The God Effect: Chapter 10 – Using the Bible
The last three chapters were all about deciding whether or not the Bible can be trusted. We looked at how God communicated through the Bible but then moved through all the ways to decide if it is true or not. At this point there is just a couple of more things to work on. One is the question of how the books inside the Bible were chosen and the other is how to go about reading and using them.
Getting What We Have
If you think about how old some of the books of the Bible are – some going back to 1500 B.C. while other “newer” ones being written in the 100’s A.D., the logical question is: “How did they all end up being put together?” That is a fair question.
First a reminder. We know now that God does not make mistakes and never does anything without making sure it is done perfectly; that is just who He is. That goes for His giving us written communication too. That’s why in Old Testament times, anyone who claimed to speak for God falsely could be killed. That’s why in the Apostle Paul’s letter to a group of churches in the territory of Galatia, he bluntly said that if anyone tried to preach anything different than what the apostles preached, that person was worthy of judgement from God.
In the end, we have to change our thinking a little. We have to understand that God, because He knows all things and is the one in control, was the one who decided how the Bible would be put together and what would be in it. No human being ever had the right to tell God what was worthy or not worthy. That means, and this is really important, that man’s job was to figure out how to recognize what was already from God in the first place. So, with that kind of seriousness, how could anyone dare to put a bunch of books together and claim they were from God? As it turns out, it was not a simple thing.
Here is how it worked
For the Old Testament, over time, four basic rules were figured out. First, the author of the book had to be recognized as having been God’s appointed minister. They had to have been bona-fide prophets. People who had spoken under God’s direct authority. Second, their authority from God had to be proven through demonstrations of power such as miraculous signs and 100% fulfillment of their prophecies. Third, what they wrote had to always go along with God’s character as well as the messages and truths that other proven prophets had revealed. Fourth, the author’s writings had to have a long history of being accepted by everyone as the real deal. No pop-up surprises. Those books had to be valued as Scripture over a long period of time.
For the New Testament, the rules were almost the same as for the Old Testament but with some added expectations. First, under rule one, the writer had to have been either an apostle, someone who had been personally taught by Jesus Christ Himself, or had personally witnessed the ministry of Jesus. When it came to rule three, not only did the book have to be in harmony with other apostles, but it could never contradict anything in the entire Old Testament either, which makes sense. If God spoke perfectly in the Old Testament, there is no way that He would allow someone in the New Testament to contradict Him! Rule four, acceptance, now meant that the book not only had to be completely accepted by Christians everywhere, but also had to prove itself by being used by great church leaders and thinkers over several hundred years. Finally, a new exception: The book had to have changed peoples’ lives. In short, it had to make a difference.
J. I. Packer summed up the who situation this way: “The church no more gave us the New Testament than Sir Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity. God gave us gravity by the work of His creation, and similarly he gave us the New Testament by inspiring the individual books that make it up.”
Reading the Bible
Just like any other document, it can be easy sometimes for it to be misunderstood. Have you ever tried to read a legal document? For that reason, it is important to look at the best way to read and understand what is in the Bible. This is not a matter of anything mysterious or special. It is actually the opposite. God did not give us the Bible to hide meanings or confuse us or make us solve word puzzles. He gave it to us to be read by everyday people, not just experts or the person with the best education.
The best way to read is to just do it naturally and the same goes for the Bible. Always read it just as you would any other book, just like normal language always works. By the way, that also includes reading special kinds of writing as it should be like poetry (e.g. the book of Psalms) as poetry that God uses to teach. The next thing is to read it remembering that it was written to real people at a real time in history with a message to them first. Read it as if you were there but also as it is personal for you also. A third thing to do is to read verses as part of the whole book. When something is unclear, always go to other verses that talk about the same thing. It is no different than trying to understand one sentence or paragraph out of a good story without knowing what had happened before.
There is a really helpful saying that sums all this up nicely called the golden rule of interpretation: “When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense. Take every word at its ordinary meaning unless the facts in the rest of the book or other Bible truths make it different.”
Useful Advice
What kind of advice is there for actually doing the reading? First, just read it! It doesn’t matter were in the Bible a person starts except that, for someone who is new to it, it works better to start in the New Testament, maybe in the book of Luke. It is also a good idea for new readers to avoid using the old King James version of the Bible – a lot of the vocabulary is from centuries ago and can be hard to understand. There are several ways to make things a little more interesting as well. For example, a lot of times a Bible writer might keep using the same words over and over to send a signal that they are extra important to pay attention to. At other times he might purposely compare two opposite ideas to make a strong point that might not be appreciated as it should be. The Bible even uses exaggeration and gives personality to things in nature just to make a point.
In the end, the Bible is not some stale, boring, hard to read book. It is not mysterious or something that was left for just preachers or professors. It is for anyone who honestly wants to learn about and understand God.
If everything we have talked about is true, from the beginning of this book until now, the Bible is God-given and is a spiritual work. For the truly serious person, it will come down to the Bible’s most important message of all – that of knowing God. The truth of the matter is that the Bible is a spiritual book and the only way to really connect with it more deeply is by personally knowing God through Christ. The huge promise of the Bible is that it will be opened up in a special way to anyone who has that personal relationship with Christ.