English Standard Version
One of the podcasts I'm hooked on is called Proof, by America's Test Kitchen. They're always finding interesting food-related stories, and the most recent episode is all about a woman who dedicated her life to researching historical recipes. They were talking about her love of source documents -- she always went to the source.
In today's modern age, we don't dig into source documents very often -- we don't look to authoritative sources. As a kid, I remember going to the Cincinnati library to research my senior English essay. We had to dig through obscure books to find research on the books we were researching. It was hard work, but it connected me with the experts. Now, we can go to Wikipedia, and we easily trust what we find there. There are usually links to source documents, but we're often just relying on the idea that someone else did their homework. It's why tweets can go viral even when they're not factually correct -- we have lost confidence in authority figures, and so everyone is an authority, and we trust anything and everything.
Scripture reminds us that there is an ultimate authority figure. As Christians, we bow the knee before the throne of grace, trusting in the God who will judge between peoples, who will beat swords into plowshares, who shall send forth God's word. It is the Lord's house that will be established, and it is the Lord who will draw people from every nation into it. We are subject to God's authority, and we can certainly rejoice that God comes to save and deliver us from sin and evil, but we must always remember that God, and God alone, has ultimate authority, and we should continually go back to Scripture, to the source documents, when we're looking for guidance and wisdom on how to live.
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