At the beginning of 2013, I asked my lead elder if I might fulfil a longstanding vision to preach a coherent series on the central message of the Bible. He graciously agreed to my idea. The process of packaging a fairly complex message over a 5 week period was an amazing blessing and step-changed my appreciation for God's Holy word. Over the next couple of days I will be sharing the 5 instalments for your reading pleasure
When I was a kid, my dad had an ashtray made from a
real hand grenade – the sort shaped like a pineapple. Some ingenious and very brave craftsman had
removed both detonator and pin, emptied the explosive powder and cut a neat
aperture for the ash. He had also mounted
the whole thing on a beautifully machined wooden disc.
My brother and I loved it and used to unscrew it from
its stand whenever we played war games in the garden.
The other day I was trying to motivate myself to
kick-start my bible reading plan for 2013.
I wondered how I had let this discipline slip so much in the past few
months – how could I have taken my Bible so for granted?…After all, there are people
in China who would pay a lot of money – who would even risk their lives – to get
their hands on just a single book of the New Testament.
A sudden memory of that hand grenade was a perfect reminder
of how many of us tend to treat the Bible.
We have taken something of momentous significance – incendiary, explosive
and in the right hands life changing – but we’ve removed the detonator and in
the process rendered it harmless. We
pick it up and put it down as we please – often to glean some words of
encouragement and perhaps a little more – but for the most part, it sits mutely
in our homes and our lives.
In spite of this sad reality, the Bible remains a
dangerous document that provides a type of information that must not only be
considered but be constantly and systematically applied as we navigate our way
through life. To build on this point, I’d like to watch a short
trailer from a movie that hit the circuit back in 2010.
I suspect, if you haven’t seen the movie, you might
have found that trailer a bit violent, confusing and a little bit disturbing. But bear with me as I give you a synopsis of
the story.
The setting is America 30 years after a nuclear
war. A lone and mysterious figure named
Eli is slowly walking westwards on a mission to deliver the world’s last remaining
Bible to a place of safekeeping. As he
carries this burden however, he is continually threatened by a variety of diabolical
characters that would like to get their hands on it. These men understand its true power and would
seek to control it so they can limit access to it…
Eli, arrives in a small town in which a few survivors
are trying to start over. There he meets
an evil man called Carnegie who is hell bent on getting his hands on the Bible
so he might control who does and who doesn’t get to see it:
“this is a small town – we’re just
beginning – all we need to make this work is that book – I know it’s power – It’s
not a book - it’s a weapon”
The book of Eli is a thought provoking film. It is also pretty violent so I don’t
recommend you watch it unless you have the stomach for that sort of
action. The movie nonetheless helps us
reconsider the absolute primacy of this document.
The bible is, quite simply, the world’s greatest bestseller. It has always been. It contains some of the most sweeping epics
known to man, some of his most beautiful poetry, excerpts of History’s most profound
wisdom – to say nothing of its power to breath life into fallen-ness.
Charles Colson – Adviser to Nixon, implicated in
Watergate
"The BIBLE -- banned, burned,
beloved. More widely read, more
frequently attacked than any other book in history. Generations of intellectuals have attempted
to discredit it; dictators of every age have outlawed it and executed those who
read it. Yet soldiers carry it into
battle believing it more powerful than their weapons. Fragments of it smuggled into solitary prison
cells have transformed ruthless killers into gentle saints"
John Quincy Adams – 6th president of the
USA
"So great is my veneration for the
BIBLE that the earlier my children begin to read it, the more confident will be
my hope that they will prove useful citizens to their country and respectable
members of society"
Thomas Jefferson – one of the founding fathers of the
US constitution
"A studious persual of the sacred
volume will make better citizens, better fathers, and better husbands"
However, just as we see in the book of Eli – The truth
of scripture is up for grabs – and it runs the risk of being overwhelmed in the
hostile marketplace of renegade philosophies.
Powerful and influential atheists are hell-bent on suppressing and
discrediting the word of God so as to peddle their own philosophies
Richard Dawkins - Scientist/Atheist
“It is a chaotically cobbled-together anthology
of disjointed documents”
“The God of the Old Testament is
arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it;
a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic
cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal,
filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously
malevolent bully.”
It is time – as Christians - that we began defending
and incarnating the word of God as the one true life giving resource that it is. Indeed, we need a reformation in our own
thinking about this incredible handbook that God has left us.
2 Reasons
There are, I believe, two reasons why we don’t treat
this handbook with the reverence, fear and level of application it deserves.
The first is that, to the untrained eye, it is a
confusing book – full of stories accounts of how strange serpent convincing a
naked lady to eat a piece of forbidden fruit, instructions carved into tablets
of stone, strange vagrants in the desert and seismic military encounters
between warring factions. Somehow,
amidst all of this, we are required to make sense of the teachings of a man
called Jesus who proclaimed to be the Son of God - and perhaps trickier still, to
make sense of a compendium of letters written by a man called Paul which
sometimes don’t make sense even after the tenth reading of them.
In short, the bible looms before people like a brick
wall or perhaps a brilliant night sky.
We can see the stars but without any frame of reference it all just
looks like a big jumble of lunar waste and planets.
In the case of the night sky, the good news is that we
don’t have to be an astronomer to make sense of it. Even an amateur with a simple handbook and a
pair of binoculars can begin to identify the Universe’s intriguing patterns and
constellations. Moreover, he is soon
able to distinguish between a comet, a falling star and a satellite.
And so it is with scripture. As we embark on our journey through
scripture, it’s almost as though we need some sort of GPS system to help us not
only chart our way but to give us a guided tour at the same time.
The second reason scripture seems so impenetrable is
the fact that we are so distracted by our modern lifestyles. The journalist Lee Strobel once remarked that
the average American is exposed to more information in the daily edition of the
New York Times than the great 18th century evangelist and Bible
teacher Jonathan Edwards was exposed to in his entire lifetime. This is to say nothing of clutter posed by Facebook,
twitter, satellite TV etc.
In short, our frequencies have become horribly
polluted and we have to actively make space for the word of God if it is to
gain any traction in our lives. Let me
go back to my analogy of the night sky – not only do we need something or
someone to help us pick out the patterns – we also need to address the issue of
pollution. Seriously, when did you last
really see the milky way? We are quite
fortunate out here in Ballito but it will only be a matter of time before we
lose our night sky to light pollution.
In October 2008, my wife and I passed through the town
of Flagstaff Arizona on a road trip through the South Western United
States. Flagstaff is home to the Lowell
Observatory, on of the world’s most important centres for the study of the
Universe. Light pollution has long been
a threat to this status so some time back the town fathers got together and declared
Flagstaff to be the world’s first International Dark Sky City. This was not wishful thinking. To ensure this reputation would be preserved,
the town council went to the extent of identifying maximum levels of lighting for
all residents – businesses included. You
can get a fine for exceeding this level.
And it works.
Similarly, we have to actively limit the pollutive
distractions in our lives to make space for the word of God. I’m not just talking about making time for
church and cell group. I’m talking about
making time for reading the word. For
understanding the word. Being committed
to reading and understanding scripture in its totality – the unity of
scripture.
Ironically, with the Internet, this task is now more
within our reach than ever before!
Solution
What are we going to do about these two factors?
Firstly, we’ve created a list of resources that might
help you to re-engage with your bible in 2013.
In fact, a list was given to each of you when you entered the Church
today.
Some of the plans we have included there include:
- A plan to read the bible in 1 year – it may not be as daunting as it sounds – I did some calculations using a device on the net and at the average pace of 200 words per minute, you could get through your bible comfortably on between 12 and 20 minutes of reading per day.
- A plan to read the bible Chronologically – for reasons we won’t go into now, the bible most of us own has not been compiled in the order in which it was written. Reading the bible Chronologically can help you really get an understanding of how the whole story comes together through time.
- A plan for Slackers and Shirkers – the beauty of this plan is that it does not hold you down to a daily reading. It merely segments the bible into 7 key themes – 1 of each being assigned to a specific day of the week.
· Believe it or not, there is also a service called “Bible
Summary” which prepares a daily 140 character summary of a bible chapter –
which you can pick up either on Twitter, on Facebook or on YouTube. For tech gurus, this could be a really fun
way of keeping you on track or augmenting another plan you are doing.
Secondly, I am daunted but excited to announce the
launch of a new series called “The Divine Relay”. This series launches off the premise that the
Bible is not actually the fragmented and confused compendium of historical
manuscripts which some people seem to think it is - but rather a coherent and
unified story which operates not only as a constitutional handbook for
Christians but which becomes the touchstone for the understanding of all of
History.
“The bible is a unique interpretation of
universal history, the history of the whole creation and the history of the
human race. And therefore it is a unique
interpretation of the human person as a responsible actor in history”
Hindu Scholar Quoted in “A short walk through the Bible”
In this series, we will look at how the baton of God’s
purpose for mankind has been handed down through history – first through the
patriarchs, and then through the nation of Israel – its Kings and its prophets.
· We will look at how his rescue plan for all humanity has been relayed
not just throughthe Old and New Testaments but how it will be carried into the
future by the Church.
We will look at how the church – in spite of all her lamentable
weaknesses, appalling failures, indefensible shortcomings – still remains God’s
ultimate force not just for revival and reformation but for civilization and
enlightened social consciousness in the world today.
A while ago at a leaders training time, we watched an
excellent talk by a thinker called Simon Sinek – it was simply called
“Why?” In it, Sinek identified something
he called the Golden Circle to explain the various ways in which people make
sense of what they do. The Golden Circle
consists of three levels – What, How and Why.
Applying this to daily life:
Many people can easily tell you what they are doing with their lives…the jobs they do, the
routines they keep, and the people they are friends with
Some people can tell you how they are going about things – how they balance work with
family – how they actively pursue hobbies – how they make time for holidays and
so on…
Almost no-one can tell you why they are doing what they do – where it is all going and
to what end. What legacy do they hope to
leave? What is the higher purpose of the
things they do?
This is equally true of how we relate to our
faith. We often get stuck in the “what” and the “how” – the Sunday morning
meeting, the Tuesday night at cell – going to prayer meeting on a Thursday and
possibly a church braai once a quarter.
But how close are we to the ultimate “why” behind the things we do as Christians?
I want to say that unless we keep this in our sights,
our faith will become meaningless and empty. It will be religion in the true sense of the
word, trying to get close to God by adhering to a system of activities.
It is the “Why”
which I hope our series on the Divine Relay will address. I hope it will help you not only re-engage
with the word of God but with the mission of the church. I hope it will help you to activate your
faith.
