Night of the Twister

It’s the summer of 1999 and I’m in college and wanting to go into youth ministry. So, I traveled with the local youth guy to a youth minister conference. One evening, I was excited because the keynote speaker was a man that I had just heard do a rather good presentation earlier that week. As the lights dim, he exclaims, “I know I was assigned this other topic but tonight I really want to talk about Y2K”. He then goes on to speak about how an Old Testament prophet was warning us about the danger that were coming. The Bible was proclaiming the danger we were all facing when the computer could not handle the new date.

I could not believe how this speaker was twisting the Scripture to justify his paranoid belief. I remember trying to look around during this to see if anybody was buying this. I couldn’t tell the temperature of the crowd (it was dark) but it seemed like the guy I was sitting beside was. I left shortly thereafter and went to bed bumfuzzled. I guess there were a lot more folks like me because the next day the organizers were doing full damage control, dismissing the speaker and what he said.

As you may remember the whole Y2K bug didn’t amount to anything. This guy may have sold some books and got some attention, but his idea was dead wrong. And worse He made it seem like God was wrong too.

… speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction.”

2nd Peter 3:16

If we try to make God's word agree with us, we take the real risk of twisting the Scriptures to say things they are not saying. Instead, we need to look at what is said and make us fit to it. We need to be careful we do not let our own opinions and agendas shape what God has proclaimed. We need to “rightly handle the word of truth” not bend it to fit our desires.

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