What are we looking for in reading the Bible? What might we expect to find? Early on, we said to try to come at it without expectations; simply let it do what it will with us, let it have its way with us. We know this is what God wants us to read. And so we just read, and read again.
What we won’t find are snappy, easy answers to our questions. The Bible has way more questions than answers. And the Bible offers no simple formulas for how to be happy, successful, or even at peace. It’s a long story about a multitude of complicated people trying to figure God out, getting it right sometimes, bumbling at other times. It’s real. It’s human. Archbishop Rowan Williams suggested that, yes, God wants us to read this book. That doesn’t mean God likes everything in the book. Some things we know God doesn’t like, and we know this from what we learn from the rest of Scripture.
What we will find as we read is a gradual familiarity with the mind and heart of God, and getting the hang of thinking and living as God’s people. Rabbi Abraham Heschel calls the Bible “holiness in words,” and points out that “the Bible is the answer to what God is asking of us.”
Earlier we called this “thinking biblically,” and even “living biblically.” From a broad reading of Scripture over a long time, we catch on to ways “thinking biblically” is out of sync with “thinking American culturally.” Some examples: in the Bible, dependence is good – upon God, and upon the community of faith. Society prizes independence and control. Biblical thinkers know it’s an illusion, and even undesirable. Dependence is the joy of a child being wonderfully loved and held in his family’s arms, or an elderly person being tenderly cared for by grown children.
“Freedom” reveals the clash of Bible and American culture. Our country boasts of our freedom – doing what you wish, going where you want to go. In the Bible, our freedom is a façade. We are in fact shackled to sin, habit, the culture, the self, crazed desires, and false gods. In the Bible, we are bound until God’s Spirit sets us free. Read Galatians 5 as one example. And God sets us free, not to do as we wish, but to be loyal and obedient and dogged followers of whatever God asks of us.
Obviously, our culture values wealth and things, while the Bible is flat out nervous about them to the point of shunning them. God wants all people to have enough, but garnering a lot poses spiritual dangers. Our culture values the growing portfolio, while the Bible declares we will find genuine joy in sacrifice, in giving, in the abundance that is generosity.
Our culture (increasingly it seems) is fearful and even judgmental of the stranger, but the Bible bends over backwards to include and demand that we include. Love, and empower those who are very different from us, with no pity, no shaming, but only deep, if hard-won friendship. The Bible’s favorites are the outcast, the shunned, the judged, the untouchables.
Are you finding any revolutionary, counter-cultural ideas as you’re wading into the Bible? If so, tell me what and how you feel about it. A professor I had spoke of long familiarity and deep understanding of the Bible as kin to the Copernican Revolution. People thought the world was flat, and thus were terribly confused about a great many things they observed in the sky and on earth. Copernicus flipped the model: the earth isn’t in the middle, but occupies a more modest place making its way around the sun. You aren’t the center of things. Your more modest place is finding your way around in the gravity of God’s grace and goodness. Then everything else starts to make such good sense.
We come by such a revolution in the mind and soul over weeks, months, and years of reading, not looking for backup for what we already think (we flat-earth fools!), but opening ourselves to newer, more mind-boggling and ever more wonderful truths. So read, ask what God is saying, and what God is asking. Listen for the holiness in words, the beauty in verses, chapters, and books in the great gift from God to us.
James