Getting into the Scriptures (or getting the Scriptures into us!)

One of the things I've been thinking about a great deal lately is Scripture. This is the narrative of our God's dealings with us. It tells us the story of our creation, our sin and disobedience, and our redemption through Jesus and the ultimate victory promised to those who remain faithful to him. It is our source of wisdom, divine instruction, practical advice on how to conduct ourselves as the people of God, and it is, supposedly, our authority in all matters of faith and practice. And yet.

And yet we don't read our Bibles enough. We neglect them. We are not soaked in them. We don't follow Peterson's (and John's and Ezekiel's) admonition to "eat this book." Instead, we are often culture-soaked, enveloped and engulfed by the messages we receive from the internet and television, music and the movies. Despite the fact that I'm a pastor, this is still something that I continue to learn as well. And so our Bibles sit on mantles, in hotel drawers, on coffee tables, night-stands, etc., conspicuously unread.

But that's not entirely true, nor is it entirely fair. The Bible is not the most friendly, accessible book. It can be intimidating. It can be unwieldy. It can be discouraging to read a verse, a chapter, or even a large chunk of one of its 66 books and realize that you have no idea what it all means. There is narrative. There is poetry. There is apocalyptic literature. There are letters. There are gospels. There are prophets denouncing God's people and announcing imminent doom and destruction. There are odd customs. There is holy war. There is what some might call ethnic cleansing. There are long lists of names (geneaologies). There are lists upon lists of arcane rules that appear to have no relevance for the nineteenth-century, much less the twenty-first! There are culture gaps of thousands of years and miles that separate us from the events and people in the Bible. Is it any wonder that it's hard to get into (and even more difficult to get it into us)?

That's why I'm very excited about the newest addition of the Bible the International Bible Society is releasing this August called The Books of the Bible. What excites me most about this--and if you follow the link, you'll see for yourself--is that they are doing whatever they can to make the Bible more accessible and readable while still maintaining its integrity. All the books are still there, even if re-arranged into their probable historical order and in relation to other books of a similar theme, thrust, or style. Gone is the two-column format which makes our Bibles look more like a phone book than something we may want to read. Gone are the in-text chapter and verse divisions. Gone are the headings. And relegated to the back of each book are the study notes. The effect is that the Bible now looks like a book we might actually read.

Granted, it is still the Bible. All of the books are in tact. Obviously. But this format restores the text. It removes it, hopefully, from our tendency to proof-text and atomize our Scriptures. And while it may prove more difficult to use this edition to memorize specific verses or passages, it hopefully will encourage a fuller reading--one that doesn't stop because of numbers which separate. "What God has joined together, let not man put asunder." I know, that's a poor example of proof-texting my point, but you get the picture. Those chapter and verse divisions are not original to the Bible, and as helpful as they are, they also prevent us sometimes from experiencing the Scriptures as one ongoing narrative, as a collection of whole books that reveal to us God at work in history and the world.

In my opinion, I am very appreciative of whatever will get us into our Bibles more easily. There are enough inherent barriers to good Bible reading that we need to overcome through study and homework, but the very manner of how our Bibles have traditionally been published and printed are themselves barriers to even cracking the spine. Eugene Peterson's The Message already had used a single column format without chapter and verse divisions; and it meant that we could pick up our Bibles like any other book, that is, in a format that was welcoming. I think of kids who inherit King James Bibles from their grandparents and can't understand a word of it. And given the offense and scandal of the biblical message, which makes it both bitter and sweet, whatever we can do to get the Scriptures into us is great news. In fact, it is good news. And isn't that what the Bible is all about in the first place?