S E51: Episode 51 | Don’t Miss the Forgeries | Bite-sized Biblecast | Romans 12:2

If you only have a couple minutes for scripture today, I got you.

Welcome to today's bite sized Bible cast.

But if you are seeing my face for the first time.

Hi, my name is Rachel and I help women with chaotic brains seek, find and live the abundant life that Jesus offers us.

So today's verse, we are in Romans 12, verse 2.

I'm reading out of the ESV.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

And this is one of those that we, especially those of us who grew up in the church, grew up Christian, grew up around Christian culture as a whole.

We know this one, right?

And it's so easy to fall into the trap of going, okay, yeah, I know, and missing so much truth that is underneath.

So I, I actually started a blood.

A blog series a year or two ago called stripping for Christians 101, where, where you strip away, kind of like your preconceived notions about a verse and the things that you think you know about it, relating to Bible verses, you know, theological concepts, all of that.

I should bring that back.

I should bring back my stripping 101 series.

But anyways, I want to take a different approach to this verse than what we typically do.

So we kind of think of it as this verse that's telling us, okay, we don't want to fall to the wayside, we don't want to get bogged down by the things of the world.

But I want to challenge you that the things you think are of the world might not actually be of the world.

And the things that you think might be solidly Christian might not be solidly what Christ would have us focus on.

We get stuck in this mindset of anything that's not from inside the church is the world, the world is outside, the world is bad, and we are safe here in our little bubble of churchy people and friends.

That is an incredibly dangerous mindset.

Because when we ascribe safety, when we ascribe correctness automatically to, to a group of humans, we're gonna have a bad time.

Because as we know, humans are flawed, humans are imperfect.

Look at Jesus.

Entire ministry, his entire ministry was reaching out to the lost.

And the people that he scolds, the people that he chastises, the people that he corrects, the people that he shouts at sometimes and even insults are the religious leaders.

They are the people who are so entrenched in their religious beliefs that they Miss the forest for the trees.

They miss the actual commands of God, which are love God and love people, because they're so focused on all of the little tiny commands that yes, matter.

But the intent of those commandments that they are so intent on keeping is to facilitate loving God and loving people.

I don't want to fall too terribly much down that rabbit hole.

So I was intrigued by, by testing, you may discern what the will, what is the will of God?

That jumped off the page to me.

So I went up and looked, or I went and I looked up the original text.

This is something that I highly recommend during your own personal study.

I really love the Blue Letter Bible app.

I believe it's free.

I don't think I paid anything for it, but it's.

I use it almost every single day.

It's a fantastic tool for being able to dig into the original text, see where words are mentioned and how they're used.

Because what we are working with is God's word, but it is a translation of God's word.

And so it's incredibly important not to get bogged down in trying to choose the perfect translation.

What I recommend personally and what I do personally is looking at multiple translations while also going back to the original text.

And the Bible Project is a fantastic resource for learning more about, you know, the cultural origins, the cultural context, historical context, all of that good stuff.

But something small that we can start with is just looking up individual words.

So the word here that kind of encompasses, by testing, you may discern is, and forgive me for pronouncing this incorrectly, dokimadso documazo, something along those lines.

And it means to test, examine, prove, scrutinize, to see whether a thing is genuine or not, like metals, or to recognize as genuine after examining, to approve, to deem worthy.

So this verse is really telling us to get into the weeds and put some effort in, put some thought in use our discernment to be able to tell what is God's will.

And this brought to mind a story from a book that I'm reading right now.

I'm reading the book the Date Detective.

I don't remember who the author is, but it's a book about statistics, which sounds super boring, but it's fascinating.

And there is this story in this book of this absolutely renowned art.

Like why can't I think of the word historian?

That's the word I'm looking for.

Abraham Bredius was this absolutely world renowned art historian who specialized in paintings by this one particular Dutch painter.

And despite being Dutch Myself, I am not going to pronounce any of this correctly.

So this painter was Vermeer and he was his work.

There weren't a ton of his works.

And eventually this painting was brought to Bredius.

They were like, hey, we think this is a Vermeer.

What do you think?

And he looks at it and he begins to just weep.

He's like, yes, this is a Vermeer and this is just absolutely beautiful.

He even has this quote where he's talking about how he could scarcely believe his eyes because it just, it was exactly what, what he was hoping for.

It was exactly what he was just wanting to like cap off his career with, was finding another Vermeer specifically religious and specifically to prove that another painter had influenced Vermeer.

Well, it turns out that painting was a forgery and not even a good one.

If you look at original Vermeer's versus this one, Christ Adamas is what the painting is called.

That turned out to be the forgery that started it all.

So if you look at Christ Adimaeus versus Vermeer's other work, you're like, this doesn't even look like the same painter.

How could such a renowned art historian be fooled so terribly?

And it's because the guy that did the forgeries knew what this historian would want to see.

He knew that he was obsessed with Vermeer, that he loved the religious angle and that he was wanting to prove that Vermeer had been influenced by this one other painter.

So he knew exactly the forgery to make.

So that even though this historian had all of the knowledge, had all of the experience, everything going for him to be able to be the person, the one person in the world who would be able to most quickly spot a fake.

He knew how to get his emotion, the forger knew how to get the historians emotions to take over so that his forgery would be considered real.

That is, that story absolutely blew my mind when I read it.

And that is what came to mind when I read this verse.

Because we as Christians, especially those of us who grew up in the church, who are immersed in Christian culture, who go to church regularly, who know all the things.

I went to Christian school growing up, for the vast majority of my school career, it is so easy for us to know all the correct things, to have the knowledge, to even have the experience, that it's easy for the enemy to bring in a forgery and tick all of our emotional boxes so that we end up being fooled.

So what I want to challenge you with today is where think through the beliefs that you hold, Think through the things that you hold most dear.

How closely do they actually line up with Scripture?

How closely do they actually line up with the character of Christ?

Because the enemy knows exactly what we want to see.

I would strongly encourage you to kind of fall down the rabbit hole of Bredius and how he was fooled.

And just the story is fascinating and it's a really, really great allegory for what we are up against as believers.

We have an enemy who is intelligent.

We have an enemy who knows how we operate.

We have an enemy who is motivated to fool us.

And so wouldn't it stand to reason that he is going to be the absolute best possible forger, producing the absolute best possible forgeries in order to get us off of this path?

So what I want you to focus on in this verse today isn't the part about, don't be conformed to the world, be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

That is absolutely important.

But I want you to dig deeper than what we typically get from this verse today.

Test and discern what the will of God is.

Don't be fooled by how beautiful the forgeries might be.

Dig in.

Use what you know about God.

Use what you know about Jesus.

Use your discernment given to you by the Holy Spirit to be able to spot the forgeries because they are going to be compelling.

Not because they're great forgeries, but because they are designed to fool you specifically.

So I want to encourage you today to break out your journal.

Or if journaling feels like too taxing today, that is totally fine.

You can type in your notes app, you can record a voice memo, you can even just sit and kind of think through the prompts that I'm about to give you.

But what I want you to do is do some journaling, whether that's physical or mental journaling, and ask God to reveal to you, where is a belief or a sticking point that is a forgery?

Where is something that you are believing that you are buying into that maybe looks at first glance for you like it is of God, but isn't actually.

And when we ask the Holy Spirit for wisdom, he will give it to us.

James talks about that if anyone lacks wisdom, they should ask the God who gives generously to all without finding fault.

That is the Rachel translation.

That is not an official translation.

I should say the Rachel paraphrase, but yeah.

So I want you to take some time to go through and with a humble heart, with an open mind, ask God to show you, are there things that you believe that are not backed up by Scripture, or that might seem at first blush like a surefire win, like absolute truth.

But when you dig deeper, when you look at how things line up with the character of Christ, when you look at how things genuinely line up with scripture, maybe they fall flat.

Okay, that is all I have for you today.

Thank you so much for joining me.

Make sure you follow for more.

I record all these videos and post them as podcast episodes as well, in addition to other longer videos.

My husband and I are going to start doing some Reddit stories soon, which I'm really excited about, but you can find all of that over at the link in my profile and I will see you in the next one.

Bye.