In this blog we have often talked about the fact that God made us finite and the implications of that fact. I recently read a book written by Joseph T. Hallinan who details various mistakes to which we humans are prone [1] because we are finite.
One mistake Hallinan mentions is that as something becomes more familiar to us, we notice less information about that topic not more. This occurs because we are flooded with information and because we are finite we must be economical with how we process all this data. What we do is to skim the information with which we are familiar and ignore the details. The result is that we tend to see things not as they are but as we think they should be. Examples Hallinan uses include a misprint in sheet music for a Brahms capricco that professional musicians and publishers missed but that was found by a student. A thirteen year old boy who corrected NASA’s estimate of the chance of an asteroid hitting the earth. A 5th grade boy who found an error at a Smithsonian Institute exhibit that had not been detected for 27 years. [2] In all these examples, the professionals missed an error because they were so familiar with the subject matter that they skimmed over the error and did not notice it.
We Christians have the same tendencies. How else can we explain the fact that there are over 70 verses in the Bible that teach salvation is through belief in God or through our conduct, pattern of behavior, motivation, use of abilities, and repentance and yet we ignore them? (See the header on this blog titled “What the Bible Says about Salvation for a list of these verses.) Because these verses do not fit our established doctrine of salvation which is that salvation is only through belief in Jesus and his death for our sins, we ignore these inconvenient details. As Hallinan states” “Facts that do not fit together . . . are forgotten, de-emphasized, or reinterpreted”. [3]
Now that we are aware of this very human tendency, what will we do? Will we continue to ignore these 70 verses concerning salvation or will we determine a reason why God included them in the Bible?
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[1] Joseph T. Hallinan. Why We Make Mistakes. New York: Broadway Books, 2009.
[2] Ibid., pp. 111-113.
[3] Ibid., p. 123.
