MIDDLESBORO, Ky. (AP) — A snake-handling pastor who appeared on the National Geographic television reality show “Snake Salvation” has died after being bitten by a snake during a weekend church service in Kentucky.

SOURCE: Snake-handling Ky. pastor dies from snake bite – Yahoo News.

While this is maybe of the extreme part of the spectrum it is still a typical example of how we pick and choose what we want to be the image of God.  It takes one verse out of the tens of thousands found in the Bible and uses it for the main focus of spirituality.  Examples such as this are used by the serious critics of the church to illustrate the absurdity of believing in God. Regrettably that is not without some degree of truth.

Yes, this is an extreme example but by no means the only one. There are literally thousands of groups, some small some very large, who take a miniscule piece of biblical text and explode it into a major belief system.  To some degree even Protestantism is an example of this. Martin Luther, who is generally acknowledged as the pioneer of that version of Christianity spent years searching biblical text for  something to ameliorate his enormous feeling of low self-esteem and utter worthlessness. When he discovered that single verse in Ephesians that said the grace is a gift and not from works he had is “aha” moment like so many others before and after him and found his version of Christ.

This is very much a forest/trees situation.  We should be looking at the overall message of the Bible and particularly of the words of Jesus Christ to find our place in life. Instead we search and search for that one iota that seems to relieve our current conditions and then practically throw away the rest of the forest to only concentrate on that one tree of knowledge. From that point on our focus on the Bible is to find similar verses to the one we found to back up our new-found system of belief and there have been centuries of that very practice occurring.

I’m not sure if any of us are exempt from this phenomenon.  Knowing the heart of God is just something that none of us are really capable of  doing. God is just too vast for our puny intellect.  It is kind of like us trying to explain our society and its inner working to the ant we are about to unknowingly step on.

Instead of looking for that single tree to latch on to we should all be forest watchers. We will never completely understand the ecosystem of the forest but we should try to see its overall beauty. During our journey into the forest we must also understand that others who are also searching might have a different current concept of the forest. That does not make them wrong or us right, it is just different. In fact not a single one of us will ever really get it “right”. Not one of us…