How NOT to read the Bible

How NOT to read the Bible

So many of us have been conditioned to read the Bible in terms of our experience rather than in terms of the experience of the people in the Bible. If we don't hear God's voice today in special ways, we assume He is not speaking in special ways anymore. If we don't see miracles today, we assume He's not doing miracles anymore. Yet the Bible is filled with dreams, visions, miracles, and many other supernatural experiences. Liberal churchgoers simply deny that these things ever happened. They say these stories are myths that were never meant to be taken literally, they were just mean to illustrate great theological truths.

Many conservative churchgoers are appalled anyone would ever read the Bible like this. They want nothing to do with rationalistic unbelief of liberals. They are certain every miracle in the Bible took place as its recorded. Yet when it comes to applying the Bible to today's experience, many conservatives are filled with the same kind of unbelief as the liberals. For many orthodox Christians, the Bible is a book of abstract truths about God rather than a guide into the supernatural realm of God's power.

Two sad effects invariably result from reading the Bible in such a de-supernaturalizing manner. First, we experience very little of God's supernatural power. Why? Because we have neither the faith to pray for miracles nor the confidence that God can speak to us in any supernatural way. Why do we lack faith? Because our method of reading the Bible has taught us not to expect these things. This leaves us with a moralistic version of Christianity that believes discipline is the key to the spiritual life. OUR discipline. Mix that discipline with a little help from God, and it causes us to be better people while we are on the way to heaven. For example, we might study the book of Proverbs and try to discern principles for raising our children, but we never learn how to pray with the kind of faith that delivers a homosexual son from his homosexuality or a teenage daughter from drugs. Beyond taking us to heaven, we don't expect too much from God. And we usually get what we expect.

The second result of de-supernaturalizing the Bible is described by Dallas Willard:

The open secret of many "Bible believing" churches is that only a very small percentage of their members study the Bible with even the degree of interest, intelligence, or joy they bring to bear on their newspapers or Time magazine. In my opinion, based on considerable experience, this is primarily because they do not and are not taught how to understand the experience of biblical characters in terms of their own experience.

Many Christians simply do not read the Bible. It is hard to read a book every day that tells how God supernaturally intervenes in the daily lives of His children, and yet see no practical relevance for these supernatural phenomena in our present experience. Once the supernatural element is taken out of the Bible, it becomes merely a moralistic life guide. And God becomes a remote God who helps His people, but not very much.

The Bible is more than a theological treatise. It is a guide to dynamic encounters with a God who works wonders. The Bible was given to us that we might hear God's voice and respond to that voice with life-changing faith. Yet it is all too common for Bible-believing people to read the Bible without ever hearing that voice.

The Pharisees read, studied, and memorized the bible more than most churchgoing people today will ever do, but unlike Moses and the other Old Testament heroes, they could not hear God's voice. Jesus said the Pharisees never heard His Father's voice at any time (John 5:37). The Pharisees claimed to be looking for the coming Messiah, but they never really expected the Old Testament examples of supernatural phenomena to be repeated in their lifetime. They had a theoretical belief in the supernatural; they believed in angels and the resurrection of the body; but expected nothing supernatural in their own lives. They did not listen for God's voice apart from the Scriptures, and they never heard His voice in the Scriptures.

A word of caution here: Please don't make the mistake of thinking that since the Pharisees weren't Christians, you and I can't repeat their sins today. Any Christian can fall into sin. The Pharisees are the New Testament's monumental warning of what can happen to religious people when they become proud. There is no more effective way to drown out the voice of God than through the noise of pride. And no believer is exempt from the sin of religious pride.

There are a number of examples from the New Testament that show us that God still speaks today in ways other than the Bible, examples from the lives of Jesus, the apostles, and others. It would be easy to discount these examples by saying these were special people living in special times. But this would be a very unbiblical way of reading the Bible. A more biblical way is to think of Jesus as our supreme example of both how to live and how to minister.

Think of the apostles as James said to think of Elijah, "as men like us who prayed earnestly." Consider the possibility of angelic visitations as suggested in Hebrews 13:2. Remember what Paul said of the miracles and judgments that happened to the Israelites in the wilderness, "These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come" (1Cor. 10:11). The miracles of the Bible are still examples and warnings for contemporary Christians.

Most of my life I've read the Bible more like a Pharisee than a New Testament Christian. Most of my life I've made the mistake of believing God for too little. For the rest of my life, if I have to make a mistake, it's going to be believing God for too much. But how can you believe an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent God for too much, especially when He Himself says, "Everything is possible for him who believes" (Mark 9:23)?

Jack Deere, from "Suprised by the voice of God"