The Bible refuses to be used for instant satisfaction. The pages won’t be handled as a technical manual or an index for life principles. The Word won’t budge, any more than you would if a perfect stranger asked for your intimate secrets. That, you’d insist, only comes with time. And commitment.
Unfortunately, unlike you, the Bible will not protest when prodded and used. And, like teenagers who think holding hands and necking sounds the depths of intimacy, we often don’t know there’s more to reading the Word than pulling verses and tidy rules out of the text. We have no idea what a steady faithfulness to absorb and sit under the Word will do for us. That is the kind of knowledge that can only be handed down, elder to younger, parent to child—and was in fact meant to be. Moses charged Israel to center parenting around oral repetition and saturation of the Word. Any young Jew of Jesus’ day would have memorized at least the Torah, if not the Writings and Prophets as well. This was a way of life, handed down with the assumption that the blessed life could only be understood from within. But ours is a generation stranded, cut off from tradition both by circumstance and choice. We inherit the suicidal notion that anything worth knowing must appeal to us before we study it; wisdom counts for nothing if she cannot explain herself to the detached observer. But the Bible won’t play along. Any Christian who has seriously tried to practice a daily quiet time can attest to this. In fact, so can any Christian who has grabbed a Bible and tried to find out, “What does God have to say about...” There is no index, and those publishers who include one do as much harm as good. The very structure of the Bible preserves hints of what we have forgotten—this is a Book to be absorbed, not used. Unfortunately our (Greek) ordering of the books obscures the original structure of the Old Testament. Its (very intentional) order began with Torah: instruction, the first five books of Moses. This was the heart. The following sections—the Prophets and the Writings—served as application of Torah to history and to human experience, respectively. They were a unit. You could not isolate a book, let alone a sentence. Isaiah illuminated Exodus; Deuteronomy was the spring from which the Psalms flowed. The New Testament bears a similar structure. We begin with four Gospels and Acts—all that Jesus did, the full revelation of the heart of Torah. Then come two more parts—Letters and the Revelation—which again show what Jesus means in particular situations and in the whole of human experience. From the genealogy of Christ to the church’s cry, “Come Lord Jesus!” all is meant to be read together. And so it is with the two parts together as a whole. To borrow an image from Flannery O’Connor, Jesus lurks in the background of the Old Testament, peering out from behind trees and rocks as we read Law, Prophet, Writing. And when he is fully revealed, he tells us that he has come, not to abolish what came before but to fulfill it. So we are reminded of what generations of Christians and Jews have known—this is a book to listen to, sit under, absorb. The Word is eager to reveal its mysteries, not to the proud scholar or impatient consumer, but to the patient, faithful love who will listen and grow in understanding.
