Refrigerator doors everywhere are filled with verses plucked from the Bible. And though seeing them there each day may encourage us, it’s not guaranteed to increase our understanding.
The Bible is not a handbook for living. The Bible is a story. From Genesis to Revelation, it’s one big, long, hard-to-understand, sometimes troubling, account. And — hold on to your Bible — it’s not about us. It’s about God.
As you might guess, I’m no proponent of “Read Through the Bible in a Year.” But when Mom decided she wanted to, I encouraged her. I wanted her to have the feeling of accomplishment that comes when you read, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.” and close the book.
But at the end of the year, Mom confided she hadn’t come away with much more than boxes filled with checks. I told her that’s why I read the Bible in chunks. I might not read a chunk every day (don’t judge me, now) because there’s enough in one chunk to meditate on for days. I told her she just might be ready to read a chunk herself, that she could meditate on it until she gained some new understanding, and then go on to another. To heck with the check marks.
As she gets more familiar with her Bible, I’ll break the news that the original manuscripts had no chapters or verses. When God’s man got writing, he just wrote and wrote until he’d said what he needed to say, and he didn’t concern himself with whether the generations to follow could find their “Verse of the Day.” Chapter and verse can serve as a map to get you where you want to go, but once you’ve reached your destination, it’s time to take a good long look around. Just read and read until the writer takes a breath.
And try to ignore the subtitles. When I’m looking for something I just know is there somewhere, I’ll use the subtitles to help me find it. But once I do, I try not to let the words the publisher used to express the main idea muddle what the Holy Spirit wants me to see that day. On another day, it might be different.
Even though the Bible was written thousands of years ago, it’s God-breathed, and the Spirit of God breathes on it and through it today. It’s alive. It’s rich. It’s got depth and wisdom with layers of understanding. Its hidden treasures can’t be described by a subtitle.
When she asks me why the accounts in some books seem out of order, I’ll tell her, because they are. And when she asks why the gospels don’t always coordinate, I’ll tell her, because they don’t. Four very different men were telling the same story.
Ask three friends to relate what happened when the four of you were together, and my guess is the four of you will have different accounts. It’s not because one has a poor memory, one wasn’t paying attention, and one is a liar. It’s because even though you may think you’re the only one who got the story right, the truth is, you all just saw things from a different perspective.
Well, the same was true of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew was a man looking for a king, so when he met King Jesus that’s what he saw and what he shared. The Gospel of Mark is probably the written testimony of the apostle Peter, and Peter was an eyewitness to it all. Luke was a highly educated Greek historian concerned with dates and places and names; he may not even have been a believer. And John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, saw things through a wider lens. (And by the way, Jesus loved all His disciples; but for John, that became his identity.)
As time goes on, I might introduce Mom to a concordance; the best-known, I think, is Strong’s. I might tell her the joke — it’s called Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance because you have to be strong to haul it around and you’ll be exhausted after you do — and I’ll explain it’s so big because it contains every occurrence of every word in the King James Bible. Every the and a and and are listed. Look up the word “love” in your concordance, and you’ll see it appears hundreds of times, but it doesn’t always mean the same thing. Of course, a concordance is usually based on one version of the Bible and different versions use different words. A concordance drawn from the King James version won’t be of much help if you’re studying a Living Bible.
An online concordance is much easier to use — there are many, and many are free. But not for Mom. She likes the feeling of a book in her hand and I completely understand.
I’ll tell her I like using a lexicon to get a more complete, more accurate understanding of a word. While a concordance is an exhaustive index, a lexicon is a detailed dictionary. It reveals the original meaning of the words found in the early manuscripts. It delves into the word’s origins and its context and the meaning intended by its authors. Greek and Hebrew aren’t always easy to convey in English. A good example is the word “word.” It has a much deeper meaning than “a pattern of letters with meaning.” A lexicon can help you unravel its complexity.
At some point, Mom might say, “Look, daughter, I just want to read the Bible. I don’t want to study all day.” At which point I’ll say, “Then when you sit down to read the Bible, the most important thing you can do is pray.”
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