Washed in the Word – Part 1 Reverence

Starting with the Right Approach

How you approach the Bible plays a crucial role in what impact it will have in your life. Many Christians hardly ever seriously spend time reading the Bible and others just look for a few words of encouragement. But God gave us His words in a book intending so much more. We have a book brought to us by the God who speaks and stars form while worlds come into existence. If you want to experience something transforming then you first must start with the right approach.

Approach the Bible with Reverence

Most people don’t pick up a random book and just start reading it. You usually pick up a book because you are atleast either curious about its subject or author, but then you may not have high expectations. You are more likely to choose a book with excitement and great expectation if you admire the author and have an interest in the subject matter. Lets give an introduction here to what the Bible is to hopefully spur you on to love the Bible and seek to read it well.

There is nothing like it in history.

Moses sat down in a tent they had setup outside the camp to meet with God (Ex 33). As on many occassions before (Ex 17,34 & Deut 17) he would write down on papyri what God would tell him to write. He had learned the Hieroglyphics and Hieratic script while growing up in Pharoah’s palace in Avaris. Also, someone had taken 22 of these characters and matched them up with the sounds of the language of his Hebrew people at some point over the 430 years they were staying in Egypt and he had learned this as well (Proto-Sinaitic). God had talked to other people before over the past millennia such as Job and Melchizedek and someone wrote down what Job had gone through and some other ancient texts seem to make similar statements to proverbs but this was the first time God was having a people he had chosen write down what He wanted them to for others to learn from for generations to come (Deut 6).

God had Moses and more than forty authors write sixty-six books over about 2000 years. Moses records how Adam and Eve fell to temptation from Satan in the form of a serpent and God told Eve (Gen 3) that her offspring would crush this serpent, referring to a coming savior. When God chose Moses ancestor, Abram, He said “Through you all nations of the world will be blessed” (Gen 12&18), once again referring to this coming savior. God said that Abram was righteous because of his faith not his accomplishments just as writers of Hebrews and Romans 1600 years later would talk about faith.

And He took him outside and said, “Now look toward the heavens, and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And He said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” Then he believed in the LORD; and He reckoned it to him as righteousness. (Genesis 15:5–6)

Job 19 looked forward to a coming redeemer. Micah 5 writes that this savior would be born in Bethlehem. Both Moses and Isaiah 53 described crucifixion hundreds of years before it was even a thing. All of these forty authors telling one story. The only example in history of a book compiled from many authors over more than a thousand years that comes close are the Vedas in Hinduism and the Daozhang of Taoism. However, all of these texts do not form a coherent story and focus more on methods to achieve immortality or improve your next life and to become like god. In the garden the serpent said “you will be like God”. These and all other religions in the world are about the ascent of man to god only the Bible tells the story of the descent of God to becoming a man. All this so that man could once again have a relationship with God his creator as it used to be at the dawn of creation.

There is nothing so indestructible through-out history?

After Moses judges were called upon to record God’s words and interactions with His people judges such as Joshua and Samuel and later kings such as David and Solomon, poets, prophets, and scribes took up the pen for God. But then civil war split the Kingdom. Evil kings took the throne such as Ahaz, Manasseh and Amon tried to destroy the scrolls of the law and tools in the temple, they even setup idols and sacrificed their own children. But then Josiah became king of Judah and had the Priests repair the temple and they found the scrolls of the law hidden away in a back room. It was not the first time and wouldn’t be the last time someone tried to destroy God’s word.

With His own people struggling against Him God calls Jeremiah and says to him “I put my words in your mouth, I have appointed you this day over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down,… to build and to plant”. Jeremiah was no king with such renown or authority yet what he was given, to tell everyone, were the very words of God. When God gives His word it goes out and it doesn’t come back until it has done what God wants done (Isa 55:11). Jeremiah tells of the fall of nations and the eventual fall of Jerusalem to Babylon all decades before it was to happen; but you see, these were words from God and so once spoken, once written by Jeremiah all of heaven starts moving to make it happen.

In 586 BC Babylon looted and burnt the temple and Jerusalem to the ground. Many were taken into captivity. God had Cyrus of Persia defeat Babylon in 541 BC and a couple years later he allowed the Hebrew people to go home returning what was taken from the temple as prophesied by Daniel decades earlier. Around 458 BC the scribe Ezra converted the Bible into the square Aramaic symbols from the script like ancient Hebrew symbols and the Bible was presented and read before the people (Nehemiah 8). In 332 BC while still under Persian rule Jerusalem surrendered to Alexander the Great. After Alexander died the son of his General Ptolemy had 72 scribes and priests come from Israel to Alexandria Egypt and translate the Bible into Greek about 282 BC. But Israel was under Antiochus and in 168 BC Antiochus IV attacked Jerusalem and destroyed all the books he could find in the Temple. The Greek empire gave way to the Roman empire (as fortold by Daniel). In 70 AD after a revolt Rome destroyed the temple and scattered the Jewish people around the nations. In 303 AD Emporer Diocletion forbid all Christian assemblies and ordered all churches and sacred texts destroyed.

By all accounts the Bible you have on your nightstand or smart phone should not exist. It has survived persecution and attempts to destroy it and erase it from history. It has survived the rise and fall of nations; no, it has brought about the rise and fall of nations, for God’s word will go out and nothing can stop it and those that try are the ones that fall. “For, all flesh is like grass, …the grass withers and the flower falls off, but the Word of the Lord endures forever” 1 Peter 1:24-25. All other books only have a hand full of copies from five-hundred to a thousand years after they were written to represent them. But the bible has some 25,000 copies a few with-in a hundred years of when the books were written.

There is nothing so necessary!

The words of the Bible have changed everything in history because they are God’s words. In fact in John chapter one he says that in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. God goes so far as to pretty much equate Himself with His words many of which are recorded in the Bible. It says in 2 Timothy 3:16 “All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.” The bible reveals to us the purposes of God and that He made the world to work in a certain way. It reveals to us who God is so that we can have a relationship with Him. God even commanded in Deuteronomy 6 and 11 “You shall place these words of mine on your heart and on your soul; and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, … you shall teach them to your children, and talk about them when you sit in your house, as you walk along the way, when you lay down and when you rise up. Write them on your door posts and your gates. that your days may be mutliplied”

All that it can do for us if we do what it says but it is so much more. In Dueteronomy 8 it says “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of GOD.” While food sustains life the very life of our soul and spirit can not continue unless it feeds upon the words of God. Its more then just reading the Bible to get a list of thing to try out or things to avoid doing so that you can get some benefit. Approach it with admiration and great expectation. Approach it with such reverence and then you will begin to find something that will turn everything else upside down.

The Bible is not a book for the faint of heart — it is a book full of all the greed and glory and violence and tenderness and sex and betrayal that befits mankind. It is not the collection of pretty little anecdotes mouthed by pious little church mice — it does not so much nibble at our shoe leather as it cuts to the heart and splits the marrow from the bone. It does not give us answers fitted to our small-minded questions, but truth that goes beyond what we even know to ask.

Rich Mullins, An Arrow Pointing to Heaven