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by Charlie Wolcott

As Christians, we are commanded to go out and preach the Word and make disciples of all peoples. Paul emphasizes to preach the Word – not to preach opinions, not to preach culture, and not to preach your own additions or subtractions. We are to preach the Word, explain it, and showcase the practical living of the truths of it. Yet what has happened today is a near complete abandoning of this command of how we are to preach. While expository preaching keeps a preacher on the text and topical preaching enables a preacher to address specific issues a church needs to deal with (both are valid), most preachers are not preaching what the Bible says but what they want to say or what they think the audience wants to hear.

In the ancient days, when a king sought to send out a message to his people, he would send a herald to proclaim the message to the masses. The herald had a clear job: to proclaim the message, answer a few questions, and never ever give a different message. If it was discovered that a herald was changing the message the king gave, it was a death sentence. The kings weren’t the first to do this either; the Bible did it first.

In Deuteronomy, God sets the standards for how a prophet (a person who claims to speak for God to man) should deliver the message and those who professed to speak “Thus says the Lord” when the Lord did not speak. They were to be put to death. God took those who used His name very seriously. The preacher behind the pulpit, the missionary, the evangelist, the author, those in any para-ministry, the apologist, and anyone who has a platform and proclaims the faith and proclaims the Gospel is under this category. I am included, too. The bigger the platform, the stricter the standard is held. While there is room for growth and maturing, just as there was for the prophets, it is absolutely imperative that when we profess to represent the faith, we represent it correctly and we proclaim what God said, not what we want Him to say. Any person who has ever understood the severity of this job does not want this job. They know how serious it is to preach and how they will be held accountable to God for how they represent Him. We can’t mess around with this.

The first sin came about because of not taking God at His Word and by adding and subtracting to it. In Genesis 3, the serpent came in and asked, “Has God indeed said…?” What was Eve’s response? “We can eat from any tree, but from the tree in the middle of the garden we may not eat nor touch lest we die.” Go back to Genesis 2 and see what God actually said. He said do not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He did not say to not touch it. Eve added to God’s command and thus did not believe it. But Eve mentioned the tree in the middle of the garden: singular. There was not just one tree in the middle of the garden; there were two. The Tree of Life was also there. God gave Adam and Eve a choice: the Tree of Life or the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eve left out the Tree of Life in her answer. So with that noted, it is reasonable to suggest that Adam and Eve created their own barriers from BOTH trees, lest they be tempted from the wrong one. Because they did not believe what God said and both added and took away from His command, they were easy prey for Satan to lead them to temptation and into sin.

When we change the message from what God said even in the slightest manner, we set ourselves up for severe trouble. Now, please don’t read what I am not saying here. I am not saying we can only directly quote Scripture and that is all we can say when we have a platform. That is not what I am saying. I am saying that we cannot make the message something different. We do have freedom to explore, dig deeper, and explain and apply the text. But all of that has to be done within the framework from which it is given.

There is a controversy about the show The Chosen. It is a fictional supposition about how the ministry of Jesus may have looked. There are people who object to such things because they are “adding to Scripture” things that were not there. I have two problems with such notions. 1) They aren’t calling their work “Scripture,” so they aren’t adding anything to it at all. That said, those watching it should know that it is not Scripture and still let Scripture be the standard. 2) These people who are reading commentaries, writing commentaries, preaching, and effectively doing the same thing.

So what does it mean to “add” or “subtract” from Scripture? It does not mean we cannot explore what and how things may have looked like from the people who lived through the Bible’s accounts. People say that the geological models of the Young Earth Creation position are “adding” to Scripture because the Bible does not speak about volcanoes and earthquakes during the Flood. I find such arguments extremely weak and frankly extremely hypocritical. Who is objecting to such models? Those who are turning to the outside, the secular community, sources completely outside Scripture, and whose work takes no input from Scripture (or minimal at that). THEY are the ones “adding to Scripture” because they are going completely outside the Bible to answer questions they believe the Bible is silent on. They do not stay within the framework or the facts that are explicitly given. Could the Young Earth geology models be wrong, be incomplete, or have problems? Absolutely. But the alternate models have much bigger problems, namely the willful denial of the history of Scripture. Even those who believe that a flood happened in Noah’s day believe that if such a flood does not fit ALL the details that are explicitly given, it is not Noah’s Flood and it demonstrates unbelief in the account of Scripture. The Flood describes a global event and ANY model that does not have those details is taking away what God did say and adding what He did not say. While it is possible such people may be saved, the Biblical standards showcase that such people are not fit to be heralds of the faith because they are not accurately representing what God said.

Some will say I over emphasize on Genesis and don’t emphasize the Gospel enough. Those who get Genesis wrong rarely get the rest of the Gospel right. We now have preachers who say that God loves homosexuals just as they are and will not make them change their ways. We have replaced God’s method of evangelism and teaching within the church with secular models of age-segregation. We have replaced God’s method of responding to the Gospel of repentance and faith to just saying a prayer. We have removed God’s teaching of holiness and purity and added to God’s love and mercy that we will be rich here on earth, enjoying pleasure all now. And as one preacher said, “Americans’ theology is 3000 miles wide and only 6 inches deep.” He’s not wrong. Why? Because we have taken away what God actually said and added what we want to hear instead.

It is a very dangerous thing to give God’s message. We must learn how to rightly divide the Word and preach it correctly. Those who have a problem with this need to step down. They need to be silent and not speak. The consequences for speaking about God wrongly are deadly. Take God seriously. Take His Word seriously. Any departure from it is sin. If we profess His name yet depart from His Word, no good thing will ever come of it.

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