Twelve Verses Your Church Skipped

Passages that are in the Bible, and are not in the sermon.

Every one of these verses is in your Bible right now. Not in an apocryphal book, not in a disputed manuscript, not in some scholar's reconstruction — in the standard text, in the standard order, printed in whatever edition is sitting on your shelf.

You have probably never heard a sermon on any of them.

That isn't a conspiracy. Preaching is selection. A pastor has forty minutes a week and sixty-six books to get through, and there is enormous pressure to spend that time on material that builds people up rather than material that raises questions nobody in the room can answer. After a few generations, the skipped passages may as well not exist.

What's in it

1. Israel was assigned to one of several gods. Deuteronomy 32:8–9
2. Humans were made mortal, and the expulsion was to keep it that way. Genesis 3:22
3. God takes credit for creating disaster. Isaiah 45:7
4. Beating a slave to death carries no penalty if they take two days to die. Exodus 21:20–21
5. Kill the boys and the women. Keep the virgin girls. Numbers 31:17–18
6. A man burns his daughter alive to keep a promise. Judges 11:30–31
7. Two bears maul forty-two children over a taunt about baldness. 2 Kings 2:23–24
8. Jesus is quoted promising the end within his hearers' lifetimes. Matthew 16:27–28
9. The word "rapture" is not in the Bible. 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17
10. The antichrist is not a person. 1 John 2:18
11. Nobody gets a choice about worshipping the beast. Revelation 13:8
12. The warning at the end of Revelation is not about the Bible. Revelation 22:18

Each one gets the passage quoted in full, what you were taught instead, the best defense of the standard reading, and why it fails.

Where I'm standing

It'll save you time to know this up front. I was a Christian, and I read my way out. I don't think the Bible was dictated, inspired, or authorized by anything divine. I think it's a collection of ancient documents written by people, and I think it says what it says.

So this isn't a document about how the church has misread a holy book. It's a document about what's printed in it.

Some of these entries show you a doctrine that isn't in the text — the rapture, the antichrist, the sealed canon. Those are correctable; a person can drop the doctrine and keep the book. The others are different. A god apportioning nations among gods. A law that prices a slave's life at the owner's inconvenience. A promise with a deadline that expired. Those aren't misreadings, and reading more carefully makes them worse.

Every passage is quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. Check every one of them against your own Bible. That's the whole method.