When we read the Bible with the church we learn that not every line of Scripture has equal weight in answering the question, “Who is God and what is God like?”
We would have a very odd schizophrenic God if we took every line in the Bible as a literal revelation of the character and nature of God.
Athanasius wrote a work denouncing the projections and false images of God that ancient pagans worshipped. We need a new Athanasius to denounce the many idols of God that Christians worship when our God is divorced from God’s self-revelation in the flesh of Jesus.
There are descriptions of God in the Bible that are clearly false, as are many of the words of the friends of Job, yet that has not stopped some Christians from writing songs and casting ideas about God from those lines in Job as if God were like those false witnesses.
It’s refreshing to learn that the first Christians did not read the Bible in this way. They read the Bible as Jesus taught them to read it, in light of himself.
Following them, we do not read the Bible apart from its measure, apart from the Word made flesh.
When the fathers exhort us to meditate on the Word they mean the person of Jesus Christ. And this is what I mean when as a pastor I encourage those under my care to meditate on the Word.
There is, of course, a deep scriptural wellspring that resources this pondering but Christ is the Word they have in mind. Christ is everything. Christ is all.
“You search the Scriptures because you think they give you eternal life. But the Scriptures point to me! Yet you refuse to come to me to receive this life.” —John 5:39-40
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