Back to the Bible? But why?
I spoke at my church at the end of September about reading Scripture. This is part 1 of 2. I’ll be posting the next talk shortly.
I’ve told several of you that I’ve been reading through the Bible. I’m actually about a week away from completing my read-through. It’s been ages since I’ve done this. In fact, I haven’t read through the entire Bible since I finished my year at bible school 25 years ago last April. I’ve read parts of the Bible since then, of course. Bits here and there. The New Testament a few times. I’ve read Genesis and about half-way through Exodus loads of times. But it’s been a lot of stop and start.
If I’ve told you that I’ve been reading through the Bible, I will also have likely told you that… it’s been rough. Especially recently. I’ve been using a “One Year Bible,” so it starts at the beginning in Genesis in January. I started reading it last year in the fall, so I actually got to start in the Gospels. (Yay.) Next week, I’ll be wrapping up the Old Testament.
So, yes. The Old Testament has been my near-daily companion for the last nine and a half months. “That explains so much,” you might say. There’s been lots of good in it, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that there’s been a lot that’s been rough too.
What is rough? Well, for example, last week I was reading the story of Esther. I love this story. Esther is awesome. So brave. The story arc is amazing – full of irony and suspense. And then I get to chapter 9. I didn’t remember chapter 9. Here’s verse 5: “The Jews struck down all their enemies with the sword, killing and destroying them, and they did what they pleased to those who hated them.”
So, this is a good example of the thing I keep running into – especially in the Old Testament, but (hey!) things like this also show up in the New Testament. The story of Ananias and Sapphira, for example. Several passages in Revelation.
For me, this book can be so hard to deal with.
So what can have possessed us to choose to go “back to the Bible” this Sunday? Do we have to?
Amy gives us hope…
Ah, Amy. When I sing a song like Amy Grant’s “Thy Word,” as we did today, I find myself wanting to give it all another chance. (That might just be me). There’s a lot of promise in those words that she and Smitty have pulled from Psalm 119: “Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path…” (and which coincidentally were part of my Bible reading for this morning.)
I’ll admit that most of the time these days I feel bewildered. Such division between people. Such wide, gaping polarization. Yet, through it all, the person and words and life of Jesus still tug at me. I have this hope that, just as Christ has reconciled us to God, we might be reconciled to one another through the work of Jesus. If we can somehow get to Jesus, maybe all of us can stay afloat in the midst of this present darkness. But man do we ever need a light to cut through the mist and mystification! Could this book help with that? Could it be a light (like Amy says)?
After all, this book (or at least the Old Testament part of it!) was a light for Jesus too. Sometimes, I wish that wasn’t the case, but it’s so clear in the Gospels how deeply Jesus – and all of these authors in the New Testament – have immersed themselves in the language and imagery of this book. The language of scripture is Jesus’ language.
The reason for this is because Jesus believed that God spoke through the words in this book. And so, I suppose the other reason for wanting to go back to the Bible is that I too want to hear God speak.
(I’m just sometimes a bit nervous about what I might hear.)
How Does God Speak?
But how does God speak? Not just “what does God say,” but “in what manner does God say what God says?” Does God sound like some of the preachers I’ve heard? You know those shouty, scary ones? Does God sound like my own voice? Is God only speaking in the red letters?
And, besides, how could God speak through this book anyways?
Because, as you know, it’s not really a book. It’s a bunch of books – a library. It wasn’t written all at once. It came together slowly, over hundreds of years, surveying countless voices and perspectives across cultures and contexts.
I’ll admit that I didn’t really think about this when I was younger. In my mind, it sort of just all came together. Moses wrote this part, David wrote that part, the four gospel writers wrote those parts, and then Paul did a whole bunch… and somehow I didn’t think much about the mechanics. All I knew was that they had written these things for me. At the behest – under the compulsion, even? – of God.
I should say that I still believe that God is speaking to me through this book. But I also think that what it means for God to speak has changed in my mind and the importance of the how has grown.
So that’s what I want to talk about today: How does God speak … through this difficult, frustrating, beautiful book? Next week we’re going to talk about how we can become better listeners to what God is saying here.
The Word of a Humble God
I mentioned earlier this month that there’s going to be a little book study in October on Karen Keen’s 2022 book, The Word of a Humble God: The Origins, Inspiration, and Interpretation of Scripture. (Anyone is welcome for that btw!)
I want to talk a bit about this book and some of the questions it is engaging because I think it does a good job of both describing what can be challenging about the idea of God speaking through history and human language while also holding on to the miraculous promise that this is God’s word to us.
Keen opens her book by recounting the discovery of the Ketef Hinnom Scrolls in 1979, which contain the oldest surviving texts from the Bible that we currently have. This little excerpt of Numbers, which would have been worn as a kind of amulet by the priest, dates to the 7th century before Christ, which – depending on your chronology – is already 5 centuries after the time of Moses that the text describes.
The oldest complete text of a book of the Bible that we have is from the Dead Sea Scrolls and dates to about 150 BC.
Her point is that the development and reception of these sacred books is a complex and convoluted process. Not only are the books themselves very human in many ways, but the transmission of these books to us through history bears the marks of their human transmitters.
For Keen, this is a feature not a bug.
Inspiration
For some of us, talking about the origins of the Bible has been fenced off as something that we should not be digging into. There’s a rumour that looking too closely at how the Bible-sausage gets made is a sure-fire way to lose your faith! Fortunately, this is not Keen’s angle. In fact, she believes a closer engagement with the text and context of the Bible has the potential to uncover new depths in our relationship with God.
Of course, if you believe that God can still speak today through the words of this book, then you must have some assumptions in place about how that actually happens. How we assume this occurs – what we might call our theory of “inspiration” – says a lot about our idea of what God is like too. It’s worth spending a bit of time on this because, unless we have a clear idea of what the God we are trying to listen to in scripture sounds like, we’re going to have a hard time discerning his voice well.
Dictation Theory of Inspiration
First up, we have a perspective that is not widely accepted formally, but is pretty widespread informally. This is the view that, somehow, God took hold of the writers of scripture and whispered the words in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek into their ears and directed their pens to write them down.
I’m pretty sure that this is more-or-less how I thought of inspiration as a kid if I thought of it at all. It was sort of like that scene in Ghost when Whoopi lets Patrick Swayze’s spirit possess her… that’s maybe too old of a reference. It’s probably the wrong reference, too.
But, taking a step back, I think that it becomes clear really quickly that this is not generally how God seems to work in the rest of God’s dealings with humans that we see. Possession and overpowering and forcing are terms that aren’t typically associated with God’s way of doing things in scripture. I guess he could – but it isn’t who he is, so he doesn’t. After all, there are many, many times when we wish God would have acted that way and God has elected not to.
In fact, there are pictures in scripture itself of how God inspires. Keen cites Exodus 31:3 as a great example. The passage describes how God enabled Bezalel, the artist who worked on the tabernacle, to do that work:
“I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills…”
Here, we see God inspiring this seriously avant-garde artist (as in he was way “avant” a lot of stuff) by giving him all of the skills and wisdom and understanding and knowledge that he needs to articulate the vision of a dwelling place that God has shared with his people. God didn’t just grab hold of Bezalel’s arms and jerk them around like he’s performing the imperious curse on him: he partnered with Bezalel, equipped him, and created something with him.
Incarnational Analogy
So if God isn’t straight-up dictating God’s speech to us, what’s happening? Keen covers a few other possibilities, but I want to just touch on one more before getting to her idea, which is a sort of variation of this one.
This theory, which she calls the “Incarnation View,” sees the Bible as a kind of analogy to what we see in Jesus – fully God and fully human.
This is a view that was most fully articulated in a book by Peter Enns called Inspiration and Incarnation. There, Enns says:
“[The Bible] was connected to and therefore spoke to those ancient cultures. The enculturated qualities of the Bible, therefore, are not extra elements that we can discard to get to the real point, the timeless truths. […] That the Bible, at every turn, shows how ‘connected’ it is to its own world is a necessary consequence of God incarnating himself.”
Love it, Pete. (I know I have a reputation for not always loving Peter Enns’s stuff, but – I liked that!)
In this view, we are able to remain open to the idea that God speaks to us through the Bible while at the same time recognizing that this is a book with a history – both good and bad. It is a book that has been used for evil and for good. It did not appear all at once. It is eminently human, yet also the revelation of God.
Yet this view isn’t without its issues. Keen draws attention to the way that – like we do with Jesus – the impossible thought of a fully divine / fully human book makes us want to pull these things apart. On the one hand, we might start to think of this incarnational analogy as really just a more complex version of the dictation model. Maybe God just orchestrated all of these minute and quantum-level instances across time leading up to the moment a Biblical author sat down to write in order to ensure that they wrote the exact words that God desired them to write. That’s a version of incarnation that downplays the human role pretty heavily.
The other side of the equation is that we overemphasize the human – in the sense of “fallen” and “error-riddled” – and assume that God gives a thumbs up to some parts and shuffles his feet with some of the other parts. That’s a very tempting view to have, I’ll admit. I mean, how can God support some of what this book says? Did he like that part in Esther chapter 9?
We’re getting to the heart of the question here.
The possibility that God might be speaking to us not just here or there, but all the way through this human-created text requires that we go deeper.
Divine Humility
Keen’s approach moves beyond the incarnation view by focusing on the rationale for God “moving into the neighbourhood,” as Eugene Peterson’s translation describes the incarnation. Just as we might ask why God chose to take on flesh in the form of a little baby in first-century Palestine under Roman rule, we should also be asking why God chose to speak to us through language and writing and this book rather than, say, uploading his truth to our brains like they do in the Matrix.
For Keen, these questions flow into each other.
The short answer is that the God we are listening for in Scripture is humble in his dealings with us. Like the father in Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son, God has rushed out into the night, with a nevermind to what the neighbours might think, near reckless in his desire to find us. He has, despite all the many great reasons not to, chosen to partner with his creation; to clothe himself in our murky, confusing language; to express himself – to allow us to express him, even – through our twisted, incoherent cultures; and – most bewildering of all – to put it all down on paper (and even stone)!
(I’ve always heard that you shouldn’t write down anything you wouldn’t want read aloud in court!)
Yet we affirm that all of this is expressive of the capital-w Wisdom of the God of the Universe. To have chosen such a thing is not humiliation; it’s pure, shocking humility.
So, rather than seeing this book as authoritative because God worked its authors like puppets, or even rather than seeing this book as some kind of perfect melding of God and humanity which is true in a way but is also difficult to understand in terms of its significance – rather than those approaches, is it possible to see the Bible as a record of the work of a God so humble that he was willing to work with us to be known? There is an authority in that that looks like Jesus even if it doesn’t solve all the ways in which this book is hard. Instead, it invites us to keep working on it with God, to keep listening.
Reflections on Hebrews 3-4
I thought that it would be sort of ironic if we didn’t crack the Bible once during this entire series about the Bible, but I suspect that would not actually be very helpful. So, I’d like for us to try to look at a real example of some of the ways that God is speaking here.
To do that, I want to read part of a passage from Hebrews 4. We’ll get into what the passage is about in a second, but let me just frame this by saying that this part of the book of Hebrews is about finding a lasting peace with God. It’s about getting to know God so that we can rest in him. That’s what the speaker means by “entering his rest” in what we’re about to read:
6 Therefore since it still remains for some to enter that rest, and since those who formerly had the good news proclaimed to them did not go in [to that rest] because of their disobedience, 7 God again set a certain day, calling it “Today.” This he did when a long time later he spoke through David, as in the passage already quoted:
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts.”
8 For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day. 9 There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; 10 for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his. 11 Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience.
12 For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
In other words: there was a promise made way, way back at the beginning of time: “a Sabbath-rest for the people of God.” It was a promise that God would, in fact, be with us. As the author of Hebrews combs through Scripture, he discovers in early Israelite history and in the Psalms that this promise does not go silent. It resounds and expands all the way to “Today” – which, for us in 2025, is also “Today.” Today the word still stands: God wants you to rest with him. Don’t resist it. Don’t harden your heart against his voice when you hear it.
The speaker begins from the assumption that God is speaking here and that, if you are willing to encounter this book in this way, as he says in verse 12, what you will encounter is a living, active, sharp, penetrating, judge-y, revelatory word that is breathing through history and poised to breathe into you.
The other thing this passage does is bear witness to how God speaks. If we put on our hard hats and roll up our sleeves to take part in some textual archaeology, we can look at this process more closely in real time. (I promise this is going to be fun…)
There are several layers that we can look at more closely:
- First, of course, there’s us, reading it today. And we’re going to be talking more about that next week.
- Near the top layer is this English translation of the Greek. The NIV translation was done by a group of translators from around the world who came together under the International Bible Society (IBS – they have since changed their name) decided that a new translation was needed. Depending on what translation you read, this layer is going to be different. Eugene Peterson’s translation was influenced by his time and place as a pastor of a small Presbyterian Church in Maryland.
- A few layers down from here is the Greek text. This relies upon early manuscripts such as the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus from the 4th century. All of this, along with two thousand years of commentary, debate, scribal copying, etc. pile up before we get to the “original” text, which we no longer have. But it is there somewhere.
- As for the original text, we don’t know much about the book of Hebrews. Some people thought it was written by Paul, but that’s always been a minority view. Many have suggested that it started its life as a sermon. So here’s a layer with the original sermon. It does kind of read like that – a sermon written for a time where our attention spans were a bit broader maybe.
- That isn’t the bottom layer, though. Like I mentioned earlier, we see the author of Hebrews engaging specifically with a Psalm – Psalm 95. The author of Hebrews ascribes the Psalm to David. If it was David who wrote this Psalm, we’re talking about a millennium or so prior to the time of the sermon.
- And so we arrive in David’s palace and we find the poet-king thoughtfully reflecting on the lessons in history he has been receiving from the High Priest Abiathar. He’s thinking about Moses and the time of the Israelites in the wilderness, rebelling against God, dying from snake bites… he’s got a tune in mind, even. He’s writes in big letters at the top of the page: Psalm 95…
- Rewind another several centuries and we are with whoever wrote the book of Numbers – tradition says Moses, but this is not claimed by the text itself. It doesn’t actually matter. Maybe Moses and others told the story over and over until someone wrote it down somewhere and then some other folks took those stories and put them in order, drawing connections to help showcase the awesome work of God in the history of Israel. The story of Israel’s rebellion – and God’s persistent desire to draw them back to him – is at the heart of all of it.
- And, of course, this image of “rest” that the sermon keeps coming back to gets its earliest source in Genesis in the picture of God resting on the seventh-day.
There are more layers than that, even. But I want to draw attention to a few things coming out of that survey:
The origins of each layer’s production become increasingly unclear the further back you go.
That’s maybe obvious but it’s important to remember. Scholarship is always questioning the traditional view – and that is ok! It actually truly does not matter because the point is that we have this book that has to be dealt with either way. The story of how God gets things done as described in this very book is one that suggests God is able to work within the messiness of human history – in fact, that’s where and how he’s chosen to work. So whether Moses wrote the whole Pentateuch on his own (except for that part where he dies) or it was a group of editors during the reign of King Josiah – and there are good arguments for either of these perspectives – it does not change the call of this text upon you to wrestle with it and listen for the voice of God.
Each of these layers emerged out of a particular context.
This means that, on the one hand, and contrary to what little-Jeff might have thought, this was not written for me specifically. The author of Hebrews had his own purposes for telling his particular audience about the Israelites in the wilderness and connecting this moment to Christ. The author of Psalm 95 also had his own reasons for recounting that moment. And something that we can be grateful for is that we don’t have a full understanding of this or that context. It will always more or less remain a mystery to us and that is actually a gift.
To take a word from Tolkien out of context: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” Because, on the other hand, in this new layer that we are now a part of here in Edmonton, at Peace, a new context for receiving and reflecting upon these words and this story has emerged. We have become part of the geology of Scripture as it accumulates through time.
Finally, several of these layers lack firm boundaries.
Like that top layer with the translation… there are over 900 English translations of all or some of the Bible at this point in time. They all bring a different flavour or emphasis to the texts they are engaging with. Are all of these together, “the word of God”? To stick with this image of a God who comes alongside us to meet us where we are, the answer is “yes.” This doesn’t mean that some translations aren’t better than others or that these translations don’t each bear a variety of biases. Some of them may just be plain wrong. But all of them together – even in the manner in which they conflict – express God’s fundamental decision to align himself with us. The lack of firm boundaries at each of the layers reflects that “the wind blows where it may” (John 3:8). The spirit of God is active – the word of God is alive.
You might say at this point: “Jeff! It’s hard enough just reading the top layer! Do I really have to become a textual archaeologist and excavate all the layers I’m encountering here?”
No, although this is maybe just a reminder that there’s a lot more here than first meets the eye. It’s also a reminder that sometimes, when we encounter things in this book that are bewildering or upsetting, it could just be that we’ve uncovered the edge of a past layer for which we now lack the context. When I read about some of the violence in Joshua and Judges or Esther chapter 9, I can’t deal with it – but possibly that just has to do with the friction between the context in which it was written and today. Not that violence was good then, but bad now, but rather that God had not yet finished speaking to people. And he still has not yet finished speaking. This doesn’t resolve the problem, but it enables me to keep working at it, to say open to hearing that word.
And, besides, I suspect if any Israelites from a millennium before Christ were to see us today, they’d be shocked by our casual idol worship. All of us desperately need God to be speaking to us still.
Conclusion
This first topic was about trying to understand how God speaks through Scripture. But it isn’t the full picture. I think it’s possible to accept that God speaks – not just in spite of – but through and by means of the mess of human history. God’s word, as it is revealed here and in the most complete way as it is revealed in Jesus Christ, the Word of God, expresses God’s humility.
What is harder to do is to find a way of listening to the voice of God as it is speaking in this way. I like what Karen Keen says about this:
“What sets the biblical narrative apart is not that it has exclusive knowledge of ancient Israel or Judah or Jesus but that its particular angle provides divinely revelatory insight.”
I think we can go even further than this, but it gives us the right terms for next week. That “angle” she talks about is the light for our path that we’ve been looking for.