We introduce now the actual overview of the Bible. It is proper and best to view the Bible as the documented process of divine revelation. We can call the Bible "The Word of God," and say all manner of precise things, trying to tie the conscience to the demands of that revelation. There's only one problem with that: People who don't know Jesus by the Spirit won't be bound by the Book, except in externals. People who do know Jesus will be bound to Jesus, and the Book is not Him.
If we were to present to those who wrote the combined documents making up the Book the popular claims made by many American Christians today, they would laugh. So very many men in Western churches have written so very many fine things from the Western rationalist viewpoint, and most of them are missing the point in one measure or another. The cultural background of Hebrew people, and later, Christians who adopted the Hebrew outlook of this new movement, were fully aware of Western civilization and it's emphasis on what man can achieve. Man was the measure of all things, and the underlying assumptions of how a man knows anything, even when not spelled out, is that man must formulate it logically. This goes against the assumptions of the Hebrew culture, which assume the mind must receive all things from above, including the logical structure.
To say the Bible is literally inspired word-for-word is silly, when almost none of us can read the words of the languages in which it was written, nor can we hold any of the original copies. Nor does it matter. Revelation is not a matter of mere words, but uses words as a vehicle. The words in the Book really don't scare the Devil that much, because he can quote the Book at length. The words themselves do not possess any magical power, nor any miracle power. The Spirit alone has power. If He breathes through the Book into your soul, it's Him using His own Book. If He breathes not because your spirit is dead, then it's just ancient literature with a puzzling collection of assumptions.
Emotional moments of seeming enlightenment are deceptive, if those moments come via the Western rational tradition. There are no hidden secrets, no key words of deep meaning, just a story told as people watched the hand of God. Because He has ever been so utterly consistent on His own terms, the Book as a whole tells a story of how He operated in the past, and how He operates today. It's mostly pretty mundane because it is all so consistent. The dramatic miraculous moments were exactly what He said He would do, and anyone who knew Him was hardly surprised by them. That is, your human mind might be amazed, but your spirit would simply rejoice the ancient rejoicing at knowing God is yet again revealed. The revelation is the thing, not the miraculous signs, no more than it would be a claim of "miraculous words."
Those who serve the King of Heaven are not bound to the Book, but bound by the Book to the King. It's more than just a tool, but it's not Him. We do not worship the Book, but reverence it's demands as a revelation of God. The Hebrew concept of writing a thing was not to offer a precise, clinical description, but to relate the events and facts as symbols, as parables to point out truths which cannot be stated in words. This fallen world is a lie, and its tools are broken, but by God's own power, He speaks through these things we have broken by our sin. He is the one who breaks through to the spirit, and human logic is just as fallen as the rest of our human nature. So we don't slavishly follow the propositional prescriptions discerned by mere human logic. Logic cannot arrive at obedience, because obedience is as much a miracle as spiritual birth itself. What begins with a miracle continues in miraculous power. The mind must be redeemed, too, and it does so by conforming itself to spiritual logic. We observe with our minds what the Book tells us about our King, and what He demands of those who serve Him, but it is processed in the spirit. We are accountable to the Book as the voice of our King.
All of this is weaselly logic unless you understand how the Spirit works. Those who reject the fuzzy and symbolic spiritual logic, by holding up such terms as "propositional truth," "infallible," and "verbally inspired," are demanding something Jesus Himself, as well as His disciples, did not. In Jesus' teachings and in the Apostles' writings, we see they had little trouble with pulling out meanings from previous Scripture wholly inconsistent with such terminology, to include some rather loose translations. Let the scholars dig all they like, presuming to mimic the modern Jewish obsession with word counts in the text, and other things, but we know for a fact Jewish scholars developed such nit-picking after embracing the Western rationalist views, which views Jesus rejected in His debates with the Westernized scholars of His day (Pharisees).
The Book is precious, not as books go, but for what it offers us. You do not blaspheme God if you happen to spill coffee on that expensive leather-bound volume. Nothing you can touch with human hands is holy and sacred, because mere things are only tools in the Kingdom. All of this will become clearer as we go through the Book, highlighting the central issues. In the Spirit, we rightly assume the Book is binding on us, which is why God preserved it. However, even human logic should indicate that His "failure" to preserve any originals, His "failure" to provide sufficient unquestionable clarity on the precise wording, His "failure" to answer all the issues over which Western Bible scholars haggle today, should tell us those things were probably not so important as they might seem. We have to assume what we have is sufficient to make us able to please Him.
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By Ed Hurst
06 March 2009
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