Jesus himself taught us how to use the word of God. He knew what passages led to God, and emphasized inclusion, mercy, and honesty. He ignored passages that were cultural, self-serving, paranoid, tribal, and legalistic. He denied exclusionary, punitive, and triumphalist texts.
Jesus used scriptures in a spiritual and highly selective way, which is why he was accused of being unlike teachers of the law. Jesus reprimanded the Jewish scribes saying that they had entirely missed the point: “You understand neither the scriptures nor the power of God”.
Without an honest, personal, love-centered, and Spirit-led experience of "God's word", we have no consistency or authority in our interpretation of the Bible.
Mark 12:24 (to the scribes) Your mistake is that you don’t know the Scriptures, and you don’t know the power of God."
Mark 12:34 "Realizing how much the man understood, Jesus said to him, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.”
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