Why do so many Christians not have a consistently biblical worldview?

This is one grand leading point throughout the Book of Deuteronomy, as we shall see in the progress of our meditations; and never was there a moment, in the history of the church of God, in which it was more needful to urge home on the human conscience the necessity of implicit obedience to the word of God. It is, alas! but little felt. Professing Christians, for the most part, seem to consider that they have a right to think for themselves, to follow their own reason, their own judgement, or their own conscience. They do not believe that the Bible is a divine and universal guide book. They think there are very many things in which we are left to choose for ourselves. Hence the almost numberless sects, parties, creeds and schools of thought. If human opinion be allowed at all, then, as a matter of course, one man has as good a right to think as another; and thus it has come to pass that the professing church has become a proverb and a byword for division.

Therefore, the sharp-edged teaching of 'all Scripture' tends to be in disrepute today. As men did with Jesus in His day, so now, they bow it out. They seldom allow Scripture to dictate to them where obedience will cost them much. There seems to be only a few people who are ready to receive and welcome all the truth of God. There can be no other reason why all Christians are not of one mind today, than that they do not desire at all costs to follow the truth. The Lord Himself says, “he who wills to do God's will, shall know of the doctrine” (John 7:17). How could it be otherwise? What then does the confusion in Christendom tell of the condition of God's people?

In contemplating the present condition of professing Christians generally, one is struck with this very painful fact, that so very few are prepared to face Scripture on all points and in all matters, personal, domestic, commercial and ecclesiastical. If the question of the soul's salvation be settled — and alas! how rarely it is settled — then people consider themselves at liberty to break away from the sacred domain of Scripture and launch forth upon the wild watery waste of human opinion and human will where each one may think for himself, choose for himself and act for himself.

Without meaning to excuse it in this way, it cannot surely be doubted that the atmosphere of what may be truly called a "Christian world" is more detrimental to development than that of a heathen world would be; and that because a Christian world stands as the very ideal of compromise, and compromise has in it as a first element disloyalty to Christ and to His word. Here you are faced, not with what is openly nor even intentionally hostile to Christ, ― what would put you on your guard, and rouse up in you all your power of resistance; no, you find in it truth owned, but not taken very seriously; you are to follow it, but not be too extreme about it. And how naturally we grow up just to the stature, morally or spiritually as even mentally, of the company we keep! how we read Scripture itself with such a traditional interpretation put upon it as is in this way acquired, until we lose capacity for taking it simply and straightforwardly, as it would necessarily appear to the faith of a child, or of one outside the current rendering.

Christians are always affected, more or less, by the prevailing spirit of the world which surrounds them. In the days of primitive Christianity this was illustrated by the Corinthians, who, dwelling in a city noted for its luxury and license, soon had these evils springing up in their midst. (See 1 Cor. 4:8, and 1 Cor. 5:1). One of the most striking features of the day is its general shallowness, and lack of that force and serious purpose which deep conviction gives; and nowhere are these sad features more painfully pronounced, than in the bosom of the Church of God.

Hence we see already the plain traces of an unreal profession of faith, which in the apostle John's much later Epistle appears after a yet more solemn guise. But James takes up its earlier shape when faith was becoming a creed, intellectual and traditional. So it naturally would where Christians abounded in close connection with their unbelieving brethren, not only in social but religious life also. For there seemed no such urgent reason to require separation as idolatry necessitated for the Gentile confessors among the heathen.

We may now briefly consider the current of thought from days not long subsequent to those of the apostles. We shall see the various but constant aberration from the truth which characterised such as drew from our text an actual preaching of our Lord in the world of spirits. Doubtless it was no question of an isolated or casual misinterpretation of the scripture before us; but this rather sprang from the general ignorance even then pervading Christendom as to the full blessedness of our standing in Christ — ignorance found in the Fathers as such, if possible more than in the popular theology of our own day, or in the puritanism of the past. Lack of faith could not but expose men to crude guesses because of their uncertainty; especially as here where the first obvious view of the passage is not the sure, sound, and spiritual one which falls in with the contextual aim and the analogy of the faith elsewhere. Indeed our way of regarding any particular portion of revealed truth can scarcely be severed from our state generally; so much so that habitually an intelligent eye can see where we are by the judgment we form as to divine things wholly remote and apparently quite unconnected. Here, for instance, a soul established in the gospel and therefore feeling solemnly the fixed doom of the lost, as well as the blessedness of the saved now and evermore, is at once delivered from nine-tenths of the speculations about our Lord's preaching to the spirits of saints or sinners after their and His separation from the body. It is ordinarily thus: where we rest not in the grace and truth which came by Jesus, we are in danger from ordinances, fables, reasonings, or from a mixture of them all. Apostolic power and fidelity, Paul's above all, cut up by the root these workings of Satan's malice; but, when the apostles were gone, the evils previously judged found too ready an acceptance and gave birth to results more openly disastrous both to truth and to souls, and, if this could be, more decidedly opposed to the glory of the Lord.

The Hebrew Christians were in danger — being attracted by their former habits, and by a law and ceremonies which God Himself had established — of forsaking a Christianity, in which Christ was not visible, for things that were visible and palpable. The Christ of Christians, far from being a crown of glory to the people, was only an object of faith, so that, if faith failed, He was deprived of all importance to them. A religion that made itself seen (the "old wine") naturally attracted those that had been accustomed to it.

The Hebrew confessors are thus seen to be dull in rising to the height of Christianity, as they saw feebly into its depths. They were impeded in learning because they had so much to unlearn. They are not the only persons now who are thus entangled. As Christendom grows old, the same difficulty repeats itself, though it be less excusable for Christians now than then for the Jews who believed. The truth fully revealed gives meaning to those ancient shadows. They had before them the material; but they needed the teaching of God's Spirit, Who glorifies Christ. Yet the ancient oracles had been used, not only for the conversion, but for the help and blessing, of souls then for some fifteen hundred years, to say nothing of times antecedent. But these were the persons who proved so slow in spiritual understanding. Therefore it is the more incumbent on all bred in religious habits, and accustomed to a groove of set forms and phrases, to watch against this danger, of which scripture gravely warns.

The important thing for Christians is to be true to what they believe and confess, or rather to what God has revealed for their faith and confession. Whatever takes us away from the grace and truth which came by Christ, always tends to subvert even Christ Himself. The Colossians had been heretofore happy and really steadfast in their faith in Christ; but they were now allowing doctrines among them which, if not rooted out, would infallibly lead them away from Christ. Here lay their danger. It is astonishing how eagerly and easily Christians are apt to admit something new. The Apostle in this case refers to philosophical speculations, which seem to have been brought in at Colosse, as well as Jewish elements, if indeed they were not combined.