I had to read a book. It wasn’t bad as an introductory book. It was about grace and how grace is utterly free and irreversible (in the book the usage rule was this: grace = effective saving grace). Then it switched gears and spoke of how one’s life must be changed.

(Sidenote: I vaguely remember not being too happy with the way this mandated change was described. How could one know that one had been changed enough to be certain one had received this grace? But I may simply be failing to recall his message accurately. Or I may have misunderstood him at the time.)

Anyway, back to the main point. The author used Colossians 1.21-22 to make a point of how we could not possibly be condemned if we received grace:

Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. 22But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation

It is possible I am misremembering the NIV as the translation used. Whatever was used, I remember the author camping on this passage, expeciall the “free from accusation” clause and emphasizing how this meant we could never be accused of anthing ever.

But what if we add one half of the next verse?

Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation—if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel.

Please understand, the writer said many good and true things using Colossians 1.21-22. He espoused doctrine I agreed with. But some of the things he said, and the way he used Colossians 1.21-22 as his basis for arguing for them, demonstrated that he expected no one to actually go back to his citation in the original context.

This was a moment of truth for me. I had, up to that point, considered my journey from generic Evangelical Arminianism to the Reformed Faith to be a move from only listening to the Bible when it pleased me to submitting to the “whole counsel of God.” I was to believe everything the Bible taught, not just the things I was already prone to agree with. (I think R.C. Sproul had a similar understanding of why one would become Reformed. He speaks of it in the introduction of Chosen by God, if I recall correctly.) But here I began to see that belonging to a more Biblical tradition wasn’t going to mean I would necessarily encounter less special pleading for the text.

And that’s the thing. I never want to argue from a passage using the unstated premise that my audience will never double check what the Bible actually says. No special pleading.