The sum of Your word is truth, And every one of Your righteous ordinances is everlasting. (Psalms 119:160 NASB)

All of God’s word equals truth (All God’s words = truth).  If you remove any part of one side of an equation, the values are no longer equal.  If you eliminate any part of God’s word, you never arrive at the truth. Learning to balance an equation is to chemistry, as “rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15 NKJV) is to Christianity. 

All God’s word is true, yet any part of His word, separate or isolated from the rest of scripture, can lead to false assumptions.  The Bible is God’s perfect and complete revelation of Himself to man. You cannot accept part of what God has said, and not all of it. It is either all true or not true at all.  The Psalmist believed that you can only arrive at truth by accepting all scripture.  The basic rule of Bible interpretation is that the Bible interprets itself.  When examining a passage of the scripture, you must compare it with what the entire Bible says about the topic. We must never look at one Bible verse in a vacuum, in doing so we open ourselves up to error and ultimately, heresy.

Many cults have used parts of the Bible and either ignored or de-emphasized other portions. One of my earlier Bible teachers, Campbell McAlpine, often said, “An over-emphasis or under-emphasis of truth will always get you in trouble.” We all have our favorite Bible verses and ways of interpreting them, yet without comparing them with the entire counsel of scripture, we are skewing the scriptures.  Are you “rightly dividing the word of truth?”  If not, then the equation is not balanced and truth is never gained.

I worked for seventeen years as a missionary with Youth With A Mission.  My missionary work has taken me to Mexico, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Spain, and Ukraine.  I hold a Masters of Education in curriculum and instruction from Virginia Commonwealth University.  [email protected]