“Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? Shall I, then, take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid. What? Know ye not that he who is joined to an harlot is one body? For two, saith he, shall be one flesh.”
That sounds pretty bad – if you’re a Christian having sex with prostitutes you are defiling Christ.
But, wait… what if you just turn the phrase around?
"take the members of an harlot, and make them the members of Christ"
That sounds pretty good! The prostitute just had a born again experience and got saved! So, Christians can save all the prostitutes by having sex with them...
The next morning I was just walking between classes, no idea what I was thinking about – probably just the things I needed to get done that day. The thought popped into my head out of nowhere. It made me laugh. I chuckled and was amused.
For about a minute.
And then it dawned on me, slowly at first, but I couldn’t shake the thought. The suddenly-not-so-humorous phrasing and conclusion was just as valid as what Paul had written. You can’t use the same logic to prove two opposite things - defiling Christ and purifying the prostitute. Paul’s logic was obviously wrong, regardless of his beliefs about personal behavior.
At that moment, for me, one door opened and another door closed. I couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle, and all the things I had believed fell apart like a house of cards in a wind storm. It was not a pleasant feeling. I suddenly realized I didn’t know anything about God, or Jesus. A verse from a song I had learned as a little kid in vacation bible school kept running around in my head:
Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so…
But what if the Bible isn’t the inspired word of God? What if everything in it is just a collection of thoughts and stories, just like every other book on the planet? How, then, would I know that Jesus loves me? Or even exists? Or what I should do, where I should go, what is my purpose, what about saving souls, spreading the word, doing God’s will? I suddenly had way more questions than the night before...
How could I know anything? And I realized at that moment that the only thing I could ever really know was what I felt inside. I might get Alzheimer's and lose my memories, but, as long as I was alive, I would have feelings.
Acknowledging my doubts about the Bible, God, Jesus, and purpose wasn’t exactly the answer I was looking for when I prayed for guidance. But that was the answer I got, and it set me on a different path from that day on. I can’t say I never looked back, but I can say that my feelings started to feel like freedom, and I never wanted to go back, no matter how bumpy the road ahead.
Your death grip on the Bible as the true and accurate inspired word of God is really just you clinging to your fears. You are afraid there isn't anyone listening. That there is no plan for your life. That no one is steering the ship, and it's up to us to get it right. That there is no heaven you're going to make it to one day. That you'll never see your loved ones that have passed, or even your dog, ever again - that once they're gone, they're gone forever. That when you die, that is the end. That the whole rapture thing is a pile of bollox...
You don't know what sin is. You think it's stuff like having sex with prostitutes, but it's not. Sin is missing the mark. And if you're clinging to the Bible like a magic 8 ball, or as an instruction manual for avoiding pain and suffering in this life, or gaining access to immortality in the next, you are missing the mark.
You think I'm telling you God doesn't exist. I'm not. Sorry, I don't have that kind of clarity or vision. I have no idea, really, whether He exists or not. But clinging to the Bible as the source of all divine wisdom is like clinging to a rock at the bottom of a river - you'll be stuck there and drown unless you let go and allow the current to take you where it will.