There is a difference between struggling with something God has said and deciding that God Himself needs to be corrected.

On August 30, 2026, Paul Purdue, senior pastor of Belmont United Methodist Church in Nashville, preached about peace, mercy, and Jesus’s command to love our enemies. Much of what he said should sound familiar to any Christian. We are called to make peace. We are not to retaliate. We are to bless those who persecute us and overcome evil with good.

Then Purdue came to Romans 12. He said the apostle Paul “ignores or obscures Jesus’ most challenging commandment ‘to love enemies.’” His concern was Paul’s instruction to leave vengeance to God. Purdue questioned whether a Christian can truly love an enemy while believing that God may one day judge that person. His conclusion was striking: “Jesus offers another way, a way of peace.”

But Paul was not telling Christians to take revenge. He was telling them exactly the opposite. “Do not take revenge,” Paul writes. And when he says, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay,” Paul is quoting God’s own words from Deuteronomy 32:35.

That takes us beyond one pastor and one sermon. The larger question is this: What happens when we decide that something God has revealed does not meet our own standard of what is good, loving, or just?

The Bible never puts God in the defendant’s chair and asks humanity to decide whether He is worthy of approval. God is the Creator, the Lawgiver, and the Judge. He does not answer to a moral standard higher than Himself. His character is the standard of what is good.

Isaiah gives us a vivid picture: “Woe to him who quarrels with his Maker” (Isaiah 45:9). He compares it to a piece of clay questioning the potter who formed it. Paul uses the same picture in Romans 9:20: “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’”

The point is not difficult to understand. The clay does not know more than the potter. The created thing does not have a higher viewpoint than its Creator. Yet that is exactly what happens when we decide that God must be corrected because His revealed character conflicts with what we think He ought to be.

That does not mean Christians are forbidden to ask hard questions. The Bible is full of people who did. Abraham questioned God. Moses pleaded with Him. Habakkuk looked at violence and injustice and cried, “How long, Lord?” Job demanded answers. The Psalms repeatedly ask why God seems distant, silent, or slow to act.

Faith does not require us to pretend that every part of the Bible is easy to understand or emotionally accept. A Christian may read about judgment, suffering, hell, God’s choosing of people for His purposes, warfare, sexual morality, or another difficult subject and honestly say, “Lord, I do not understand.”

But there is a great difference between saying, “I do not understand how God can be right,” and saying, “Therefore God—or the Bible that reveals Him—must be wrong.” One asks God for understanding. The other assumes that we are qualified to correct Him.

When Job finally heard from God, he was not given an explanation for every mystery. God first reminded him of something more basic: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?” (Job 38:4). Before Job could understand everything God was doing, he had to remember God is God and he (Job) is not.

Most Christians are never going to carve an idol out of wood and bow down to it. But there are other ways to make a god in our own image. We can take the parts of God’s character we like most—love, mercy, compassion, acceptance—and then use our own definitions of those words to reject everything else the Bible says about Him.

It often sounds spiritual: “The God I know would never…” “Jesus would not…” “A loving God could not…” The problem is that we may no longer be allowing God to tell us who He is. We have decided first what God must be like and then read the Bible through that conclusion.

That is not letting Scripture explain God to us. It is rebuilding God to fit us.

Romans 1 describes the same ancient problem: people exchange the truth about God for something created. The form changes, but the temptation does not. We would often rather have a god who agrees with us than the God who sometimes confronts and corrects us.

This is especially important when someone tries to place Jesus against Paul or against other parts of Scripture. Yes, Jesus commanded us to love our enemies. So did Paul. Romans 12 tells Christians to bless those who persecute them, refuse revenge, feed a hungry enemy, give a thirsty enemy something to drink, and overcome evil with good.

The chapter Purdue criticized is filled with commands to love our enemies.

But neither Jesus nor Paul taught that loving an enemy means pretending God will never judge evil. Jesus spoke about judgment many times. He warned about hell, separation from God, destruction, and a coming judgment. The Jesus who welcomes sinners and offers forgiveness is also the King who will judge the nations.

Paul’s point is simple: judgment belongs to God, not us. Christians can refuse personal revenge precisely because we trust God to judge rightly. We do not have to become the judge.

God’s mercy and God’s judgment are not contradictions. Christians see both at the cross. Sin is serious enough that it cannot simply be ignored, and God’s mercy is great enough that Christ gave Himself for sinners. If we erase judgment to preserve mercy, we end up corrupting both.

Submitting to Scripture does not mean shutting off our minds. It means trusting that God is holy, just, wise, loving, and good even when we do not yet understand everything He has said. Proverbs 3:5 tells us to “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” That is not a command to stop thinking. It is a reminder that our understanding is not the final authority.

Second Timothy 3:16–17 says Scripture is useful for “teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” In other words, the Bible does not come to us merely to confirm what we already believe. It corrects us.

The danger becomes greater when these ideas are taught from a pulpit, classroom, podcast, or other Christian platform. James gives teachers a sobering warning: “Not many of you should become teachers…because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly” (James 3:1).

False teaching does more than get a theological point wrong. It can change the God people believe they are worshiping. If we teach people that God must always agree with modern ideas of what is fair, loving, or acceptable, we may eventually give them a god who simply reflects their own values.

The New Testament repeatedly warns that this can happen inside the church. Paul says people will reach a point when they “will not put up with sound doctrine” (sound doctrine means faithful biblical teaching) and will look for teachers who tell them what they want to hear (2 Timothy 4:3). He warns that some will “depart from the faith” (1 Timothy 4:1). Peter warns about false teachers (2 Peter 2:1). Jude tells Christians to defend “the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people” (Jude 3).

None of that permits Christians to become cruel. We do not defend truth by enjoying someone else’s failure. Galatians 6:1 tells believers to restore a person gently while also watching themselves. We should want a teacher who is wrong to repent, return to the truth, and be restored.

A pastor may wrestle openly with a difficult passage. A Christian may admit that a teaching is hard to understand. Honest questions are not the problem.

But none of us has been authorized to repair God.

The warning about false teachers also places responsibility on the people listening. Christians are not supposed to believe something simply because a pastor said it, a denomination approved it, a respected author wrote it, or a gifted speaker made it sound convincing.

Acts 17:11 gives us the example of the Bereans (people in the ancient city of Berea who listened to Paul preach). Luke says they received Paul’s message “with great eagerness” but also “examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.”

Notice both sides. They were eager to listen. They were not looking for an excuse to reject Paul. But they also did not accept his teaching blindly. They opened the Scriptures and checked what they heard.

And this was the apostle Paul. If the Bereans were praised for checking an apostle’s preaching against Scripture, no pastor, theologian, author, denomination, tradition, podcast, ministry—or publication like The Issachar Watch—should expect less scrutiny.

Paul later writes, “Test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). John says, “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). The test is not whether a teaching sounds compassionate, intelligent, traditional, modern, conservative, or progressive. The question is whether it agrees with what God has revealed in Scripture.

This keeps us from replacing one unquestioned teacher with another. A pastor who mishandles Scripture is not corrected by finding a different personality who happens to agree with us. Teachers can help us understand the Bible. They do not stand above it.

The church is strongest when teachers explain Scripture faithfully, and the people listening know Scripture well enough to recognize when they do not.

There is another danger. We can become so busy finding error in everyone else that we stop allowing Scripture to correct us. Biblical discernment (the ability to recognize truth from error) should make us humble, not merely suspicious.

Jesus showed us that attitude when Satan tempted Him in the wilderness. Again and again Jesus answered, “It is written” (Matthew 4:1–11). Satan even quoted Scripture himself, but Jesus recognized that he was twisting it.

Discernment is also more than an intellectual exercise. Jesus promised that the Spirit of truth would guide His people into all truth, and James tells us to ask God for wisdom when we lack it (John 16:13; James 1:5). We study carefully. We compare one part of Scripture with another. And we pray that God will show us our own blind spots as readily as we ask Him to show us someone else’s.

It would be easy to end this article by pointing at Paul Purdue or another teacher whose words trouble us. But that would miss the point. The temptation to judge God is not limited to progressive churches, seminaries, or public controversies. It can happen to any of us.

We all tend to notice the passages that support what we already believe and move more quickly past the ones that challenge us. Conservatives can do it. Progressives can do it. Churches and traditions can do it. The question is not simply whether we own a Bible. The question is whether we are willing to let it correct us.

So the Berean test comes back to us. When Scripture challenges something we already believe, will we examine it as carefully as we examine the teaching of someone we distrust? If our discernment only works against the other side, it is not much discernment at all.

Sooner or later, Scripture will say something we would not have written ourselves. When that happens, who moves? Do we bend God’s Word until it agrees with us, or do we allow God to change us?

Pray: Father, give us humility before Your Word. When Scripture challenges what we assume to be true, teach us to listen before we judge and to trust You when we do not understand. Protect Your church from false teaching. Give courage and humility to those who teach. Restore those who wander from the truth. Give us wisdom through Your Spirit to recognize what is true and hold on to it.

Respond: Open the Bible for yourself. Listen eagerly to faithful teaching, but test it as the Bereans did. When a passage troubles you, do not ignore it or force it to agree with you. Read the surrounding passage. Pray about it. Seek wise and faithful help. And remain willing to let God’s Word correct you.