Day 075: Twisted Scriptures (Deuteronomy 15:16-17)

16 But if he says to you, ‘I will not go out from you,’ because he loves you and your household, since he is well-off with you, 17 then you shall take an awl, and put it through his ear into the door, and he shall be your slave forever. (Dt. 15:16-17)

In the Eighties and early Nineties, guys wearing one earring was a thing. It showed you were living on the edge. You were a rebel. It was cool. And all the guys on MTV had one.

It was important, though, that you pierced the correct ear. “Left is right; right is wrong” was the way to tell the world that, while you were going out of your way to imitate Duran Duran, you still liked girls.

So, of course, I wanted to get my left ear pierced. But I was also a seminary student and a part time youth minister, which meant that looking like one of the guys in Duran Duran wasn’t going to be a good reason to get an earring.

So I spiritualized it. I found this verse in Deuteronomy, which describes the process for an indentured servant binding himself to his master’s household. I said, “This will show that I’m so devoted to the Lord that I want to be His servant forever!”

I strengthened my argument even further when I found Psalm 40:6. In the 1984 NIV it read, “my ears you have pierced.”

That translation turned out to be an outlier. Most translations understand David to be saying that God had opened his ears to hear His word, not pierced them. When the NIV was revised in 2001, it changed the line to reflect that consensus: “my ears you have opened.”

The earring lasted, oh, about a year. And for what it’s worth, not a single person ever came up to me and said, “Wow– you’ve got an earring. I can tell you really love the Lord!” Not even once.

Mercifully, the earring went away before I met my wife’s father for the first time, which turned out to be my one moment of exercising good judgment of the whole episode.

I’m thankful that my wife (girlfriend at the time) didn’t break up with me. I’m thankful that the church didn’t fire me. I’m thankful that God loves me, no matter how much I misuse His Word.

And I’m thankful that, thirty years later, I’ve maybe learned a little more about not taking God’s word out of context or cherry-picking verses to justify what I want to do. Lord knows, we all have an amazing capacity to twist God’s Word for our own ends. Just in today’s passage alone, look at everything I could excuse:

• Binge drinking (Deuteronomy 14:26 ): “Look– the Bible says I can spend my money on strong drink!”
• Ignoring the poor (Deuteronomy 15:11 ): “There will always be poor people in the land, so there’s nothing we can do about it!”
• Slavery, with the same passage I used to justify my earring.

God will use God’s Word to accomplish God’s purposes. We don’t use God’s Word to justify our purposes.

And I’m sure there’s a verse for that, somewhere.

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