excellent book, Is God a Moral Monster? This is a topic I also cover in chapter 6 of my book, Jesus and Captain Kirk.
But I stray. Getting back to the subject at hand in today’s post, I’d like to show just how incredible and amazing the Word of God is, if we take the time to really understand what the Word is saying and how it applies today.
The problem isn’t with the Bible, but with us and our unbelief. I think that many biblical principles are too far advanced and ahead of us, and we simply aren’t ready or willing to accept it as a society.
If that sounds outlandish, here’s a sampler of some of the things the Bible says. As you read this short list, contrast it to our present day economic and social system … (if you dare).
All debts are to be forgiven and erased every six years. No matter what. No exceptions.
Foreign immigrants, specially those fleeing oppression and injustice, are to be accepted, taken in and treated like family, and given shelter.
Goodbye oligarchy. Rule of law is to be strictly enforced, and rich people are NOT to be allowed to use their wealth to control the country or influence the system.
Social security. People are to be helped generously to get back on their feet. The poor are to be fed and clothed and given assistance, with no expectations that they will pay back.
No military draft. You don’t have to fight in a war if you don’t want to.
Women are to be treated as equals.
The poor and lower classes are to be given the same treatment as the rich and upper classes.
Crazy, or what! And that’s just for starters. It gets worse, at least from the perspective of the mega-rich and privileged. Many biblical principles will be highly offensive, and stick in the craw of many people - even right wing evangelicals if they’d actually pay attention to what Jesus says.
Point number 1 alone would crash our perverted financial system over night if it was adopted, because our system is addicted to easy credit and on-going debt that never ends. It’s a system in which people can buy more stuff than they need with money they don’t have, and the debt just keeps piling up.
This can’t end well.
It’s very easy to look back at previous generations and see their injustices, but it’s not so easy to see our own. As Jesus pointed out in Matthew 7:1-5, we tend to be blind to our own faults, but have perfect 20-20 vision when looking at the faults of others.
This happens at social and cultural levels, as well as personal. We’ve abolished slavery and we look back at history and wonder how people back then could have ever supported it. We say to ourselves that, had we been alive in those days we never would have tolerated such horrible injustice.
But I often wonder what future generations may say of us, when they look back upon the 21st century. What injustices around us now do we tolerate today, that future generations will scratch their heads and wonder how we could have been so stupid…
We no longer accept slavery, perhaps, but we tolerate an economic system that keeps lower income people effectively trapped in poverty with little hope of bettering themselves. The education needed to get a better job is unattainable for many.
We tolerate a perverse system in which 1% of the American population holds 90% of the wealth.
If that’s not bad enough, we then stand aside and let them run the country - for their own benefit, of course, not ours. So people and society in general dismiss the Bible as backwards while they usher in the oligarchs.
Almost 38 million Americans live in poverty, 11.5% of its population.[1]
More than 30% of single parent homes – mostly women – are poor.
Wages earned by those in the lower income groups are barely enough to live on. Once rent is covered, there is precious little left over for anything else, like groceries, medicine and childcare. Forget about college courses to learn new skills.
The vast majority of low-income workers do not get paid sick time. Finances at lower-income levels are so tight, a day or two off due to illness often means bills won’t get paid. So low-income people will go to work sick, or send a child to school sick, because they cannot afford the time off. Yet business executives making millions will resist pay increases and paid sick time for workers.
We tolerate this injustice. It’s not ideal, we tell ourselves, but it’s just reality. We justify our injustices the same way previous generations justified child-labour and slavery.
While corporations get rich and CEO’s make millions, efforts to improve conditions for workers are resisted by the wealthy who benefit from the status quo. They will argue that the economy cannot afford it. They issue dire warnings of impending economic doom. They warn that raising wages will lead to huge price hikes and mass unemployment. These arguments are eerily similar to what pro-slavery advocates said prior to the American Civil War. The U.S. economy was very dependent on cheap slave labour, just as our modern economy depends on low-cost workers today.
It’s easy for us to look back and sneer at the flaws we see in previous generations. It’s not so easy to recognize our own for what they are, things we accept as normal that to a future generation will be recognized as painfully, obviously wrong.
Here are some criticisms and questions future generations may have for our so-called ‘enlightened’ western society today:
Why were young people sent to prison for years over minor, non-violent, offenses?[2]
Why were Black people convicted at far higher rates than Whites for the same crimes?[3]
Why was executive pay 265 times that of the average worker? The average worker made $33,000 a year compared to the $8.7 million average for CEOs.[4]
In the early 21st century the U.S. justice system was sending thousands of people to jail for minor, non-violent crimes – often without a fair trial due to plea bargaining – resulting in the highest incarceration rate in the world.[5] Why was this tolerated?
The vast majority of the prison population came from poor households. Why didn’t they make college accessible and affordable for everyone, so that low-income kids could have a better chance and some real alternatives?
Why was there little money for better inner-city schools, but they had billions of dollars to build new prisons?
Better education was denied people who didn’t have the funds, regardless of intelligence and aptitude, making it extremely difficult to break the cycle of poverty they were born into. This is effectively a class system, keeping people trapped in the lower classes. Why was that tolerated?
Why was it a huge political battle just to make health care more available to lower income families?
Getting justice in court was much more difficult for poor people. That’s because they couldn’t afford better lawyers. Why didn’t they recognize that as a form of bribery that favored the rich and perverted justice for the poor?
The rich were allowed to send thousands of high-priced lobbyists to Washington, meaning the interests of the rich got preferential treatment over everyone else. Why wasn’t this recognized as the systemic bribery that it was?
Why did they worship the beautiful and talented, and shower them with obscene amounts of money? Why were famous actors and singers paid better than nurses, police officers and fire-fighters?
My purpose in asking these questions is to get us thinking about some of the perversions and injustices of our society that have become normalized and acceptable, things that are so much a part of the acceptable background we don’t even see it anymore for what it is.
In the 19th century child labour was normal and accepted, and people who challenged it were considered crazy and unrealistic. I think we need more “crazy” people to start challenging the accepted norms today.
The Bible commands justice for the poor, the elimination of poverty and the cancellation of debt. We are to generously provide for the needs of others; feed the hungry, heal the sick, take care of other people and not expect that they be able to pay for it.
Jesus warned against the dangers of materialism. He said that we are not to be greedy or selfish; that we are to love people, not money.
Interestingly, the Bible is also very clear in its commands that the rich and powerful are not to be favoured, and not to be allowed to use their power, influence and money to pervert the system to their own interests. However, that’s exactly what we see going on around us now.
The Gospel tells us that all people, regardless of race or skin colour, are our brothers and sisters. It commands us to love other people as we love ourselves. To treat the stranger and foreigner in our midst as family. To shelter and protect those fleeing oppression. It means the end of hate and racism. This is extremely relevant to our present-day culture that worships money, and is consumed with greed, racism, materialism, violence and injustice.
Biblical commands like this may strike us as too idealistic and Pollyanna, but that only reflects a problem with our society and the norms we’ve come to accept, not the Bible. The problem is us and what we’re willing to accept and tolerate.
The moral and ethical truths in the New Testament are timeless and apply to all cultures because it addresses the underlying human condition that we all share.
In response to people who assert that the Bible is backwards and irrelevant, I would like to show the opposite is true. Not only is the Bible extremely relevant, in many respects it is ahead of us socially; it’s our modern Western culture that’s getting it wrong, not the Bible.
When those who believe in the Bible take its core message to heart and act accordingly, then those who don’t believe, or at least aren’t so sure, may be more inclined to listen when Christians talk about Jesus.
Thanks for reading part 1. In future posts we’ll take a look at how the Bible is ethically and socially ahead of our society.
This post is adapted from my recent book, Jesus and Captain Kirk, available on Amazon.
[1] https://www.debt.org/faqs/americans-in-debt/poverty-united-states/
[2] The ‘3 Strikes’ and ‘habitual offender’ laws in many states results in long prison sentences, even life, for minor offenses.
[3] The likelihood of imprisonment for a Black man is 1 in 3. For White men it is 1 in 17.
[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/424159/pay-gap-between-ceos-and-average-workers-in-world-by-country/
[5] As of June 2020, the U.S. incarceration rate was the highest in the world, with 25% of the world’s prison population. It enjoys sharing the top 5 with such enlightened countries as El Salvador, Turkmenistan, Thailand and Palau.