A few years ago, ministry group and eBook publisher AllAtHisFeet.com produced a series of ten small books. They are brilliant reading if one has a heart for going on deep into the things of God and being church (ecclesia) rather than attending church. This series embraces these titles: The Hammer; The Plow; The scales; The Crucible; The Sickle; The Trowel; The Sword; The Chisel; The Anvil; The Plumbline.
I mention this not
simply because I love their work, but because I see that, in our day, each of
these ten things can legitimately be seen as a metaphor for the word of God.
But before we go any
further, let’s all be clear that when I speak of the word of God, I do not mean the bible. We’ll get to that in a moment. For now, let me be clear that what I am
saying is that the word of God (in its proper understanding) can legitimately
be seen and experienced metaphorically as each of these ten implements.
And let me also be
very clear: the bible itself makes no claim to be the word of God, and it nowhere says anything that gives us
justification or permission to call it the
word of God.
For new covenant
believers – especially Gentiles – the word of God is inscribed on our hearts
and minds, according to the bible. And no-one knows the word of God like the
Spirit of God, and the Spirit of God is God’s gift to those who are born
again. To settle for the bible when the
Holy Spirit is available is a bit like winning the lottery and settling for
just a refund of the price you paid for your ticket. And it is an affront and an insult to God.
Or it’s a bit like
settling for a toy scale model of the real thing.
In keeping with
modern Western society’s fetish for over-simplification, christians in the West
tend to want one simple idea and one simple word for more complex ideas where
the New Testament uses multiple words.
We use the term “the word of God” where the New Testament uses three, perhaps four,
words to speak of four separate and distinct ideas. However, the biblical idea of “the word of
God” is more complex and much deeper than any one of these words – indeed, possibly
more than all the words combined.
Whether we are
talking Old Testament or New Testament, God’s idea of “the word of God” is God
communicating with His dearly beloved children.
When the heroes of the Old Testament were meditating on the word of God,
they were probably not reading a text but mentally and spiritually recalling
things God had said and done. A word
often inserted into the Psalms by their writers is (in English) Selah.
It was an instruction to “pause and reflect”; to stop reciting or
reading and think for a while about what has just been said.
This is the basic
idea of meditation. It is the process in
which we respond to the speaker or writer internally, sometimes silently,
sometimes by muttering. My wife is a
sign language interpreter and I often catch her thinking and talking to herself
in sign language; it’s one of the ways she ‘meditates’: mulls things over.
It is the process by
which we mull over the implications and applications of what has been heard or
said; it is how we process the information or instructions we get from hearing
and reading. Some people liken it to
mastication; the word used to describe a cow chewing the cud. We “chew over” things to work out what they
mean and how, when, why they might apply to us and our circumstances.
Of course, the
crucial question is what are we meditating on, mulling over and
processing? And to many the world over,
it is the bible. To me, the bible is
only a part of it. If we in fact receive
the gift of the Holy Spirit, then we can have “the word of God” in full and
abundant measure, not just the sixty-six or seventy-three books traditionally
nominated as “the word of God” by men.
And it’s not just to me: none of the characters in the bible had the 66
or 73 books we now have. For instance,
most of the record of Acts in the New Testament was written on the basis that
‘scripture’ was the books of the Jewish Torah.
And what was King David meditating on?
It certainly wasn’t “The Bible”.
And even for King David, the scrolls of the Jewish Torah were not public
documents to be read by anyone who so chooses.
But I don’t want to
spend much time on this, since most of the people reading this are not Jews,
and we are no longer under the promises and the blessings and curses, or the
terms and conditions, of the old covenant.
For us as Gentiles, we need to understand that we cannot have Jesus and the
old covenant way. In relation to us, God
vacated the old covenant when He established the new covenant in His Son Jesus
the Christ. And in that new covenant,
the word of God is all God
communicates with His beloved sons – Jesus the unique first-born, once-born
son, and all those (male or female) who put their trust in Jesus who thus
become the “many sons” He brings to glory as in Hebrews 2:10.
The word of God is
not just the bible. In fact, the bible
itself, as I said, uses three words to convey a richer and deeper meaning of
the idea of “the word of God”. And even
then, the idea is larger in several ways than the combined meanings of these
words. So let’s think about it for a
while – let’s meditate on it; let’s mull it over; let’s ‘chew the cud’; let’s
process the information God has permitted us to have concerning this matter of
His word to us.
Cheers,
Kevin.
No comments:
Post a Comment