While discussing faith with my sister-in-law (who is not a believer) last night, she asked me, "What do you get from it? What does reading the Bible do for you?" My reply was probably about a half hour long. It's a very difficult question to answer. I'll try to re-explain it here.
For one, it's a great book. I've always been a weirdo who liked Shakespeare and since most people around have had a taste or two of Shakespeare in some way and have a sense of the difficulty we all have in interpreting it, it's a great example for comparison. In the opening scene of one play (I'm too lazy to look it up or try to remember which at the moment...), a man bites his thumb and it causes a kerfuffle. To us, that makes no sense, but venturing into the context within which it was written, we find out biting the thumb was kind of the old version of giving the finger (i.e. offensive). Reading and studying the Bible requires that sort of contextualization, but it's beyond that.
You can master Shakespeare to a certain extent. You can take a passage, rip it to shreds and own it. You can know it inside and out. I believe you can't do that with the Bible for a number of reasons.
First, the translation. The Bible is written in languages wherein the words have multiple meanings. Add all those meanings together and you have the potential for never fully grasping what the author (or God) fully intended.
Second, the context. Sure, some Bible scholars who study it forever can get an idea of the context of all of it, but the rest of us have to rely on the knowledge of others to get an idea what was going on back then. And even then, as we see in our every day lives, times change quickly and societal behavior is pretty complex. Different larger areas have different customs and within those areas there are different customs and so on. Groups within groups within groups make it hard to point out one behavior and say, "Back then, this is what people did." Luckily, I guess, the Bible focuses on one main group, right? Even though it seems to span a vast piece of land...
Third, the Bible moves the spirit. I believe that every time you crack open the Bible, the words reflect your mood and your place within your soul. You could probably read the same passage every day and every day, see something different in it. The Bible's just like that somehow.
... which brings me to another reason I love the Bible: trying to study the Bible teaches you a new way of learning.
The idea that the Bible changes with the heart with which you read it is what made it so hard for me to read it in the beginning. I started reading it with no intention on believing it. I just wanted to learn what it was all about. The problem with that idea is that the Bible is partly textbook, partly poetic, partly a self-help manual, partly... well, everything and every genre. There's even music in there. So to learn it, you have to learn it through each genre. Like my aunt told my little cousin a long time ago, "Watermelon is like cereal. You have to drink and eat at the same time," so is the Bible only on an infinitely more important scale.
While I finished my biology degree, I learned how to learn biology. In the process, I took English courses, journalism courses and political science courses (along with others) and each one of those areas taught me a different way of learning. While biology requires great attention to detail and to slight changes, political science focuses on the big picture and major changes. And while English classes focus on symbolism, choice of words and so on, journalism applies a sort of cynicism and manipulation to the concepts. Everything you learn comes with learning how to learn it.
Learning the Bible was so difficult for me in the beginning. On top of the three things I mentioned above (translation, context and the complexity and spirit of God's message), I had to overcome the heart part. You cannot read the Bible and truly understand it without opening your heart to it. That's probably true of any book, any novel- you can't empathize with the characters or even fall in love with the characters without entering into the words with an open heart, ready and willing to be affected. For some reason, the Bible is different that way. I expected to read it as a textbook only and learn without having my soul affected in any way. I expected to learn it without letting the words change me.
The problem with that kind of learning is that when you hit my #3, you hit a roadblock. Without sounding too religiony, I believe that if your heart is closed to what you are reading in the Bible, God won't push it in. God will only let you learn what He feels you are ready to learn. He knew my heart was hard, broken and impenetrable in the beginning and He didn't force his way in. He didn't alter His words to affect me because I wasn't ready nor willing to be affected. Only after I prayed for clarity in His words, wisdom and meaning, did I start to feel affected.
That kind of prayer opens the heart. In the process of asking God to show me what He meant, I was opening my heart to being shown. And that's when the words got in.
My SIL is deeply spiritual and is learning to be a yogi. She's learning about meditation and while I was explaining all this to her, I realized the connection between Jesus and meditation. Through prayer, for example, the heart finds a certain measure of peace simply by letting go of the control for a little while. Lately, finding enough money for food is a little hard sometimes, and I have to give it up to God. "God, please provide for me," I pray, but in doing so, while I want to ask for food and specific things that will make my life easier, if I truly trust God, I have to let go of those specific things. God will provide for me, but it might not be in the way I expect. It might not be food or by somehow lifting the burdens off of me. For all I know, maybe the best thing for me is to endure some more suffering. Maybe the best thing, the thing which shapes my puzzle piece into the precise shape it needs to be, seems painful and horrible in this moment or in my moment of most suffering.
But that's where the meditation comes in. If every facet of our lives directs us in such a way that we contribute our part (or piece of the puzzle) to God's plan, then we should find peace in the bigger picture, the picture outside ourselves, outside our tangible lives and outside what we believe is important and is our purpose.
Sure, we do our best to get ourselves out of pain and suffering. We don't wait for God to get us out of our rut. We're proactive in our own lives. But at a certain point, things become out of our control and that's when we turn to God. Ideally, we'd turn to God even when we feel we have things figured out, but we tend not to. When things are under control or are going our way, we tend to forget how many things God placed in our lives that contributed this picture of a life we have right now. I believe that's part of the reason God lets us suffer.
Jesus will do whatever it takes to solidify the bond we have with Him. If you don't fully grasp the love and the connection you have with Him, He'll make it so you do.
After I got betrayed, I started to question why God had brought this person into my life. Looking back on our relationship, he treated me so badly so often and the more I thought about it the more the badness outweighed the good. I met him by a sheer twist of fate, and for that reason, I immediately thought he was my "one". He broke my heart in one of the most terrible ways imaginable and left me shattered. What was this all for? Why did God introduce this character into my life story only to have him destroy me? Was it just to show me God, even though he was a terrible example of a Christian? This morning, while listening to a sermon on the way to work, I figured it out.
He was smart. He was a rocket scientist (kinda literally) who believed that the Bible was the word of God (even if I'd discover later on that he didn't really know it). He didn't even know why he was an aerospace engineer. He didn't even like planes. He didn't particularly care for them at all, but somehow, he was led into that program, finished it and got a job with a prestigious branch of the US government. That's when I found him. He had just started that job. Whether I chose to or not, the fact that he worked there probably did affect my opinion of him. Later on, I'd discover he was miserable there and told him to quit and move out of that city, even finding him jobs to apply to. But I digress.
Here, in this simple twist of fate, one of the smartest people I'd ever know came into my life and I fell hard. But there was some fine print. His "one" in his head was a Christian. Eventually, he gave me a Bible and everybody thought I cracked it open to please him. But in all honesty, because I was ready to marry this guy and he wanted kids (I hadn't wanted any up to that point), I did it for my kids. If they were going to be Christian, I was going to have to encourage them. I did want them to be Christian, simply because I wanted them to have something I didn't while I was growing up. I wanted them to know that they are loved all the time, and from what I knew at the time, that's what God does.
Once I cracked open that Bible though, I was on my own. That's why it was so hard for me to figure out what this guy's reason was in my life. He didn't help me be a Christian. If anything, he made me hide it and feel ashamed of it. The passion I developed for learning it threatened his lack of Christianity and so I stopped talking about it with him.
When he got rid of me, it was next to impossible for me to attribute my believing to him coming into my life because I'd worked so hard at it for so long without any support from him. Meanwhile, he was betraying me and hurting me every chance he got in the most unBiblical ways.
But my point is this: without his obviously scientific brain and the impression that he might actually be smarter than me, without that twist of fate, without falling for him, without preparing myself and my soul for his babies, I would never have gotten my heart to a place where I would pray for meaning from the words before reading the Bible. I needed that introduction to get me started. I needed this illusion of a man to open my eyes to the rationality of religion.
And I needed the fall- the betrayal, the anger and the shattering of my soul- to submit to God and let Him piece me back together.
I can kind of picture Him standing there, watching His plot unfold in the life of a girl who probably has never felt loved in her entire life. How else was He supposed to get in? My heart was a two way mirror. I emitted love, but I never let it in. And God shattered the crap out of it in such a terrible way to get at me.
God does provide, whether we like it or not.
So I prayed and I read my Bible and the characters started to affect me. First I read Matthew, then John and by the end of John, John's love for Jesus made me cry.
The problem with falling in love with Jesus, the character in the Bible, is that you end up... falling in love with Jesus. And as I've learned from reading and listening to Tim Keller, if Jesus is not God, then none of it matters, but if He is God, then I owe Him my life. The fact that I exist at all becomes Jesus. Jesus becomes everything.
And you know, it's really hard to fall in love with a character who has a kind spirit beyond our comprehension, and who opens your soul up in the most brutally amazing way and then close the book and go back to thinking you were ok the way you were.
At some points, even now, I wonder if the only reason I believe it is because I love it, not because I actually believe there is a God. I love learning it, I love what the story is about, I love the way it moves my soul, I love the way it opens my heart and challenges me to forgive and grow and love.
What it amounts to, in spite of my deep-seeded agnostic rebellion and pure rejection of religion, is that somehow, I love Jesus.
And that's what I get from the Bible. That's what it does for me.
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