What Do We Say about,… the Bible? Is It Still Relevant?
Luke 4:14-21
February 12, 2012
Then Jesus, filled with the power of
the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the
surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by
everyone. When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to
the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and
the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and
found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to
proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the
oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And he rolled up
the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the
synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this
scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Have
you ever been booed? I mean really booed
by others? I’ve been booed twice. I actually got booed at my wedding. You know how at weddings people clink their
glasses to get the couple to kiss. I
told Diane that I wasn’t going to do that, and so when people started to clink
their glasses to get us to kiss, I shook my head “no.” That’s when they booed us.
I
also was booed once in a class at seminary.
It was my first year, and I don’t remember what the class was, but we
were in the midst of a discussion on the relevancy of the Bible in today’s
world. I made the comment that I just
wish we could get rid of the Old Testament.
I said that it was filled with violence, bigotry, and archaic ideas, and
that we would be much better off without it.
After I said it, members of the class actually booed me. I chalked it up to their being ignorant, but
over the years I discovered that I was the ignorant one.
My
comment was born out of my ignorance. I
had read the Bible from cover to cover the summer before seminary, but I have
to admit that I didn’t really understand much of it. The Bible really isn’t a book to be read
cover to cover like a novel. It’s a book
to be read slowly with biblical aids to help it make sense. But I didn’t know that. When I read the Old Testament it confused me.
I wasn’t sure if it was accurate history or not, and I couldn’t keep all the
stories straight. Also, when I read the
prophets, I couldn’t figure out what they were so angry about. Same with Paul. I now understand the different books, but
back then I was just confused. So I picked up and held up the violence and what
seemed like bigotry, without recognizing that this was a very small percentage
of the Old Testament.
My
beliefs about the Old Testament reflected what a lot of people in and outside
the church think about the Bible. Over
the years I’ve heard many, many people complain that it’s an archaic and
outdated book full of ancient superstition, violence, bigotries, and ignorance.
Is
the Bible outdated? Is it still relevant
to today? How we answer that question
has a lot to do with whether we’ve actually read the Bible or not, and how we’ve read it if we have. What I’ve noticed over the years is that a
lot of people have strong opinions on the Bible, despite the fact that they’ve
never really read it, or if they have, they’ve read it like I did before going
to seminary. I had a strong opinion
based on little knowledge and lots of ignorance. But the question still remains: Is it outdated? Is it still relevant? To answer those questions, you have to get
clear on what the Bible is and isn’t.
First,
despite what many Christians argue, the Bible is not a history book. It’s a book of wisdom and revelation. The Bible is not trying to tell us what
happened in human history or the world’s history. It is trying to tell us about who God is and
who we are. It is trying to tell us
about what God has done, is doing, and will do.
It uses history, but it’s not a book of history.
One
reason it is clearly not a book of history is that back when the books of the
Bible were being written people didn’t think historically. That’s hard for us to understand in our
modern age, but to delve into history as a study, you need one crucial thing
that people of ancient times didn’t have:
leisure time for study, as well as
written records to study. To wonder
what happened in history, people have to have the time to sit around and think,
and in the ancient world people didn’t have that time. They often lived hand-to-mouth. They had very little free time. So their questions weren’t historical
questions about what happened. Their
questions were about why life is so hard and where God is in the midst of this
hard life. When we treat the Bible like
a history book, we actually misuse it. .
When
the Bible is read literally as history, it gets stripped of its wisdom. As a history book it’s “okay” history. Many, or even most, of its stories are based
on real historical events, but that doesn’t mean that they were written to give
us historical accounts. Remember, the
biblical writers were trying to tell us about God, not history. That’s why, in
Genesis, there are two different creation stories. Because we have a need to have only one story
due to our desire to have one historical account, we tend to merge the stories
to create one story, but there are two, and they can’t be easily merged.
The
first story is the one we often cite. It’s
in chapter one of Genesis, and it tells the story of God creating the world in
six days and resting on the seventh. In
this account, humans are the last to be created. Everything comes before them, and on the
sixth day God creates humans, and it insinuates that God created a bunch of
them, not just one or two. As it says, “So God created humankind in his image, in
the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
So in this story, God creates humans last, and probably creates a
whole tribe of humans. Then in chapter
two a whole different story is told. In
this one God creates a garden with a spring welling up in the center that
becomes the headwaters of the great rivers of the Middle East. In this story one human is created
first. The plants and animals all come
second. Toward the end the human is put
to sleep and a male and female are created from that one human.
These two stories conflict with each other, especially if
they are historical accounts. But they
don’t conflict if the purpose of the stories is to tell us about what God has
done, is doing, and will do. In the
first story we learn that everything is created as good, and that we humans are
created in God’s image. It’s telling us
that we are good, the world is good, God is good, and there is something of God
in each and every one of us. The second
story tells us something similar, but it also tells us that there is a
propensity toward sin among humans—toward carving our own way in ignorance of
what God wants.
The Bible knows that these two stories exist
side-by-side, yet it doesn’t try to reconcile the two. It puts them both there to teach us about God
and ourselves. The problem is that we
humans (perhaps out of our sinful need for things to have things fit our image)
cram the stories together and treat them like historical documents on
creation. We have a need for this, but
the Bible doesn’t. It gives us two
stories and says to us, “Learn about God, the universe, life, and yourself from
these stories.”
The creation stories aren’t the only place in the Bible
where different accounts are given. A
bit later in Genesis we get another conflict.
In chapter six, we hear the Noah story that we’re all familiar with. Noah builds an ark and puts in the animals
two-by-two. But then in chapter seven we
get a surprise. The story is retold and
God tells Noah to build and ark and put the animals in seven-by-seven for every
ritually clean animal, and two-by-two for every ritually unclean animal. If it’s history, why the two stories? Because it’s not trying to tell us history,
per se, but about God and us. These are
stories about human sin, and God’s attempt to get humans on the right
track. One is told from a general Jewish
perspective, the other from a more orthodox Jewish perspective. We don’t see the need for the two
perspectives today, which is why we tend to choose the first story over the
other, but back in ancient Judaism they did see the need because they were trying
to communicate different things through each story.
Again, there are other areas where the Bible
conflicts. For example, look at the
Gospels. There are four gospel
stories. If it were history, wouldn’t we
only have one? And looking at the Gospel
stories you find that some actually conflict in the details. For instance, let’s just look at the time
when Jesus overturns the tables in the Temple.
In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, this takes place after Jesus has spent three
years teaching, preaching, and healing.
It’s part of what irritates the Jewish authorities, and eventually leads
them to crucify him. But in John’s
gospel Jesus overturns the tables right after he’s baptized. Then he goes on to do his three-year
ministry. Some have tried to say that
the discrepancy is due to the fact that Jesus must of have overturned the
tables twice—once in the beginning of his ministry, and once during the
end. But that’s not what the Bible tells
us. The Bible doesn’t care about the
chronology because it’s trying to tell us about the nature of Jesus, of God,
and of us. It’s not trying to be
history. It’s trying to be a book of
wisdom and revelation.
We
have a need to turn the Bible into something it isn’t. What the Bible is best at, though, is lifting
the veil between us and the Divine. It
doesn’t care so much about history as it does about trying to help us connect
with God and to see God all through everyday life. All of its stories are about people experiencing
God, people struggling to follow God, people calling on each other to be better
in following God, and instructions on experiencing and following God. It also contains prayers (the Psalms and
Lamentations), wisdom (Proverbs and Ecclesiastes), and much more. And at times it actually argues against
itself.
For
instance, in the earlier books of the Bible there’s an implicit theology that
when we do good, God will bless us with stuff—wealth and health. And when we don’t do good, we get punished by
God taking away our stuff. But the whole
Book of Job argues against this belief by suggesting that an upright, honest,
and righteous man is cursed even though he is good. In that book it changes the theology to say
that sometimes we aren’t blessed because we are good. Instead, even though we are good we must find
a way to hold onto God in faith even though bad things happen to us.
It’s
because the Bible lifts that veil that we preach on it each week, and it is why
Jesus studied it himself. You see the
Bible is a book of ancient wisdom and revelation. It’s not like the bestselling books on
spirituality of today. There are a lot
of very popular books both in the Christian world and outside of it, but none
have the full scope that the Bible offers.
We get attracted to books written by one person, writing from a modern
perspective, telling us what is comforting for us in a modern context. In other words, we get attracted to spiritual
books that are geared to us today. And
as a result, that tend to have modern biases that we simply can’t see because
we are modern. In essence, we are
obsessed with newness, and often lack appreciation for ancient wisdom. We love new things and new ideas. Think about this. Who of you, if I offered you $100,000 to
renovate your home, buy a new car and television, and do whatever you want,
would turn it down? We love new
things. And like things, we are
captivated by new ideas. We tend to
think that only ideas generated today are valid. We do this in all areas of life. We think that ancient people we generally
ignorant compared to today—that they were superstitious, lacking in scientific
knowledge, and prone to ancient biases.
The
Bible overcomes this by being a book written by hundreds of writers spanning
almost 3000 years. The Bible itself was
composed over 1500 years, but it contains stories that go back much
earlier. What this says is that the Bible
is timeless, not time-bound, while our thinking is time-bound, not
timeless. When we look at the Bible, we are
tempted to think of it as just being old.
But compare the stories of Daniel with the stories of Moses. There’s almost a 1000-year gap between the
two. We tend to think that only a
generation or two separate them, but the wisdom of Exodus and of Daniel span a
long period. This overcomes the
obsession with newness by connecting us with wisdom and revelation about God
that is timeless. Thus, the Bible is not
a historical textbook, or even a guidebook.
Instead, it is a book that should be read, reread, and thought deeply
about so that in the process we can become transformed into people that God
calls us to be. As the Eastern Orthodox
Christians might say, we are created in God’s image, but through reading the Bible we begin to be formed more and
more in to God’s likeness.
Ultimately,
what makes the Bible powerful is how, century after century, it has had the
power to transform people who read it. The Bible is always relevant because it
always has the power to transform cultures, nations, and people. Think about all the movements that have been
inspired by the Bible. Individual rights
conferred on people through the Magna Carter were principles that came out of
Christian thought. Modern capitalistic
thought was built, in many ways, by the thinking of the Puritans in
Massachusetts and the Quakers of Pennsylvania.
James Madison’s understanding of Presbyterian government inspired much
of our modern American Democracy. The
Civil Rights movement under Martin Luther King came straight out of his and
others’ reading of the Bible.
Ultimately,
though, what I think makes the Bible incredibly relevant year after year is how
it has had the power to transform individuals for over 2000 years. Let me show you what I mean. A number of years ago a retiring general was
given a send-off dinner by his staff.
This general had been a good general, caring about his troops, organized
in his manner, and effective in his thinking.
To everyone around him, it seemed like he had had a seamless and consistently
rising career. During the dinner,
several junior officers asked him, “You’ve had such a successful career without
the normal ups and downs. How did you do
it?”
The
general said to them, “You think this because you don’t know much about my
earlier career in the military. Let me tell you about my life before I got it
together. When I was a young officer I
let alcohol destroy my life. When I was
sober, I was a good officer. I was
respectful of my superiors, and supportive of my soldiers. But I couldn’t quit drinking. There were days when I started drinking early
in the day. And on those days I was surly
to my superiors, and I abused my soldiers.
No one knew what kind of officer they were getting on any day. Then I started getting demoted. I was one of the few officers ever demoted to
private, which they did to try to get my head on straight. All it did was make me more despondent and I
drank more.
“One
day a monk from the local monastery came by.
The officers used to let them come to the base to beg for alms, and to
give spiritual counsel. The monk saw me
sitting on a bench, looking like the world was crushing me down. He asked me what was wrong. I told him my story. He said to me, ‘I have an idea. Tomorrow I will bring by a copy of the four
gospels, and each time you want to drink, try reading a chapter from them
instead.’ I looked at him like he was
crazy, and said, ‘That’s not going to help me.
Reading a book isn’t going to help me.’
He replied, ‘Well, the reason I suggest this is that this is exactly
what my brother did. He was in as poor a
shape as you, and his salvation was the four gospels. He did what I suggested to you, and he’s now
been sober for 15 years. Just try it.’
“The
next day he brought a copy of the four gospels to me. I thumbed through it and scoffed, thinking,
‘I don’t even understand what I’m reading.’
With that, I threw it into my footlocker. Later that day I felt the need to have a
drink, so I looked through my footlocker for money and came across the
gospels. I started to read. At first I felt nothing but the desire to
drink, but as I kept reading chapters the desire to drink went away from
me. The next day I felt the need to
drink, and this time I grabbed the gospels, and the desire went away. Over the course of the next year I read the
gospels everyday, and the desire to drink went away completely. I’ve now been sober for 25 years. I begin everyday with a half-an-hour of Bible
reading, and it keeps me on the right path.
From that point on I was made an officer again, and rose up through the
ranks to what I am now. So you see, my
career wasn’t always easy, but once I got right with God things worked
out.”
This
is the power of the Bible. It transforms
history, nations, cultures, groups, and individuals, and it has been doing so
for 2000 years. What it says to me is
that the Bible is always relevant,
but to find out how relevant it is, we have to actually try reading it.
Amen.
