Redacting God’s Word

Have you come across the word ‘redacting’? It is the process of concealing information while leaving intact the rest of the document or record containing it; often by obscuring or hiding part of the document someone does not want you to see. It seems to me that the devil is a master at doing this with God’s word.  He often does this by distracting us as we read it, and so we find we haven’t taken notice of what we have read. Another way is by emphasising our past hurts, failures, and rejection to make us believe that what we are reading can’t apply to us.

In the film ‘Hidden Figures’, Katherine Goble works at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, in 1961, alongside her colleagues Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughan, as lowly ‘computers’, performing maths calculations, without being told what they are for. All of them are African-American women, and the unit is segregated by race and sex.

At one point she is required to calculate the rocket trajectory, but is given heavily redacted information (large sections of a document were blotted out by a black marker), yet she successfully calculates the figures. Amazed and perplexed by what she has done, they interrogate her to find out how she was able to do it. She explains that she just held the document up to the light, and then she could see through the redacted parts.

We need to do the same. We need to hold up to God’s light (coming to us through the Holy Spirit) our beliefs about what God is saying to us, and about us, in His word. He doesn’t get it wrong. His word applies to all of us, and none of us are excluded from His love and forgiveness through His death on the cross in our place. It’s time to stop letting the devil get away with redacting God’s word and hiding His truth from us.