Under the knife
Why would you read a book that puts you, the reader, under the surgeon’s knife or, even more unsettling, slices through to your blood soaked entrails like a sacrifice on the altar?
“For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do” (Heb 4:12-13).
If you read God’s living word for all its worth, it’s got the power to cut through to the hidden plans and intentions that make up the real you. It exposes the contradiction between your public façade and the inner person. And the result? You become vulnerable to God’s critical scrutiny and judgement. Maybe not the kind of book that will feature on your must-read list.
But if we want the good news of the gospel first we have to hear the hard news of the gospel. Scripture mirrors back to us just how degraded the image of God, formed in us in Eden, has become. We have stopped living in accordance with our maker’s instructions. We have failed in our stewardship of His Creation. And the “word of the truth, the gospel” (Col 1:15) sets out our predicament in plain sight: we “are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Heb 4:13 ESV). The experience of the Jews at Pentecost shows there can be no short cutting this uncomfortable process. First the word hits its mark (“when they heard this”): then, stage two, the scalpel’s incision to uncover the disease (“they were cut to the heart”): only then is a way forward possible:
“Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we do?” (Acts 2:37).
But why the need to study these things? Surely hearing bad news just once is enough? …..it’s because we forget. We walk away from the mirror and blank out of our minds the reflected image of the stains of sin on our cheek. For as James said:
“For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was” (James 1:23-24).
And, as the image of the truth fades, we smuggle back into our hearts the idols of money, sex and power which tell us that they will make us happy. Knowing this is our fatal flaw, we have a genius for self-deception: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jer 17:9). So God has initiated a protective fix as only He can, if we: “humbly accept the word God has planted in your hearts, for it has the power to save your souls” (James 1:21 NLT).
The map for us
Study may sound unappealing. Think more of the child with a book and a torch under the covers entering new worlds of wonder and possibilities: it’s God’s redemption-story-cum-repair-manual. Through its pages we see the way men and women can escape cold death and how God’s right ways win out in the end. And stretching our imaginations we are offered tantalizing glimpses of a future prepared for His children by a loving Father. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Cor 2:9). And there is a life changing promise for each student-reader; if we give ourselves over to its healing influence and grasp the hope it offers, God will work through His word, to rewire and renew us and save us from ourselves.
The Scriptures do not just set us on the grid map of where we are (sinners, lost in a fog with no compass) but they also point us in the direction of travel (a redeemed cosmos where evil has been eradicated). So we had better be sure we know how to read the map and, crucially, what we should be looking for. The Pharisees believed they were the authoritative travel guides but willfully ignored the directions on the road:
“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:39-40 ESV).
The word was not just written down: it became flesh. Just as John the Baptist steered his hearers to Jesus, the Scriptures point beyond themselves. The word is a lamp to guide our feet to the Christ: this must happen, it is non-negotiable and we cannot pay lip service to it. The Scriptures are not just a source book of true propositions about God and His purpose. They do contain such truths but Scripture is not structured that way. Nor is the Scripture just to be looked on as a mine of intertextual links — a puzzle quest — where we are left merely marveling at its intricacy. Study must usher us into the presence of God. And we make a profound mistake if we imagine mastering the Scriptures is the same as reaching our destination. The Scripture points away from itself and towards God. God is the source of truth and His Son speaks the truth he has heard from his father. “…a man [Jesus] who has told you the truth that I heard from God” (John 8:40 ESV).
One of the sweetest truths the Son utters, as he prepares to leave his disciples, is his word about new creation living: “And this is the way to have eternal life — to know you, the only true God, andjesus Christ, the one you sent…” (John 17:3 NLT). We cannot content ourselves that our study has merely enabled us to know the truth about the Father and the Son. Such knowledge is vital but it is not connected to eternal life. The connectedness and relational intimacy of ‘knowing’ the Father and His Son is suggested by Jesus earlier in John’s gospel:
“‘If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23).
Loving Jesus means knowing the word and keeping the word, his words in particular, meditating on them, and allowing them to become part of us. But this is a means towards a wondrous end: we look up from our studies knowing that we are bound up in an unbreakable intimate bond of love, and that we have been invited into a home set up for us by the Maker of the World and His Son the Lord of Life. The Bible of the serious student may take a beating, sliding aside or perhaps to the floor, as he suddenly falls to his knees in prayer or in tears or as she springs up spontaneously from her studies to dance with joy.
Our transforming journey
Our Bible study is a journey which moves us on from knowing to becoming, from information to transformation. The Bible answers the knowledge question: who is the Light of the World? It is Jesus. (John 9:5). It positions him at the pinnacle of the Creator God’s plan. The narrative tracks God as He works that plan through history, demonstrating His unshaking commitment to His covenant to redeem a world broken by sin through His son. Creation, Fall, Israel, Exodus, Exile, Return, Resurrection, Second Appearing: the great arc of God’s plan curves down to Jesus who “when the fullness of the time was come” confirmed the “promises to the Fathers” as all of those promises “find their ‘Yes’ in him.” And he — the bright and burning light of the world — will one day spread abroad the healing effect of sun soaked righteousness from sea to sea. “But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings” (Mal 4:2). So far so clear. But our first answer was incomplete — omitting to address the ‘so what’. Yes: Jesus is the Light of the world — but so is the disciple. “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden” (Matt 5:14). The truth about Jesus must become a truth about us. Knowing the light, we are called to become the light. The first word to the disciples after resurrection is: you have a job to do: flood the world with the gospel of salvation: be ambassadors of the kingdom. “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20:21). As the Scriptures change our worldview, we recognize that to be loyal to that call will involve a re-alignment that puts us at odds with the workaday attitudes around us, of wanting and getting and spending. The Scriptures depict the high functioning disciple-community as a “colony of resident aliens”1 surrounded by a culture that is hostile to it. To shine as lights the Scriptures appeal to us to stop looking inwards, to stifle our community quarrels and to look outwards, beckoning to the world, offering it something it doesn’t know and doesn’t have: a way of living, a way of loving and an assurance of peace with each other and with God.
We cannot become part of God’s heavenly commune on earth if we have merely a drive-by acquaintance with His word. We are called by the gospel to be the advance guard of the kingdom, the outriders heralding the coming king, and are expected to wear his colors, speak his language and know his laws now. God’s agent of change for equipping the “children of the kingdom”(Matt 13:38) to respond to this profoundly challenging call is the Spirit in Scripture. The same power that fired up the prophets and inspired the psalmist is just as powerful now in energizing the disciples of today in service of their king. The Bible is weaponized with God’s Spirit, and can embolden the disciple to take on the “desires of the
death and how I get saved — Paul concludes with a necessary corrective: the aim of God is to create a people who live in harmony with one another and with once voice glorify God. We are saved as part of God’s great plan “to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations” (Rom 1:5).
“Now I commit you to God and to the word of his grace, which can build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified” (Acts 20:32 NIV). That is what we all want but of course it doesn’t happen by magic. Nothing will happen if the book remains closed. We have to invest the effort of an Ezra who dedicated himself (lit: set his heart) to study and to do. (See Ezra 7:10.) If our study has as its objective to soak ourselves so deeply in God’s words that we cannot but come away changed by them, then this will involve going beyond skimming the surface. Although this article is not concerned with ‘how’ we study but ‘why’, the link is unavoidable:
“This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success” (Josh 1:8).
Regular interaction, mulling over, pondering leads to close familiarization (the how). Then follows the changed way of life, the careful practicing of all that is written (careful to do). Finally, and importantly, there is the outcome (good success) in the sight of God.
Our study of Scripture takes its place as one element in the range of activities that the thriving body of Christ-disciples put their hearts and hands to:
“And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42).
This description of the earliest set of believers gives a balanced portrayal of what the new-born church considered vital for its survival, health and growth. Teaching is but one discipline among others and should not be privileged to the detriment of the balance of the whole. What is striking from all Paul’s letters is his absolute delight in the transformation he had witnessed in the lives of those in the ecclesias. The precise mix of how this has come about — through study, fellowship, the work of the angels, answered prayer — is not something he spends undue time analyzing.
- He delights in the news of the faith of the Ephesians and the Colossians in the Lord Jesus and their love toward all the saints (Eph 1:15).
- We listen as he provides a breath-taking account to the Corinthians of the Macedonians’ generosity towards the poor saints in Jerusalem, describing how they urged him to be given the privilege of contributing even when they had nothing themselves (2 Cor 8:1-4).
- And he calls out how the love and faith of Philemon for Jesus brims over in the way he ministers to other disciples (Philemon 5).
What does interest him is ensuring that he reminds his recipients it is the work of God among them that has produced these heartening changes:
“I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in him” (1 Cor 1:4-5).
Our Bible study fits in to the many part mosaic of the living breathing, praying, good-work-performing life of the church under the good hand of the Lord.
As Paul wraps up his second letter to the Corinthians, in what might seem to us a startling and unexpected move given the sometimes bruising nature of what has gone before, he blithely sums up what he wants from the believers in Corinth:
“Be perfect” (2 Cor 13:11)
And why should we not take this as our strap line as the purpose and outcome of Bible study? If you are a new creation then your study of the Scriptures should see you living like a new creation. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Cor 5:17 ESV). Be what you are. Forget compromise. This is not about making a go of it — doing your best. Jesus likewise sets the bar high: “be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt 5:48). Being perfect is what we were presumably designed for. This of course we fail to achieve. We remain sinful people. Selfish. Broken. Defective. We are not perfect.
The Greek word behind Paul’s exhortation to be ‘perfect’ can come through into English with the meaning of ‘mending’ — in fact it is first used of the disciples mending their nets in Matt 4:21. “And going on from thence, he saw other two brethren, James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in a ship with Zebedee their father, mending their nets; and he called them.” It means to make fit for purpose and if necessary repair what is defective so that it can fulfil that purpose: the ESV translates Paul’s words “Aim for restoration”.
God is not, in Paul’s words, demanding we become perfect, so much as issuing a recall. We need to be repaired and he is calling us in for the work to be done. And like any recall, it is the manufacturer’s responsibility to repair the defect. And this is what God’s Scriptures can do through Christ. They are God’s recall notice. They tell us that God doesn’t love you just as you are. In fact, He really can’t stand you just as you are. That’s why Jesus died. Through Christ and through His word, God begins the change from a sinner into a saint. He repairs your defects. The old is gone and the new is made fit for future glory.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One