The Bible as God's Word

How the Spirit reaches you

Spirithome > Scripture > Living with the Bible

THE BIBLE HAS IMPACT

It's often said in mainline Protestant churches that the Bible is only the Word of God when it is read with faith. I myself would not put it quite that way. It seems to me that there is something about the Bible that is the Spirit's own, in a way that nothing else is. Christians acknowledge this in saying that the Spirit inspired the actual writings and speeches (such as by the prophets, story-tellers and editors) that led to the writings. If so, much of the Spirit's greatness should have rubbed off on it. One way to see if it's so is to see if it bears a key mark of God's Word : it does not come back empty. Does the Bible meet this standard even in non-believers' hands? Yes. For all of this modern culture's disbelief and cynical bitterness, it's not at all rare to see the Bible's effect. Even in the hands on those who don't believe in Christ or even in a god, whether in art or literature, diplomacy or politics, family life or inner transcendent longings, and whenever people speak of peace or justice or morality or character or vision, something of the Bible's words, meanings, ethics, and intents do in fact come through. Sometimes those doing it have no idea where it came from; sometimes they know full well and ignore or reject God but still learn from the truths God put into the Bible. It does not come back empty. There are other measures of the Bible's nature as God's Word too, and it measures up on all counts.

Read It With Trust

Christians learned to trust the writings of the Bible by way of experience, over generations, repeatedly seeing how it leads us to what's good and true. Yet Christians sometimes talk as if everybody knows this, as if you could go up to just anyone and say 'the Bible says "do this"', and they'll jump to attention and say, "yes, sir!". To be blunt: Most people who do not believe in Christ do not believe in the Bible. The Bible still has some limited degree of respect from almost everyone, but if they're not already committed to it by faith, odds are it'll do no good to try to convince them of anything solely (or even mainly) from the Bible. It's not an authority to them because they don't believe in the One who stands behind it. Christ's followers, however, have discovered how clueless they are about following Christ. We found out how it is the Bible that clues us in.

READ THE BIBLE WITH ATTITUDE

The Bible screams to be read with faith. But it really matters what faith one has. Case in point : Saul of Tarsus. He had read the Hebrew Scriptures all his life long. He was even trained in the school of thought and practice which was slowly developing what would eventually become the Talmud. He thoroughly believed in God -- not just any god, but the God of Abraham and Sarah, of Moses and of David -- and probably believed strongly enough to give up his life if need be (a very real possibility in Roman times). By all the standards of Scripture as revealed up to Jesus' time, he was following God as he should have. But those standards had been radically changed only a few years earlier, and God set about to break through all that Saul knew. God didn't use Scripture to make the breakthrough. There was no New Testament yet to bear the new Word, since people were still busy living the New Testament. So God created an experience that would open Saul up to the truth : Saul was blinded. When his blindness ended, he had new eyes for seeing what had already been revealed in a new light : a new Word. Saul was no longer Saul, but Paul. And Paul went on to live, and write, that new revelation, as the author of letters and as the foremost evangelist of all. The light that the Spirit shed through Paul's life and pen, in turn, now lights our way.

BRACKET THIS !

God doesn't speak objectively or dispassionately. So, why should God's Word be studied objectively or dispassionately? Only one reason is good enough : to better understand it so that our passions, our limitations, or our prejudices don't blind us. One way to think of it is this : when writing, a writer might use brackets [ ] or parentheses/clommers ( ) to make an aside or take care of a side track or add a needed reference or make a corrective statement. It's good to 'bracket out' the passion of one's faith briefly, to get it out of the way of what the Spirit is really saying through the Bible passages you're studying. Brackets are useful, but only within the context of making the unbracketed whole easier to understand. When 'bracketing' in Bible study, the bracketed 'objective' look at the passage(s) is to be done within the context of a passionate faith in the Word outside of the brackets, for the sake of making that whole life of faith better and stronger. The more objective view may well include scholarly methods or measures, logical thinking, history, and measuring up the interpretations against other evidence. All sound methods soundly pursued are worthy of use, but they are to be done in brackets set within the whole picture.

EUREKA!

(... so take a bath...)

The Spirit works hard within us to get us to grasp what God has done and is doing and will do. The moments when God's revelation hits home is sometimes described as a Hmmm... or an Aha... moment. But Hmm... and Aha.... happen regularly to anyone whose brain isn't switched off. Sometimes, though, it's a lot more than that. Reformed writer Gabriel Fackre caught these moments better by calling it a 'eureka experience'. It's got WOW to it. It breaks through the smog of life. If you try to use a room fan to clear out a fog bank, it fails because it's too small; you can't cut through the smog with it. But the Spirit's got a hugely powerful light that burns its way right thorough it. It's a potent gift from God.

BRICK BY BRICK

When you keep plugging away at Bible study, the Spirit rewards you for it. You may not notice it, but you are being shaped and built up brick by brick as you learn God's Word. What is unfamiliar turf at first eventually becomes familiar. One lesson builds upon another, and a vision starts taking shape. The big picture comes into view. Each time you go back to a passage of Scripture or read a Bible story again, you understand it better because of all that you've discovered since last time. And you can see more of how you are to live it out in the world around you. It takes a lifetime, and even then it's not complete, because the New World you're being rebuilt for is not complete. One day, it will be. But you'll have to trust that to the Spirit who's building it.

There's also something called "biblical criticism", which is a scholarly effort to peel back the layers of work that created the Bible to find what was originally in each layer of writings, and why each layer came about. One leading example of this is the Documentary Hypothesis, on how the first five books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) came to be. Such scholarly study can often be very helpful. For one example, it teaches us that while the way the Spirit formed the Bible is more focused and intense, there are key ways in which it is like the way the Spirit works among us for other tasks. Yet sometimes scholarly study can pull you away from the reason for reading the Bible. At all times you must keep in mind that scholarly study uses good and bad scholarly theories. For many centuries it has been observed that the fewer people there are who actually believe the Bible, the more scholarly studies there are about the Bible. Søren Kierkegaard (in his *Journals*, #216) suggested that we might gather up all copies of the New Testament in one place, then pray that God would take them back, because we humans deal so poorly with it. He thought of returning it to God because the only hope for the Bible in his time was divine action. But it has always been so, and God has kept taking action for the Bible - thank God.
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QUOTES

"Faith is the master, and reason the maid-servant."
----- Martin Luther

"Consider that the first time someone spoke of God in the third person and therefore no longer with God but about God was that very moment when the question resounded, 'Did God really say?' (Genesis 3:1). This fact ought to make us think."
----- Helmut Thielicke

"Through this experience I found that the Bible was not adequate. I needed God in a personal way -- not as an object of my study, but as friend, guide, comforter. I needed an existential experience of the Holy One. Quite frankly, I found that the Bible was not the answer. I found the Scriptures to be helpful -- even authoritatively helpful -- as a guide. But without my feeling God, the Bible gave me little solace.

In the midst of this 'summer from hell', I began to examine what had become of my faith. I found a longing to get closer to God, but found myself unable to do so through my normal means: exegesis, Scripture reading, more exegesis. I believe that I had depersonalized God so much that when I really needed him I didn't know how to relate."
----- Daniel Wallace, about what happened during his son's bout with rare cancer. In *Christianity Today*, 12 Sept 1994.

"Perhaps there will be many Christians to whom it would not occur to pose the question whether the process of secularization has anything to do with the biblical understanding of the goal of history. The Bible, for them, belongs to a religious world which is not admitted to belong to the world of secular events... But this is to read the Bible wrongly. Whatever else it may be, the Bible is a secular book dealing with the sort of events which a news editor accepts for publication in a daily newspaper; it is concerned with secular events, wars, revolutions, enslavements and liberations, migrants and refugees, famines and epidemics and all the rest... We miss this because we do not sufficiently treat the Bible as a whole. When we do this, we see at once that the Bible... is in its main design a universal history. It is an interpretation of human history as a whole, beginning with the saga of creation and ending with a vision of the gathering together of all the nations and the consummation of God's purpose for mankind."
----- Lesslie Newbigin, *Honest Religion for Secular Man*

Questions

• Think of Bible ideas, symbol, or passages that have affected your life through non-Christian or general-public sources or people. (They're all over the place, but you may have to think a bit to find them.)
• Look at the list of words that are used for describing the Bible. Which one(s) mean the most to you? Why? Which one do you have the hardest time accepting? Why?

Pray For Guidance and Wisdom

Let us ask the Lord to broaden our ideas, make them clearer, and bring them closer to the truth, that we might also understand the other matters which He has revealed to His prophets. May we study the Holy Spirit's writings under the guidance of that same Spirit and compare one spiritual interpretation with another, so that our explanation of the texts may be worthy of God and the Holy Spirit whom inspired them. May we do this through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom glory and power belong -- and will belong throughout the ages. 
----- Origen