I want a different Bible.  By this, I don’t mean that I want the latest fancy goatskin Bible in my preferred translation.  My hands are bad, and it’s difficult for me to use paper Bibles anymore.  Rather, I want a Bible that says different things than the Bibles I already own.

I want a Bible that says that the road to life is broad and found by many.  It doesn't contain specific instructions about salvation or the church.  This new Bible would say that sincerity is enough.  Then, I wouldn’t have to fear for my Methodist neighbors or have awkward conversations with them.  They’d be fine already.

I want a Bible that allows women to teach and exercise authority over men in the church.  My sister and my wife are good Bible students and gifted public speakers, more so than I am.  My new Bible would let them take the pulpit just as I do.  As a side benefit, it wouldn’t make me look like such a Neanderthal!

I want a Bible that doesn’t condemn the practice of homosexuality.  I have friends and loved ones who are caught up in that sin.  Some of them would get baptized tomorrow, if only this stumbling block were removed. 

In my new Bible, I’d take the stumbling block right out.  I like those people!  Why cause them pain by telling them that God hates their behavior?

I want a Bible that allows divorce for any good reason.  There are a lot of terrible marriages out there in which people suffer greatly.  I don’t like telling them that they must not separate what God has joined together.  For that matter, I don’t like disagreeing with my brethren who make emotional arguments in favor of divorce.  I take no pleasure in Scripture-checking people.

My new Bible would let the good people whom I like get divorced, and it would let them get remarried too.  It’s so hard to live alone!  My revision would let them find happiness with someone else.

I want a Bible that is different in many other ways too.  Its message would conform to the world and to my own inclinations, instead of demanding that everyone conform to a revelation that has not changed in 2000 years.

However, there’s a problem with the Bible I want.  In my new Bible, I would be lord, and Jesus wouldn’t be.  All of the above are my ideas, not His.

I am dying.  It’s a cliché to say that Jesus is my only hope, but words cannot convey the desperate clarity with which I see that truth.  I have no other hope left.

If I follow the Bible I want and appeal to Him for help at the last, He has told me what His reply will be.  He will ask, “Why did you call me Lord and did not do what I said?”  It chills my soul even to imagine hearing those words.

I don’t want the Bible I have, with so many hard sayings and painful demands, but I cling to it with all my strength.  I strive to honor and proclaim it, whatever the cost.  I have no alternative.

By contrast, the Bible I want is a luxury I can’t afford.

In Ecclesiastes 12:11, the Teacher notes that all proverbs are given by one Shepherd.  I don’t think this means that every wise saying from every society is literally inspired.  Rather, the point is that the more wisdom a proverb contains, the closer it comes to the Source of all wisdom and to His revealed word.

This is certainly the case with an epigram I first saw attributed to Jeff Bezos a year or two ago, though I would guess that somebody else came up with it first and he merely popularized it.  Regardless, the world’s richest man wants us to know that the secret to success in business and indeed in life is this:  Create more than you consume.

It certainly has the counter-intuitive quality that we associate with Scripture, doesn’t it?  The world wants us to believe that the secret to life success is, simply:  Consume.  Put yourself first.  Take what you want.  If somebody else comes out on the short end of the deal, how tragic and sad.  They should have paid better attention.

By contrast, worldly wisdom declares the creator (as opposed to the self-indulgent taker) to be a chump.  He works hard churning out all this stuff for others, but he never gets back what he put into it.  Otherwise, he wouldn’t be creating more than he consumed.  He is the natural prey of the consumer.  What a tool!

And yet.  Jeff Bezos didn’t get eleventy hundred billion dollars by thinking about what he wanted.  He made all that money by figuring out what others wanted and creating a way to get it to them.  By contrast, the guy who is focused on what he wants is sitting at home on the couch watching The Price Is Right because he walked out on his job at the Kwik Mart (after having worked there for three whole weeks) when the manager got on his case.

“Create more than you consume” matters if you want unimportant stuff like money.  It matters a whole lot if you want eternal life.  We usually don’t describe God as the Consumer, but we call Him the Creator all the time.  That’s probably a hint about which direction both of those words are aimed.

So too, Paul says of Jesus in 2 Corinthians 8:9, “Though He was rich, for your sake He became poor, so that by His poverty you might become rich.”  Is the Lord a creator or a consumer?

We must ask the same question about ourselves.  It’s easy for us to be consumers, even as Christians, to do nothing but take in our churches, families, and friendships.  However, if we are primarily parasites, the relationships that we feed off of will sicken and die.  Paradoxically, though, when we seek to give more than we take, we nourish them, and they in turn nourish us.  To say things another way, the one who seeks to save his life will lose it, but the one who loses his life for the sake of the Lord and the gospel will find it.  

Create.  Give.  Lose.  The world will think you’re an idiot, but God won’t.

The contrast between Revelation 13 and Revelation 14 is one of the most striking between any two chapters in the Bible. In Revelation 13, all the news is bad. Even though the dragon has been defeated in heaven, a new ally for him, the beast, emerges from the sea. Another evil creature, a beast who is a false prophet, comes up out of the earth.

Together, these beings do incredible harm. The dragon leads all the earth to worship him and the beast. The false prophet mimics the work of Christ, deceiving all the people of the world. Now, anyone who does not worship the beast will be killed, and anyone who does not receive the mark of the beast cannot buy or sell. In short, by the end of Revelation 13, it seems that the bad guys have already won!

Revelation 14 tells a different story. There, we learned that 144,000 have not followed the dragon or the beast. Instead, they have remained faithful to God. Also, God uses His angels to begin his plan to overthrow the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet. Babylon, the city of the beast, will be destroyed. Furthermore, all who have worshipped the beast will be punished. The righteous will be rewarded, and in the end, it is the will of God, not the will of the dragon, that will triumph.

In addition to making for exciting reading, this two-chapter sequence reveals a fundamental truth about the cosmic struggle between good and evil. It always looks like evil is about to win. This has been true at many, many times throughout the history of God's people, and it is certain to continue to be true.

Indeed, we ourselves may feel this way right now. It may be that as we consider the apparent moral decline of our country, the work of the devil is as apparent to us as it is in Revelation 13. The same may hold true in our personal lives as well. In my own life, developing a terminal illness does not look like a victory for God!

However, we must hold the truth of Revelation 14 firmly in mind. It was not obvious at the end of Revelation 13, and it may not be obvious in our lives now, but God is preparing an answer. If we see trouble looming on the horizon, how much more is He aware of it! He has had all the time in the world to address our situation. He knows what He is going to do, and His power is such that He will infallibly do it. Nobody reaches the end of Revelation and concludes that God has lost, and if we are faithful to Him, no one will think that He has lost the battle in our lives either.

This is not always easy to hear. We may well feel like God should have turned the chapter to Revelation 14 a while ago! As always, though, God works on His timetable, not ours. If we trust in Him, His triumph in our lives is as certain as His triumph in Revelation.

I'm hard to horrify these days, but this morning, I read an article from Forbes that did the trick. If you have a strong stomach, you can find it at https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/how-tiktok-live-became-a-strip-club-filled-with-15-year-olds/ar-AAWEiIw.  To summarize, it describes how perverts online are able to use TikTok Live to pay teenage girls for sexually suggestive behavior.

Naturally, TikTok condemns these practices, and they use various forms of content moderation in an attempt to prevent the sexual exploitation of children. However, TikTok has a problem. They make money when users exchange money over TikTok, and they have every reason to make the exchange of money as easy and appealing as possible.

For instance, the creeps are able to pay girls without using anything as crass as digits on a screen. Instead, they send money using cute little emojis: hearts, flowers, cartoon animals, and the like. I have a 12-year-old daughter. I understand all too well how appealing such a mode of payment would be to girls. You get money and you get adorable at the same time! Tragically, the cuteness conceals from the girls the danger and degradation that lie before them.

To put things another way, TikTok has a perverse incentive. On the one hand, they certainly don't want to be involved in child abuse. On the other hand, though, they make the most money from a platform that makes exploitation easy.

Many of the safeguards that TikTok has enacted rely on users. For example, users younger than 16 are prohibited from hosting live streams, and users younger than 18 cannot receive money. Sounds airtight, right?

Sadly, this is not the case. Even if teen girls aren't wise enough to see the traps in their path, they certainly are clever and tech-savvy enough to evade such rudimentary restrictions. All they have to do is lie about their age when they sign up, and they can host all the streams and receive all the money that they want to.

It's certainly appealing to have all that money to spend on clothes and coffee, and I would guess that many girls, especially those from troubled backgrounds, would find the attention appealing too. According to the Forbes article, these livestreams can attract audiences of thousands. If you're an insecure fourteen-year-old, how would you like to have thousands of men telling you that you're pretty? The girls have perverse incentives too.

For parents, this is grim news, and it underscores an unpleasant truth. We cannot trust social-media giants to protect our children, not even a little bit. The people in charge of all these platforms don't want to abet evil, but they want to make money more than they want to be righteous. Like Pilate, they will not intervene effectively because the costs of intervention are too high.

This is yet another reason why children under 18 should not have Internet-capable devices in private spaces. I understand that many children in public schools are required to have Internet- capable phones in order to do their class work. However, when children aren't doing class work, those phones need to be with Mom and Dad. We are naive enough that we are mainly worried about our children watching porn, but in truth, watching porn may be the least of the spiritual dangers online.

No matter how many times I read the Bible, I always find something new in it.  Nor are these discoveries subtle or inconsequential.  Often, they are magnificent!

So it was with this week’s Bible reading.  I’m familiar with Revelation.  I’ve taught it several times and read it many more.  However, never before had I paid attention to Revelation 7:16-17.

Part of this is formatting.  The NASB95, which is the translation I keep in my head, sets those two verses in prose.  Yesterday, however, I read out of the CSB, and it divides the text into poetic parallels.  Wow!  What a difference!  (This, by the way, is a great reason to read from multiple translations.  Different renderings and even different formatting can help us see different things)

Anyway, here’s the way the CSB reads:

“They will no longer hunger;
they will no longer thirst;
the sun will no longer strike them,
nor will any scorching heat. 
For the Lamb who is at the center of the throne will shepherd them;
he will guide them to springs of the waters of life,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

Revelation has the reputation of being forceful rather than beautiful, but that’s purely gorgeous!  Contextually, this applies to the multitude that has come out of the great tribulation, but it is a promise for all Christians to cherish.

Indeed, it’s a promise that I cherish.  I suffer now, but I know that God never has promised any Christian that life on earth will be free from suffering.  In John 16:33, He promises the opposite.  Thus, my life now gives me no reason to doubt His faithfulness. 

Rather, I endure, and I anticipate His fulfillment of His promises in the life to come.  In that day, I will neither hunger nor thirst.  God will provide for my most basic needs, and He will fulfill all the others too.  Likewise, neither the sun nor scorching heat will strike me.  God will shelter me from all external oppression.

The next verse explains why I will receive all these blessings.  I love the image here!  In this life, human shepherds shepherd sheep.  In the life to come, the Lamb will shepherd us.

As with the divine shepherd of Psalm 23, He will lead us to water, but the spring to which He will bring us flows with the water of life.  I long for this so much that it hurts!  My illness is incurable and terminal.  I often have thought about what it would be like to go to Jesus in the days of His ministry and be healed even of this.  However, the day will come when He will heal me completely, body and soul.

That day will be as free from sorrow as it is from sickness.  God Himself will dry my tears, as He will dry all the tears of the righteous.  I struggle to comprehend this.  How can it be that we no longer will be grieved even by the memory of sorrow?  Perhaps the answer lies in 2 Corinthians 4:17.  As we dwell in the midst of God’s glory, every earthly affliction will fade into insignificance.

This hope is the only thing that sustains me, or could sustain me, on my journey.  Without the promises of God, I am a pitiable wretch.  With them, suffering only sharpens my focus on my reward.