Building on the Foundation

Before reading this post, I highly recommend you read The Scary Truth and Approved Conclusions . It provides necessary context. Next to the Holy Spirit, context is one of the most important aids to understanding the Bible. A lack of context is one of the primary reasons most of the false teachings in the world have come about, and it's vital if we actually want to know the truth about what God is telling us through His word. For proper context, you generally have to read the verses around the verse and sometimes the chapters around it (In the case of Paul, the entire letter, the words of Jesus, and the Old Testament. I'm only half kidding.). Without getting the context, you can come to some pretty wild conclusions, like sin is good and we should sin more so that the grace of God can abound more in our lives. So the context around a particular verse is important, but also the subject (who or what is being talked about), and who the recipient of the verbal or written instruction...

There is often a question among Christians about which translation is best to use. The reason this is important is the truth, and what we consider the truth to be. A lot of translations are translated using the translator's idea of what a passage should say, rather than what is actually there. These are called thought-for-thought translations, and they are a tragedy because they change the word of God, either by adding to it or, in many cases, taking away from it. It's obvious why this is a terrible idea, yet some of these translations are quite popular among Christians, mostly because they’ve never looked into them. I myself would have recommended some of these poor translations just a few weeks ago, but I looked into it a little more, and it was shocking what I found.  Essentially all translations commonly used today are thought-for-thought translations, which presents a problem. Unless you have a good translation to compare it to, there is a good chance you will be misled by...