Pedantic Word Choices
There is an old hustler bet where you offer a sum of money (say $50) to somebody in a bar if they can drink an entire pint in a minute. An experienced drinker can often polish off a pint in well under that, at which point you can take their money because they did not finish it in exactly a minute, they finished it in less, so they lose.
We in the Christian community often do the same sort of thing. We will insist there is a moral difference between Murder and Killing People despite the fact that there is nothing about the Hebrew Language to indicate that. We’ll say we don’t like Dating but instead we’ll support “courting” we will insist that it’s wrong to Lie but we’ll say stuff that is deceptive or misleading as if that’s okay.
We are like the expert in the law in Luke 10. We know that we should love our neighbor, but we pretend not to know what the word “neighbor” means
I could write articles about every one of these inconsistencies I see. But frankly I’m just not that starved for topics. At the end of the day the root problem is simply this: It is very easy to follow the bible so long as you are prepared to reinterpret all of the words in the bible to mean whatever you need them to.
So if you believe there is a difference between “teaching” and “preaching” between “submitting” and “obeying” between “drinking” and “drunkenness” between “judging” and “judgement” and between “gossip” and “talking about someone behind their back” then I have to ask you a question:
What then is the difference between believing the “bible” and just believing “whatever you want”?