In America, we have a church on every corner, yet we’re still looking for the power of God. Could it be that the power of God is found not in a place, but when the individual decides to die to themselves and become, not like Paul or John or Peter, but become the person God created them to be, here in this culture?
A guy at my church asked me a great question about the Bible the other day, and I answered him in an extensive, drawn out type answer that took a while to research. In the midst of my research on the question, I found this article by NT Wright, who, in my humble opinion is the man, and at the same time is not trying to be the man. In the aforelinked article, Wright asserts:
“The Christian Bible we know is a quite astonishingly complete story, from Chaos to Order, from first creation to new creation, from the Garden to the City, from covenant to renewed covenant, and all fitting together in a way that none of the authors can have seen but which we, standing back from the finished product, can only marvel at.”
This is a great article and worthy of your reading time, but something that stuck out to me – a question I would like to raise – is this: Do we do Scripture injustice by giving “new believers” excerpts of Scripture, specifically John and Romans, in an effort to teach them a specific theology bent relevant to these two books?
I mean, in one sense, I understand that all Scripture is powerful, in that it is inspired by God, and so excerpts are fine, no matter what books of the Bible they carry. But that’s not why we offer up those two books as relevant to those who are “new to the faith”, is it? We want them to read those two books because we want them to believe what we believe – I think – about the Bible, and our thought is that if they read those two books first, what we believe will come easier to them.
I’m not a legalist about this thought, in fact, it’s just a thought. But I wonder if we take the appropriate story out of the Bible when we hand someone an excerpt of Scripture, and say, “Here you go. You don’t need to know why you need salvation, redemption, and the like. You just need to know that you do. So get in the Christian line, sis (or bro, if she is a he).
Right now I’ve just finished Deutoronomy, and am reading Isaiah and Hebrews, and the light bulb just kind of clicked on today reading each of these books, that I wonder if people are missing out on the full experience at first because the meat is so important that we forget the forks and diningware, not to mention the appetizers?
It’s just a thought, but I’d like to hear yours.
