People say error-prone men wrote
the Bible's books and even more quarrelsome ones decided that some would be authoritative
and others not. Then scribes had to translate them into other languages and
then still more translated the translations. They say that too many hands have
touched the product. Therefore, its purity is corrupted. “You can’t be sure
that this is the word of God,” they say. “It’s a man-made book.”
They seem to have in mind that the
writer of Luke was a devout demigod possessed by the Spirit and shaking in
ecstatic transcendence as he penned the divine secrets. And then later on, a
fat monk, bitter and cynical, transcribed Luke’s gospel and in his spiteful
soul he decided to change a word here, a sentence there, so that the end result
was nothing like the masterpiece that it was.
But I question whether either Luke
or the monk felt the possession of the Spirit when writing or transcribing. I
think both were just in love with Jesus Christ and wanted to tell his story.
Both had been dead but were now alive and their souls pulsated with the drums
of heaven, crying out to all the earth that their God had not abandoned them.
Our
God has not abandoned us!
And both did their best in that
moment. And the Spirit of God took their work and took the decisions of those
men deciding which books and letters should comprise the Bible and which should
not, and a guidebook was given us which the Spirit could now speak through the
same as it had been doing before there was a guidebook.
My older brother said something
truly profound once. We were talking about the controversy of people claiming
falsities in the Bible and he goes, “The
word of God is not letters on a page.” That blew me away. The Great Story is happening whether it is
written down or not. The Gospel is
happening all around us. It was happening before we had an Old or New
Testament. It will be happening if all the Bibles in the world are destroyed.
Jesus is the Word of God and he is bringing about the exciting resolution of
this Great Story. The Spirit of the creative Father is bringing souls back to
life, clothing dead bones with beating hearts and bleeding flesh.
The Word of God is why people
from all over cannot turn away from the simple beauty found in its pages.
Because the Great Story is within them and it will not let them go. Their souls
will not let them leave. The Spirit of God is working, always has been. The
word of God is not letters on a page. The kingdom of God is within you and it
is all around you.
To the people who say that the Bible
is just a man-made book, I answer, “Well of course it is! And God helped them
make it. If you knew the God of the Bible then that wouldn’t surprise you in
the least! The fact that God would use men and women as his instruments for
writing down and spreading his Good News does not bother us at all. That is just
like our Father! He has been working through men and women, associating with
them and calling them friends since he first laid eyes on Adam. And why are you
so certain that even if a fat monk made an adjustment to a word in a book of
the Bible that it was not the Spirit of God acting on him, too.”
There are sixty-six books in the
Great Story; sixty six books which prayerful servants wrote (for this story was
so incredible it had to be written down). I do not think as the authors wrote
or the elders canonized they had to tangibly feel the Spirit of God working in them. How many times do we make a
decision and pray we are acting in faith? Our lives are full of simple,
insignificant decisions made stumbling in the darkness, yelling out to God who
seems far away that hopefully we are making the right choice.
Fairy tales are never fairy tales to
those in them. Only for those who read the adventure after the fact do they
understand, and can see, that there
was an unexplainable force which seemed to always work its will throughout the
story, even though the characters could rarely see it.
We make choices with no sensation of
grace. We choose with zero ‘divine providence’, whatever that even means. Most
decisions in our daily lives are made absent the audible voice of God telling
us which way to go. We make a decision because at that specific moment in those
specific circumstances under the tearful guise of a broken—and oh how I
pray!—faithful heart, we feel that it is the right decision.
We can only do the right as we feel
God leading us to see the right. We make choices in our lives with zero
rationale other than a shrug of the shoulder and a thoroughly resigned look in
our eye (perhaps a twinkle from the wretchedness of faith). We choose and pray
that we have acted within the will of God…for we cannot see it. We have no idea
what his will is…I have no idea.
Why could the book which tells of
his Great Story not have come together the exact same way?
I am not suggesting the Bible is
fallible and therefore not the word of God. I believe it absolutely to be the
word of God in human language. All I am suggesting is that the Bible in its
vastness—full of seeming contradictions, outdated laws, incomprehensible paradoxes—is
the most beautiful story the world has
ever known. And this story is about a God who is doing something incredible in
our midst; only humans are never fully sure what it is.
The Bible is mutilated and battered and marred and
dusty and worn and hanging by a faith-hewn thread…demanding living faith…for those who wish to live.
But remember Jesus, God’s only Son.
He too was mutilated and battered and marred and dusty and worn. Blood poured
from his scarred and broken body. Blood poured from the visible image of the
invisible God. And it was through this offering of mutilated flesh and spilt
blood that redemption came to all.
Why can God’s Great Story not be the
same way? Why do we imagine God to have written each word in the Bible with his
own invisible finger, when he demonstrates through Jesus Christ that his
inexplicable pleasure and wisdom is to become one of us and redeem us from
within?
Regardless, it will still always
come down to one blunt question: Do you believe that God is who he says he is?
That is always the question before us. I do believe Jesus is the Son of God. I
do believe that life is only through him. And because he is alive, we too will
live. Therefore, I am dead as thoroughly as I live. If you believe, it demands your
soul. Faith is not another choice among many…it is all or nothing.
This
Great Story, if you believe it, demands everything…absolutely everything. If you
are not willing to give it, then you cannot follow him. But our God is
merciful.
We do not know why he has done it
this way. It is a mystery that no one has ever been able to figure out. He
works through people. For some reason, it gives God great joy to use people
like Paul, the Christian killer, or Paul, my beautiful date, to deliver his
message. And no matter the messenger, real or fictitious, the message is always
the same: he is so in love with us. He
always has been and always will be.
In the same way that he humiliates himself to speak
to every human however they will listen, he humiliates himself by tainting the
absolute purity of his name with the dirty fingertips of man. He seems to enjoy
the weak fingertips of man. For some reason, when we are weakest, God is
strongest; when it is darkest, God is brightest. The written down form of the
Gospel simply betroths the message he is trying to deliver: He is with us.
He has always been with us. Climb higher, come
and see what he has done.
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