Handling the Word of God

Zondervan, publisher of the New International Version of the Bible, is conducting a “Bible Across America” tour in honor of the NIV’s 30th anniversary, reports the Los Angeles Times. “Hand-Copying the Bible, One Person Per Verse,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 17, 2009, http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bible17-2009feb17,0,3674654,full.story. The tour will take six months, across all 50 states and include 90 cities, during which 31,173 people will copy one verse each, two times, to create two completely handwritten versions of the Bible. One will be donated to the Smithsonian Institute, the other to the International Bible Society. Zondervan plans to publish the handwritten bible as “America’s NIV.” http://www.bibleacrossamerica.com/home.php.

Isn’t this an incredible project, both timely and relevant? Many believers evidently agree, lining up the past two Sundays at Saddleback Church in Lake Forrest and Rolling Hills Covenant Church in Rolling Hills to participate. At a time when many people consider the Bible an anachronism, others across the country are reaffirming its worth word for word and line by line.

As I read about believers cherishing the opportunity to reverently transcribe printed text into their own script, I was reminded of 1 John 1:1: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched – this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.”

John was speaking of Jesus, the Word made flesh, authenticating his existence as both God and man. The Bible is about as close as we can get to that hands-on experience John speaks of. We long to have all our physical senses, not just our spirit, engaged in our love affair with Jesus. And that, I think, is why we sometimes have such convoluted relationships with Jesus the Word and the Bible the word.

How do we create the balance that seamlessly weaves the two together?

Perhaps, like me, you find Bible study hard and memorizing scripture even harder. We would rather hear the word of God directly from the original source. But I’ve found the flaw in that reasoning: My spiritual organ is still largely encased in unredeemed flesh. I don’t hear well some of the time and don’t always interpret what I hear accurately. Because of that, I’m forced to delve deeply into the written word for confirmation. It’s a necessary tension.

Others of you may be so uncomfortable with this uncertainty that you’d rather rely on scripture as your only source of revelation. There’s nothing wrong with that, I suppose, except that you might be missing a rich well of affirmation and an intimacy that you won’t find anywhere else. I think that without a live interaction with Jesus, the word of God becomes a rule book, easy to dismiss as out of touch with changing cultural and moral values. A steady diet of Jesus the Word keeps scripture alive, urging us to the relevancy of conforming our actions to its wisdom.

I think the focus of our private devotions should be the integration of our relationship with Jesus and our relationship with the Bible. And I think at that juxtaposition, both our physical senses and spiritual being’s craving to know Jesus gets met. What do you think?

The poet William Rose Benet put it this way in the first stanza of “The Words of Jesus”:

When you read what he said
It never stays on the page,
It comes alive in the air. Aramaic or Greek
I have not, but the words glow and speak
Even in English, the words have joy like rage,
They step over aeons, march over ages,
They are not antlike marks on whispering pages!