Practicing Jews and Christians are called to be “people of the book.” That doesn’t mean they always are, but it does mean that while our religion is meant to be a relationship with our Creator through which we strive to become more and more like Him, we also believe that our Creator revealed Himself, His plan, and His purposes in the book we call Scripture. After nearly four decades as a biblical scholar, having read most of what has been written to discredit the Bible, I am even more convinced today that the Bible has been inspired by God than I was growing up believing what my parents taught me about it.
The Bible is the most important and influential book in human history… most read… most translated… most quoted… most studied… subject of the most books. It was penned by more than 40 authors over a period of some 1500 years. These authors were not born to the great civilizations; they were not the learned of world empires. They were born at the least likely of times in the least likely of places. They were shepherds and builders and farmers, and even those who became great, did so because of God, not from great opportunities that fell to them by birth. The one thing they all had in common was a conviction validated by fulfilled prophecy that the One Holy Creator of all had revealed Himself to them and that their writing was inspired by His Holy Spirit. They changed the world for unimaginable good benefiting multiplied billions.
If God exists, which I believe the evidence demands, then He is a creator. If He is a creator, He is a communicator for He has made a world that preaches the Creator’s power and glory. It also teaches paths of life and death through the cause-effect structures in nature so that those who desire good can find it. We might think of things like the principle of sowing and reaping or even laws of causation. The folly of children reveals the need for all of us to discover truth, not INSIDE ourselves, riding our feelings like an ill-fated surfer, but OUTSIDE ourselves, discovering by observing God’s world things like which berries will kill us and which will sustain us, how wheat grows best, and what kind of behavior leads to human thriving and which to misery and death. If the Creator is a communicator, then we should expect Him to reach out to His creatures, even if for specific reasons, which we will discuss another time,[1] He does so through intermediary means rather than directly.
In the entire history of man, no collection of books has done more to elevate the human race out of poverty, out of oppression, out of misery than Scripture. No work has done more than the Bible to teach men trustworthy patterns for family, society, and justice… all while preaching grace, mercy, and compassion. It stands head and shoulders over every other sacred text in areas of morality, ethics, love for one’s neighbor and even love for one’s enemy. It is the reason for the rise of global literacy and public education.
After ages in stagnation, humanity began to rise at unprecedented speed and incalculable ways when Scriptural influence spread across the globe, giving birth to the scientific method, free market economics, constitutional republics, the expansion of philosophy, the industrial age, and eventually the technological explosion. Economists call this rapid change the hockey stick of prosperity…. a long flat handle with a sharp upward turn at the blade. This upward turn did not come to everyone all at once, however, but as any given people embraced basic principles from the West that the West got from the Bible, their upward blade of prosperity began. Without Scripture, the whole human race would still be trapped in the long ages of pagan dysfunction, for it alone shattered paganism’s stranglehold on humanity, taught the people of many lands that there is a path of life to be found in the Creator’s world, and, then, gave them the map to it.
Imagine such a treasure in your hands. What should one do with such a gift? It’s a book. Read it.
On Christmas morning, 1974, at the age of seven, my wife, Melodie, received her first adult Bible. She remembers no other gift from that year, though her parents were generous with their children. As she unwrapped it, and realized what it was, she describes herself as being awash with the sober importance of the moment, filled with awe and a little fear. She was holding responsibility in her hand, the map of the paths of life and death, knowing all the while that part of her inclined toward wanton ruin and another to divine order and blessing. Me, I got army guys.
Even so, by 19, I was so spiritually hungry for biblical wisdom and knowledge that I wished that I could just eat the Bible like the Prophet Ezekiel did[2] and absorb it into my very being. Easy attainment, however, is not God’s way. I’ve had to work at it, sacrificing my time and my energy and my arrogance to sit at the feet of God, learning from His prophets in His inspired Word. The Christian life is not a 50 yard dash, so don’t act like it’s one by freaking out over how much there is to do. Being Christian is a marathon of many years of steady going, periods of exhilaration, periods of struggle, loss, and energizer-bunny growth. Today, I want to call you to the love of God’s Word. If you don’t read it you can’t learn from it. If you don’t love it, you won’t learn from it even if you do read it.
[1] God is omnipotent (all powerful) but chose to permit freedom of choice for His creatures so that love would be real. For love to be real it must be chosen amid options, not necessarily chosen without consequence. In short, a direct revelation of God would overwhelm human will, eliminating choice, and rendering devotion irresistible mechanics.
[2] Ezekiel Chapter 3 in the Old Testament.
