Christians love quoting Bible! It’s a good thing; after all there are so many inspiring, comforting, and encouraging verses in the Bible! And so we like to underline the most powerful verses in the Bible, we write it out on our walls, t-shirts, and so on. Is it bad? Not at all, but what my concern is that when people pluck a certain phrase, a verse, or even a part of a verse from the Bible and turn it into a certain belief system, or a philosophy of life. You cannot take the promise that God made to a specific person during the specific circumstances and translate it as if He is saying it to you in your specific situation. You cannot take the promise that God made to Joshua that he will be successful contouring the land and translate it so that it means God is telling you that your new restaurant will be successful. Yes, God did make similar promises many times to His people in various situations but, if we would to be objective and read the ENTIRE Bible, we would also find that many times God told people NOT to go ahead because they will not be successful if they do, and in some instances God did not answer to people at all! We all love plucking out the encouraging promises God made to the heroes of the Bible and applying it to ourselves but nobody wants to take the words that God spoke to King Saul when God rejected him. Nobody wants to apply the words God said to the Kind Baltasar when God scolded him for being, as we like to call it, a waste of space.

My friends, I want to make it very clear that I am not against quoting the Bible, but what I am against is building an illusion as if one verse applies to you and another one doesn’t. Bible isn’t a collection of witty and encouraging quotes and it wasn’t written to be used as a game of scrabble where we can pluck out certain pieces of it and arrange it in a way that suits us best or that supports the philosophy of our choice. Bible was meant to be read as a whole so we can understand the concepts, the actual message that is behind every story. Unfortunately, there is a vast number of life philosophies and various teachings that are going around that are built on just few phrases or verses plucked from the Bible with a surgical precision – God forbid should the second part of the verse find its way into the message; it will spoil the whole philosophy!

I understand that the temptation to draw parallels with the heroes from the Bible is very strong, so much so that if your brother steps on your toe you automatically crown yourself to be Joseph, who was betrayed by his brothers and later became ruler of Egypt. If your family business is farming – well, that’s concrete evidence that you’ll be a king just like David, after all he was a shepherd too! But there is no point in fooling ourselves and feeding the delusion while our God is still alive, He did not stop speaking the minute the last verse of the Bible was written and, I believe, He has a message for every one of us for the specific situation we are in. But plucking out various verses from the Bible and playing mix and match with them is very foolish and self-deceiving practice – doing it may temporarily soothe your emotions but it will lead you nowhere in the long run.