What's Not in the Bible? What sayings do people mistakenly think are in the Bible? - Podcast Ep. 123

Things That Are Not in the Bible at All

Welcome to the Got Questions podcast. So today it's going to be a fun conversation. We're going to be talking about the questions we receive about things that are actually not in the Bible. Common sayings, whether they have an origin in another Christian book or even completely in secular culture, but a lot of people think are in the Bible, they're actually not.

And these can kind of be broken down into different categories. We're going through each of those categories one by one just to kind of help you. Here's some things that you need to know are actually not in the Bible.

So joining me today is Kevin. Kevin's the managing editor for Got Questions Ministries. And so Jeff, he is the administrator for BibleRef .com. If we were to break them down kind of into the categories, the main one would be what are the things that are actually not in the Bible.

And let me start off with give you what I think is probably the most frequent we receive. And that's that God helps those who help themselves. This is a saying that I've heard many, many times. I'm guessing we've been asked the question over a hundred times in our history.

It's like, where's the Bible verse that says God helps those who help themselves? Or what does it mean that God helps those who help themselves? And one, it's not in the Bible at all. There's not even anything in the Bible close to that saying.

And if you really look at it, that's not true at all. I understand the motive behind it is to try to get people to actually be active in their faith, to do something rather than thinking God's going to do everything for you.

But at the same time, especially related to salvation, God helps those who are helpless. We cannot help ourselves in terms of achieving our salvation or make ourselves savable by God. It's like, no, God does all of the work.

All we do is at his drawing and his calling, we receive it in faith. So in terms of salvation, God helps those who help themselves is definitely not true. And then in terms of other areas of the Christian life, I mean, we are to be active.

We are to be obeying God's word. We are to be doing things to improve our walk with Christ, to improve our understanding of God's word, to improve our fellowship with others. And so, yes, in that sense, we're helping ourselves.

But to make it sound like even our daily Christian life is dependent on us doing the work, us helping ourselves, that is not the message of the Bible at all. So God helps those who help themselves. It's not in the Bible.

And for the most part, it is actually teaching the exact opposite of what.

The Bible teaches. There's others that we see that people bring up, and that mistakenly quoted area is a relatively common one where there's ideas that are just so frequently heard that people assume that they must be biblical.

It reminds me of a musical, The Fiddler on the Roof. There's a character, the main character in that musical, who every once in a while will make some pronouncement. And he'll say, as the good book says, and then he'll bring something else.

And there's a Jewish scholar in the town who will roll his eyes and say, no, it doesn't. No, it doesn't say that. And he'll say, well, it says something like that. So we have a lot of these phrases that are common and popular in hearing that don't really have anything to do with scripture.

One of them is the idea of cleanliness is next to godliness. Sometimes you'll hear that. I understand where that comes from, because there's a lot of talk in the Old Testament, especially about things like ceremonial purity and what things you can touch and cannot touch and how you, you know, how you get cleaned and things like that.

But there again, that is not something that's actually found in the Bible. We have phrases like let go and let God, which is sort of the polar opposite of God helps those who help themselves. You know, the one sort of says, you're supposed to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

And the other one almost says, just do nothing and let God do all of it. There again, neither one of those is, is biblical when it comes to cleanliness and godliness. Yes. We want to take care of our bodies.

We want to be reasonable and respectable and so on and so forth, but God's not judging anybody based on how long they're going between showers or how tidy their office spaces, things like that. Let go and let God is in the same category as the idea of God helping those who help themselves.

You can't take it to an extreme. God does not expect us to just sit around and do nothing and let him do everything. There's a sense in which there are some aspects of life that we do need to say, I can't do anything about this anymore.

I've done everything I can do. So I'm going to choose to trust God and allow him to take care of the rest of it. Or I'm going to let him solve a problem that I can't solve, but let go and let God very often is just used as that sort of blanket statement that says you're just supposed to leave it and let it go.

And those aren't the only ones. Some of them we have more explicit sources for. Some of them, we really don't know where they.

Came from. Jesus, take the wheel that comes divine, right? That's going along with what you were saying there with let go and let God kind of thing. No discussion of this type would be complete without mentioning Shakespeare, because Shakespeare actually used a lot of Scripture in his plays.

In fact, according to the Bible in Shakespeare, published by Oxford Academic, Shakespeare alluded to Bible passages in every single play he ever wrote. And he quoted from or alluded to Bible verses more often than he used any other external source.

So that plus the fact that Shakespeare was writing about the same time and in the same type of Elizabethan English that the King James Version was written in makes a lot of what Shakespeare says sound an awful lot like what the Bible might say.

And people get confused sometimes. Maybe you guys have seen the quizzes online where they give you a list of quotes and you're supposed to say, is this Shakespeare or is this Bible? And sometimes it is kind of difficult to tell the difference.

But I've got three of them here that they're Shakespeare quotes, but they kind of sound like they might be from the Bible. And I think these might be some of those quotes that people get confused with sometimes.

One of them is, neither a borrower nor a lender be. So just the phrasing of it and the sentiment of it sounds very biblical. And we have warnings in Scripture against going into debt to people. And so this actually though is from Hamlet.

It's the advice of Polonius, and it's from Act 1 and Scene 3 of that particular play. So not in the Bible, but it is biblical, I guess we could say, in that it agrees with biblical principles. Another one from Hamlet is, to thine own self be true.

And that's from that same speech in Hamlet. And so there again is another one that kind of sounds like it might be in the Bible, but it definitely is not. And then here's another one, this one from King Lear, Act 4, Scene 7, where we get the phrase, forgive and forget.

And we use that sometimes, you know, this is the biblical thing to do, just forgive and forget. Move on with life. Don't hold grudges. Don't let bitterness grow in your life. And these are all good. This is all good advice.

But that actual phrase is not found in scripture. It's more closely tied to this line in King Lear. The line actually says, pray you now, forget and forgive. So the order is reversed from how we usually express it, forgive and forget.

But yeah, this is from Shakespeare. There's some wisdom in Shakespeare and some of that wisdom may even be in agreement with biblical truth, but it is good to remember where the source actually is and not get confused as to, you know,.

Is this from the Bible or not? It's especially important to know what the source is because sometimes people don't realize exactly who is speaking. And sometimes that makes kind of a difference as to how you're supposed to interpret the statement, especially inside of its own context.

Sometimes you'll see a joke, a meme that's passed around the internet sometimes, where you'll see somebody who sent flowers to a funeral and the verse that they quoted said, all these things I will give you if you will fall down and worship me, which sounds like nice sentiment, except that's Satan talking in the Bible.

So a little bit of an awkward quote. When you talked about Shakespeare, Polonius, that character, a lot of people don't realize that his character is sort of a politician, depending on how you want to play him.

He's either sort of a bumbling doofus or a conniving fraud one way or the other. And that whole speech is meant to be taken by the audience as to sound like the kind of meaningless nonsense that politicians bring up.

But it turns into something that we hear all the time in pop culture and then it just gets in there. And like you said, with the sound of it, I can see why people would think that might be sort of biblical even when it's not.

Mm-hmm. And even, Jeff, when you mentioned earlier the let go, let God, first thing that came to my mind was, do we have an article on that one? Because I bet you a lot of people search for that and thinking that it is actually in the Bible when it's not.

If I were to go back into my memories as a child, I remember my mom would say, this too shall pass a lot. Probably whenever I was whining about something terrible that had happened to me, that really wasn't all that terrible.

And for a long time, I thought that exact quote was in the Bible somewhere, but it's not. I mean, like a lot of these, the principle, you can say, yeah, to an extent. I mean, everything in this world is temporary.

This world is not our home. Heaven and earth will pass away. So yeah, everything eventually is going to pass. But the way that phrase is most often used in our culture, it's not exactly from the Bible.

And maybe one other that I think is also a very true statement, and I think it's helpful reminder for us is, hate the sin, but love the sinner. Where we can find sin in someone's life, including our own lives, and we can hate that sin without actually hating the person.

That's an important distinction to make. And it's not only just for us, but it's also very difficult in our current culture to do that. Because for so many people, if we're saying their lifestyle or their choices are wrong, they view that as us hating them.

When it's like, no, we're hating sin. We're not hating the sinner. But love the sinner, hate the sin is actually not in the Bible. Although I would say to a certain extent, both aspects, both parts of that saying do have some biblical truth to it.

How about this one? All men are created equal. Of course, the idea is biblical. We know that all people are created in the image of God. And that in Christ, especially, there is no Jew or Greek or Barbarian or Scythian or any of the others that are mentioned there.

But so we are all equal in God's eyes. But that particular quote is, of course, not biblical. You can go to your concordance and look and look and look, you're not going to find the reference for that.

It is, of course, from the Declaration of Independence, a wonderful document and express some wonderful universal truths, such as that one, that all men are created equal. But no, it is not in Scripture.

And then going back to another literary source, Alexander Pope wrote an essay called An Essay on Criticism back in 1711. And in that, he said, to err is human, to forgive divine. And we've heard this probably often in our lives, to err is human, to forgive divine.

And it kind of has the ring of Scripture to it, kind of smacks of something that you might find in the Bible, but it's not. It's from Mr. Alexander Pope from a few centuries back. And so again, it's one of those that you can look and look and look for it in the pages of Scripture, and you're just not going to find it.

I had a pastor friend that used to say, well, it's in the book of Hezekiah. Just look up to Hezekiah 316 or whatever. And of course, there is still a book of Hezekiah in Scripture. And so that was his way of saying, it's not in.

There. You're looking in vain. A lot of those, it's interesting because they do have connections to biblical ideas. In other words, just because something is not a direct quote from the Bible, doesn't mean it's totally wrong.

And that is where some of these are a little more confusing. But at the same time, it is important for us to distinguish when a statement in and of itself is not in the Bible. I think the idea of hate the sin, love the sinner is one that's very important for us to be clear is not actually stated in the Bible.

And Shay, as you were saying, I think one of the reasons is because as human beings, we do have a difficult time handling concepts like hate appropriately. I mean, even in our daily lives, we recognize that there are some things that we should be morally viscerally against.

And in that sense, there are things in the world that we should hate, but we're not always good at knowing exactly which ones we should and shouldn't. So the focus of Scripture is on us staying away from sin and loving other people.

So even though the principles in there, it's important for us to remember that they're in there. Kevin, like you said, all men being created equal, that's a very biblical concept. In fact, that's an idea that outside the Bible, you just don't see.

It's one of the things that makes our civilization unique in its approach to things like human rights. The only thing about the quote from Alexander Pope that I can think of is that here in the Midwest, we talk a little bit different.

So to us, er is what we say when we're confused. Er is how we talk about making a mistake. So to us, it's to er is human. That's my only confusion on something like that. So we know it's not in the Bible, but there again, there's a parallel to what Scripture says in that, because we are going to make mistakes as human beings and forgiveness is something that we're called on to bring up.

Common Misquotes of Scripture

Now, so far, what we've really talked about is we've talked about things that either are just not in the Bible at all, or they're vaguely biblical, but they're not really in Scripture. The other category that we see all the time is where people have specific verses in mind or specific phrases in mind.

And what they're saying is a misquote. In other words, there is a statement or a quote like that in the Bible, but people are getting that one wrong. I think one of the most famous one is the idea that the, that money is the root of all evil.

We hear that a lot. Money is the root of all evil. And that's not what Scripture says. First Timothy 6, 10 says that the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. So it's the same warning about money and greed that a person can get involved in all kinds of terrible things if they're greedy, but it's the Bible does not teach that literally everything that we do wrong in the world has some connection to money or to greed or to funding and so on and so forth.

So again, there's different categories, but they all have the same basic problem, which is we're getting wisdom from somewhere without checking it against Scripture.

Yeah, you're exactly right, Jeff. We get a lot of questions about misquotes of Scripture and not even misquotes. It's the person's fault. It's the way a Scripture verse is commonly quoted throughout cultures.

You see posters with these misquotes and other than the love of money being the root of all kinds of evil, another common one is the lion shall lie down with the lamb. You see in most Sunday school classrooms for children, there'll be a poster of a lion and a lamb lying together.

Like, well, the principles are the same, but the actual quote is, and the wolf will dwell with the lamb and the lion will lie down with the young goat and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little boy will lead them.

That's from Isaiah 11 .6. And then Isaiah 65 .25 reads, the wolf and the lamb will grace together and the lion will eat straw like an ox. So these verses mention a lamb and a lion in the same verse, but it's not the wolf.

It's not the lion and the lamb that are lying together. It's the wolf and the lamb. But the main point is the same, is that in the millennial kingdom, we believe even the animals will appease each other.

So a lion or a wolf and a lamb could lie down together, or normally be a predator-prey relationship, and they will be at peace. No risk of them, one of them seeking to devour the other. So again, it's not like a major theological error, but it's, we should strive to get scripture right.

And the scripture actually says the wolf is the one that will be lying down with the lamb.

I'm thinking that there should be a law of some kind where before you make a Bible poster or you create a Bible meme to share online, you've got to make sure you're quoting it correctly. And it'd be also nice if you were required to keep it in its proper context and not try to misquote it in any way.

I'm thinking of 1 Corinthians 10 .13. It says that God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but will with the temptation also make a way of escape that you may be able to bear it.

And a lot of people will take that verse and kind of twist it around a little bit and come out saying, well, God will not allow us to be tempted beyond what we are able. I mean, he knows our limits and he's not going to push our limits.

He's going to, he's going to tamp things down and make sure that whatever comes our way, we can handle. And that's not what the verses is actually teaching. There are times in which God allows things to happen in our lives that we cannot handle.

We've got to rely on him. Think of the life of Job. There was more than he could handle in his life. And then specifically in that verse, it's talking about temptation and trials. God is providing a way of escape so that when we are tempted, we don't have to sin.

We don't have to fall into the trap that Satan has laid before us, but there will be a way of escape. Even if it is as simple as what Joseph used when he was confronted by Potiphar's wife, he just ran out of the room.

He physically removed himself from the temptation. That might be the way of escape, just something as straightforward as that, but there will always be a way of escape. That's the promise. We don't have to give in to sin.

We don't have to yield to sin. We can yield.

To the Holy Spirit. It's interesting the way that our culture has a tendency to pick and choose which parts of that verse that they want to use or to claim. Because like you were saying, what the verse says is that God always provides some means of escape so that we do not have to sin.

That God will always give us some non-sinful option that we have in any circumstance. We can never look at God and say, wasn't my fault. There was nothing I could have done. I just, I had to sin. We always spin that to say, God will never give you anything that you can't handle.

And we like to apply that when it comes to things like stress and life and things like that. Very few people want to actually apply that in the only place it does apply, which is sort of like saying God will never put you in a circumstance where you have to sin.

So when you sin, you have nobody to blame except yourself. That's not the way that we want to use that concept. We want to use that when it comes to sports and getting fired and being sick and all sorts of things like that.

But we don't want to use it in the one spot where we're supposed to use it. And I think Shay, what you were saying before is a good thought that just because we hear these things does not necessarily mean that they're automatically right or automatically wrong based on whether they're correct in the Bible or precisely correct in the Bible.

Some of them do and do not have a lot of importance, but we do sort of want to follow, we'll call it Kevin's law. You have to quote it accurately and you want to be careful of the context when you do that, because if you don't, then you're mistakenly ascribing something to the Bible that's not actually biblical wisdom.

And following good wisdom is always a good idea, but you want to differentiate between good wisdom and biblical good wisdom because there is a difference.

Other Sayings That Sound Biblical but Aren't

If I were to think of one other ones I saw recently, this will go back to the stuff that's not in the Bible that people think it is. What's commonly known as the serenity prayer, God helped me to, I don't know, change the things I can, accept the things I can't, and to know the difference, something to that effect.

And someone asks, Hey, where is that prayer in the Bible? I remember my mom had it on a poster in her bathroom and I wonder where that came from. It's not in the Bible. I think there's a lot of good truth to it.

Maybe it's a couple more that have come to mind as I was kind of preparing for this one where idle hands are the devil's workshop in the sense of, I think this is usually used with basically you need to keep kids really busy doing something or they'll find something bad to do.

That's kind of the context. Well, again, some truth to that statement, but again, not in the Bible. And then also when I saw recently in a question was there, but for the grace of God, go I. And in context, it's saying, it's usually you see someone else who's failed in some terrible way.

And you say, this is a you know, I'm not above that. I could potentially make the same mistake, commit the same sin as that person did, but therefore the grace of God protecting me, I could make the same mistake.

So the helpful reminder, something that I say fairly often, but again, not specifically from the Bible, although I'd say it's a biblical statement to make sure. Yeah. That one has.

Definitely got a lot of connection to the truth of scripture. It tells us, be careful where you think you stand lest you fall, you know? And then again, we just talked about Corinthians saying, God will provide a means to escape if you're confronted with temptation.

And part of what Jesus told us to pray was lead us not into temptation. So it's, there's something to be said for saying, yeah, you know, we need to be careful about judging other people in their circumstances because God had put me in a different circumstance or put me in that.

Circumstance. Maybe I would have made that mistake. Yeah. So this has been the GotQuestions podcast on things that are not in the Bible or things that are kind of in the Bible, but we're misquoting it.

And we introduced Kevin's law today that says, if you're going to print a poster, you must make sure it is quoting scripture accurately.

Write that one in.

We have articles on GotQuestions .org on a lot of these. We have one, yes, we have one article that kind of goes through the most common, not in the Bible ones. And then some of these other ones, we actually have articles dedicated to them.

So if you want to learn a little bit more and even actually learn where they actually do originate, you could check out some of these articles on GotQuestions .org. So I hope our conversation today has been encouraging to you and also educational about some things that are not in the Bible that you may have thought was, because I know on at least a few of these at some point in my life, I thought they were in the Bible.

So GotQuestions, the Bible has answers, and we'll be fine.