A smart person reads the Bible with their head. A wise person reads the Bible with their heart. A righteous person reads the Bible with their hands. Just as the body grows fat on even the healthiest food without exercise, ingesting Scripture without acting on it is unhealthy. While there is nothing wrong with the esoteric pursuit of nailing down the finer details of what we call “apocalyptic prophecy” (Daniel and Revelation), far more real estate in the Bible is dedicated to what we call “classical prophecy,” which challenges the way we live and speaks on challenging matters like social justice and true worship. There are entire books of the Bible that have very little story in them, but have plenty to say about the way we live our lives. The Bible is a very practical book, not meant merely to satisfy academic curiosity or to entertain us emotionally but to change the way we deal with ourselves, God, and other people. When we hear the word “wisdom” these days, many tend to think of secret or even mystical kinds of knowledge, but in the Bible, wisdom is about very practical matters. The book of Proverbs is a great example. These wonderful little gems cover everything from why getting drunk is a bad idea to why being fair to the poor matters. Somewhere in between, it has a good deal to say about having a good work ethic, choosing a spouse whose company you actually enjoy, staying away from adultery, and not co-signing loans, among other topics. These are not deep, mystical matters of highbrow philosophy, but the everyday stuff of life. (Conveniently, Proverbs contains 31 chapters that make it easy to read on a monthly cycle. If you’ve never read this fabulous book, it’s pretty easy to take on at a pace of one chapter a day.) One of the challenges of living much of the advice contained in the Bible is the historical distance between us and its original audience. Advice about allowing widows to glean in fields and regulations about how to go about marrying a captive bride ring strange to our ears now that most of us don’t work in fields and certainly don’t carry off captives in war. For such archaic things, it’s important to take the time to consider what the principle behind the advice was. In the case of allowing widows to glean, the principle is mercy towards those unable to provide for themselves without compromising their dignity. The regulations about captive brides were an important protection against violating, hurting, and humiliating conquered peoples. Another challenge in translating the Bible into action is how to treat the stories. All too often, people copy the actions of people in the stories of the Bible without carefully considering those stories in context. The rich complexity of these stories in portraying blessed but broken people should make one careful about which characters they copy and how. Context matters, and frequently these stories are more about what God manages to do despite the people’s sin than they are about the praiseworthiness of the people themselves. Some of the ancient advice contained in the Bible is easy enough to translate to today, but extremely hard to practice. When Jesus talks about the issue of lust, He doesn’t mess around: fantasizing about a beautiful member of the opposite sex is adultery. The Bible contains incredibly high standards that are impossible for an ordinary human being to meet. Even Moses, who God entrusted with the original Ten Commandments, had murder and disobedience in his track record. A full realization of the high standards of the Bible is meant to do several things. First of all, and most obviously, it is meant to inspire you to live better. Even though no one but Jesus could ever successfully follow the spirit of every piece of ethical wisdom in the Bible, every step in the right direction matters. Advice given in the Bible isn’t idle bluster, but truly practical stuff meant to make things better. Secondly, a full realization of the impossibly high standards of the Bible is meant to drive you to the foot of the cross. If we were capable of doing everything the Bible says to do, we wouldn’t actually need Jesus as our Savior. Examining our own hearts in comparison to the Bible’s high standards really should drive us to the conversion experience that comes from recognizing the enormity of our own sin and how badly we really do need God’s help. If you spend long enough with the text, you will realize just how selfish and deceitful your own heart really is, how badly you need the Holy Spirit to work on it, and how desperately you need Jesus’s sacrifice to save it. Finally, going through this whole exercise should give you a sense of genuine humility. When you have seen the enormity of your own sin, you do not judge it so harshly in others. You see more of it everywhere because you are now aware of just how many varieties of sin there are, but you do not use that knowledge as a weapon against others because you stand accused in the same way. Your sin is no less sinful for being less obvious and visible than someone else’s. As we experience the Bible with our heads, hearts, and hands, we will discover our personal limitations and our need for community. Two minds, two hearts, and two pairs of hands are better than one. Next week we’ll address why.
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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