Do Not Tamper!

Rather, we have renounced secret and shameful ways; we do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God.

2 Corinthians 4:2a

I am always amazed at how up to date the Scriptures seem. You would think that Paul had just been listening to some Christian radio broadcasts or television programs when he wrote this. There were people in his day, preaching in churches and evangelizing, who were practicing disgraceful, underhanded ways. They were relying on cunning approaches and even tampering with the Word of God. Paul says, Seeing other people do this, I want nothing to do with it.

Notice particularly what this consists of, because this speaks to our own time. First, he says, I have renounced secret and shameful ways, that is, the practice of deliberate deceit. Every now and then a report appears about some evangelist who hires converts to stand up in his meetings and confess Christ, or to come down front and give a testimony of being healed, in order to make the evangelist look like a success. That is deceitful. You read of Sunday Schools that bait and bribe people to come to church. I have met preachers who have phony degrees, obtained for $100 or so, sent by some diploma mill somewhere. That is deceit. I know of missionaries who send reports home to their supporting churches about things that have no basis whatever in fact in their ministry. They tell of things that never occurred, reporting achievements in the preaching of the gospel that never really happened. I know of Christians who tell someone else's experience as though it happened to them, and thus they lie in the name of Jesus.

But Paul says we do not rely on those kinds of things anymore. Nor do we tamper with God's word. Can you imagine anybody in the name of Jesus tampering with God's word? Yet it happens all the time. Peter speaks of those who twist the Scriptures. It is not difficult to do that. You can take a great biblical word and give it another meaning, and using the same language, talk about something else entirely: The word resurrection is disemboweled of its biblical content and made to mean something that it does not mean in the Bible. The word Christ is made to stand for a person or a being who does not exist in Scripture at all. Yet people who hear you use that kind of language are fooled. That is twisting the Word of God; and it happens all the time in our day. You find people who infer that the Bible is inferior to the discoveries of modern knowledge — present day scientific discoveries have proved it wrong; therefore, it is not to be trusted. This is tampering with the Word of God, because nothing in the Bible has ever been proved wrong by scientific discovery.

Lord, grant me discernment to recognize the ways your Word is tampered with today. Help me to renounce such things. Amen.