you have captions on your TV, you’ve seen many misspellings and mistakes in punctuation. And the places I notice their errors most often are in Bible and war stories. Recently I was watching a World War Two movie, and a ship was about to be attacked by Japanese planes, and of course the bugler began playing “general quarters” over the loudspeakers. But of all the calls the caption-writer could have written, he said “reveille was sounded.” It was broad daylight and all hands were already on deck, so it certainly wasn’t the time to be getting them out of bed. They’re very bad about recognizing warplanes, too. They’ll say the planes are heading for a torpedo attack, when the planes are clearly dive bombers.

They’re even worse on bible terms, and it’s easy to see that they are not bible readers. And so you want to be very careful about the religious programs that you see on the tube. Even commentaries what you would expect to follow the bible, can be very incorrect or misleading. For example, I was watching a commentary and the voice over was talking about the four gospels, and said, something like, “for example, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John’s stories have many inaccuries.” Obviously, they haven’t studied the whole story. And things like prophecies really mix them up. For example, the Bible said that Christ would be born in Bethlehem…but in another place, it says He would be called out of Egypt…and another place says He would be called a Nazarene. To many, these are inaccuracies, but He was born in Bethlehem, then the parents took Him to Egypt for safety, and on the way back, they stopped and lived in Nazareth. All prophecies came true. But like the poem of the Blind Men and the Elephant, they were all “partly in the right, though all were in the wrong.”

Enjoy your biblical books, movies and whatever, but don’t take anyone’s word as Gospel except the Gospel itself. Check up on those people who play games with the Bible.

37BT Bill Thornton July 23, 2007