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I knew the book was special long before I knew why. It had been a Christmas gift from my parents
“God could have conducted unending individual spiritual conferences. But He does not want us connected only to Him; He wants us connected also to one another.”back when I’d have chosen cars and trucks and guns and games. Yet there was, I sensed, something different about this boxed Book with its black leatherette cover. The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments Translated Out of the Original Tongues and with the Former Translations Diligently Compared and Revised. The Authorized King James Version, 1611, Red Letter Edition.
I was 9.
Over the years, I occasionally opened the box, but rarely read The Book—until much later. For some reason I can scarcely explain, I tossed the Bible in the car as I packed for a camping trip. That impulse led to my first startling experience of this Book “speaking to me.”
It was a crisp, late-summer night high in California’s Sierra Nevada, before a crackling campfire, alone, reading the entirety of Saint Matthew’s gospel in one sitting, as the sparks swirled into the sky and disappeared among stars so close. When I came to the betrayal, trial and crucifixion of Jesus, after so compelling a portrait of the man, suddenly, and despite the King James language, the story became personal. It seemed not so much a part of a book being read as a conversation being spoken. It was very much like being let in on a dreadful but exhilarating secret.
I realize it is not uncommon for a reader to be struck by an “aha!” moment at reading most anything—catching the meaning of something for the first time or seeing a concept in a new light. But this was different because the ideas were different. God, I knew, was letting me in on His thoughts.
In Print, In Person
In giving us the Bible, God has placed His secrets out in the open, down where we can reach them. Read them. And it does make sense to me, hearing these words I read as God’s words. Think about it: God loves us—He’s dramatically demonstrated that—so wouldn’t He choose to communicate with us somehow? Wouldn’t He want us to avoid exhausting speculation about what He’s like and who Jesus was and where evil came from? Wouldn’t He warn us if He saw we were in danger?
God knows life can be perplexing, at times even sickening. Wouldn’t He give us information so we could understand it and perspective so we could tolerate it?
God has expectations of us and has made promises to us. Wouldn’t He formalize things, put it all in writing like a contract?
Certainly God could communicate, warn, inform and promise privately, individually, personally, simultaneously, directly. He could have simply whispered His ideas in my mind, and yours, and his, and hers, and theirs all at once. He listens to millions of complex prayers simultaneously; why not talk His ideas into us, each of us, alone?
I have concluded there are some distinct advantages to receiving God’s secrets openly, in a book. The Book is objective. I can hold it, look at it, evaluate it, explain it. So can you. So can we, together. We can read it. Study it. We might come to different conclusions on the meaning of some phrase or idea, but we have a common source we can come back to: The Book.
Can you imagine, if we each claimed a private pipeline to God, how competitive we could become? Private “revelation” is so subjective. We might disagree sharply. Who would arbitrate? And by what standards? How could we judge the ideas that you say flow through your direct, private pipeline? Or the ideas that I say God gave me?
The Book Connects Us
It calls for our energy and involvement as we invest effort and initiative in seeking to understand Him, bringing the ideas off the page. So we read. We study. We exert mental energy. We take part in the process of finding God.
The Book brings God’s friends together. If I had a private link with the perfect God, I might shun interaction with His imperfect people. Instead, we are linked together to cooperate in our search for understanding.
The Book—here are 66 individual books, written by 40 authors, in three languages, in several different countries, over hundreds of years—yet, taken together, it reads as one unified Book, authored actually by God. But with such human involvement!
The words of The Book passed as stories from generation to generation. The scrolls hand-copied who knows how many hundreds of times. The manuscripts circulated, read, explained, collected, ultimately printed and distributed, translated and retranslated as we learn more of the language and culture and as our own language changes over time. The Book—those words—over generations, read and studied and explained.
We would not have God’s ideas without the help of God’s other friends. Obviously, God values all this connectedness of His people, His family, His kingdom, His priesthood.
God could have conducted unending individual spiritual conferences. But He does not want us connected only to Him; He wants us connected also to one another.
The Mind of God
Yet there is that personal connection too, an intense individuality in our emerging spiritual perception. There is ultimately a face-to-face accountability and a sense of divine conversation as we contemplate the thoughts of God.
“’No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him,’” Paul reminded us. “But God has revealed it to us by His Spirit. … We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us.”
And what has God freely given us? Open secrets about His way for us to live and His agenda for all our tomorrows, in time and throughout forever.
Yet, in some mysterious way, as open as God has made His secrets, people who do not know God do not understand His ideas. The secrets seem stupid; too silly to be wise. “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God,” Paul says. “They are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. ... For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct Him? But we have the mind of Christ.”
We who read with understanding have work to do.
I guess, one day it just clicked. I turned a corner in my mind. The Book that had seemed so special because of its protective box and leatherette binding took on a deeper meaning. It had once captivated me precisely because it seemed so forbidding, unapproachable: The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments Translated Out of the Original Tongues and with the Former Translations Diligently Compared and Revised. The Authorized King James Version, 1611, Red Letter Edition.
Then, epiphany.
Was it that night in the Sierra? Was it some afternoon when curiosity prompted me to crack The Book open? At some point I realized I was no longer reading words from people about God, I was reading God’s Word to me. And a responsibility settled over me with astonishing weight: I have only one life to master this Book.
I may have forever to get to know God. But I need his open secrets now.
READ. REMEMBER. AGAIN.
PSALM 119 · 1 CORINTHIANS 2:7-16 · 2 TIMOTHY 3:14-17 · HEBREWS 4:12 · JAMES 1:22-25 · 1 PETER 1:23-25 · 2 PETER 1:19-21
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