Don’t Get Me Started (rewind from September 2018)

All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness;  2 Timothy 3:16  NASB

Scripture– Let’s follow up on yesterday’s lengthy (I apologize) description of the Bible as a book about human encounters with God. Peter Enns adds some important insight:

Seeing God as a character in the story who can be talked to, reasoned with, shows regret, finds out things, and changes his mind can be troubling because it doesn’t sound very much like the sovereign signal-caller of the universe. . . . But this ungodlike God of the Bible gets at the very heart of both Jewish and Christian beliefs about God.  This God doesn’t keep his distance but embraces human experience and becomes part of the human story.  He is “on the scene” with bracing regularity.[1]

It’s a bit scary, isn’t it?  We want a Bible of certainty, a book that we can say, “You see, it says this in the Bible and therefore it must be true.”  Of course, what we mean by true is that it is timelessly true; something that isn’t part of the culture in which it was written; something that is eternal and certain and (consequently) abstract!  We want the Bible to be a Western religious version of Euclidean geometry.  Grant me two parallel lines and I will prove all the rest.

But Enns suggests that we can’t even approach the Messiah in this way.

To see Jesus, you won’t get there by sticking to the script.  You will only see Jesus there in hindsight and under the surface, where your reading of the Old Testament is driven by faith in Christ, where Jesus has become the starting point for re-understanding Israel’s story, not the logical conclusion of Israel’s story.[2]

Reading the Bible like this is very different than listening to a lecture on soteriology. But we want the Bible to be lectures on soteriology, because then it is safe. It is controllable.

When we grab hold of “correct” thinking for dear life, when we refuse to let go because we think that doing so means letting go of God, when we dig in our heels and stay firmly planted even when we sense that we need to let go and move on, at that point we are trusting our thoughts rather than God.  We have turned away from God’s invitation to trust in order to cling to an idol.[3]

It was so much easier when I thought I had all the answers between those leather covers.

Topical Index: Bible, 2 Timothy 3:16

[1] Peter Enns, The Bible Tells Me So:  Why Defending the Bible Has Made Us Unable to Read It, p. 158.

[2] Ibid., p. 202.

[3] Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty, p. 19.