To arrive at truth we must dismiss religious prejudices from heart to mind. We must let God speak for himself…To let God be true means to let God have the say as to what is the truth that sets men free. It means to accept his word, the Bible, as the truth. Our appeal is to the Bible for truth.
Where did the quote above come from? Sounds like something you’d hear from a good evangelical church, right? Nope…it’s from “Let God Be True,” a work from The Watchtower Bible And Tract Society of the cultic group, the Jehovah Witnesses.
The problem here is not that certain cults and heretical groups deny the “words” of the Bible but that they deny the “sense” of those words. That is, they deny the true and genuine meaning of those words.
You can holler all day long that you receive and accept the Bible. Fine. But it doesn’t stop there. The next question is, “do you receive and accept the true and genuine meaning of that Word?”
This is where creeds and confessions come into play. A confession, like the Westminster Confession of Faith, is not designed to replace God’s Word, but is designed to help explain it’s true and genuine sense. When I say that I subscribe to the original Westminster Confession, I am not saying that the Westminster Confession takes precedent over Scripture. I am saying that the Confession does a great job at explaining and summarizing the true sense of what that Bible teaches in the essentials.
Consider: Satan had no problem quoting Scripture to Jesus (Matthew 4). But he certainly has a problem with its true meaning.
It’s not enough that men like Don Preston of the hyper-preterist movement can write tons of articles, filled with tons of Scripture references. What men like Don Preston have demonstrated over and over again is their incompetency in handling that Word RIGHTLY.
It is interesting to note that right after the Apostle Paul exhorts Timothy to “study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” that he warns of “profane and vain babblings” that “increase unto more ungodliness” like those of Hymenaeus and Philetus who rejected, not the word “resurrection,” but it’s true meaning.
