USING THE BIBLE VERSUS BELIEVING THE BIBLE

In a little-known movie from thirty years ago, a man on a bulldozer is about to drive through the door of a small country church. In the scene, the pastor walks out, sets a Bible on the ground in front of the loader, and says, “Nobody moves that book.” 

The contractor — Billy Bob Thornton, in Robert Duvall’s The Apostle — climbs down out of the cab. “I’ll move it. I’ll run over you. I’ll run over all of you.”

“Nobody moves that book.”

The congregation behind the pastor begins to repeat it. The contractor bends down to lift it. His hand stops. He cannot. The pastor puts a hand on his shoulder, and the man begins to weep. It is said that when Duvall delivered the altar call, preaching from the Bible, in the movie, a member of the film crew gave his life to Christ on set.

Such is the power of the word of God.

Even when you are play-acting with it, God is not play-acting with you.

It's been said, "I don't care what you believe about the Bible. I care how you use it."

In another place, there was a church, somewhere, that had its congregation hold up their Bibles every Sunday and recite a pledge. This is my Bible. I am what it says I am. I have what it says I have. I can do what it says I can do.

It was a minute of confession with Bibles raised, but then a sermon of polished self-esteem — your best life now, and how God wants it for you. Then a long offering. Then out the door. That's play-acting with the Bible in real life. They "believed" in the Bible, but they did not use it well because they did not read it.

It's not the error of any one particular tradition, but you can find Christians in many traditions like this. We can have right answers memorized from a catechism and a theology so neat that it fits on a single sheet of paper. What is it for if you don't read the Bible where it came from?

To use the Bible well, you must read it.

To read it well, you must read it in context, which means reading it both quickly and slowly. Fast enough to know the whole story. Slow enough to be cut by the parts that are doing surgery on you in the moment, where the words act as a scalpel to the heart, cutting away the sin that entangles.

The big picture and the detail. Both. Not one or the other.

We may have a favorite chapter or verse, but no idea where it sits in the story. Or we generally know the big story that Jesus saves us, but we have never let any single verse land hard enough to leave a healing bruise. Either way, we can have a Bible we believe but do not use.

James 2:19 says it this way. “You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe — and shudder.” Even the demons have orthodoxy. They could pass the theology exam. They could correct your doctrine over coffee. What they do not have is the friendship of God.

James presses, “Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar?” Abraham heard the word of God — take your son, your only son, whom you love — and walked up the mountain. He did not parse it first. He did not write a paper on the typology. He did not say, Yes, Lord, I see what you are doing here. I love you for it. He went.

Only then, James says, was the Scripture fulfilled: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness — and he was called a friend of God.”

Not a man who believed something about God.
A friend of God.

We must read slowly when we're on this mountain.

Abraham obeyed, and that verified his belief. The sacrifice was stopped when the angel called. There was a ram was caught in the thicket, and Abraham came back down with his son.

But when Jesus was crucified, God the Father went all the way through with what he had asked Abraham to begin. God delivered up his only Son, whom he loved, on the same range of hills, for friends of his who had not yet shown up. Romans 5:8 says, "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Abraham’s mountain was a test. Calvary was not.

One person has said, "This is the strange asymmetry at the center of the Bible. We are summoned up a mountain we cannot climb. He climbs it for us. That is what the Bible is for. Not a pledge. Not a totem, but rather a summons, a surgery, a friendship."

I do not care what you believe about the Bible. I care how you use it.

One of the best ways to use it is to pray it. Pray God’s words back to him. Put your name in the petitions. Put your sin in the repentances. Put your fear in the psalms. Put your hope where the gospel keeps putting it — in the only Son who actually went up the hill.

Read it fast enough to find yourself in the story.

Read it slowly enough to let the story find you.

Then walk where it sends you.