Be not carried about with divers and strange doctrines. For it is a good thing that the heart be established with grace; not with meats, which have not profited them that have been occupied therein. Hebrews 13:9
How far are you allowed to travel on Sunday? Nobody ever asked you that before, did they? Because we don’t have any concept of being restricted in how far we as good Christians can travel with a good conscience on Sunday. But that was not the case in Bible times. Any Pharisee would be able to tell you that no one should travel any further from his home than 2,000 cubits (about half a kilometer) on the Sabbath. Where did they come up with that distance? They got it from Numbers 35:6, which gives the distance around one of the cities assigned to the Levites that would be included in the Levites’ portion of the promised land. But what, you might well ask, does that have to do with the distance one might legally travel on the Sabbath? Nothing that I can think of. But the Pharisees somehow made the connection, and used it as the basis for one of their many rules and regulations that governed the lives of the ancient Israelites. To them, the rules were just as important as the Scriptures, even though many of them were distortions of what the Scriptures actually said. We need to be careful today that we are not led away from the truth by divers and strange doctrines that are not based on the Scriptures.
Take the doctrine of baptism, for example. We believe that baptism follows conversion, that baptism is an outward sign, a public acknowledgment, of a work of conversion within the soul and the sinner’s confession of faith in Christ. Where do we get this doctrine in the Scriptures? A key text is in Acts 8:37, as Philip the Evangelist responds to the Ethiopian eunuch’s question as to why he should not be baptised: ‘And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.’ But this doctrine is not supported in most of the modern-language versions of the Bible, because most of them (The ESV, the NIV, Darby, etc.) do not include Acts 8:37. Why not? Because they follow the lead of the Westcott and Hort conspiracy that rejected the Majority Text of manuscripts on which Bibles such as the King James Version, Douay-Rheims version, Websters Bible Translation, and others, are based. Westcott and Hort, staunch believers in the Roman Catholic doctrines of infant baptism, along with other Catholic teachings, tossed out the Majority Text in favour of the corrupted Minority or Alexandrian Text that is preferred by Rome. This an example of divers and strange doctrines that the Lord’s people are in danger of adopting by using Bibles that deviate from the truth.
We are living in a world that seems prepared to accept anything, even things that appear pure nonsense to us. Muslims, for example, swallow the teachings of a man who claimed to have received revelations to himself in a cave, with no corroboration from anyone else. Mormons follow the teachings of a man whose claims have been disproved scientifically and archaelogically. New Agers swallow the unproven and fanciful mysticism of the ages. And the doctrine and practices of Sodom and Gomorrah are openly embraced by political parties, by religious denominations, and by society as a whole despite being condemned by the Word of God.
As Christians, we must see these things for the divers and strange doctrines that they are, and refuse to be carried about by them. – Jim MacIntosh