You are My All in All

King of Glory

Vicki Yohe

"LORD KEEP ME DAY BY DAY!"

Born Again

Everywhere That I Go

Holy Is The Lord God Almighty - Chris Tomlin

Mercy Me - Word of God Speak

Blessed Be Your Name

From Adam through Noah to Abraham; The Genesis Covenants

We Fall Down

The B-I-B-L-E #8 - Mike Cope

For this final post in the series, let me point out the obvious: Bible knowledge doesn’t always translate into Christlike thinking and living. I’ve known some brilliant Bible scholars whose lives were anything but godly.

We can read scripture for a lot of different reasons. Some read trying to prove their preconceived dogmas. Others read just to gain knowledge (as if “knowledge of God” in scripture referred to info on a hard drive rather than personal relationship). And still others read to serve what Eugene Peterson calls the replacement trinity: Holy Needs, Holy Wants, and Holy Feelings. (”The new Trinity doesn’t get rid of God or the Bible, it merely puts them to the service of needs, wants, and feelings.”)

So for this last piece, I want to underscore the image of Peterson’s new work, Eat This Book. He skillfully plays with the image of John — and before him Jeremiah and Ezekiel - being asked to eat the scroll.

“The voice then tells John to take the book from the angel. He takes it and the angel tells him, ‘Eat this book’: Get this book into your gut; get the words of this book moving through your bloodstream; chew on these words and swallow them so they can be turned into muscle and gristle an bone. And he did it; he ate the book.”

He’s pleading for a way with scripture that is more than just packing in the knowledge (as important as that is). We are to read scripture in a way that lets the words dissolve, digest, and distribute to our very nerve endings. These words — as they point us to the life-giving God — will offer health, vitality, holiness, and wholeness.

“The act of eating the book means that reading is not a merely objective act, looking at the words and ascertaining their meaning. Eating the book is in contrast with how most of us are trained to read books — develop a cool objectivity that attempts to preserve scientific or theological truth by eliminating as far as possible any personal participation that might contaminate the meaning. . . . The reading that John is experiencing is not of the kind that equips us to pass an examination. Eating a book takes it all in, assimilating it into the tissues of our lives. Readers become what they eat.”

We read the words of scripture not as curiosity seekers who have an hour to zip through the Louvre (”Quick! Where’s the Mona Lisa . . . Venus de Milo . . . The Winged Victory?”) Rather, we come as disciples of Jesus who live in a story. We absorb the words, reading them carefully and slowly.

Because this story comes sentence by sentence, we enter carefully into our reading as a community. “The more ’spiritual’ we become, the more care we must give to exegesis. The more mature we become in the Christian faith, the more exegetically rigorous we must become. This is not a task from which we graduate. These words given to us in our Scriptures are constantly getting overlaid with personal preferences, cultural assumptions, sin distortions, and ignorant guesses that pollute the text. The pollutants are always in the air, gathering dust on our Bibles, corroding our use of the language, especially the language of faith. Exegesis is a dust cloth, a scrub brush, or even a Q-tip for keeping the words clean.”

Our goal is not to master the text, but to be mastered by it as we are drawn by God the Father, Son, and Spirit into the world of the kingdom. We read humbly and obedient. We pause prayerfully over words and phrases. We memorize sentences. We reflect on paragraphs. We marvel at the overarching story.

I often hear today that our people don’t know scripture like we used to. Why is that?

Maybe it’s our distaste for the kind of arrogance that knowledge often produced. Perhaps it’s also business, laziness, and a general cultural shift from reading to watching.

But I want to close this series by urging us all to enter again eagerly into the world of scripture. Eat the book. Taste the words of the Torah, remembering that they come from a rescuing, life-giving God. Chew on the words of Isaiah 56-66 as you seek to imagine what life after the exile lived before God might look like. Digest the gospeled words of Matthew as he walks you through the story from Abraham to David to Jesus. Be nourished by the encouragement of the writer of Hebrews as you’re called to keep your eyes on Jesus, our high priest who sat down at the right hand of God.

A meal awaits. Feast on it!

The B-I-B-L-E #7 - Mike Cope

One of my prize possessions in my library is Adolf Deissmann’s Light From the Ancient East, first published in 1908. When I bought it during my grad school days, it felt like I was being privileged to enter into a wide world of sacred discovery.

But, of course, “sacred” is not what it was about as much as “secular.”

New Testament scholars used to believe that the Greek of the NT was a special type of holy language: a Holy Ghost Greek. Since about 500 of the approximately 5000 Greek words in the pages of the NT were unknown from any other source, many assumed that the Spirit had supplied a special vocabulary that fit the special nature of the documents.

But in 1897, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt pulled a bunch of paper scraps (papyri, actually) from a garbage dump in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. These were full of the kinds of notes sent by common people: shopping lists, notes from parents to children, bills, receipts, etc.

Before this, most of what we had access to was the stuff from historians, politicians, poets, and philosophers. They had continued to write in the “better” (classical) Greek, rather than the “common” (we use the word “koine”) Greek of the people.

But all of a sudden there was a treasure trove of information. And guess what? Nearly all of those special “Holy Ghost words” started showing up. Deissmann, a German professor, started sifting through the tons of information and soon published Light From the Ancient East, helping others understand that the Greek language in the New Testament was, for the most part, the language of the streets. Common life, common business, common communication.

In Eugene Peterson’s Eat This Book , which was so helpful for writing this little post and about which I’ll say more tomorrow, he celebrates the impact of this:

“The difference that this has made to Bible translation and Bible reading is hard to exaggerate. In retrospect it shouldn’t have been such a surprise that this was the kind of language used in the Bible, for this is exactly the kind of society that we know that Jesus embraced and loved, the world of children and marginal men and women, the rough-talking working class, the world of the poor and dispossessed and exploited. Still, it was a surprise: our Bibles written not in the educated and polished language of scholars, historians, philosophers, and theologians but in the common language of fishermen and prostitutes, homemakers and carpenters. . . . We often thoughtlessly supposed that language dealing with a holy God and holy things should be stately, elevated, and ceremonial. But it is a supposition that won’t survive the scrutiny of one good look at Jesus — his preference for homely stories and his easy association with common people, his birth in a stable and his death on a cross. For Jesus is the descent of God to our lives just as we are and in the neighborhoods in which we live, not the ascent of our lives to God whom we hope will approve when he sees how hard we try and how politely we pray.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve actually read through Deissmann’s tome. But when I was a young, eager student of the Greek New Testament, I soaked it in. These words written by people and somehow inspired by God (so I believed — and believe) came in a language that fit the nature of Jesus’ incarnation.

Again, from Peterson (as he leads up to explaining what he was seeking to do in his transation, The Message): “Virtually anyone can read this Bible with understanding if it is translated into the kind of language in which it was written. We don’t have to be smart or well educated in order to understand it any more than its first readers did. It is written in the same language we use when we go shopping, play games, or ask for a second helping of potatoes at the supper table — and it requires translation into that same language.”

How Could I Ask For More

The B-I-B-L-E #6 - Mike Cope

Here are ten things that amaze me about the Bible.

1. Even though there is much “variety” in scripture (ever gotten whiplash reading Ecclesiastes after the this-world-makes-sense wisdom of Proverbs?) and even though the books in scripture came over hundreds of years, it contains an overarching theme, a narrative unity. It speaks with profound insight about creation, the fall, Israel, Jesus, the church, and the final consummation.

2. It speaks both simply and deeply, to child and to scholar.

3. While it keeps being claimed by groups who laughingly think they’ve figured it all out, it keeps resisting, plunging us to deeper insights and mysteries.

4. It doesn’t seek to prove much. It is a book of confession and proclamation more than it is a book of apologetics. It doesn’t try to prove that God created; it confesses that God created. It explores the implications for this world since God created (and since he delivered from bondage . . . and since he restored after the exile . . . and since Jesus was raised from the dead . . . ). It’s an inside job from those who are already on a journey of faith.

5. It isn’t embarrassed by faithful exploration of difficult questions. Words of doubt and lament don’t get edited out (unlike in many contemporary churches).

6. It permits the writers to explore faith through their own expressions (see #2 in this series). It doesn’t share our need to work out all the jars and clashes.

7. It points consistently to God, insisting that he–in all his glory, power, and mystery–has ways that are not our ways.

8. It seems to know me. It speaks to my life with profound insight.

9. It refuses to be the object of our desire. Some people saw the signs of Jesus (especially in John’s gospel) but never looked much beyond the signs to the one who performed them. (”My, my, really good wine,” said the wedding planner, smacking his lips.) Likewise, too many Christians develop a passionate devotion to the Bible as if it were part of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Bible. Like the index finger of John the Baptist, it points beyond itself.

10. It insists that I decide. It’s not JUST history; it’s not JUST prose and poetry; it’s not JUST insightful and true. It demands that I listen, decide, commit, and act.

Come, Now is the Time to Worship

Lifesong - Casting Crowns

The B-I-B-L-E #5 - Mike Cope

Today, I want to quote a couple women whose writings have inspired me.

First, Barbara Brown Taylor:

For all the human handiwork it displays, the Bible remains a peculiarly holy book. I cannot think of any other text that has such authority over me, interpreting me faster than I can interpret it. It speaks to me not with the stuffy voice of some mummified sage but with the fresh, lively tones of someone who knows what happened to me an hour ago. Familiar passages accumulate meaning as I return to them again and again. They seem to grow during my absences from them; I am always finding something new in them I never found before, something designed to meet me where I am at this particular moment in time.

This is, I believe, why we call the Bible God’s “living” word. When I think about consulting a medical book thousands of years old for some insight into my health, or an equally ancient physics book for some help with my cosmology, I understand what a strange and unparalleled claim the Bible has on me. Age does not diminish its power but increases it. . . .

The word of God turned out to be plenty strong enough to withstand my curiosity. Every time I poked it, it poked me back. Every time I wrenched it around so I could see inside, it sprang back into shape the moment I was through. In short, the Bible turned out not to be a fossil under glass but a thousand different things — a mirror, a scythe, a hammock, a lantern, a pair of binoculars, a high diving board, a bridge, a goad — all of them offering themselves to me to be touched and handled and used.

And then this wonderful story from Kathleen Norris’s Amazing Grace. She tells of a Saturday evening when she and her husband were eating at a local steakhouse and struck up a conversation with “an old-timer, a tough, self-made man in the classic American sense.” They had known him casually (”he knew us as oddball writers, misfits in the region”), but this evening, probably because he was about to enter chemotherapy, he was more talkative.

Out of the blue, Arlo began talking about his grandfather, who had been a deeply religious man, or as Arlo put it, “a damn good Presbyterian.” His wedding present to Arlo and his bride had been a Bible, which he admitted he had admired mostly because it was an expensive gift, bound in white leather with their names and the date of their wedding set in gold lettering on the cover. “I left it in its box and it ended up in our bedroom closet,” Arlo told us. “But,” he said, “for months afterward, every time we saw grandpa he would ask me how I liked that Bible. The wife had written a thank-you note, and we’d thanked him in person, but somehow he couldn’t let it lie, he’d always ask about it.” Finally, Arlo grew curious as to why the old man kept after him. “Well,” he said, “the joke was on me. I finally took that Bible out of the closet and I found that granddad had placed a twenty-dollar bill at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, and at the beginning of every book . . . over thirteen hundred dollars in all. And he knew I’d never find it.”

We laughed over this with Arlo, and he began talking about the interest he could have made had he found that money sooner. “Thirteen hundred bucks was a lot of money in them days,” he said, shaking his head.