Is the Bible the Word of God to Me?

Perhaps you have heard the story of the young man who was desperate to hear from God. So he prayed a quick prayer of guidance and opened his Bible at random. Looking down at the page, the words he read were: “And he (Judas) went and hanged himself” (Matthew 27:5). He shuddered, slammed the Bible shut, and quickly dismissed any connection to himself. Then he said another, more earnest, prayer; tightly shut his eyes; opened his Bible again; and read: “You go, and do likewise” (Luke 10:37). “No!” he thought to himself, briefly doubting this guidance methodology. Giving it one more try, he prayed even more earnestly, took a deep breath, and paused as if to give divinity greater access to his trembling fingers. Once again he opened the sacred book and glanced down to see the words: “What you are going to do, do quickly” (John 13:27). I never did find out what happened to him.

However humorous or tragic you may find this story; this method is fairly common. You may have used it yourself. Your life may have taken a significant turn based on this method. But is it a legitimate form of Bible reading? My guess is that most who would claim such a thing as a legitimate experience would not prescribe it as the normal every day way to read the Bible. Instead they regard it as a special moment in which God led them this way.

Whatever you think of this, it seems to me that many people approach the Bible in exactly this way without realizing it. Not the random part, but in the way we extract verses and apply them to our lives. Do we not read the Bible, hoping that God might speak to us from it? That’s reasonable. It is his written Word after all. But how does he speak to us from his Word? We happen to be going through a particularly difficult time, when that day’s reading includes the words: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you” (Isaiah 43:2). Tears roll down our cheeks as if God had stepped into our room and personally spoken to us that everything will be okay. But those words were not spoken to us in the 21st century. They were given to the ancient Kingdom of Judah hundreds of years before Yeshua came about a time when the nation would be under Babylonian oppression. Is applying these words to our personal current problems really that different from the young man who randomly read, “You go, and do likewise”?

It doesn’t take much of a reading of Scripture to see that it wasn’t written directly to you and me. The bulk of Hebrew Scripture was written to ancient Israel and the New Testament to various audiences in the first century. Whatever the audience, the vast majority of what was written was not in the form of timeless sayings, but within particular contexts (there are a few exceptions, such as the Book of Proverbs). Yet this doesn’t stop us from treating the words of Scripture as if they were written directly to us today.

One of the times I was personally given a Bible verse by someone ended up being very instructive with regard to this subject. I was at a conference many years ago in Vancouver. During the lunch break on the last day, a few people were praying for me. It went longer than I would have liked and it got pretty intense (they meant well). It was getting near the time for the afternoon session to begin, when a woman I didn’t know was trying to take her seat in our row. Soon after, she spoke up, saying: “Pardon me, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I believe the Lord has something for you” (meaning me). It was Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” Since then I have learned that many people have been given this verse, and I can understand why. If you’re going to take a verse out of context to encourage some struggling soul, it’s hard to find a better one. What can be better than to know that God’s plans for me are good and not bad? But in that moment, when I heard those words, the thought dropped in my mind: There is more to this than just the verse. So I made a mental note to look up the passage when I got the chance.

Around five that afternoon, when I was home trying to get some rest before supper and the conference’s final session, I remembered to look up the passage. It turns out it is Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles in Babylon. Much of his book is pretty negative as it addresses the terrible consequences of the people of Judah’s rebellion against God near the time of the destruction of Jerusalem. The twenty-ninth chapter is one of the few positives in all of Jeremiah. Here the exiles are encouraged by God through the prophet to get on with their lives in a foreign land, because their situation is only temporary. The Jewish nation will be able to return to their homeland in seventy years. There is even a hint of a future greater restoration apart from the return from Babylon. As I read the chapter, I realized for the very first time, that God’s plans and purposes for my people, the people of Israel, were still in effect. Until then, I thought of Paul’s reference to the Gospel as being “to the Jew first” (Romans 1:16) as simply historical (the Gospel was presented to the Jews first and then after to the Gentiles). With the inclusion of non-Jews as part of God’s family, Israel, I thought, retained no special role in God’s plan. But in that moment, I realized I was wrong. As Paul writes elsewhere in Romans: “For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). God’s promises to my people were yet to be fulfilled.

I don’t know what the woman who gave me the verse was thinking, but receiving Jeremiah 29:11 that day forever changed my life. Not only did it change my understanding of God’s relationship to our people, I also learned that I could personally count on God’s goodness, because of his ongoing commitment to us. My understanding of the context enabled me to not only grasp what God was saying through Jeremiah at the time, but it helped me to know God better and properly understand the implications of these words to myself in my own day.

Maybe Jeremiah 29:11 has been given to you too. For years it has been a source of encouragement as it convinced you that God has good plans for you. I am not saying he doesn’t. He does. Not because Jeremiah 29:11 was written directly to you, but because the faithfulness of God as expressed to Israel in Jeremiah’s day is the same faithfulness of God that has been extended to you because of your relationship to him through Yeshua.

The genius of Biblical narrative is that God’s truth is given to us within concrete examples. We don’t simply read about God’s love, mercy, forgiveness, and so on as abstract concepts. Rather, we read about him and his attributes in practical terms. So instead of just reading “God has good plans for his people” as a universal timeless saying, we encounter these and other such words in the context of God’s goodness toward Israel, the activities of Yeshua and his early followers, and in letters to real communities of believers in actual places and situations. We see a people failing miserably at times (that’s Old and New Testament, by the way!), yet unable to divest themselves of God’s love and goodness. We can observe instances such as God’s encouraging of the exiles and derive encouragement for ourselves when we are in the most difficult situations. For if God’s plans were good for the Jewish exiles in Babylon, how much better plans must he have for those who have experienced his forgiveness and acceptance in Yeshua! Therefore, it isn’t illegitimate for you to claim Jeremiah 29:11 or other verses for your own. It’s that we need to understand how the power of these verses get from their original contexts to you and me.

Let’s return to my opening story about the young man’s attempt to hear from God by randomly opening the Bible. Can God ever use such a method? Of course he can, and I believe he has. But he does so in the same way that he might use anything else to get your attention about something. That doesn’t imply that this is the appropriate way to read and study Scripture. In fact, I suggest the more we learn the Bible within its context, the more, not less, God will speak to us through his Word. If reading it out of context has made a difference in your life, how much more difference will it make when you understand what God is really saying through it!

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The Most Important Thing

For followers of the Messiah the question over life’s priorities is perhaps both the easiest and most difficult question there is. I guess many would consider the most important thing: “being faithful to God,” and perhaps quote Paul: “It is required of stewards that they be found faithful” (1 Corinthian 4:2). Don’t we all long to hear Yeshua say to us one day: “Well done, good and faithful servant.” (Matthew 25:21)? Life isn’t about money, success, or recognition, but rather being faithful to God. Easy answer, right? But is it, really? Doesn’t this answer beg for clarification? What use is such an answer if we don’t know what “faithful to God” entails? That’s what makes the question so difficult.

We resolve this difficulty in various ways. Some, maybe most, don’t think about it. They do what they do because they do what they do. Subconsciously, there is likely much more going on, since such people may not realize they are fulfilling an unspecified set of expectations, which may be derived from their upbringing or due to the influence of one or more peer groups. Going along with whatever crowd we are a part of may not be a problem unless it conflicts with what it means to be faithful to God, which we wouldn’t know until we have adequately worked through this question.

Another way to resolve the difficulty is to limit faithfulness to God to one’s sense of calling. If you are able to satisfactorily answer the question, “To what prime role has God called you?”, then as long as you put significant time and energy into that role, you may be at peace with the question. But is our service to God limited to some prime role we have? That’s besides most people not having have a strong sense of calling to begin with. But even if you do, how do you know you are being adequately faithful?

Maybe faithfulness to God is not wrapped up with the roles we play after all, but rather in the spiritual and personal aspects of life. For some serving God is limited to the moral realm: staying out of trouble; being honest; staying away from sin, especially sexual sin. It’s not so much the roles we play, but how we play the game (of life) that counts. As long as we behave ourselves, God is happy with us. For some faithfulness has nothing to do with behavior at all. All we need to do is “believe.” They think as long as we have faith in Yeshua, nothing else matters.

But limiting spirituality to the confines of morality alone or disconnecting it entirely from the everyday details of life in the name of faith is completely unbiblical. People of faith are called to be faithful to God in all sorts of ways in every area of life. The verses quoted at the beginning are a small taste of the overwhelming testimony of Scripture on this topic. Yeshua said, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work” (John 4:34). Yeshua came to accomplish a task. That included living a perfectly moral life, but also doing the teaching he did, the signs he performed, and the death he died. His faithfulness to God included everything. The same is true for the long list of other exemplary Bible characters throughout the entire Scriptures. While faith in God and the Messiah is key, they were commended for their faithfulness.

We still haven’t resolved the difficulty. I will offer two guidelines that I believe are indispensable in answering this question. There is no formulaic one-size-fits-all answer for this very important question. However, these two guidelines will provide you with an essential foundation to help you live a life of faithfulness to God.

First, you need to see yourself within God’s overarching narrative. That’s fancy talk for finding your place within God’s story. The prevailing mood today is meaninglessness. For many, human life is nothing more than power and desire. Many Yeshua followers, knowing this is untrue, opt to disengage from life, trying to live in an alternate spiritual reality. But this is not what following Yeshua is all about. He calls us to be part of his rescue operation of the creation. An operation in which everyone has a unique complex role to fulfil, work that is the “food” (essential life nutrients) Yeshua speaks about.

When we begin to understand the overarching story revealed in Scripture, we will better perceive the grand vista of God’s purpose for life. This opens vast possibilities for the gifts and talents God has bestowed upon us as well as provides the necessary definition and limitations for those almost infinite possibilities.

But even with definition and limits, how do we know what we should be doing, so that we can be genuinely faithful to God? This is where faith, the second guideline, comes in, but not in the irresponsible detached way I discussed above. Faith doesn’t simply make life better. Nor it is a free pass, dismissing us from all responsibility. On the contrary! Faith is our intimate and personal connection with God. The context in which Yeshua speaks about his work as food is his encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, and which begins with “And [Yeshua] had to pass through Samaria.” (John 4:3). Note we read, “Had to pass.” What was the basis of the necessity to go into that region? Knowing how it turns out, we know God had a special assignment for his Son to do that day. That’s why he took the normally avoided road into Samaria. Yeshua’s faithfulness to his Father led him to go off the beaten track in order to fulfill an unusual assignment.

No formula could ever result in what Yeshua did that day. “But that’s Yeshua,” you might say; he is the Son of God! True, but are we not to follow his example as did so many others in the Bible, who through various means discerned (not guessed!) God’s will? Their faithfulness was derived from their intimate relationship with God.

How do we get to that place where we too have such discernment? That’s something that God is more keen to give us than we will ever be ourselves. Yeshua said, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27). Following Yeshua is not just another way to describe a passive so-called faith, that is nothing more than mental agreement over his identity and history. It’s an intense relationship of purposeful attention to his promptings via the Holy Spirit. It’s something nurtured through an honest and intentional pursuit of Yeshua and his ways through the Scriptures, prayer, godly community, along with a willingness to obey him whatever the cost.

It is as we lovingly respond to his desires in every area of life, both big and small, that we can anticipate hearing the words one day: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

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