Grace Purposes in the Heart

Adversaries of Pauline dispensational right division like to accuse us of removing portions of the Bible. Don’t be moved by ignorant assertions such as these.

The same person in your Bible who instructed Timothy in “rightly dividing the word of truth” also said “all scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable”.

Both instructions were given by the same person, in the same epistle, in consecutive chapters (2 Tim 2:15; 2 Tim 3:16).

It should be obvious that the instruction to rightly divide is not an instruction to remove portions of the Bible from inspired scripture.

We need all scripture in order to rightly divide it! If we only had Paul’s epistles, there would be nothing to discern.

The words of a dictionary are divided by their initials, and the definition of “church” is found in the section for the letter “C”. This does not mean we throw out the other sections. How else would we know what the word “ignorant” means?

Just because we need the entire dictionary, does not mean we mix all the words together. A dictionary becomes useful when we rightly divide the words alphabetically.

The Bible becomes useful when we rightly divide the author, the audience, and the application of its teachings.

Pauline right division does not remove parts of the Bible – it acknowledges all parts of the Bible literally and discerns their place.

For Christ’s sake,

Justin “all scripture rightly divided” Johnson