We can never separate God from His word.
God’s word is not like a file sitting on a server somewhere that we can download and listen to at whim without direct interaction with God Himself. We are used to interacting with words in a way that dissociates them from the speaker or writer; we read books written by dead people, and we listen to mp3 talks and songs spoken or sung by people on the other side of the world whom we will never meet, and who don’t even know we exist. When God speaks, ‘… he alone turns his personal privacy into a deliberate disclosure of his reality.’
When we hear Him speak we encounter not just words, but God Himself; His words are always accompanied by His personal presence. When we read the Bible we can not only be sure that God is speaking as we read, but that we are in a sense coming face to face with the Living God.
The theologian S. Lewis Jones said, ‘In the 19th century, first Scripture died, then God died, than man died.’ What he meant was that the authority of the Bible was undermined by liberal European ‘Bible’ scholars who saw human reason and science as the ultimate authority. This led to a cultural revolution in which the church was no longer the main influence in society, which led to Frederich Nietsche’s observation:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
It was thought that this social revolution would bring great freedom and progress for the human race, but instead, as Dan Phillips says:
‘It left man with no authoritative word about his origins, with no authoritative word about his meaning, with no authoritative word about his purpose, or even about the guidelines for life; and so what he hoped for was great joy and freedom, instead what he found was great despair, because he found that he had sawn of the very branch that he was sitting on…’
We cannot reject what God says and think that we can somehow retain God apart from His word. If God were to stop speaking both this universe would cease to exist, and God would cease to be God.
God speaks in order to bring about relationship. Exodus 20:1-17 is an outline of the Ten Commandments, a summary of God’s moral code given to ancient Israel. Before we read it as a list of rules to follow, we need to read the introduction in vss 1&2: ‘And God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.’ When people say ‘I keep the 10 commandments – by which they mean the last 6 of the 10 – it is meaningless unless they do so in the context of a relationship with God – ie. The first 4, and that they understand the God to whom they relate as the One who has redeemed them from slavery (ie. to sin and death).
In the course of receiving the Law, Moses was on Mt Sinai, and was talking with God about the need for His presence to go with them. He had just taken the Ten Commandments to the people, discovered them worshiping a golden calf, and had smashed the stone tablets on which the commandments were written. He had come back up the mountain to plead with God not to abandon them. After hearing God’s promise of faithfulness and grace, he asked, ‘Please show me your glory.’ (Exodus 33:18). God instructed him to re-carve another set of stone tablets, and then did as Moses has asked: he revealed Himself and gave him a glimpse of His glory. What is remarkable about Moses’ experience is that it wasn’t what he saw, but what he heard. God ‘proclaimed his name’ (Exodus 34:5) – He made Himself known by words:
The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation. (Exodus 34:6-7)
If you want to know God, you need to be prepared to listen as He speaks, because He is The God Who Speaks.
How do you approach the Bible? Is it just another document, with interesting information and rules to follow? Do you actually expect to have an encounter with the Living God when you open it and read? Do you think that God is somehow absent when you don’t have a warm fuzzy when reading?
New Jerusalem 