So… what IS this thing on my bookshelf?

I strongly suspect that inside a majority of houses a Bible can be found lurking somewhere. Jammed in between other stranger-delivered books like the Book of Mormon and the Baghavad Gita (“As It Is, With A Forward By George Harrison”). Great-granny’s carefully-preserved King James black-leather-bound monster with illustrations by Gustav Dore, inherited for years, with no-one game to remove it from the house. Nestled comfortably alongside Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”, Shakespeare’s works and other essential pieces of important literature which never actually get read – but no-one should be without.

But what is, exactly, that thing sitting in my bookshelf?

It is, of course, a remarkable book. For those who view the Bible as (purely) a collection of literature from the Ancient Near East, that’s actually a good starting point. It’s a collation of sixty-six books of wildly varying literary genres. Its contents range from soaring, soul-searing poetry to essays in existential angst (long before Kierkegaard gave it a name), from grand epic storytelling to detailed census records, from deeply personal studies on the nature of suffering to delicate and subtle erotic poetry. There are accounts of atrocity, anger, destruction, terror and mayhem. There is also mercy, peace, tranquility and deep, deep compassion. And that’s just the Old Testament – the “first half”, if you like. We haven’t even considered the wisdom of Christ as viewed through the lens of the four Gospel writers, or Paul’s new perspective on theology (no apologies to N.T. Wright), or the wild imagery of John’s Apocalypse.

The reasons for its enduring literary legacy hardly need repeating – this book is unique.

For the Christian reader the Bible is much, much more than even that. If you’re reading this, and you aren’t a Christian, I’ll try and explain why we cherish it so deeply. Hold the scepticism aside (for the moment, anyway) – it pays to understand why we think the way we do. Even if you disagree, understanding  this will hopefully start explaining why we say and do what we do.

This is the Word of God. This is where the One who made the universe, and everything in it, tells us His mind. It is the way that Yahweh Elohim – the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Father of Jesus – has chosen to show Himself most clearly. We believe that this has been passed from the mind and the heart of the Living God to the minds of men and into recorded, written language. Whether given to human writers by divine prophetic vision, by hard toil and research, or by multiple authors and editors (and there’s ample evience of all of the above), we hold that what we have in front of us has been breathed out by God, and has been breathed-in by man.

The great apostolic theologian, Paul, wrote to his protege Timothy, and he reminded him that “from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. All Scripture,” he continues, “is breathed-out by God, and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.” [1]

For teaching. For reproof and correction. For training. A while ago I worked for a company that had about 180 retail outlets. The sheer volume of instructional data was phenomenal – training material, operations manuals, product information, business and marketing campaigns – all with the aim of teaching, training and laying down rules, limits and consequenses. As someone who had the responsibility of writing some of the training manuals and work methods, I can tell you that the material adds up, accumulates… and gets heavy.

This book, this Bible, is unbelievably compact considering the job that it has been designed to do. And most Bibles printed today are designed to be portable, to be of utility to the modern reader, to be accessible to today’s individual. The days of gathering around the parish priest as he read Latin from an enormous book are well and truly over – the wish of the old Reformers has been granted, and almost everyone can read the Bible for themselves.

I have on my desk one of those old black monsters. It’s an 1800’s Authorized Bible, clad in textured leather (partly by design, partly by age and elements from well over a century’s use) with india-inked, gold-edged pages, that old heavy typeset that physically indents the paper… and it weighs considerably more than my city’s telephone book. Hardly the stuff of portability – although, in fairness, it was a lightweight in its day, and could fit into a saddlebag of a travelling preacher.

In comparison, a friend of mine has the same Bible stored in his iPhone, downloaded out of thin air, now lightly sitting inside his pocket. His Bible, literally weighs nothing – it’s an app. He can read it, send it, cut-and-paste bits into other documents. He can write sermons on the train, and once attempted to do the same while driving his green Kombi-van.

With these advances, themselves as revolutionary as Gutenberg’s printing press, it is good to know that the Bible is being read. Not just read, but studied, consuled, commented upon, examined, taught from, prayed over, and pondered over in solitude, in Bible-study groups, congregations and television audiences, in seminaries, universities and colleges around the world.

The Word is being read!

[1] 2 Timothy 3:15-17 (ESV)