About Gift of His Word

The Bible is a gift. It is not the only thing God has given us, and it is not God himself. God is the source of truth. He spoke the world into being, and he also inspired the words of Scripture. Creation can tell us real things about him. History, language, and the rest of what he has made can help us hear those words more clearly. But creation is existence, not explanation. It is easier to misread a world than a sentence. Scripture is the written gift: where it speaks, it speaks with authority.

This site exists to receive that gift without shrinking it.

What I am trying to do

GiftOfHisWord.com is a place for teaching and study that stays with the hard questions. Many of those questions divide Christians. Some of them get settled too quickly from a single verse, a favorite teacher, or the need to keep the room calm. I do not plan to shy away from them.

That does not mean every article is a fight. It means I will not stop at the point where disagreement might begin. I will try to explain the main views on a subject fairly, including the ones I do not hold. Eschatology is a good example. People land in different camps because they are weighting different passages, different sequences, and different ideas of what “fulfillment” means. If you only learn your own map, you will not understand why the other maps exist, and you will not understand the Bible as well as you could. Seeing the other side is not a courtesy. It is part of the work.

After I have laid out the views, I will say what I think the whole of Scripture requires, and why.

Where I am coming from

I do not treat a verse, a paragraph, or even a whole book as if it were the only word God has spoken on a subject. Isolated texts can be handled with great care and still be misheard, because the rest of the canon was given to us for a reason. Exceptions in Scripture are real. They do not automatically become the rule. Deborah and Esther, for example, have to be read as themselves — and then read again in light of the rest of what God has said about men, women, authority, and his ordinary design. The local text keeps us from flattening the story. The whole canon keeps us from turning the exception into a new law.

I am trying to think in systems, not in compartments. What I believe about creation has to survive contact with what I believe about redemption. What I believe about the end has to survive contact with what I believe about the beginning. A theology that works in pieces and collapses when the pieces are set beside each other is not finished yet.

That work has a name. It is close to what the church has long called systematic theology, read under the older rule that Scripture interprets Scripture. I use history, language, and the created world as helps. I do not treat them as a second bible. My aim is not to add to the text. It is to understand the text in the light of everything else the same God has given.

How this differs from a common kind of caution

Caution is good. The fear of putting words in God’s mouth is a holy fear. A great deal of damage has been done by people who were sure too soon.

There is another danger that looks like humility and is not. It is the habit of stopping short of a conclusion so that no one can say you were wrong. It sanitizes the text by refusing to ask what the text, joined to the rest of Scripture and to the world God made, actually commits us to. It produces many small, careful buildings and no house. Scholars and pastors who work this way are often protecting something worth protecting: they do not want to bind consciences beyond what is written. I respect that. I also think it can become conflict avoidance. If the people of God will not think out loud about the hard things, the light we were told to put on a stand gets hidden under a bowl of qualifications.

I would rather move slowly, show my work, name the other side, and then say what I think. That is more dangerous. It is also more honest.

The kind of question this site will take up

Here is one example, not because it is the only difficult subject, but because it shows the method.

Jesus said that in the resurrection people neither marry nor are given in marriage. Many take that as the last word: marriage belongs to this age only. That reading deserves to be stated at full strength. Jesus is not a minor witness.

There is another question that will not go away if you start at the beginning instead of only at that sentence. God made the man and the woman for each other because it was not good for the man to be alone. God does not change. The new heaven and the new earth are not the disposal of creation; they are its healing. So I am not satisfied to treat the original union as a temporary accommodation that glory finally abolishes. I want to know how Jesus’ words, the creation gift, the character of God, and the promise of a restored earth belong to one story rather than two.

I may be on the less common side of that question. I am not asking anyone to accept the conclusion on the strength of an About page. I am saying this is the kind of work the site is for: do not let one passage silence the others, and do not let a system silence the passage. Hold them together until they speak.

You will find the same pattern elsewhere. I will describe the major eschatological positions so that a reader can see why each one exists. I will do the same with other disputed doctrines. Then I will argue. The argument is not the same thing as the map.

Who I am

My name is Rex. I am an engineer. That habit of mind is part of why this site exists. I tend to connect things in a different way than a lot of other believers do — a passage with another passage, a doctrine with a fact in the created world, a hard question with the logic that has to hold if God is consistent. Over time people noticed. They started bringing me the questions that do not fit in a short answer.

That has become real work in the church. I have done ask-anything nights with high schoolers at youth group: difficult passages, logic, science, and the other subjects that sit next to God and the Bible. I have walked people through supposed contradictions and shown why they are not contradictions. I have helped others through complex pieces they had been told to leave alone. I have taught and preached on the logic, science, forensics, archaeology, history, prophecy, and language that surround God and Scripture.

People generally enjoy it when I teach. I usually joke that is because they do not have to put up with me every week, and because the material is different from what most pastors have time to do. The reception is often warm anyway. The pleasure, for me, is watching someone see how amazing the Bible actually is — not a thin book with a few safe sentences in it, but a gift sturdy enough to take the hardest questions without coming apart.

A soft fence

I want people to know the true God. That is the point of the site. I do not want anyone pulled away from him by deception — the kind that comes from outside the church, and the kind that is generated inside it.

Disagreement, especially in the deeper or more disputed areas this site will enter, does not mean we are not brothers and sisters in Christ. Shared life in him is not the same thing as shared conclusions about every hard text.

I do believe Christ is the answer. The longer I sit with the whole of Scripture, the more I see that he is the only way that does not collapse. If we have to add the extra machinery some churches attach to him — extra mediators, extra rules for belonging, extra revelations that sit beside the Word — we will mess it up. He is sufficient. That is not a small claim. It is the claim.

That is not the same as saying that everyone who uses his name is his. The demons know he exists. The devil knows he exists. People lie. Some claim to follow him and do not. Knowing about Christ is not the same as belonging to him. This site is not here to baptize every profession. It is here to point to the Christ of Scripture, and to refuse both the additions that bury him and the slogans that empty him.

How I ask you to read

Read the views you do not hold. That is often where the neglected passages are.

Do not confuse my confidence in a conclusion with a claim of infallibility. God is the source of truth. This site is an attempt to hear him. If Scripture shows that I have added what he did not say, I will correct it. Where I have refused to say what he did say, press me.

If you came here for a place that never risks a sentence that could start an argument, this will not be that place. If you came here for a place that treats disagreement as a reason to look at more of the Bible rather than less of it, you are in the right house.

The Word was given. The honest response is to open it all the way.