Russian road maps from the 1930’s were often deliberately misdrawn and mislabeled. Soviet cartographers falsely identified their streets, relocated entire rivers, altered geographic features, and changed boundaries. All of this was done by politicians who wanted to confuse enemy armies in the event of an invasion.
It was a crafty move, no doubt. But anyone honestly wanting to navigate the cities and countryside must have found such truncated directions extremely confusing.
A lot of these “roadmaps” proliferate today in evangelicalism. Their ambiguity is maddening at times. A mountain range is said to lie here, while it is nothing more than a parking lot. A shopping mall, we are told, sits over there, though it is actually a sewage plant.
No directions are certain. Nothing is as it seems. That’s a useless map, because any map that only kinda gets you someplace, hardly qualifies as a map at all.
For sure, alternate versions of Jesus have been around practically since the beginning, and Jesus Himself warned us about them (Mt. 24:24). But more recent shenanigans involve trying to brand certain teachings and points of emphasis as a “gospel issue,” or “biblical concern.” This happens when evangelical cartographers finesse changes to the map of faith. This involves co-opting terms like “love” and “unity” to promote camouflaged agendas. The problem is, we’re suckers for this technique because we melt in the face of biblical lingo—even when said terminology has been moved around on the map to create a fictitious landscape.
This kind of thing leads people down blind alleys, or, worse, straight into the city landfill.
Thankfully though, Scripture fairly handled, always leads in a true direction. You don’t have to be a genius to make the journey work. The prophet Isaiah writes,
“And a highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Way of Holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it. It shall belong to those who walk on the way; even if they are fools, they shall not go astray.” (35:8)
In fact, faithfully abiding in the truth of Scripture, “turning aside from it neither to the right hand nor to the left,” (Josh. 23:6), we will find ourselves on a golden street with a river of life flowing through the middle, and a tree of life laden with fruit on either side. According to Revelation chapters 21 and 22, it is the one street that runs throughout the heavenly city, New Jerusalem. No humanly engineered complications exist there, and no possibility of getting lost.
This, of course, is another way of saying that we “walk in the Spirit,” (Gal. 5:16), therefore our way is the way of a living Person. And it can only lead to one place of epic encounter: “the throne of God and of the lamb” (Rev. 22:1).
This is an updated edition of a post originally published on John Myer
Featured Image by Sara from Pixabay
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