During
the Sundays in Lent we are looking at 7 essential elements of
following Jesus. On Ash Wednesday we spoke of how prayer is just
talking with God and is not terribly different from how you should
communicate with your spouse. But you should also listen to your
spouse, Now, aside from mystics and prophets, not many of us hear
God's voice, at least not in an auditory way. My experience is that
as I talk to God, his responses form in my head. If I say “Lord, I
can't do _____,” the rejoinder “You can with my help”
immediately occurs to me. The answers often formulate themselves in
my mind as I formulate my questions and objections before God.
What
helps is that I have steeped my mind in the written word of God.
While I can't always quote chapter and verse I read the Bible enough
to have a pretty good idea what it says on various issues and I can
Google to find the passage and get the exact wording. But just as my
familiarity with Sherlock Holmes would make me suspicious of any
story in which he believed in spiritualists and mediums, my
familiarity with scripture gives me a pretty good idea of what it
does and does not say. Then I check it out to make sure. And
occasionally I am wrong, which is why I keep studying it.
In
2013 we did the Bible Challenge, which consisted of reading the whole
of scripture in a year. I salute the people who took up the challenge
with me and those who read my daily blog posts as I reread the Bible.
But you know who puts most Christians to shame? The inmates at the
jail. They typically read through the entire volume in 2 to 3 weeks.
Of course, they have little else to do. But it is possible for those
of us with more demanding schedules to read the Bible in as little as
90 days. And if you take a year, it is easy.
That
said, I recommend not only reading but studying the Bible. For one
thing, it is not one book but 66, written by roughly 40 authors. It
is not just a tome of moral instruction but also of story, history,
poetry, parables, legal texts, letters, visions, and a family saga
that encompasses love and romance, treachery and tragedy, politics
and intrigue, nobility and triumph. And it is also an ancient Near
East document written in a couple of Semitic languages as well as
Greek, with customs that go back millennia. There are several good
Study Bibles out there that will help you understand the whole array
of biblical literature.
And
if you don't have a study Bible there are websites like
biblegateway.com and biblehub.com where you can read the Bible in any
number of translations and languages and get lots of commentaries to
study as well. You can get these sites as free apps as well as the
Logos app which gives you access to a whole library of scholarly but
readable reference works by Intervarsity Press, and the Bible.is app
which will read the Bible to you in various translations, with music
and dramatization if you like. I also like the Touch Bible app which
has the easiest navigation for finding a passage or a verse. And on
YouTube you can find every Psalm sung in every musical form you can
think of.
So
there's no excuse not to read and understand the Bible. But I will
give you a Cliff Notes tour of the scriptures.
The
Bible begins with 5 books that make up the foundation of Judaism. The
Torah is Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, a
mixture of story, history, moral and legal principles.
Genesis
tells us the beginning of humanity's dealings with God, in a form
that was readily understandable to those in the Ancient Near East but
simple enough to be understood universally today. It tells us that
human beings, both male and female, are created in God's image. As
such, we are moral agents in the world. It also tells us how we have
totally botched up taking care of God's creation and each other,
turning a paradise into something like hell on earth. It tells us how
God decides to use the descendants of Abraham and Sarah to bless all
the peoples of the earth. (Genesis 12:1-3) We follow that family as
its members both reflect and fail to exemplify the image of God in
mankind. Genesis concludes with the sons of Jacob or Israel moving
into Egypt to avoid famine.
In
Exodus we find that after hundreds of years in Egypt, the children of
Israel have become a slave class. God hears their cry for help and
sends Moses to lead them out of Egypt and back to the land he
promised to Abraham and his descendants. This climaxes in chapter 20
where God enters into a covenant or agreement with the people of
Israel. If they will be his people, he will be their God. The rest of
the Torah is the extended version of that contract, plus priest craft
and a census, interspersed with the Israelites' wanderings in the
wilderness for 40 years. That's where most people get bogged down so
I recommend reading a chapter of the New Testament each day as well.
Joshua
tells the sometimes harrowing, sometimes rousing story of the
Israelites conquering the promised land and its apportionment among
the 12 tribes of Israel.
Judges
tells how the land fares as a lawless, loose federation of tribes,
led occasionally by charismatic individuals called judges.
Ruth
is a story of faith and romance about King David's grandparents.
First
and Second Samuel cover the transition of Israel to a monarchy and
stories of the warrior-king David. First and Second Kings tells the
story of his dynasty, the split of the nation into a northern and a
southern kingdom and the tale of the rival royal houses until both
nations are conquered and taken into exile. The books of First and
Second Chronicles recaps Biblical history with special emphasis on
the nation of Judah.
Ezra
and Nehemiah recount the people's return from exile and their efforts
to restore the kingdom of Judah once more.
Esther
tells a story of how a Jewish princess in a pagan land saves her
people.
After
those books of history come the wisdom literature of the Bible. Job
recounts the drama of a good man undergoing a terrible ordeal and
wrestles with the problem of why bad things happen to good people.
The
Psalms are the hymnbook of the Hebrews, covering the whole range of
human emotions in relation to God, from sorrow, anger and indignation
to compassion, praise and hope.
Proverbs
collects the aphorisms of Jewish sages, elevating the concept of
wisdom.
Ecclesiastes
is a down to earth meditation on life and death and how to live.
Song
of Songs is a poetic wedding drama with some surprisingly racy
passages on erotic love.
The
rest of the Old Testament is the writings of the prophets, often
unpopular spokesmen for God, who comment on the current and future
states of the northern or southern kingdoms. They offer warnings of
judgment as well as promises of restoration, depending on how the
people respond to God's call to return to him and to healthy
relationships with their neighbors, especially the downtrodden. Some,
like Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, contain difficult-to-interpret
visions of the future. Hosea is an enacted parable of God's love for
his adulterous wife of a nation, while Jonah is a parable of God's
love and forgiveness for all, even those outside his people. In the
prophets we also get glimpses of the Messiah, a promised prophet,
priest and king whom God will send to save his people.
The
New Testament begins with the gospels, 4 overlapping accounts of
Jesus, the Christ or Messiah, whom God sends to liberate all people
from their enslavement to sin. From 4 different perspectives, they
all tell of his ministry of healing and preaching and of his death on
the cross, a shameful form of execution, and of his surprising
resurrection. The book of Acts then follows the early years of the
church, with special emphasis on the ministries of Peter and Paul.
The
next 13 books are letters from Paul to his churches, to his
colleagues in ministry and to an important Christian leader over the
tricky question of freeing one of his slaves. Paul is an orthodox Jew
with an unexpected mission to the Gentiles and his multi-ethnic
ministry forces him to deal with issues of diversity and essentials.
These letters are the earliest books in the New Testament, predating
the gospels by decades.
Hebrews
is an early Christian sermon revealing how the Old Testament relates
to and foreshadows the New and especially Jesus Christ.
James
feels like the New Testament's sole wisdom book, focusing less on
theology than on the practical side of demonstrating one's faith in
how one lives.
First
and Second Peter focus on major problems that the churches were
struggling with, including persecution from outside and false
teachings from within.
The
3 letters of John continue the themes and heady mystical tone of the
gospel of John, emphasizing the importance of love, truth and Jesus,
the incarnate God.
Jude
is a short book that recaps the prophetic themes of true worship and
moral behavior.
Revelation
is a prophetic book in the vein of Isaiah and Ezekiel. This book was
a message of hope to a persecuted church, assuring Christians that
when the worst is over, God will bring peace, healing and wholeness
to the world. It is couched in deliberately difficult language to keep the Roman
Empire from destroying the book. It starts with 7 letters to churches
in various stages of faithfulness and laxity. The central chapters
use images from the Old Testament prophets to depict a world in the
throes of the final struggle between God and evil. The last two
chapters give us a breathtaking portrait of a resurrected and
restored paradise on earth where the God of love will live among his
people and death and sorrow and pain are no more.
Overall,
the Bible tells the epic love story of how God makes a beautiful world which his
creatures fill with violence and ugliness and how God starts his long-term plan to win his creatures back. He even enters into his creation
as a human being named Jesus (“Yahweh saves”) to take upon
himself the consequences and brunt of our evil. He then pours out his
Spirit upon those who open themselves to his love and transforms them
into the body of Christ, the ongoing embodiment of his grace. The
Bible ends with a glorious vision of this kingdom of God on earth and a prayer
for Jesus to hasten and consummate God's plan for a new heaven and a
new earth in perfect communion with each other.
Once
you see the overall plot of the Bible, it is easier to figure out
where each book fits in. Even so, it helps to check out reference
works whenever you have questions. And you need to pay attention what
genre each book is in. The stories in Judges and First and Second
Kings read like Game of Thrones, depicting behavior that is
sometime worthy of emulation and sometimes emphatically not. In fact,
even the so-called heroes of the faith are fallible human beings who
sometimes fall way below God's standards. No mere human is perfect. Yet God works through them. We can all relate to that.
In
the poetic books, including parts of the prophets' writings, you need
to make allowance for hyperbole and metaphor. Jesus uses both. You
need to look out for Hebrew idioms and euphemisms. For instance, to
“uncover one's feet” is to undress; stranger means foreigner or
alien. It helps to compare translations, especially using more
literal ones alongside paraphrases. No one translation can capture it
all, though the Amplified Bible tries, basically by unleashing
a thesaurus on some passages.
A
good Bible dictionary can help you keep track of persons, places and
things, as well as help you trace certain themes across the various
books of the Bible. Commentaries can help you understand individual
passages, and pick up on emphases and themes within books. Again you
can get both through the Logos Bible app.
As
students and followers of Jesus we live at a time when we have
unprecedented access to the Bible and a wealth of scholarship. We
need to know what scripture does and does not say. We need a deeper
understanding of God so that we can cut through all the garbage out
there about God, both from his detractors and from misguided and
ill-informed supporters. We need to be able to, as 1 John 4:1 says,
“test the spirits to see whether they are from God...” As
Shakespeare said in The Merchant of Venice, and as Jesus saw in
his temptation, “the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.”
So we need to know not only what it says but what it means. We need
to know context and nuance and how one verse that seems to make a
sweeping generalization is modified by another verse on the same
subject.
We
also need to acknowledge that the Bible is not primarily a legal
treatise, nor is it a science text, seeing as science was invented
long after the last book of scripture was written. It is not really
interested in how the world is constructed but why. It is about the
meaning of creation and our place in it. If it is at all about “how,”
it is about how to live a life of love and justice and peace. It is
about how much God loves us and how far he will go to save us from
self-destruction. It is about how to respond to that love.
The
Bible is a portable library full of timeless wisdom and eternal
truths. Jesus studied it to the point where he quoted it from the
cross. As his students and followers, we need to get into the Bible
deeply so we can know the mind of Christ. And we need to put what we
learn there into practice.
But
where can we do that? We'll talk about that next Sunday.
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