Getting to Know God through His Book

We look for God. We see him in the sky, the sun, the moon and the starts. We see him in nature, through beautiful mountain vistas and desert landscapes. We hear preachers preach about him and teachers teach about him. Our parents tell us about God. Sunday school teachers tell us about Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, Joseph, Moses and David. We watch movies, videos and Bob and Larry!

John Wimber used to say: “God’s got a book out!” We study the Bible. We attend Bible studies. We study Study Bibles. We try different versions. We look for God. Out of this search we come to know “God as we understand him.”

Somehow as I was growing up, the Bible became a textbook. I attended Christian school in grade school, high school and college. One of the required courses was Bible. I learned all of the parts of the Bible that my teachers thought were important to support the doctrines of my brand of church.

Later in life, when I had teenagers of my own, they were taking a course in the New Testament and asked for my help on their homework. As we talked about the assignment and I began to help it became clear pretty quickly that my children had never read the Bible for themselves. They knew John 3:16, but not the context. They had years of Bible as a required course in their education, but had never read the Bible!

My parents relied on weekly church attendance and “Sunday School” teachers to teach me about God. One of my favorite activities were the Bible “races.” The teacher would call out a text address: John 3:16! Psalms 23! First Corinthians 13! We students would turn in our Bibles as quickly as we could to the text and then jump to our feet and read out the verses. I learned the books of the Bible and where they were located and that it was good to find the verse quickly! There were prizes involved!

It wasn’t until much later in life that I ever sat down and read the Bible, not to find the answer to an assignment, or to win a prize but to get to know God. While this is only one way to find God, it is a good way.

When I was growing up, the Bible translation we used had been done in 1611 as commissioned by the King of England. With all the thees and thous and believests it seemed that God had hired Shakespeare to write his book. I was a teenager when the Good News for Modern Man version was published. One of my high school Bible teachers gave us the assignment to paraphrase passages of the King James Version in our own words. This was a great exercise for a teenager in the 60s!

About a year ago I spent a very driven six weeks paraphrasing the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. When I finished I was a different person inside.

Last year I had lunch with Tony and Felicity Dale, two followers of Jesus who have been practitioners of “Simple Church” for a number of years. I asked them how they helped new believers start on their spiritual journey. I loved their simple response. “First we get them baptized, then we usually start with the Gospel of John.” I had read their book, The Rabbit and the Elephant and knew that there Bible study method did not rely on deep scholarship or professorial teaching, but on letting God speak through the text.

The Gospel of John is a great place to start:  ¹ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was with God in the beginning. ³ Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. ⁴ In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. ⁵ The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. [John 1:1-5, NIV via Biblegateway.com]

Growing up in God means getting to know him. It involves “getting in the Bible and getting the Bible in you.” John Wimber used to teach that the Bible is like a menu in a Denny’s Restaurant, with pictures of a Grand Slam, Steak and Eggs or a Hamburger. He taught that some of us behave as though the menu is the meal! We try to eat the pictures. He was saying that there is more to a life in God than the consumption of the Biblical text. That reminds me, it’s time for breakfast. I think I’ll go get a Grand Slam.