The Bible - magic book or divinely inspired?

All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. 2 Timothy 3:16-17

Something rather different today. When publishing a post I generally try to keep it to about 800 words. But today I have broken my own rule, for reasons I will explain later. I flag this up at the start, so that if you feel a couple of thousand words is more than you want to bother with you are warned in advance and can click off. I hope you won’t, of course. But I just wanted to be fair!

So… here we go.

The story of how James and John, the sons of Zebedee, asked Jesus for the places of honour in his final kingdom prompted various thoughts in my last two blogs. Especially, it reminds us of the sheer humanness of Jesus, that though he was the Son of God both his physical powers and his spiritual authority were limited: “such a thing is not for me to grant”, he said of their request. It reminds us that Jesus is fully human as well as fully divine.

And the story certainly reminds us of the humanness of the disciples! It seems they could be sinfully ambitious; they had their rivalries and jealousies; no doubt there were personality clashes from time to time. Which I found encouraging, as I thought of the many imperfections of myself and my fellow church members! God in his grace chose to use those imperfect men, so why not us too…?

But one thing there wasn’t space to comment on was what some people would call a contradiction between Mark’s account in Mark 10: 35-45 and Matthew’s in Matthew 20:20-28. Mark tells us that it was James and John themselves who approached Jesus directly with their request; but Matthew says it was their mother on their behalf (while they, presumably, stood by, perhaps looking a touch embarrassed).

Need this bother us? There are Christians who are so schooled in the belief that the Bible is the inspired word of God that they do find such “discrepancies” or “inconsistencies” troubling. In my own younger days in the Christian life I was one such - I used to turn quite eagerly to books (which seemed to be published at regular intervals) with titles like “Explaining Bible difficulties” or “How to reconcile Bible differences”.

“Ah!”, I would think, “this book, written by a real Bible scholar, will put me straight on this matter”. But that never seemed to happen; such books invariably disappointed. True, they could often be helpful in other ways; but the fact is that some of the explanations seemed pretty feeble, and some required unconvincing mental contortions. It took me quite a time to reach the point of saying to myself, “Perhaps this is the way the Bible is meant to strike us! Perhaps God expects us to live with unresolved questions; so we might as well get used to it, and relax”.

Putting aside for a moment the James/John story, this question raises many issues about the Bible, about in what sense it is inspired by the Holy Spirit, and about how we should read it. And this is such an important question that I felt it was worth digging into in greater than normal length.

I think there are at least three main principles we always need to approach the Bible with.

First, we need to recognise that while the Bible is divinely inspired it is also humanly written. That doesn’t mean it contains errors or mistakes, but it does mean that it bears the hall-marks of its human authorship. I think we can draw a parallel between Jesus as the living Word of God and scripture as the written Word of God.

Imagine that you could time-travel back to the days of Jesus. You walk down a road near Jerusalem and you see a group of men sitting in the shade by the roadside. Somebody tells you, “Oh, that’s Jesus of Nazareth, the latest prophet, taking a break with his disciples”. Really! You look again with a special interest, for obvious reasons. At first you can’t decide which one is Jesus; they’re all just sitting together chatting.

What do they look like? They’re wearing - well, whatever men of their ages and social standing at that time and place generally wore: light tunics, sandals, perhaps a home-spun robe thrown over the shoulder. Some are bald, some are bearded, some tall, some short. Perhaps one  walks with a limp; another squints as if his eyes aren’t too good.

If you hadn’t been told who they were you wouldn’t have given them a second look. Just ordinary men, perhaps some of them looking a touch scruffy. I wonder if Jesus had some sort of facial blemish, like a wart or a mole (if indeed we are right to think of warts or moles as being “blemishes”). The church has traditionally applied Isaiah 53:2 to the coming Messiah – “he had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” – so why not?

Such was Jesus, the living Word of God.

And it’s the same with the Bible, the written Word of God. A collection of books gathered together over several centuries, the Bible is of its own place and time. It belongs to the first century AD and before; and it contains many passages, in both the Old Testament and the New, which leave us puzzled. This puzzlement may be due to things which are completely outside our sphere of experience, like worship customs in ancient Israel; or events which feel disturbingly alien to the spirit of Jesus, like the wholesale slaughter of defeated enemies in the time of the kings; or just details of historic events – dates, statistics, locations - which don’t seem to tally with one another.

But – and this is the point – such difficulties are exactly what we ought to expect from a collection of ancient documents. The Bible is an inspired book; but it isn’t a magic book! In the ancient world there was not the same attention to detail that we would expect from modern historians who have to make sure that every i is dotted and every t crossed.

Just as Jesus, the living Word, had his human “blemishes” and weaknesses, so too does the Bible, the written Word.

Tuning back to the New Testament, have you ever noticed, for example, that the order of Jesus’ three temptations (recorded by Matthew and Luke only) differs according to which gospel you happen to be reading? Matthew 4 gives them in the order 1, 2, 3; Luke 4 gives them in the order 1, 3, 2. Those books I mentioned which claim to “explain Bible differences” can do a fairly straightforward job of explaining this discrepancy – if that’s what it is - but the “ordinary Christian” may find it a little disconcerting when they first notice it.

Another example: all four Gospels record the events of Resurrection morning, when Jesus rose from the dead (though Mark’s account is strangely brief - why does the risen Jesus never appear? and how odd that the last word of his book is that the women “were afraid”!). But have you ever tried to harmonise all the details of the four accounts – the part played by the angels, the comings and goings of the various women, the men who dashed to the tomb (everybody running, running, running!), the encounter between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and so on. Oh, it can be done, don’t worry about that! But let no-one pretend it’s easy!

The key point that emerges from all this is simple: the Bible is to be accepted on its own terms, as we find it. It is not for us to try to tidy it up when it seems to leave loose ends or fails to satisfy our curiosity on every point. Our business is to read it as it stands, and to read out of it the truth that God has placed there; it is not our business to read into it what we feel should be there, or what we want to find there. And if there are things we can’t understand, or things we really don’t like very much (as there will be), well, so be it. Just grasp the basic message! - about which there need be no doubt or disagreement.

Second, we need to recognise that the Bible contains a variety of types of literature, and we need to read it according to those types.

Read the Song of Songs as if it’s no different from the Gospel of John, and you’ll end up in confusion. The Gospel of John is in essence a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end; the Song of Songs seems to be a collection of poems, some of them of quite an erotic nature. Leviticus is essentially a collection of laws, most of which relate to worship practices in ancient Israel which, while they certainly point forward to Jesus, have little to say to us today of practical application.

Some Christians are so determined to find Jesus in every verse of the Bible that they twist its natural meaning into something altogether different. I was chatting with a friend once about Psalm 1, which I have always taken to be a beautiful little pen-picture of the godly man or woman: “Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked…” Just that, pure and simple. “Yes”, my friend agreed, “but of course it’s really about Jesus”. For a moment I was stumped: really about Jesus? No! How did he make that out! - that isn’t by any means the natural meaning! Certainly, it applies to Jesus, the sinless Son of God, above all others. But to say that it’s really about him is simply mistaken: it imposes on a simple, straightforward, ancient text an interpretation which is alien to its natural meaning.

The Book of Revelation is a report of a sequence of visions seen by a Christian imprisoned for his faith; it features all sorts of strange characters – angels, beasts, dragons - which obviously represent spiritual realities. But it is certainly not to be interpreted as a literal writing of history-in-the-future. Such fantastic readings have given rise to all sorts of weird and not very wonderful theories.

That word “literal” leads to another vital principle…

Third, we need to recognise that the Bible teems with poetic, metaphorical, non-literal figures of speech. And why wouldn’t it, like, as far as I know, every language spoken on the face of the earth?

I remember as a child at school learning a poem which contained the line, “the moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas”. It certainly interested me; it stirred my imagination; but it also puzzled me: how could the moon be a ship (ghostly or otherwise), and how could it be tossed about on waves (cloudy or otherwise)? But once I had grasped the fact that poetry often takes everyday things and events and makes them fresh and vivid by using non-literal language my problem disappeared. Of course! - suddenly I could see that threatening, stormy sky in a whole new way. To take that line of poetry literally would be to make it (quite literally) non-sense.

Much of the Bible, especially the psalms and the prophets, is poetry. One of the great advantages of modern translations is that they appear on the pages as such, following the lines of the Hebrew verse. Try to force them into a strictly literal meaning and you end up with nonsense.

In Job 3, for example, Job is described as “cursing the day of his birth”. Well, how absurd is that! How can a day long disappeared into the mists of time be cursed! And absurdity is piled on absurdity. Job wishes that day – a day probably fifty years gone by, bear in mind – to “perish”, (verse 3), to “turn to darkness”; he wants God “not to care about it” (verse 4); he even seems to imagine a group of people whose business in life is “to curse days” (verse 8) and he looks to them to support him in his cursing. Crazy!

Yet we know instinctively what Job 3 is about: it’s an elderly man who is almost out of his mind with misery and pain screaming at the world that he wishes he had never been born. And the absurdly exaggerated language conveys the sheer intensity of his wretchedness. Certainly Job 3:1 could have read simply “Job opened his mouth and said ‘I wish I had never been born’” and we could then go straight on to chapter 4. But how much we would have missed about the extremes of human suffering! Such is the divine inspiration of God’s word.

What sort of book is Job anyway? A straight historical account of an ancient figure? It certainly doesn’t read that way. It reads more like an ancient legend put into poetic form - indeed, with its little cast of characters, Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar and Elihu - almost like a play. The historic Job has been lost in the mists of time; we know next to nothing about him. But, boy, how much we can learn by sharing in his suffering!

The Book of Job is an extreme example of non-literal language, and a book which raises all sorts of vital questions. But to read it as, say, a source of doctrinal truth would be like reading a car maintenance manual as if it were a novel! – what, for example, is Satan doing in heaven in chapter one? Where is “the land of Uz”? Why does the prophet Ezekiel twice link Job with Noah and Daniel (Ezekiel 14), two men widely divided in time? We can only speculate.

The Bible contains history, poetry, prophecy, teaching, stories, and a whole lot more beside. To make proper sense of it we need to learn what sort of literature we are dealing with. That can be tricky, and opinions will differ; but we shouldn’t let that trouble us. What stands out crystal-clear is the essential message of Jesus as our Saviour, Lord, King – and Friend.

Enough! If you have stayed with me this far, thank you. But I’m afraid I may have tested your patience, so, though there is much more that could be said on such a vast subject, it’s time to stop.

And going back to where we started, if we’re still fretting about “was it James and John themselves, or was it their mother?”, then I’m afraid we’re wasting valuable time. What matters is (a) that that request was made, and (b) that Jesus used it as a launch pad for some vital teaching about his mysterious divine/human person and about the nature of leadership in his body, the church.

For the rest… why not just relax and let God make it plain as and when he sees fit?

Father, thank you that you have given to us the Lord Jesus Christ as your living Word, and also the scriptures as your written Word. Help us to live this earthly life daily in simple faith and humble obedience to all that you have revealed to us by your Holy Spirit. Amen.