Building my theology. Plumbline

The great thing about truth is that if you don’t like what you are hearing here, today, you can change channels and find a thousand different sources of truth. Sad, but “true”. Truth is being traded and sold in countless varieties. People have become truth-seekers, but they don’t seem to ever be truth-finders. Maybe because education tells us “it’s arrogant to say you can truly know something”. Even Christ-followers bounce back and forth within the realm of teachings about God, from one opinion to another.

• sovereignty of God? or free will of man?
• tongues, miracles, healing for today? or not for today, faded after completion of scripture?
• save the earth because God is green? or God is going to blow up the earth so don’t worry?
• we’ll all suffer through the trials till Jesus returns? or don’t be left behind in the rapture?
• the church is israel? or there are distinct dispensations in God’s work with salvation?

Reminds me of a pendulum. Grant it, one definition of pendulum is perfectly fine…

• A body suspended from a fixed support so that it swings freely back and forth under the influence of gravity, commonly used to regulate various devices, especially clocks.

But it’s the other definition that characterizes too many Christ-followers:

• Something that swings back and forth from one course, opinion, or condition to another: the pendulum of public opinion.

Now, if you don’t know what truth is, if you are in the process of building your theology, you must wander through various teachings. You must weigh out what God is teaching you, versus what is simply the creation of some teacher’s active imagination. The 1st century writers warned us about this pendulum problem, and the false teachers who like to pull us in different directions:

[they] are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind [jude 1:12]

For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. [1 timothy 4:3]

The problem with pendulums is that they constantly swing back and forth. As they rush towards one direction, by definition they are rushing away from the opposite point. We hear a new teaching that captivates us - it’s logical, exciting - so we sprint towards it. But it often means we are abandoning last month’s truth, the truth we just KNEW had to be straight from God. So which is it?

As I build my theology, I want to avoid the pendulum, but rather take up the plumb line. A plumb line has two purposes:

1. A line from which a weight is suspended to determine verticality or depth.
2. A line regarded as directed exactly toward the earth’s center of gravity.

I want to pursue God and His truth in such a way that I am open to Him changing my thinking, even on subjects I think I have figured out. But I must seek and ask Him to balance me, to be my plumb line, so that I can determine spiritual verticality - so that I do not topple. He must be the line that determines my center, and the depth of what I am learning. I don’t want Him to shake His head at my ramblings, and like Paul say I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— [galatians 1:6]

I want the plumb line of God’s guidance, because then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming. [ephesians 4:14]