Some Things to Know About the Bible
“The words of the LORD are pure words, like silver refined in a furnace on the ground, purified seven times… The law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces.” – Psalm 12:6,
“The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” – Hebrews 4:12
The Bible is worth more than all the gold in the world. It is alive and active. It can enrich our lives immensely. The great English bishop of the 19th century, J.C. Ryle, said, “Happy is the man who possesses the Bible! Happier still is he who reads it!”[1] It is our food (Jer. 15:16), our life (Deut. 32:46–47), our comfort (Ps. 119:50), our strength (Ps. 119:28), our guidance (Ps. 119:105), our desire (Ps. 119:20), our hope (Ps. 130:5), our love (Ps. 119:97), our joy (John 15:11), and our treasure (Ps. 119:72).[2]
There is nothing like the Bible. It’s perennially the world’s best-selling book. It has transformed every culture it has encountered and has given a framework for living, especially in the Western world. We treasure it as God’s very word, as his gift to us so that we might know him.
The Bible is something we never truly master, even if we read it all day, every day of our lives. It’s deeper than any other book, with more to discover about who God is, who we are, and what this world is than any other book could ever offer. As the 19th-century English pastor Charles Spurgeon once said, “Nobody ever outgrows Scripture; the book widens and deepens with our years…The deeper you dig into Scripture, the more you find that it is a great abyss of truth. The beginner learns four or five points of orthodoxy, and says, ‘I understand the gospel, I have grasped all the Bible.’ Wait a bit, and when his soul grows and knows more of Christ, he will confess, ‘Thy commandment is exceeding broad, I have only begun to understand it.’”[3]
Reading the Bible is a life-long pursuit. For some of us, it’s still a very daunting book. Maybe you’ve tried to read it several times and can’t seem to make it through. Perhaps you’ve read it multiple times all the way through, yet you sense there is still more to learn.
No matter where you fall on that spectrum, I want to highlight some things that make the Bible unique among all the other books in the world. My hope and prayer is that these encourage you to take up and read.
Big
First of all, it’s a big book, and in our bite-sized publication era, where Tweets and Facebook posts are the newspapers of our day, we struggle with long-form reading. I fall into that category too. I love to read, but this modern world has trained my brain to take in small doses of information at a time. Reading the Bible takes far more effort than scrolling social media or the Apple News app.
How can we overcome this problem? It helps to break it down. Rome wasn’t built in a day, as they say. If you’ve never read through the whole Bible before, it will be hard to pick it up and go right through without a plan. Thankfully, there are many reading plans that you can use to guide you. Google is your friend here.[4] Take it in reasonable bits. Maybe that means a few chapters a day for you over a year. For some, it might mean bigger chunks over a shorter period.
Don’t let the size of the Bible intimidate you. Just start reading and ask God for help to continue.
Ancient
The Bible is an ancient book. As Michael Bird says, “Even though the Bible is for us, it was not written to us, nor was it written about us. When we read the Bible, we are entering into a historically and culturally distant world and we must ‘mind the gap’ as they say on the London Tube.”[5]
Thankfully, we already have a good bit of practice in this kind of world-shifting. For example, we naturally do this when we turn on a TV show. Of course, the images help, but our brain can put us in a particular time and place. A Western is a different context from Star Trek. Some things only make sense when you understand the world where the events occur. We must do a similar orienting exercise when we come to the Bible. If we don’t, we might misunderstand and misapply what we read. A letter is a different type of literature than a narrative. It helps to know what you are about to read.
A good study Bible will serve you well here. The ESV Study Bible is one great resource. It includes an introduction to each book of the Bible with information on the author, date, place of writing, theme, purpose, occasion, and background. It even highlights the literary features of each book, providing even further orientation.
Complex
The Bible is also a complex book. It is a collection of 66 books written in three languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek) by dozens of authors over more than 1,500 years. Nevertheless, it tells one story of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. It’s truly a remarkable accomplishment.
To complicate it more, these 66 books are in different genres. The Bible includes history, narrative, poetry, wisdom, prophecy, gospels, letters, and apocalyptic literature. Knowing which genre you are reading is vital to reading the Bible correctly.
You often hear people say they take the Bible literally. Literally, that can’t be true because the Bible includes all kinds of literature that, if it were to be taken literally, would be terribly confusing and unhelpful. Sometimes it’s telling us mere facts. But other times, it uses imagery to get the point across. Jesus did this all the time. Think of all the images he uses of himself in John’s gospel. For example, he refers to himself as the “door” (John 10:9). Are we supposed to think of him as a literal door—wooden, about seven feet high, with hinges and a doorknob? Surely not. That makes no sense at all. Instead, he is a door in the sense that he is the entryway into God’s kingdom.
No one reads the Bible literally because it just makes no sense to do that. Instead, we are to read each part according to the type of literature it is, taking the words seriously and looking for the true meaning behind each one. Again, a good study Bible is of great assistance in this regard.
Inerrant
Second Timothy 3:16 says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” In other words, the Bible is inerrant.
The inerrancy of the Bible has been hotly debated for centuries. At various times, it has been misused, misdefined, and misunderstood.[6] Without getting too far into the various topics, the classical orthodox Christian view is put simply as this: the authors spoke the truth in all their affirmations, and the original text of the Bible is without error or mistake. The doctrine of inerrancy means that you can trust your Bible while reading it. God does not lie.
Complete and Sufficient
The Bible doesn’t tell us everything we wish we knew. Wouldn’t it be nice if God spent more time on Genesis 1 and 2 explaining exactly how the world came to be? What about the dinosaurs?
The Bible also doesn’t answer all our tough questions about how some things work. Divine sovereignty and human responsibility, for example. How can both be true? We cannot ultimately answer that because the Bible doesn’t. There is tension in the scriptures. God is presented as entirely sovereign, and we are held responsible for all our actions. When the Bible holds something like that in tension, we must learn to be okay with that.
Though the Bible doesn’t tell us everything we wish to know, it does tell us everything we need to know. We are not saved by knowing the details of the world's creation. Old Earthers and New Earthers are saved only by faith in Jesus Christ. Arminians and Calvinists are saved only by faith in Jesus Christ.
What do we need to know? We need to know the gospel. We need to know that we are sinful and unable to save ourselves, but God sent his Son to live the life we should have lived and die the guilty death we deserved to save us from the wrath of God that we were owed. Three days later, he was raised from the grave in a glorious resurrection, and all who turn from their sin and put their faith in him and his work, trusting him for salvation, will live forever with God in a renewed and restored universe upon Jesus’s return.
The Bible doesn’t tell us all we wish it did, but it tells us enough. It is complete and sufficient in its message of repentance and grace.
Divinely Inspired
The Bible is a divinely inspired book. This is where we depart from what the world would recognize about the Bible. Here, we step into Christianity. The Bible is not just any old historical book. It is God’s gift to us. It’s his very word. It’s his message to us. It’s his revelation of himself. As Paul says in 2 Timothy 3:16, “All scripture is God-breathed.”
Though human hands wrote the Bible, those men wrote words from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit (2 Pet. 1:21). God did not take over their bodies and make the authors serve as mere scribes. Instead, God inspired them by his Spirit and worked through their personalities and circumstances to create the Bible. And what a gift this is to us! We have God’s words in our human language!
Authoritative
Because of its divine inspiration, the Bible can never be wrong. If it were wrong, that would mean God would be wrong, and he can’t be (Num. 23:19; 1 Sam. 15:29; Heb. 6:18; Ps. 89:35). Now, the problem with that is that sinners like us will look at parts of the Bible and think, “Huh, I disagree with that.” I would go so far as to say that if you never disagree with the Bible, you probably haven’t understood what you’ve read. The Bible should confront our thinking. It should bother us. As Tim Keller said, “Only if your god can outrage and challenge you will you know that you worship the real God and not a figment of your imagination…If your god never disagrees with you, you might just be worshiping an idealized version of yourself.”[7]
Though we may disagree, we must bend our thoughts to God’s. We cannot “agree to disagree” with the Bible. We must change our thinking to match what God has said. Because of the holiness of the Word, we have no right to deviate from it. Saint Augustin put it plainly. “The Scriptures are holy, they are truthful, they are blameless.… So we have no grounds at all for blaming Scripture if we happen to deviate in any way, because we haven’t understood it. When we do understand it, we are right. But when we are wrong because we haven’t understood it, we leave it in the right. When we have gone wrong, we don’t make out Scripture to be wrong, but it continues to stand up straight and right, so that we may return to it for correction.”[8]
Lest that discourage us, view this as a great gift instead. We live in an age in which truth is a very malleable thing. It’s something everyone gets to define for themselves. But truth that changes with the times is not truth at all.
The Bible stands outside of our time and engages and informs our time. It does that not only for us but for every age. This is incredibly helpful and comforting. The problem with looking to our age for answers is that while we may have come to some view on something that is true, we still have our blind spots. No era is infallible. But God’s word is. If you want to truly be a counter-cultural influencer that lives on the razor edge, stand on God’s word.
For example, we live in a day when there is a strong (and right) emphasis on justice and equality. But divorced from scripture, our culture either takes those good and right ideas to improper ends or dead ends.
In the LGBTQ+ discussion, there is much talk of justice and equality, using similar language used in the Civil Rights era. While we should treat every person with dignity and respect, we cannot begin redefining basic ideas of personhood to fit an ever-shifting culture. A man and a woman are not malleable things. They are biological truths. Using the biblical concepts of justice and equality apart from the biblical definitions of personhood only takes us to an improper end, missing the actual point God is making about the dignity of each man and woman created in the image of God. We are not our sexual identities. We are God’s good creation. Only he can define us.
On the other end of the spectrum, our culture can take the good and right ideas of justice and equality to a dead end where no one can win. Divorced from scripture, if anyone fails the culture's definition of justice or equality, the game is over. There is no forgiveness or mercy for the offender.
Only the Bible strikes the right balance between upholding justice and equality, the proper definitions, and the opportunity of experiencing forgiveness and mercy when we fail. Not only that, but the Bible also gives us the power to forgive others when they have wronged us. It is a way out of cancel culture and into real community. That’s life on the razor edge. It’s surprising. It’s counter-cultural.
In his book The City of God, Saint Augustine told a better story of Rome than Rome could tell of itself because he looked through a biblical lens. The Bible knows us better than we know ourselves. It tells a better story of us than we can tell of ourselves because the Bible sees outside and beyond us, and we can only see ourselves for whomever we might be at any given moment. We can’t see the fullness of our lives at any given moment. The Bible, however, does. And that story of ourselves is founded in a more profound love than we have for ourselves. It’s a story steeped in the mercy and grace of Jesus.
We need this more than we realize. Without God setting the tone, we cannot truly know ourselves. To know ourselves, we need to know God. John Calvin said this about knowledge in his classic book The Institutes of the Christian Religion. “The whole sum of our wisdom—wisdom, that is, which deserves to be called true and assured—broadly consists of two parts, knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves…The purpose of the first of these is to show not only that there is one God whom all must worship and honor, but also that he is the fount of all truth, wisdom, goodness, righteousness, judgment, mercy, power, and holiness…The purpose of the second is to show us our weakness, misery, vanity and vileness, to fill us with despair, distrust and hatred of ourselves, and then to kindle in us the desire to seek God, for in him is found all that is good and of which we ourselves are empty and deprived.”[9]
When we come to the Bible, we are coming to a book that shows us who God is and who we are, but we are not the main attraction. God is. And that revelation of God helps us understand him and ourselves because everything in this world is understood in the context of God. He gives meaning to it all because he is the Creator of all.
[1] Ryle, J.C., Practical Religion
[2] Smethurst, Matt, 8 Things Your Bible Says About Itself, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/bible-says-about-itself/
[3] Spurgeon, C.H., The Sermons of Charles Spurgeon, vol. 2, n.d.
[4] Here is one great place to find a plan: https://www.ligonier.org/posts/bible-reading-plans
[5] Bird, Michael F., Seven Things I Wish Christians Knew about the Bible, page 95.
[6] For a more detailed analysis, see Matthew Barrett’s essay for The Gospel Coalition entitled “The Authority and Inerrancy of Scripture.” https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/authority-inerrancy-scripture/
[7] Keller, Timothy J., The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism
[8] Augustine, Colossians, 1–2 Thessalonians, 1–2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, page 269.
[9] Calvin, John, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, page 1.
