How to Read the Bible

Some people say you must approach the Bible with reverence, studying it line by line, meditating on each word, taking it to heart. Such argued that reading the scriptures like a novel is not ideal and does not make for useful experience, nor does it enrich whoever approaches it this way.

I suppose some view the bible as a kind of a wild animal, you know, a lion or a gorilla…something you might want to approach with trepidation, lest you displease it and it gobbles you up.

The bible is a book, a precious and inspired collection of books – read it fast, read it slow, sing it if you like, and dance it if it makes you glad. It does not matter if you come with a heavy or a light heart, in mockery or sincerity. Be sure it will leave its mark on you, one which will never cease to haunt your imagination, chiselling its message into your mind like a sculptor. A mark you will either carry around with love or with anger.

Show Up Anyway

You know, those days when you don’t feel like doing anything (I’m not entirely sure but I think there is a song with a line like that). When you wake up and stare at your computer screen with slant, expectant eyes as if you are expecting a precious long lost item to fall back into arms…and after fifteen minutes realise: nah…nothing is going to be written today.

But the gurus have always told us to show up anyway. So here I am, present, in front of the ever so white-looking blank page, bored.

His Purpose and Pleasure

“Bowing down in blind credulity as is my custom before mere authority in the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment of private judgement, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874...

The story of my birth might be untrue. I might be the long-lost heir of the Holy Roman Empire, or an infant left by ruffians from Limehouse on a doorstep in Kensington to develop in later life a hideous criminal heredity.”

(G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography; House of Stratus, 2001)

How do you verify if God’s exists? Most people who had near death or out of the body experiences are champions of the divine. Comfortable people who had most of their needs met physically and intellectually are mostly champions of ...err...earthly stuff. 

Truth is most of us are champions of themselves. We’ve always believed what we wanted to believe.  The poor are led to believe a God will solve all their financial problems. All their efforts are to please that divine being in return for a measure of comfort. As it happens at times, when that level of wealth or comfort is reached, their interest in such deity cools off. Meanwhile the rich simply do not love to be accountable to anyone, especially when it comes to material things. So submission to any god who is going to demand more stuff than necessary is out of the question.

So what do we really believe? What humanity’s purpose on this earth? The truth is: I don’t know, neither have I met anyone who does. However what I do know is everything exists for the Creator of this earth’s pleasure. Riches, love, happiness, birth, death, earthquakes, floods, famine, disease...EVERYTHING exist for His purpose and His pleasure. This sounds callous and hard, but that is why God is referred to as, well...God; and if you are able to figure Him out at every turn maybe you are the one the world ought to worship.

Many are the purposes in a man's heart, And the counsel of Jehovah it standeth

Proverbs 19:21; Young's Literal Translation

 

 

The picture used is courtesy of ©Horia Varlan, 2008

Free Audiobook for July 2013: Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

“From the simple setting of his own barber shop, Jayber Crow, orphan, seminarian, and native of Port William, recalls his life and the life of his community as it spends itself in the middle of the twentieth century.

Surrounded by his friends and neighbors, he is both participant and witness as the community attempts to transcend its own decline. And meanwhile Jayber learns the art of devotion and that a faithful love is its own reward.

Warning, this book contains strong or potentially offensive language.”

© Courtesy of ChristianAudio