Scripture Invites You Into a Community Across Time

I've got a question for you today. Why...why this book? Why this Bible? Have you ever stopped and asked yourself that? Why this one? There are a lot of other ways God could have given us His Word. For instance, He could have directly implanted His truth into our brains. Or even maybe given us instincts like animals, where we just did the right thing. But if God wanted to still let us have free will, He could have done other things. He could have used skywriting. He could have written in the clouds His Word, and we'd see it every single day. Or put video screens on every corner so you'd always see what He says, scrolling right there. Or maybe this could have grown on trees. Maybe we could have had Bible trees that were all over the world, and you just pluck it, and it's already in your language. In fact, it's already customized for you and says things specifically for what you'll need. Or maybe it could have been like a user manual. Maybe God could have just given us a modern user manual, where it's alphabetized, it's by topic. You just look at the thing that you need help with right now, and it just tells you what to do right there.

Instead, He gives us this collection of writings, which sometimes is sold as a user manual, but then you start reading, and you realize it doesn't quite work like that. It's got court documents, it's got songs in it, it's got a bunch of letters to different people in different churches. The biggest chunk of it probably is story, is narrative, and it tells a story.

That's what God gives us. It tells us the epic story of what the Father and Son have done, and are doing, and what they purpose to do in our world. What I think is fascinating about that is that God has chosen to reveal Himself to us as experienced by other people.

So, real people across time, God had these interactions with them, or groups of people, had them write it down, and that has been transmitted to us. Moses at the burning bush, Hannah asking for a son, David praying while fleeing from his enemies. And over the course of those narratives, a portrait gradually comes together of God's character, who He is.

And that all comes together in the person Jesus Christ, whenever He lived on this earth and died in His mission, and what He's going to do when He comes back. He's the express image of that portrait that was building across the Old Testament. But what's so fascinating to me about us getting this book from other people is that God actually draws us into a community across time, you could say.

God always likes community. He's brought us together to worship together here. Some places you don't have anybody, but you're still part of this community across time. Because what God gives you is Jeremiah's experience, and Isaiah's experience, and Joshua's experience, and you read through those things. And so, there are some implications from that. If God talks to this person over here, and they convey it to us over here, we've got to learn a few things about this person to really understand what it is they're trying to tell us. Who were they? What were their priorities? What were their hopes? What were their dreams? How do they normally talk in their society? What was their cultural setting? What were the immediate circumstances for why they were writing, when they were writing, and who they were writing to? We're accountable to all of that whenever we open our Bibles. And so, what we need to do is treat the biblical writers the same way that we would want to be treated. Which, I think, to help make this point, I would say, I'm married. I have a wife. She normally makes dinner. I think you could appreciate this analogy no matter what relationships you have. Normally, Joy makes dinner, and whenever I talk to her, and she says, I just don't know what I'm going to make for dinner tonight. Sometimes, she's just trying to work through what she's going to make. But, you know, there are sometimes I hear something different in her voice, because I know her well enough. We've known each other for 20 years now, that I know what she's really saying is, can I not do this today? And when I hear that, I'm hearing something in her voice. I'm putting it together with other things that I know are happening, perhaps at home, or that we have going on. And so, I know the thing not to do is to say, well, I saw this thing in the pantry. If you need ideas on what to make, why don't you make that tonight? You know, this is what happens when we love each other. We put together the whole picture. We get to know each other, and we are trying to have a meeting in the minds. Let's turn to 2 Peter 3. On the other hand, you've probably dealt with people in your life where they twist your words. They're not interested in the meeting of the minds. And we learn to be cautious around those people. We realize, okay, with this person, I've got to watch my words, because they're going to dig into the dictionary. They're going to use etymologies to bring back to me what I'm really saying there. They're not trying to get to the meeting of the minds.

In 2 Peter 3, 15-16, we wouldn't want our words twisted this way or transferred to some other context that we wouldn't intend. If we were the biblical writers, we would want for later readers to grasp the same things we wanted to get across to the original recipients. Here Peter is writing, and he says, Consider that the long-suffering of our Lord is salvation, as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you, as also in all his epistles, speaking to them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of Scriptures.

Note here Paul speaks from wisdom. It's from wisdom that he's been given that he's been speaking. That's interesting. But also these people, it doesn't say that they're malevolent necessarily, although maybe that's an implication of what Peter's saying here. But he says that they are untaught and unstable people. They're untaught. They're taking what Paul's saying, and Paul's saying it with a certain background, a certain expectation of what Paul knows and what he expects his readers to know, and he expects them to share together, and these untaught people are not honoring that. Maybe they don't know it. Maybe they're choosing not to know it, but they're not taking it in context. There are some people who deny that this is inspired at all. They think this is just a bunch of human words, and so because of that, they don't see why they're subject to God. Maybe that's the reason why they don't want to see it that way, because they don't want to be subject to God. But it's possible to go too far the other direction. In trying to hold this up as God's word, you can try to eliminate any humanity in it whatsoever. It's almost a Gnostic spin that people can put on the Bible. I think I had a little bit of this as a kid, trying to imagine how the Bible worked. You picture the Apostle Paul sitting at his desk late at night, and he falls into a trance. His hand starts moving. The stylist starts moving on the paper. Then he wakes up and looks down and sees the title 2 Corinthians. He says, oh, I wonder what I wrote? He starts to read it. If you have that idea, as you read through the Bible with that idea, you realize it just does not hold up pretty much anywhere. There are moments where God comes and he gives a message and a vision, or he says, thus says the Lord. But most of the time, the biblical writers are very open about why they're writing. They'll tell you, this is why I wanted to tell you this thing. So we can pull from that. We can see that God has to be guiding their minds into truth, not guiding their hands on the paper. So I love how our fundamental beliefs, the United Church of God's fundamental beliefs, has a fundamental belief on the Word of God. And I'd like to quote this paragraph from it. It says, the entire Bible reveals the acts of God's merciful intervention to save mankind for eternal life in his family. The writing in the various books of the Bible reflects the human writer's own personality, style, and vocabulary. Nevertheless, they wrote as they were moved by the Holy Spirit, 2 Peter 1, 21. Thus God influenced and directed the minds of his servants, while at the same time allowing them free expression as they wrote the books known as the Word of God. God could always do everything himself if he wanted to. He could have just dropped the book down right on Peter's doorstep. He could have sent Paul a letter and said, send this on, you know. He could have done that. But we find across the Bible that God loves to work in partnership with humans. And that is so often his ideal way to get the things done he wants to see done in the world, is have humans do it. And this is how he's given us his Word.

So that means that it is something that we should ask when we read the Bible. What did they mean? What did they think they were saying to the people that they were writing to? And the trouble with the sort of the trance view, where they don't know what they're writing, is that it removes that. It lets us ignore the writer's intention. And when we set aside their intention, because we assume that they didn't have any, that's what allows us to just kind of open the Bible and say, well, what is God saying to me right now in this? I'm not accountable to any other time and place where this was written. And then whatever pops into our minds, well, that's what God says. So we can turn the Bible from a window into God's mind into a mirror of ourselves if we're not careful. That's what will happen whenever we don't have any of that accountability.

So no, we are accountable to the intentions of the authors God inspired. We must take the time and the good faith, just like me with my wife, just like all of us in all our relationships, we want to not misunderstand each other. So we work hard so that we have a meeting of the minds. That's what we do with the people who gave us God's word, to try to truly understand what they meant. Sometimes God shows up and says, thus says the Lord, but most of the time, though, God works through these biblical writers in a way that lets their thoughts and their feelings and their own voices shine through. But at the end of the day, God still claims total inspiration. Like if you had a video camera, if you were a fly on the wall in Paul's life, you could imagine maybe what this would look like is you're watching him be taught as a kid, and he grows up, and he does this advanced study with Gamaliel. He goes away, he sits, and you're watching him sit and think, and you see him go pray, and you see him talk to the people who are traveling with him as he constructs a letter, and you see him working with the scribe as they write it. Then at the end, God can point all of that and say, I did that. I am responsible for the final product, the words that went in there. That's what that inspiration looked like.

Before we sit down and let our Bible fall open, and we look down on a verse and we say, what is the Scripture saying to me today? We should love our ancient brothers who wrote the books, love them as ourselves. First, ask the question, what was the writer trying to tell his original audience? This is the anchor point. This is the point that will actually help us get to what God is saying to us today through this Scripture. This is the anchor point for what God is trying to tell us today. Otherwise, we'll just likely fill the gaps with whatever is on our mind that day, or what seems right from our point of view. And we'll think God is speaking to us, but we're actually just speaking to ourselves. We love God and his people by striving for a true meeting of the minds. God said, it's not good for a man to be alone. It's not good for any of us to be alone.

The Bible always promotes people coming together in the context of worship. He said, on the Sabbath day, this is what he wanted, us doing this together. So God always connects people together. There could be somebody watching this right now, or later on, who is the only member of the Church of God in their whole country, or in their city for hundreds of miles. Yet even when we find ourselves alone, as Elijah thought he was, when we read the Bible, we are drawn into a membership in a community across time.