The words, ‘the Bible is a product of the culture of its time’ are what these people keep teaching undergraduates, church members, and the unbeliever. They are also words we heard when we were in undergraduate school as well.
They have been passed down from generation to generation as if they are some long-held truth. Instead, those words nullify most of the biblical commands, instructions, and other teachings the biblical authors have put into the content via God’s instruction.
That simple declaration opens up an escape clause that allows modern believers to cherry-pick which of the biblical verses they will accept and believe and which ones they will discard.
To use a word we do not like, that sentence empowers ‘Christians’ to take charge of the Bible and fashion it into a religious book that they like. Removing the harder to follow scriptures and focus on the easier ones, even though the latter is often misunderstood and misapplied.
As Peter has told us, the biblical content is not from any human source or private interpretation. That means that those words in that sentence are wrong. God did not take wise sayings, words of wisdom, or other top-quality works from secular culture or the unbelieving world and ‘Christianized them.’
The culture that the biblical content came from is not one from this world nor trapped in a limited era of history, applicable to that era alone. The Bible and its content come from a holy culture, one that transcends earthly time and is applicable in all eras of history.
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The Biblical content comes from God who has his own culture. It is holy, just, fair, and it applies to everyone no matter how little, how big, how young, or how old.
The Bible has no earthly source and is God telling us how we are to live in his culture. Once we become Christians, we enter that culture and leave the old one behind. Our home is not this world, as the song goes, we are just passing through but as we pass through we are still expected to live by God’s culture, not this world’s.
— “Dr.” David Tee, Theologyarchaeology, Where the Bible Came From, May 19, 2021
