I love the Bible. This “book” is unique compared to all the rest. It is special: holy. This is why the old Bibles had Holy on the cover — because the Bible is like no other book.
Now, I realize that when I talk about loving a book — even if it is the Book — some folks cringe. They accuse Christians like me of being “bibliolaters,” suggesting we almost replace God himself with a book. That may be a real danger for some. Perhaps some Bible readers out there would say they love the Book, but don’t really like its Author. But I doubt it’s many. With a mere human book, you might say you love the book but not its author. But with the Bible?
Let’s do beware that danger — and acknowledge that it’s likely not the most threatening one in our generation. And let’s not overlook the peril far more pressing in our day: when people say they love and respect God yet seem to have no real interest in his Book.
Bored with God?
In my mind, one of the greatest imaginable tragedies is a professing Christian who is bored with the Bible. Could a truly loving husband cherish his wife but not care for her words? Could an adoring wife respect her husband but not what he says? What are words anyway? They are the breathed-out expressions of the person himself. Words are audible revelations of the otherwise unknown heart. Your words are part of you. How people treat your words is how they treat you.
If you’re bored with God’s words, are you not bored with God himself?
I get that it sounds dry and non-relational and inauthentic to hear the charge over and over again, “Read your Bible, read your Bible, read your Bible . . .” I sympathize. I agree that we need to say more, so much more. But the instinct to orient Christians in a fundamental way on God himself through his own words is vital. You cannot know and love a Person whose words you ignore and reject.
Part of the reason “read the Bible” sounds hollow to some people is because they have a thin concept of the Bible itself. It’s a book, they think. Books, words on a page, sentences and paragraphs can only do so much for you. To really know and enjoy and experience true relationship with God, there must be some special avenue or technique out there that I haven’t found yet. Maybe Desert Fathers can help. Maybe medieval mystics. Or something Eastern. Nature? Solitude? Almsgiving? Sacred art and icons? There must be some other way to know God than through hearing his voice in his word by his Spirit.
But there’s no real getting around that God gave us a Book. He made the world and us, and he sent his Son, and if we’re going to understand any of it rightly and savingly, we need the Book he gave us. And if that sounds boring to you, then I hope it might help to rehearse how the Bible’s not just a book.
The Bible may look like a book, but it is far, far more than any other book. And it deserves to be read and engaged in distinct ways from how we treat other books. We may be prone to read the Bible far too much just like any other book, and when we do, we miss the thrill of the multidimensional wonders of God’s words to us.
For starters, consider three reasons why the Bible is not “a book.”
1. The Bible Is a Library
First, the Bible is not a single book but a Library. And what a library it is!
It is a library of 66 God-revealed, God-breathed books. The first 39 set up and anticipate the coming of God himself in the sending of his Son. Then 27 more tell us in distinct and complementary voices about Jesus’s life and death and resurrection, and the early church, and the application of Jesus’s words and work to our Christian lives. God gave us a whole library: five-and-a-half dozen stunning portraits of himself, feasts to enjoy, and lights for our path.
God didn’t give us just a book to show us himself and feed our souls and guide our lives. He did it 66 times over. Brothers and sisters in Christ, we are heirs to an embarrassment of scriptural riches.
We have Genesis, which explains the design and depravity of the world in which we live: created by God, cursed because of human sin, crying out for a rescue that God himself promises to bring. He starts from scratch with a moon-worshiper named Abram and creates a special nation who teaches the world about the true God and prepares the way for his coming.
We have Exodus, which tells the greatest story of redemption that existed until Jesus came and redeemed his church.
We have the Psalms. Oh, the Psalms! The Psalms is its own library of 150 life-giving, life-guiding, heart-healing, soul-inspiring poems.
We have Isaiah! Some call it “the fifth Gospel” because it anticipates the coming of Christ with such clarity and striking detail. And Isaiah has 66 chapters! This one book offers any scholar a lifetime of riches, and all the more the rest of us. If needed, a Christian could live months or even years in Isaiah alone — and it’s just one of 66 in the Bible.
Those are just four highlights from the pre-incarnation Scriptures. How much more, then, if needed, could Christians thrive years on end with just the Gospels, or Acts, or Romans, or Hebrews.
And our God did not require us to live on Hebrews alone, but on every word that proceeds from his mouth. Climactically, that capital-W Word is Jesus himself. And practically, the layered, textured, detailed, stunning access to Christ himself comes to us in the wealth of words and angles and glimpses we get in the endless treasure that is Christian Scripture.
2. The Bible Is God-Breathed
You then might look at this treasure of a Library, see human names on the books, and ask, “But is this really from God himself, or is it from men who shared a monotheist then Trinitarian conception of God?”
To be sure, men did have a vital part to play. They devoted their hearts and lives and words, and spoke and wrote, but not as from themselves. Christians believe, in the words of Jesus’s apostle Peter, that “men spoke from God” (2 Peter 1:21). The Library didn’t fall from heaven in a moment, or 66 moments. It wasn’t dug up and translated with special glasses. God authored and assembled his Library in an even more marvelous way — by working in and through the lives and efforts of his appointed spokesmen: prophets, chroniclers, and scribes in the first covenant, then apostles and their associates and assistants in the new covenant.
This Library we call “the Bible” is both genuinely through men and ultimately from God. It is not an ordinary book by men alone but the special Book from God, through men, inspired by God’s Holy Spirit. As Peter captures it: “Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21).
For a millennium and a half before Jesus, and now for two millennia since, God’s people have found this Library to be set apart from all other books. We have heard with clarity in this Library the voice of the one true God, as we hear him nowhere else. No other canon of books comes close. Christians believe that all Scripture — all 66 books in the Library — is “breathed out by God” through his appointed spokesmen (2 Timothy 3:16).
We acknowledge that just quoting what the Bible says about itself isn’t enough to persuade skeptics. You need to experience the Library for yourself. Don’t just visit once, but live in it for a while. Keep coming back. Jump up and down on the floorboards. Explore the rooms. Spend unhurried time sitting at the desks. And see if the compelling, self-authenticating authority of God’s own voice in and through Scripture captures you. Do you begin to recognize a distinct, unified, compelling voice emerging in and through the many inspired spokesmen writing across the centuries?
No argument for the Bible as God’s own words is more persuasive than opening the Library and strolling through it yourself for a while.
3. The Bible Is Alive
Finally, what you might come to discover, as untold millions have over the centuries, is that the Library is no mere history book that captures what an author thought and said in the past. This Library is the living voice of the unchanging God, who continues to speak through these same inspired ancient words by the power of his living Spirit.
Christians don’t come to the Bible just to hear what God said. We come to hear what he says. We come to hear him speak, even today, through his written word, by his empowering Spirit.
The Holy Spirit not only inspired the words that human authors wrote millennia ago. He also illumines these very words in the minds and hearts of God’s people today. In this Library, we encounter not only the God who spoke but “him who is speaking” (Hebrews 12:25).
So, when you come to this Library, come with expectation that the living God will speak to you in his living word by his living Spirit.
Fresh Invitation
If you haven’t experienced the Bible this way, I invite you to try it afresh. Your subjective experience of the Bible does not determine the objective reality of what it is. There is no other living, God-breathed, Spirit-enlivened book apart from this Library. If you’re bored with this Book, the defect and need is in you, not in the Bible.
Call it what you will: the Bible, Scripture, God’s Library, the “chief” and “soul” of his means of grace for the Christian life (as Jonathan Edwards put it), or the first and foremost of those means. But don’t call it boring, and don’t settle for a narrow-minded, small-hearted experience of the Bible as just a book.
Desiring God