We are currently in the middle of a sermon series entitled "The Good News," in which we are taking a look at what God's plan of redemption is for creation from Genesis to Revelation. Throughout this series, there has not been much practical application time during sermons beyond this: "we must be a people who do the hard work of reading and studying the Bible." Along with this hard work of studying the Bible, we must be a people who allow what we find out to shape us, to help us on our journey towards knowing Jesus more and more and on our journey towards Christ-likeness.
Yet this isn't easy, even if there are 5 or 6 Bibles in every home, one for each room of the house. Often, the Bible becomes a place where we flip to our favorite passages to dwell with and linger over. Or if we read it in large swathes, we don't understand most of what is being said. Instead of reading the text slowly to comprehend it, we "zone out" and suddenly we're 5 chapters ahead of the last thing we remember reading and have no idea of what is going on. Or perhaps we readily and quickly make direct applications of the text to ourselves without first understanding what it meant to the audience of the day. On the other hand, we can all too readily dismiss something as useless and irrelevant for today instead of thinking about what the text meant and then saying, "how does this help me think about my life today in light of Jesus Christ?"
Take for example, the following declaration of judgment in Jeremiah 17:4-5 which reads, "By your own act you shall lose the heritage that I gave you, and I will make you serve your enemies in a land that you do not know, for in my anger a fire is kindled that shall burn forever. Thus says the LORD: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the LORD" (NRSV). If we take these verses out of context, not knowing Israel's history or Jeremiah's place in it, what would this text mean to us? Perhaps we would think one of the following suggestions:
1) "Irrelevant because this is for Israel, not us. Who reads the Old Testament anyway? Get me back into Jesus/Paul." Then we close the Bible and go back to something more relevant, like watching the Walking Dead.
2) "Whew, those Israelites are bad. They kindle the LORD's anger. God gets angry. I wonder if God is angry at me? 'Cursed are the ones who trust in mere mortals...' I guess I shouldn't talk about [insert deep wound about molestation/rape/abuse] because I should just give this to God. Maybe that's why those bad things happened - I lost my heritage because I trusted in people instead of the Lord, who then got angry at me. I should never have trusted [insert person who hurt us]. Only the Lord. I will never trust again."
3) "'Don't trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength' - see my wife is wrong. I shouldn't go to the gym or workout to get healthy, because then I'd be trusting in my body, which is clearly a sin. Therefore, I should sit down and watch TV."
Then we might close up our Bible's, say a short prayer, and we are done for the day. The problem with this is each and every one of the above perspectives [admittedly hyperbole] has something that is not quite what Scripture, or God, intended in it. Stay tuned until next time when we'll see why these thoughts are actually abusive of Scripture and the importance of studying Scripture seriously.
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