Ye shall not add unto the Word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from It, that ye may keep the Commandments of the Lord your God which I command you. Deuteronomy 4:2
The book of Deuteronomy is 34 good-sized chapters, with a great deal of detail and information. But not one word of it is superfluous; Moses was instructed carefully not to add anything to what God told him to write, nor was he to leave anything out. All of Scripture is like that. Godly men spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost, and they uttered exactly what God would have them to say.
We have to be careful that we preserve this principle. Is it possible for us to add to the Word? I am afraid we do it all the time, even as we criticize the Pharisees for creating a huge bank of rules and regulations to accompany Scripture. For example, we make the pattern of our meetings so absolute that anyone who does something a little differently is considered a troublemaker. Oh, I know that many of the things that we do are reasonable and practical, and based on sound scriptural principles, but there are some things that could stand a good shaking.
And what about leaving out parts of the Word? No, we don’t use the penknife approach of King Jehoiakim in Jeremiah 36, but we do argue away some of those things that are inconvenient for us. We ignore some things that we say we don’t quite understand, and we misapply some things that challenge our lifestyles.
And do we misinterpret Scripture? We have to be careful. Just because the only verse in the Bible that speaks about wiping dishes (2 Kings 21:13) refers to a man doing it does not mean that only men are to wipe the dishes. That’s a light-hearted example, but there are some serious issues caused by misapplications that are just as wrong. I have heard of some Christians who insist that the somewhat negative reference to a man wearing a gold ring in James 2:2 is an absolute prohibition against any man wearing a wedding ring. I am not making this up. I repeat, we have to be careful.
We are dealing with the Word of God. It is holy. Let us honour it. All of it. – Jim MacIntosh