Opening Up the Bible

Acknowledgements

This book first appeared as I Believe in the Bible, and I am very grateful to Faithbuilders for republishing it with its present format. I should like to thank the Proclamation Trust for study leave to enable me to do much of the writing of the text and to the students of the Cornhill Training Course, by whom many of its ideas and examples have been tested and clarified, over the years. My warmest thanks are due to Nancy Olsen, whose keyboard skills converted my hieroglyphics into successive drafts of a readable manuscript.

To my colleague Doug Johnson and my daughter, Philly Simpkin, who read the first draft, many thanks are due for their helpful suggestions And to my wife Heather, whose love and support, as always, enabled me to start, continue and complete the project, I owe my deepest thanks and gratitude.

Introduction

'Of making many books there is no end.' The words of the writer of the Bible book of Ecclesiastes certainly have a contemporary ring about them. However, the purpose of this particular book is to encourage the reader to read the greatest book of all, of which God himself is the author. The Bible, still the world's best-seller, is probably found in more copies, editions and translations than any other text that has ever been published, and yet in spite of its availability it remains unknown – a closed book – to so many people today.

Most of my adult working life has centered on this book, ever since I first tried to explain one of its texts, as a raw and somewhat nervous student, to a supportive and hugely tolerant little congregation, in a rural chapel, over 40 years ago now. My great passion is still to understand the contents of this amazing book, so as to seek to live it out and share its truth and light with others. As a Christian pastor and teacher, it has been my privilege to open the Bible and try to explain its meaning several times a week, in a great variety of contexts, to all sorts of people, believing and sceptical, around the world. I have been able to put the Bible to the test and I have never found it to fail. Wherever you go, whatever the culture, the Bible speaks to the basic needs of the human heart and mind with an immediate relevance and a penetrating power, which can only be explained by its divine origin. 'Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit' (2 Peter 1:21).

I believe in the Bible because it is God's book, articulating in human language the mind of the God who made us for relationship with himself. It is through the pages of the Bible that we come to know his character and to understand his ways. It is here that we encounter God in person as we meet Jesus Christ, the central focus of the whole revelation, and are called to repent of our rebellious autonomy by acknowledging God as God in our own personal lives. The Bible is not a book about God; it is God speaking to us, in a directly engaging way, teaching, rebuking, correcting, training and equipping us to live rightly in his world now, in preparation for the life of the world to come.

Like all good gifts, the Bible can be abused, and has often been misused by those whose own agenda is to distort its message and destroy its credibility. It is often said that you can make the Bible mean anything you want it to. But that is only true if the basic rules by which we understand and interpret any document are ignored or infringed. Of course, if a sentence is lifted entirely out of its setting and then made to stand on its own as an absolute statement, the Bible can be made to say some strange things. 'There is no God' is a straight quote from Psalm 14:1, but look at it in its context! Playing childish games like that with the Bible is the worst sort of trivialization. And yet the Bible remains a closed book to millions of people for a variety of reasons which are almost as trivial. The tragedy is that so many of the answers to the dilemmas of our contemporary world are contained within its pages, and yet lie there unknown and ignored. It is as if medical researchers were to discover a cure for cancer, write it up in a widely circulated textbook, distribute it to every hospital and health center around the world, and then for the precious information to remain unread on the bookshelf, as people continued to die of the disease. If we were told that God was going to make a television broadcast after the evening news tonight, most of us would plan to be in, or at the very least to buy the box set! We would be interested to know what he would say. But he has already told us all we need to know to bring us to eternal life, and the book lies unopened and unread.

The purpose of this book is to encourage you into reading the Bible for yourself, whether or not you have tried it before. They say that you can eat an elephant if you tackle it slice by slice. So the aim of these pages is to make the Bible more accessible, by seeing how its great variety keeps returning to, and underlining, its central story. Its goal is to give confidence in handling the Bible well, practicing the principles of good understanding and interpretation, so that its message becomes clear and compelling. We may not always like what we discover, because the Bible has a way of getting under the skin, challenging our comfort zones and questioning our dearly held opinions. But that could be what we most need if our lives are going to be changed and renewed. However, it is perhaps true that this book should come with a 'health warning', because reading and understanding the Bible is a high-risk activity. What we do with what we discover can have eternal implications, because we never walk away from an encounter with God in the Bible unchanged. Either our hearts are softened as we accept what he says to us, through faith and practical action in obedience; or they are hardened, as we refuse his revelation and reject his demands. The Bible will not allow anyone who reads it seriously to remain neutral.

To say that I believe in the Bible is not just a credal statement; it expresses the passion that motivates my life and ministry. When Martin Luther was accused of being obsessed with the Bible and totally prejudiced in its favor, he didn't deny the fact. Rather he retorted that it was natural for anyone to be prejudiced in favor of his own mother, affirming that it was through the Bible he was brought to birth – to a new, eternal life in Christ, which is what it means to be born again. That is the experience of every Bible-believing Christian. The Spirit of God still uses the Word of God to produce the people of God. Those who belong to that community affirm that all they believe comes from God's revelation in the Holy Scriptures. They are supremely those who believe in the Bible.

David Jackman, London, November 2005

1

The Bible at the Start of the Twenty-First Century

It was an ordinary afternoon at the school gate, as the cars pulled up and the pushchairs were wheeled across the zebra crossing. But Alison had a mission in the couple of minutes before the children began to stream out. She had got to know Christine quite well during the term and had enjoyed the snatched conversations they often had together. Now was the time to ask her to the Bible study for those investigating Christianity, which she and some other mums at the church were planning to start. She grabbed her courage with both hands and launched out into the invitation. Christine's response was hardly enthusiastic. 'The Bible? You mean you actually spend your time reading that old-fashioned stuff? I can only remember bits of it from school in RE lessons – all that fusty, musty language, people slaughtering one another, or committing adultery, and those weird, out-of-date explanations about how the world began. Anyway, science disproved it all long ago, and it's all been rewritten and changed down the centuries. I really don't have time to waste on all that rubbish. I'm just too busy with the children.'

* * *

The debate round the table in the students' union bar was getting heated. 'No, Dan, I don't want to come and read the Bible with you and your friends,' Matt was almost shouting. 'I tried to read it once and it didn't make any sense. Anyway, didn't you listen to that lecture this morning? A literary text doesn't have a 'meaning.’ It's just black marks on white paper. It's just a place where the ideas of the author are expressed. I'll relate to it one way, and you another, and Kate another. It's only what you want it to be. You want your Bible to mean something to boost your predetermined religious ideas, and that's fine for you. Sure! You can have your Bible-study circle, but don't try to force your ideas on me, because the Bible is just an ancient text from an archaic culture. I'm a twenty-first century man, mate, not Neolithic!

* * *

Julia and Andy slowly realized that they were facing a dead-end. The circles their relationship had been going round in for two years or more had become a downward spiral and they were facing break-up. They had tried so hard and invested so much in one another. They'd had their good times and neither of them really wanted to face the future alone, but they couldn't face it together, either. 'Someone at work today asked whether we'd ever looked at the Bible,' Julia ventured. 'Supposed to give us some uplift, direction even; full of good advice, that sort of thing.' Andy stopped stirring his coffee and looked up. 'Yeah, right! But where would you even start? I tried it once, but it doesn't have a subject index, does it, and none of it seems to make sense or fit together, and what on earth have all those incomprehensible names got to do with us? Anyway, we're not the religious sort, are we? That's not what we need right now!'

* * *

Three different, but negative, views of the book that is still by all the figures the world's best-seller. We could all multiply the scenarios from our own personal experience, because to most people at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Bible is quite simply a closed book. For many it's a black, forbidding book, speaking in a language 'which thou dost no longer use in conversation with thy friends'; consigned to the mists of antiquity. To others, it's a slippery collection of mutually contradictory ideas that can be made to mean almost anything, and then be pressed into the service of almost any cause. For some, it's a glorious part of our cultural heritage, along with Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson, the flowering of the English language, a profound influence on the minds and imaginations of generations long since forgotten. To most, it has nothing to say to life today, because it deals in certainties and absolutes which no longer command any credibility. Its ethos is more the quill pen than information technology. To a few, it is the living and enduring Word of God, the means by which the eternal creator of the world, everything and everyone in it, continues to reveal his purposes and character to human beings, created to know their deepest fulfilment and satisfaction in a personal relationship with him.

I believe in the Bible. It is a book written in time, unfolding eternity. It could not be more relevant and is never out of date, because it reveals the unchanging character of the God who is there. Its divine truth still transforms human life and experience, and it is available in easy-to-read, accurate, modern translations in every bookshop in the land. But the Bible does need to be unlocked, and all too often we lack the time and patience to unpack its treasures carefully enough. We pick it up and, rather like a lucky-dip at the village fete, hope to pull out something of value with the minimum amount of effort. We are like the eager five-year-old returning from her first day at school, bitterly complaining that she hasn't learned how to read yet. What we need to do is to make a start!

Let's do that by exploding two myths about the Bible that commonly deter the contemporary explorer at the very outset of the process. The first is that it is an advanced religious textbook, accessible only to the experts after years of study in Semitic languages or the more abstruse areas of philosophy and theology. On the contrary, if you can read a newspaper, you can read the Bible, particularly if it is in one of the excellent contemporary English translations. It has been said that, like the ocean, the Bible is shallow enough for a toddler to paddle in and deep enough for an elephant to drown in. Through its pages, we are introduced to otherwise unimaginable spiritual depths: mysteries that were kept hidden in God's providence, but have now been revealed. However, it is neither obscure nor mysterious in its essential contents.

The second myth is that the Bible's historical antiquity-makes it remote from our everyday, contemporary life. Its historical particularity seems to distance it irretrievably from our world. But the Bible is full of human life. On every page we encounter real people who have the same concerns and struggles, the same problems and opportunities, as we do. Their cultural clothing is different, but we would be blind not to see beyond such superficial distinctives to their essential humanity, which is common to ours. We are not in a fairy tale world, nor are we bound up in a cultural time-warp, when we read the pages of the Bible. We are among flesh and blood like our own, facing a common experience of what it is to be human, in the real world, and exploring the possibilities of knowing the God of eternity in the midst of time.

The Bible's Claims

But why a book? And what is this phenomenon we call 'The Holy Bible'? To answer these initial questions, we need to step outside of the immediate picture, in order to examine some issues which are even more fundamental. For example, what is the ultimate ground for believing anything about anything? How do we come to the practical judgments we make in everyday life, as to what is true or false; right or wrong; what works or doesn't work? Or, to express the issue more abstractly, what grounds of authority do we look for in making decisions about what we believe, or how we behave?

In the practical affairs of everyday life, we recognize the authority of fact, established by proof, which becomes a conditioning factor in every aspect of our lives and experience. The law of gravity is an example of an observable and constant physical phenomenon, which I am powerless to contradict, either by argument or will power. It is a fact that if I jump from the top of a high-rise building I shall fall to the earth, irrespective of what I may have persuaded myself in my own mind as to the likely outcome of the event. If the action takes place, the consequence follows and both are facts. They can be proved by visible evidence and tangible results. There can be plenty of argument about how and why the event happened, but the fact that it did happen cannot be denied. The radar speed trap, the police cameras, the video clip are all automatically accepted – as corroboration of past events. Arguments can and do happen about interpretation, but they only happen because there are facts and events about which to argue. The Bible has many claims to this sort of factual authority.

But there are very many areas of human thought and expression where facts need to be interpreted, if their full significance is to be appreciated. Our opinions and subsequent actions will probably be based on the degree of authority, or credibility, we attribute to a particular explanation or interpretation. In such areas, we may utilize a whole range of criteria by which to make our assessment. How do we come to our value judgments? It may be on the basis of what the majority think, so that the opinion survey percentages become the arbiter of what is acceptable and what is not. Or, we may decide to go with what the experts say, even though different schools of equally well-qualified people may fundamentally contradict one another's findings. Perhaps we revert to what we were taught at school, or by our parents – 'Well, my mum always used to say…' – and it becomes a dictum which influences our thinking almost without our realizing it.

The problem with all such criteria is that they are limited in scope and transient in relevance, because they are conditioned by our humanness. For example, in the recent discussion about the lowering of the age of consent for homosexual activity, the percentages of the public approving or disapproving the various proposed changes have swung wildly backwards and forwards over a period of time according to different polls. But if the 50 per cent who wanted reform at one time have been reduced to 25 per cent a few months later, does that affect the rights or wrongs of the issue either way? It may provide a more-or-less accurate barometer of public opinion, but it has no authoritative comment to make in the area of morality. Existentialist philosophers throughout the second half of the twentieth century consistently pointed out that right and wrong, truth and error can only be meaningful concepts if they are grounded in a divine Being, outside of and distinct from our human relativism. Jean-Paul Sartre's dictum, that finite man is meaningless without an infinite reference point, recognizes the reality that human beings cannot attribute meaning in life without an authority external to ourselves, greater than we are, consistent and unchanging, by which moral absolutes can be declared and upheld. This is the authority which the Bible claims to be able to mediate.

Let's spend a short time understanding the logic of the claim. If the only ground for Truth (with a capital 'T') as a given absolute lies in a divine being whose attributes are infinite and eternal, then the most important quest any of us can be involved in is to discover whether such a God actually exists. This is the quest for an ultimate authority. But how could we ever discover such a reality with any certainty? Clearly, such a 'God' could not be expressed as a mathematical formula, however complex, or be available for our examination like the data of a scientific experiment. Such a being must be, by definition, far beyond human analysis and even imagination, because of our finitude. Any 'deity' that could be encompassed within the framework of a human mind, however brilliant, has thereby forfeited the title of 'god.' So the long quest by humankind either to discover God, or even to create our own deity, is doomed to failure. We have neither the mental nor the spiritual capacities to achieve the goal. Indeed, the Bible recognized the dilemma, centuries ago, in one of its earliest books, when it asked the rhetorical questions, 'Can you fathom the mysteries of God? Can you probe the limits of the Almighty? They are higher than the heavens – what can you do? They are deeper than the depths of the grave – what can you know?' (Job 11:7–8).

At this point, we must not miss an important clue in the Bible itself. It is that nowhere in the 66 books which constitute the Bible as we have it, is the existence of God argued or proved on a philosophical basis. The church has sometimes attempted the task, with arguments about the unmoved Mover, or that just as a watch is inexplicable without a watch-maker, so a complex universe requires an infinite creator. But the Bible's own method is to state God's existence and point to the evidence of his words and actions. In other words, the Bible's claim to ultimate authority lies in its declaration that God has chosen to reveal himself by what he does and what he says, and that its own pages are the authoritative record of that self-disclosure. 'Proofs' will always be inadequate, because God's reality transcends the greatest human intellect. The God of the Bible is not the sum total of our best thoughts and most insightful notions about him. God would remain forever hidden from human perception and completely unknowable had he not chosen to make himself known, and to do that in terms which his human creation can understand, because they are the same currency of words and actions by which we make ourselves known to one another.

The human parallels are both clear and helpful. We have all had the galling experience of trying to get to know someone only to be met with a brick wall of resistance. Of course, we each have the right to reveal, or conceal, our thoughts, words and actions from others. Indeed, the measure of depth in our interpersonal relationships is largely the extent to which we are happy to disclose ourselves to another person, marriage being the prime example. But while relationships among equals are conducted on the basis of mutual disclosure, the same is not true of relationships with superiors. There the measure of relating is determined by the condescension of the higher to the lower. The first-grade schoolboy does not bowl along to the principal's office for a chat whenever the whim takes him. The subject cannot demand access to his or her monarch. The greater has to stoop to the lesser, if any relationship between them is to exist at all. How much more then must this be the case between the infinite yet personal God, who is the creator of the universe, and his finite, human creatures? To imagine that we could saunter into his presence, with our hands in our pockets, or could put him through our computers and come up with a comprehensive analysis, is only an indicator of our human arrogance. The only hope that finite human beings have of relating to the infinite is if he condescends to reveal himself to us. The only way that morally flawed people can relate to a God of perfection is if he discloses himself on terms that can bridge the chasm between us. Again, it is the Bible's claim to do just that, which constitutes a unique authority.

Alternative Authorities

There are, of course, many rival claims of authority within the broad field of religious belief systems. Even within Christianity itself, different emphases have emerged, and at root these account for the many divisions along denominational lines that church history has sadly witnessed. However, all Christians would agree that all authority within creation rightly belongs to the creator. As Daniel told King Nebuchadnezzar, we must, 'acknowledge that the Most High is sovereign over the kingdoms of men and gives them to anyone he wishes', and concede that 'Heaven rules' (Daniel 4:25–26). Again, 'His dominion is an eternal dominion; his kingdom endures from generation to generation … He does as he pleases with the powers of heaven and the peoples of the earth' (Daniel 4:34–35). The question is how that authority is mediated to us.

For some, it is through the church and its traditions. The Bible is seen as the product of the believing community, which is therefore superior to it. The interpretation of a book that would otherwise be dead therefore becomes the primary task, and only then can it become a source of authority. The properly appointed officers of the church become the custodians and arbiters of truth, by whom the Bible's message is interpreted and applied. The 39 Articles of the Church of England recognize an important place for tradition in the life of the church, but add the rider so long as it, ‘be not repugnant to the Word of God', recognizing that the church is subsidiary, as an authority, to the Bible. The authors of the Reformation formularies recalled the charges Jesus himself laid at the door of the traditionalists of his own day, the Pharisees, when he accused them of elevating their traditional practices above the teaching of the Old Testament. 'You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men,' he told them (Mark 7:8). And again, 'You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions… Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down.' (Mark 7:9,13). Jesus is criticizing tradition as the ultimate authority because it actually takes us back to a human base, which is inevitably flawed and inadequate.

The same weakness must be identified in the exaltation of human reason to the position of ultimate authority. The Bible then becomes an authority, but acceptable only in so far as it accords with what seems reasonable. It is argued that, after all, the Bible is a book produced by human authors, who were themselves inevitably conditioned by their culture, language and thought-forms. To give them an authority beyond that of a witness to developing religious experience would be naïve and misleading. Once again, this view internalizes the ultimate authority to that of our own wisdom and knowledge, both of which are notoriously subjective and ephemeral. Bible writers claim much more for their writings, though in the relativism of our own times the authority of what seems reasonable is culturally very attractive. In the end, of course, we lose any concept of unchanging truth, or absolute standards, so that the Bible itself is relativized and shorn of its divine power and authority.

But perhaps the most popular authority base for twenty-first century people is that of personal experience. We have become suspicious of being overly dependent on reason and skeptical about the effects of warring schools of rationalism within our world. The behavior of the twentieth-century mass-murderers such as Hitler, Stalin and Mao, all in the name of rationality, has produced a sense of vulnerability within human beings which has contributed to a headlong retreat from all externally informed authority systems. Whether religious, political, academic or parental, authority per se is no longer trusted and now subjected to the most rigorous examination. Indeed, one might argue that the defining characteristic of our postmodern, contemporary culture is the repudiation of the very concept of objective authority, in favor of personal autonomy and individual creativity. 'Just do it!' has become more than a sales pitch; it embodies a culture. If it feels good, it is good. If it's OK for you, then do it your way. The only restriction is that it shouldn't inhibit me from enjoying what's OK for me.

In such a context, the message of the Bible takes on authority only when I decide personally to agree with it. Its record of how prophets and apostles met with God in the past may or may not reverberate with my experience, but it is that experience which becomes the ground of my personal being. What I feel and experience emotionally therefore becomes more real, more significant to me as a living human being, than what I think, or read, of what others have written. There is an immediacy, a 'nowness', to the authority of experience which becomes all-controlling. The Bible may be a useful foil, or even a plumb line by which to evaluate experience in a wider, deeper context; but it can also be restrictive and inhibiting. Why should God commit himself to words spoken yesterday, if he is the living God of today? Who is to say that he cannot reveal himself equally through current dreams and visions,