Opus 2026-050: Coffee, Grace

The traditions of the elders are like old coffee grounds where the flavor and the freshness has been leached out.

Up above, I said “leached out” and the AI added a “B” to make it “bleached”.  That is also a good illustration, but it’s a totally different one.

When you make coffee, you don’t reheat the old grinds and run water through them.  Well, I guess you could, but you get decreasing flavor with each reheat.  I think I tried it somewhere in my past.  No, you get new beans, grind them up and get your truth out of them.

So many of the traditions that we accept as biblical truth have gotten stale in the reheating over the years.  It may very well be that in the ritual excesses of the Roman Catholic Church, Calvin and Luther were right in rejecting what they had to say and instead emphasizing grace and faith.  Grace and faith are certainly biblical concepts.  The Bible does say we are saved by grace.  It says we are saved through faith and believing is a constant in the salvation process.  However, in spite of everything that your traditional elders have told you, the Bible does not say that you are saved by faith alone.

You don’t believe me?  I don’t really expect you to because you’ve heard it otherwise so often.  I even started out on a bit of Clickbait that asked the question, “How many times does the Bible say ‘faith alone’?”  I didn’t get very far before I realized that he wasn’t really asking what the Bible said.  He was asking what the tradition said.  Do your own research.  Look for the phrase “faith alone”.  You won’t find it in the KJV.  You only find it once in the New American Standard.  When you find it go to that passage and read what it says, and then ask yourself who am I gonna believe, the traditions of the elders, my own lying eyes, or what the Bible clearly states.

There are many battles for truth to be fought.  God is loving.  God is kind.  Jesus did not go to the cross in order to see how many people He could throw into hell.  We can probably make a lot of mistakes in our theology and still make it to heaven.  I for one want to be as close to the center of the target as I can be.

homo unius libri