Reading and Meditating on God's Word

The scriptures referred to are mentioned in the text.

In 2013 we participated in the Bible Challenge, which was simply to read the entire Bible in a year. And I put my reflections on each chapter every day on my blog. You can also get special editions of the Bible that arrange the text in a form that takes you through the whole thing in a year. There are apps that will do that for you and even ones that read the Bible to you so you can do it on your commute. It's not hard to read the whole Bible in that time. Inmates at the jail can do it in 3 weeks. Of course, they have little else to occupy their time. And ever so often you will read about a church holding a Bible marathon in which people sign up to take turns reading parts out loud so that the entire thing from Genesis to Revelation can be heard in about 90 hours. Other churches have a program in which participants read the whole Bible in the 40 days of Lent. I am in favor of anything that educates more Christians on the basic texts from which we get our beliefs and behaviors.

My only caveat is this: reading the entire Bible, though essential to being a well-informed Christian, is just the first step. To get the most out of this document that has changed the world, you really have to study it. There is an old Woody Allen joke about how he took the Evelyn Wood course on speed reading. He said, “I read War and Peace in 42 minutes. What's it about? I'll tell you what it's about. It's about Russia.” Similarly merely reading through the entire Bible once will only give you the most superficial understanding of it. Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair claimed to have read through the entire Bible over a weekend at the age of 12 or 13. She said she was shocked by the inconsistencies and impossibilities and sordid sex and sadism of it. She might as well have summarized it by saying, “It's about God and sin.”

One problem with people who look at the Bible as O'Hair did is that they tend to think that in 2000 years no Jew or Christian has ever noticed these parts of it. Which means they haven't availed themselves of all of the literature out there where devout people deal with those very things. And in some cases the inconsistencies are more apparent than actual. For instance at a certain point Matthew and Luke's genealogies of Jesus diverge. Which would be troubling only if Joseph and Mary were brother and sister. But they are descended from different branches of the Davidic line. One genealogy traces Jesus' lineage through his legal father and the other through his biological mother. There are a few other issues but they are by no means insurmountable.

Some of the problems are cleared up by understanding the culture, something a cursory reading would not pick up on. In our Bible study this week we dealt with the fact that Exodus says that the Passover is to be celebrated in the first month of the year, which it sets in the spring, whereas in other parts of the Bible the first day of the Jewish year, Rosh Hashanah, takes places in the fall. It turns out that, like us, the Jews' liturgical year was different from their calendar year. The church year starts with the first Sunday in Advent, in either late November or early December. The calendar year begins January 1. If you really want to complicate things you could point out that the US government's fiscal year starts October 1. It's not a contradiction; it's cultural.

A related problem is that of translation. The King James version of 1 Timothy 6:10 reads, “For the love of money is the root of all evil...” But the American Standard version, noted for its attempt to be as literal as possible while still being readable, renders the same verse thus: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil...” Most modern translations, reflecting a better understanding of the underlying Greek, follow suit. There is no perfect translation but today's are based on older and better and more numerous manuscripts as well as a better understanding of what the text is actually saying.

Which brings up another way in which problems in the Bible are often resolved: we learn more as time goes by. There is practically nothing in the Bible that skeptics have not doubted: Pontius Pilate's title, the existence of David, the existence of the Hittites. At one time, the only evidence we had for those things was found in the Bible and nowhere else. Those three things eventually were resolved in the favor of the Bible by archaeological discoveries. As the saying goes, absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. Sciences like archaeology, paleontology, and geology periodically have to be rethought and reorganized simply because new evidence is found that had been buried for thousands or even millions of years. A new fossil, an new stratum, or a new inscription can overturn our current understanding of the past. Science is always a work in progress.

But our study of the Bible should go even deeper than these matters. It is the content not the incidentals that has captured the interest and devotion of people for millennia. Contrary to what many skeptics think, most Christians do not use the Bible as a science text that tells us how the physical world works but as a spiritual text that gives us a greater understanding of ourselves, our fellow human beings and God. It gives us essential insights in how we should think, speak and act in regards to those 3 relationships. Sometimes it gives us prescriptions of how to do those things and sometimes it gives us descriptions of how people have acted in those areas, and not all of those descriptions are to be emulated. Madalyn Murray O'Hair saw terrible things in the Bible. Apparently her pre-adolescent brain did not discern that some of those were meant to be bad examples. Perhaps she did not pick up the fact that the Bible never says that people are perfect or the fact that God can use messed up people and situations to bring good out of bad. Perhaps she missed how often God condemns violence, deceit, greed, rage, lust, envy, selfishness, oppression, xenophobia, exploitation of the poor, animal abuse, being a bystander to injustice, mistreatment or neglect of the disabled, the aged, women and children. She evidently overlooked all the commandments to love your neighbor, and the foreigner, and even your enemy. I'm pretty sure she missed all the condemnations of pride, or to use the better translation, arrogance. Oddly enough, arrogance also leads to bad science, something she was supposed to care about. Know-it-alls don't advance science; it's acknowledging that they don't know everything that motivates scientists to keep asking questions, keep learning, keep questioning the orthodoxies within their own disciplines. Humility was not a virtue in the ancient world. Its introduction into culture by Christianity is at least part of the reason that science really took off in the West and why most of the early scientists were not merely Christians but often clergy.

In fact, the Instruction for Lent to read and meditate on God's holy Word would be useless were it not for the fact that we are a faith in which literacy is prized. In the ancient world, the upper classes could read. Middle class folks and business people, like merchants and landowners, must have been literate. For that matter certain types of slaves could read, like the Greek physicians so favored by the Romans. But the average peasant may only have had knowledge of certain written words, so he could read signs, and only enough math for his most basic needs. He wouldn't read for information or pleasure because books, which had to be hand-copied, were expensive.

The church very early on insisted that clergy be literate. Bishops could read because they often came from the upper classes. Monks were expected to read and write and were taught if they could not. During the so-called “Dark Ages” the knowledge of the classical world was preserved by monasteries. Irish monks were even sent as missionaries to the European continent and did their best to revive literacy, which was spotty among parish priests. But the invention of the Guttenberg printing press and the emphasis of the Reformers on being able to read the Bible led to increased literacy in countries where the Protestants were in the majority, so that, for instance, the Scandinavian countries were fully literate by the 17^th century.

Nowadays not only can you buy any kind of Bible you want, you can download several on your phone. You can also get quite a large range of Bible dictionaries, concordances, commentaries and other tools for understanding the scriptures online as well. So if you haven't started studying the Bible for Lent, you can do so shortly after reading this. I just want to give you some tips to start you off.

I would definitely start with one of the gospels. Mark is the shortest. If you read 3 chapters today and one chapter every day hereafter you will have it done by Easter. I would definitely use a study Bible for the explanatory notes. My current favorite is the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible. For more devotional purposes, the Life Application Study Bible is good. If you don't have one of these, you can go to biblehub.com or the Logos Bible app and find some of the same features. In addition you can go to my blog for those comments I posted. Go to February 1^st 2013, Day 33 of the Bible Challenge for Mark. But I just summarize chapters and highlight certain features.

To go deep, get a commentary. Nelson's New Illustrated Bible Commentary is good, going verse by verse. If you have a Kindle may I suggest the Baker Illustrated Bible Commentary or for individual books in the New Testament the appropriate volume of N.T. Wright's For Everyone series.

If you want to go in deep on specific topics, or just get more information on persons, places and things mentioned in scripture, get a good Bible dictionary, like the Holman Bible Dictionary or the New Bible Dictionary by Intervarsity Press. You can look up specific verses using Google or with a concordance, of which Strong's is the best, especially in a newer edition. But many Bible apps will have a concordance feature and often they will be linked to Strong's numbers, which tell you the Greek or Hebrew word underlying the English, complete with definitions and etymology.

A word of caution here. Don't be like one of those comic book geeks who gets so lost in the forest of details and theories and the inevitable controversies that they miss out on the main purpose of comic books: entertainment. The main purpose of studying scripture is to get closer to God and to become closer to Christ in our thinking, speech and action. Look for the things that help you do that. The other stuff can be ultimately useful but it can also divert you from the main purpose of scripture, and you can lose your way, Bart Ehrman is a respected Bible scholar who lost his faith because he was raised to be a fundamentalist and take everything literally. Most atheists are just as literal as fundamentalists when it comes to the Bible. If you don't allow for paradox and nuance and you wish to reduce everything to a simple formula, you won't make a very good student of scripture or of science either.

It's important to remember that the Bible is not a straightforward “how to” book about life. It is a library of 66 books, written by at least 40 authors over thousands of years. It contains poetry, parables, proverbs, letters, wisdom literature, and history. It uses metaphors, similes, hyperbole, irony, and even humor. Jesus came up with some comical images, like people straining out gnats from their drinks and swallowing camels, or trying to remove a speck from someone else's eye while walking around with a log in their own. Familiarity has drained these sayings of their funny and startling nature.

My point is that you cannot compare what Paul is saying in one of his letters to what a psalm says as if they were of the same genre. Be careful, too, of looking in Jesus' parables for facts about, say, heaven or hell when they may just be story details to support the main point. It's important to know that something can be true without being literally factual at times. If I say my heart leaped when I saw my beloved, don't go looking for medical conditions in which the cardiac muscle in my thoracic cavity moves away from its fixed position without killing me.

The Bible tells the story of the God who is love and who creates a world and populates it with creatures made in his image. As part of that image, these creatures are free to choose to love him and each other. They choose not to and so God decides to win them back. He works through flawed people to teach folks to trust him and also to set it up so that he can enter into his own creation and make a change that will require a great sacrifice on his part. Once he does so, he pours out his Spirit on those who put their trust in him and enables them to spread the story of his love and invite others to join in the effort to bring everyone into the circle of his love. He promises to return and recreate the world and its people when he knows the time is right.

Once you know the greater story you can figure in how the various books and passages fit into it. You can see how people respond to God in different circumstances and observe the varying degrees of success they have in thinking like God. So when the people God chose to be a blessing to the world go against both the letter and the spirit of what he commanded them, they see him as a stern judge. When they repent and return to him, they realize he is forgiving. When reflecting on God's creation, they see God's delight in it and how it reflects his majesty and his orderly ways and his provision for his creatures. When in distress, they feel the pain of being separated from the source of all goodness and wonder where God is. When they are rescued, they proclaim his faithfulness and mercy. 

In Jesus' own life, we see him angry with those who twist God's words, gentle with those who are outcasts, determined to alleviate suffering regardless of the rules, impatient with his slow-on-the-uptake students, courageous when standing up to power, forgiving to friends who denied him and subject to pain, sorrow, surprise, compassion, and feeling abandoned. Jesus is God and God is multifaceted.

One last tip. When Jacob is at a low point in his life, he finds himself wrestling with a stranger. Jacob says, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” The man subsequently gives him the name Israel, which means “the one who wrestles with God.” As we have said, there are parts of scripture that disturb people. You can pretend it doesn't because it comes from God. You can reject the whole Bible because of the bits that bother you. Or you can wrestle with it. God has allowed those parts to be in there for a reason. Maybe it was so that we can wrestle with some the issues and features of this life that upset us. And out of that wrestling can come blessing: insight, strength, knowledge, acceptance, and a desire to make the world better. So read honestly and prayerfully. Meditate on it.

There is a reason that people still read and get wisdom and comfort and inspiration from the Bible. The Bible changes people. So does life but it doesn't always change folks for the better. The Bible tells us that God can change us into the people we were created to be, regardless of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Our past need not determine our future. There is hope to be found if we trust in Jesus, the Word of God made flesh. We read the written Word of God to learn more about his living Word, Jesus, our Lord, in whom we see what God is like and what we can be.