Photo by: Akira Asakura
Let’s talk about what’s happening in the conversation following my last couple of posts. By using the literature model of author intention, plot, subplot, character development, mood, setting, conflict, resolution etc., I’ve left some of you with the impression that I’m being disrespectful of the sacred page.
That’s what I don’t want to do. I lost more than a few of you.
So I’ll ask for your patience and a chance to regroup. I know that many of you would agree that, just as God chose to reveal himself in the body of a Man, he has also chosen to reveal himself by means of a true Story.
Just as Jesus was the best Man who ever lived (while at the same time being God in the flesh), so the Bible is the best Story ever told (while at the same time being the inspired Word of God). The implications are far more important than our conversation is showing.
I’ll take responsibility for that. I jumped into the McKee discussion without giving you adequate disclaimers. I led you down a path that I had not prepared you to follow. Our conversation never got to the point of the last post. I didn’t lead the discussion well. I am honestly sorry.
But the point of the true story of the Bible is too important to just “pass on” because I’ve run on without some of you in the woods.
If the “binding” and underlying message of the Bible is revealed to us in the form of a true story (history), can we then rightly read it as a dictionary of religion, or as an encyclopedia of spirituality? My guess is that some of you might say, “Let’s read this book as no other book. This is the inspired word of God.” So I push back, “I agree, so how should we read it and make sense of it?”
Someone replies, “Let’s read it as true history combined with inspired sections of law, poetry, songs, proverbs, parables, predictions.”
I agree. So how should we read it? Since all of it was written to someone else, living in different circumstances, at least 2000 years ago, how should we read and make sense of it (since it was all written for us (2Tim 3:16)? Is it our duty to do (or at least to try to do) everything that the Bible tells people to do, even in the New Testament?
Photo by: Bob AuBuchon
I don’t want to once again lose you here in the woods.
I also know that any number of you could lead us out.
You know the way. You know the story. You see the forest from the trees. You know about the first two trees and about their separate paths. You know about the one tree on which our Savior died. You know about the trees at the end of the path that will bring “healing to the nations”.
You also know that the point of all of this is to help us know the One who is using our walks with him in the woods of our own circumstance, to show himself to us, to teach us to trust him, and in the process to grow in his likeness (in spite of the terrible capacities for evil, distraction, and confusion that remain in us)… as he leads us to “his Father’s house”…
Apart from that big story, we really do get lost in the woods of the inspired, misunderstood, and misused words of the Bible. Apart from reading every word of the Bible in its own immediate, and in the wider context of the whole story of inspired revelation, we don’t give the Bible the respect we give other books.
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