The Living, Breathing Word

The scriptures referred to are Hebrews 4:12-16.

I've decided to give up trying to get down to my original weight. 8 pounds, 5 ounces was unrealistic anyway.

That's one of thousands of jokes going around the internet. And as Isaac Asimov said, like most humor, it is based on a sudden shift of perspective. When people talk about going back to their original weight, we rarely realize that what they consider it to be is actually an arbitrary number that they reached in their early 20s or before they got married or before they had kids. The fact is that as living, growing beings, after the first week, we will always weigh more than we originally did. If we didn't, there would be something very wrong with us. One sign of a healthy baby is it gains weight; it grows. Nothing living stays exactly the same over time.

So what does the author of Hebrews mean when he says “the word of God is living and active?” How can words written 2000 and more years ago be “living and active?”

Life is a tricky thing to define scientifically, because there are so many varieties of living things: animals, plants, fungi, bacteria. There are certain basic characteristics of biological life but we can safely say the author of Hebrews was not a scientist. So let's stick to features people back then observed about living things. Growth is one. Another is breath.

In the very first book of the Bible we are told that God breathed into the first human the breath of life and they became a living being. (Genesis 2:7) Even before medical science, people knew that living persons and animals breathed and dead ones didn't. (Psalm 104:29) And today the first 2 things you check before doing CPR on someone is whether the person's airway is open and whether they are breathing.

It is not too much of a stretch to propose that the author of Hebrews was thinking along the same lines as Paul when he wrote to Timothy, “Every scripture is God-breathed...” (2 Timothy 3:16) That's the literal meaning of the word usually translated “inspired by God.” I breathe out, shape the breath with my throat, tongue, teeth and lips and thereby express myself. And all God-breathed scripture, Paul says, is “useful for instruction, for creating inner conviction, for setting straight, for training in righteousness.” ( 2 Timothy 3:16; my translation)

Of course, that could be said even if it were breathed out and expressed long ago. Everything dead once lived and breathed. But Hebrews says God's word “is living.” Which means the word is still alive and breathing, expressing God's message. The word is also “active.” The Greek word used is the one from which we get “energy.” It means “at work, effective, producing a result.” God's word is not a museum piece, like something a person created for his time and culture with nothing to say to us today.

But here's the thing: the Bible was written millennia ago using words and thought forms of a specific time and culture. So in Genesis it talks about God creating, not an atmospheric bubble around earth but a vault, because that's how the people at the time thought of the sky. Trying to explain that it was really a mixture of gases held around us by gravity would have gone nowhere then and distracted from the essential part of the message: God made the world we see and live in. As C.S. Lewis put it, science is like the footnotes to a poem. God's word is the poem itself. When Romeo says in the balcony scene, “But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!” there's no need to stop for a lecture on astronomy and the star in the center of our solar system; you get what he is saying about this radiantly beautiful girl he loves.

And while I highly recommend getting a study Bible and commentaries and Bible dictionaries and concordances and other books and apps for understanding the Bible in greater detail, the remarkable thing is that, even without these things, it can speak to you and you can get the essential meaning of it. It is not like one of those obscure art films that leave you completely in the dark at the end concerning what it was about. The Bible is about God creating a good world and when we ruin things, saving us through Jesus.

So in that way the word of God still communicates his message and is still effective in reaching people and changing their minds and their hearts. Though it was set down beginning in the late Bronze Age and going through the early Roman Empire, it still speaks to us in the early 21^st century. Just as it is popular to stage Shakespeare's plays in contemporary settings because the stories do not rely on all the trappings of the 16^th century to work. We can relate to the characters despite all that. And the Bible offers timeless wisdom and spiritual insight that has helped people for thousands of years.

But that is only true if we do not freeze the Bible in time. Instead it is like a photo album of the life of a still living person. You can look at the baby pictures and the school photos and graduation photos and note that you can readily identify the familiar eyes or smile of the person you know even back then. You can note the essential features that have persisted but you can also see the changes that have happened. And you can see some defining characteristics that will develop and grow stronger with time.

For instance in the world where the word of God was first spoken, slavery was a universal feature of all societies. But look closely and you notice that the Bible has laws that protect the slave. A fugitive slave was not to be returned to his master. (Deuteronomy 23:15-16) A slave permanently maimed had to be freed, even if only a tooth was knocked out. (Exodus 21:26-27) A master who killed a slave was punished. (Exodus 21:20) And after 6 years Hebrew slaves were to be freed. (Exodus 21:2) And even foreign slaves got to rest on the Sabbath. (Exodus 20:10) It is also where we get the concept and word “redeemer,” from the relative who redeems or buys back a kinsman from slavery. (Leviticus 25:25, 49)

In the New Testament, Paul reminds masters that they must “treat your slaves with justice and fairness, because you know that you also have a master in heaven.” (Colossians 4:1) In other words, treat your slaves the way you want God to treat you! Paul even tells slaves that if they have an opportunity to get free, they should take it. (1 Corinthians 7:21) And when he must, by law, return a runaway slave to his Christian master, Philemon, Paul tells him to go easy on the slave, Onesimus, charging to Paul anything stolen, (vv. 18-19) and treating him like a brother (v. 16) or as he would Paul himself (v.17). But he also strongly suggests that Philemon go even further and free Onesimus so that he can continue to help Paul in his ministry. (vv. 13, 21)

One of the reasons that slaveowners in the American South did not want their slaves to learn how to read, according to historian Henry Louis Gates Jr, is precisely because they did not want them to read the Bible! After all the central event in the Old Testament is God freeing an entire nation of slaves! And God and Jesus are characterized throughout the Bible as redeemers. (Psalm 19:14; 78:35; Isaiah 47:4; Jeremiah 50:34; Luke 24:21; Galatians 3:13; Titus 2:14; Revelation 5:9) So the slaveowners cherry-picked the scriptures that talked about slaves obeying their masters and ignored the ones that held them to account or talked about freeing people. They were like my grandmother who went through her picture albums and cut out the faces of the people she didn't like and didn't want to be reminded of.

But just like the distinctive features of children grow and become more pronounced, the distinctive features seen in the Bible are like snapshots of a living person and those features continue to grow stronger beyond that moment in time. And so Christians noticed this trend when it came to slavery. Their growth in understanding God's love led many early Christians to free their slaves. Some of their bishops had been slaves. There was even a bishop of Ephesus whose name was Onesimus, who may have been the same one who was the subject of Paul's letter. Later Christians led the movement to abolish slavery, beginning with Bishop Bartolme de la Casas, who opposed the the Spanish conquistadors making slaves of the native peoples in America. Christians like William Wilberforce in Britain and Francis Daniel Pastorius in the US led the movements to abolish slavery in their respective countries. And, yes, there were Christians who supported slavery and, yes, they quoted selected verses of the Bible, all the while ignoring the direction in which the living word of God was going. Yet scripture tells us we are to grow in Christ. (2 Peter 3:18; 1 Peter 2:2; Ephesians 4:15)

And here I want to draw attention to the wording in our passage from Hebrews. It says, “For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating as far as the division of soul and spirit, of joints and also marrow; and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of him to whom we must render account.” (translation and emphases mine)

Did you notice the surprising pronouns in verse 13? We are talking about the word of God but then the author uses the personal pronoun instead of the impersonal one we would expect. I omitted the uses of “it” because they are not in the Greek. This “him,” which is in the Greek, indicates that the word of God being spoken of is in fact Jesus Christ, identified as the Word of God in the first chapter of John's gospel.

Indeed, as C.S. Lewis wrote to a lady inquiring about the Bible, “It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers will bring us to Him.” Jesus said, “You study the scriptures thoroughly because you think in them you possess eternal life, and it it these same scriptures that testify about me...” (John 5:39) In other words, Jesus is the Living Word of God and the Bible is the written word of God, which is about the living Word of God. In the Bible we get a true description of what Jesus said and did but it is a mistake to think that he has done nothing since. It is a mistake to think that he is not still speaking through his Holy Spirit and guiding us today.

There are issues we must deal with that were not around in the days of the Bible. There were no machines that kept bodies alive long after they would otherwise have died, thus giving rise to end of life issues. There were no weapons of war that caused mass death or even threatened all life on the planet then but there are now. There were no factories that could poison rivers or make the air unbreathable then. There were no micro-plastics so pervasive that we all, including our children, accumulate a credit card's worth of plastic in our bodies every year. There was nothing like the internet to spread not only knowledge but misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric and self-radicalizing propaganda to every person on the globe with a phone. There were no corporations which could do whatever they wished to make money without regard for the wellbeing of anyone but their stockholders and who could use their political contributions to make the government turn a blind eye to chemicals and practices that endanger people at large. Since such things were not in the Bible, are we to ignore them now?

N.T. Wright has said the Bible is like a play with a missing act. We have the beginning, where God creates everything. We have the part where we ruin his creation. We have the part where he puts his plan to rescue us to work. And we have the part where the plan culminates in him sending his Son to do what we can't in order to save us. We even have the ending, where God steps in and creates a new heaven and a new earth. The missing act is what we do between the end of the first century and the ending of the play. That's the part the author has given us to improvise.

But we can't go against what has already been established in the story. If you were missing part of Hamlet you wouldn't fill it with Hamlet strangling Ophelia or him approving of Claudius killing the king and usurping the throne. It would be out of character with what he has already said and done. But we have seen so-called Christians who have done things which contradict what Jesus did and said, like the crusades or the inquisition or persecuting other faiths or even other Christians. Jesus told Peter to put down his sword when his disciple tried to defend him at his arrest. (Matthew 26:51-52) He even healed the man Peter injured. (Luke 22:50-51) Later he told Pilate a sign that his kingdom was not from this world was that his disciples were not fighting to rescue him. (John 18:36) In addition, he told his disciples not to stop someone who wasn't part of their group from doing healings in his name. (Mark 9:38-40) Jesus also said to turn the other cheek and to love our enemies. (Matthew 5:38-48) Committing violence or persecuting others in the name of Jesus Christ is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.

C.S. Lewis, in the letter I quoted earlier, went onto to say, “But we must not use the Bible (our fathers too often did) as a sort of Encyclopedia out of which texts (isolated from their context and...read without attention to the whole nature & purport of the books in which they occur) can be taken for use as weapons.” And though compared to a two-edged sword, since Hebrews talks about the word of God penetrating to the point that separates joint from marrow, I think that a modern analogy would be a scalpel. After all, it talks about laying bare thoughts and intentions of the heart. And Jesus said it was out of the heart that evil comes. (Mark 7:21-23) In Ezekiel, God actually talks about what we would call a heart transplant. “I will give you a new heart , and I will put a new spirit within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 36:26) In Jeremiah God says of his new covenant, “I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts and minds.” (Jeremiah 31:33) The solution is not external things like words written on stone or paper but God's living Word, Jesus, in our hearts.

The word for “breath,” that vital sign of life, in both Hebrew and Greek also means “spirit.” And that is how we can understand and stay in character with what God has expressed in his living and active Word: by having the Spirit of Christ within us. (Romans 8:9; Galatians 4:6; Philippians 1:19; 1 Peter 1:11) Just as it would not be in the spirit of Sherlock Holmes to solve a mystery by flipping a coin, it would not be in the Spirit of Jesus Christ to think or speak or act in a way that does not show love for God and for our neighbor. But it is in his Spirit to forgive, to heal, to feed the hungry and to visit those who are sick or in prison and to welcome the alien. (Matthew 25:31-46)

It would also be in the Spirit of Jesus to greet new and unfamiliar situations in new ways that are also loving, healing and forgiving. That's what Jesus did when a centurion approached him about healing his slave and said Jesus didn't have to use his usual method of going to the sick person and touching him. The centurion trusted that Jesus could just say the word and heal him at a distance. Jesus was amazed by this man's faith and this becomes the first but not last time Jesus heals this way. (Matthew 8:5-13; 15:21-28; Luke 17:11-14; John 4:46-54) If Jesus can try something new, so can we.

You'd be surprised at the number of things we accept as Christian that do not go back to the Bible but were introduced later in line with the Spirit of God's living Word: church buildings, Sunday schools, hospitals, ministries set up for specific needs, like for the homeless, for those with substance abuse, or for those caught in natural disasters, seminaries, ordained clergy, personal Bibles, and all the reference books I used for this sermon. Most Christians would think of those as good and natural outgrowths of God's word.

Restricting the activity of the living Word of God, Jesus Christ, to the Bible is as good as putting him into the same category as inspiring figures of the past who are dead. The risen Jesus said to his disciples, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone's sins, they are forgiven; if you retain anyone's sins, they are retained.” (John 20:22-23) He didn't say, “Here is a fixed list of all the things, good and bad, you will ever encounter and how to deal with every one of them.” He said the Spirit “will guide you into all truth.” (John 15:13) The Greek word for guide means “to lead the way.” But you don't need someone to lead the way if you aren't going anywhere you haven't been before. Jesus knew we would encounter things not covered in the written word of God. So we must rely on him, the living Word of God, speaking and working through his Spirit.

Is that scary? Yes, but so is growing up and leaving home and making a life. But just as you can always talk to Mom for advice on what you are dealing with, we can always talk to our heavenly Father about the challenges we are facing in our lives. And we can ask ourselves, “What would Jesus want me to do?” And then listen to his Spirit.