How should we read the Bible?
Serious believers read a serious
Bible and because it’s the word "of God" it’s read with seriousness. No
bad thing that, because you don’t have to look far for people who treat
the scriptures as something equivalent to a religious Reader’s Digest. A
pox on that approach!
But while the biblical witness is
something we must take with profound earnestness we’re not to read it
with always-furrowed brows, a case of the jitters and a fear of thunder.
It’s true that our personalities, our past experiences, present
environments and our theological tendencies affect how we read the
Bible. This makes perfect sense. Still, the Christian (in his or her
saner moments) will surely feel led to approach the scriptures through
the lens of Jesus Christ. It’s precisely because God takes sin seriously
that he came in and as Jesus Christ to rescue us from it and bring us
righteous and joy-filled life. The last word in God’s mouth is not about
sin; it’s about Christ in whom his love for and faithfulness toward his
creation is revealed in all its stunning but unfathomable depths.
When
people say the Bible is a series of "love letters" they irritate those
of us that take the Bible with profound seriousness. More than that, in
our cultural climate the description is too saccharin, too Mills &
Boone in tone. It reduces everything in scripture to a wooing note and
sweet romance. This is unhealthy! But having said that—and I think it
needs said—the grand drift of the Bible comes to its climax in Jesus
Christ and in and as him God comes passionately saying, "I mean you no
harm! None at all!" To read it in any other way is to miss the tender and
mighty love of God. To isolate texts, even large sections, of the stern
divine response as if God threshed around in perpetual rage, quite
prepared to dismantle a world and all in it—to isolate them from the
whole clear witness of scripture is to misread it entirely. If the
statement that the Bible "is a series of love letters" is too sweet and
reductionist, at least it turns its eyes in the right direction.
We
must make up our minds about God as he has finally revealed himself in
Jesus Christ or we’ll read the Bible the wrong way. We hear God’s voice
best in the way he speaks in Jesus Christ.
There was the
widower father of two children whose boy threw up his heels and went off
into the wild blue yonder while the girl stayed at home, gentle and
strong and supportive of the grieving father. A year or two after they’d
just about given up on ever hearing from the boy they got a letter from
him and since neither the father nor the girl could read they took it
to the local butcher and asked him to read it for them. It was the wrong
morning and the wrong man. The butcher was an austere man and on this
morning was in a particularly sour mood. He took the note and read it to
them in a flat, almost snappy tone. "Dear father, I’m very ill; send me
some money. Yours, Tom." The father was indignant. "Not a word from him
all this time and when he does decide to write, he demands money! I
won’t give him a penny!"
Nevertheless, though the father and
daughter were grieved that the only thought he had of them was money,
maybe, the girl thought on the way home, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to take
the letter to the baker. Who knows, maybe the butcher had misread it.
The baker, a different kind of man, read the words the butcher read but
it wasn’t the same message. In a warm and tremulous tone he read, "Dear father, I’m very ill; send me some money. Yours,
Tom." On that reading, indignation was completely obliterated and help
was soon on its way from a lonely and worried family to a stumbling and
sick young man far from home.
I like God because he has written
us a "love Story". It’s easy to pick out harrowing pieces of text but
it’s every bit as easy to pick out vast stretches of tenderness and
strong love and assurance and inspiration. I like God’s way of writing
and I won’t let a sour preacher with a gloomy mind so read it for me
that I miss the warmth and steadfast love of God.