Engaging the Bible: An Existential Journey

Now it's that principle that I want to translate now to the reading of the Scriptures. We're not to come to the Bible and simply remain aloof from its message, trying to reduce it to an objective bit of information that we are to dissect and analyze and record in our memory banks, but this book is a book that is filled with life. It is addressing us in the midst of the stream of our own lives, and if it is going to speak to us, we need to step into its skin, to read these stories in a certain sense as if they were written especially for us. [00:03:11]

The Bible is filled with drama, and to read it existentially means to try to bridge that gap between ourselves and the first century and the culture in which the Bible was written and try to project ourselves into the life situation of the Scriptures so that we can feel it as well as read it with our eyes. There's some license that goes on here that preachers use all the time. It involves the task of reading between the lines. [00:05:37]

I'm talking about feeling, what the people in the Scriptures are feeling, and supplying for ourselves the passion that comes from real life, because the biblical characters are not fictional. They are not fairy tale characters. They are real people -- real flesh, real blood -- and we need to be reminded if anything is the Scriptures themselves remind us from time to time, as St. James does in his epistles when he exhorts the people of God to pray. [00:11:22]

One of my favorite illustrations of the way we must try to recreate the situation comes in the tenth chapter of the book of Leviticus where we have there the record of the death of the sons of Aaron: Nadab and Abihu. We read the text as follows: "Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer and put fire therein and put incense thereupon, and they offered strange fire before the Lord, which He commanded them not, and there went out fire from the Lord and devoured them, and they died before the Lord." [00:12:21]

Now what do you think it was like for Aaron? Do you think Aaron, after he hears that his sons had been slain at the altar, casually strolled over to the tent of Moses and said, "Moses, I have a theological question for you. Perhaps you can help me. I'm just not quite sure why it is that God would take the lives of my two sons. Perhaps you can enlighten me." Do you think that's how it happened? [00:14:08]

I remember as a seminary student, we had to go through speech exercises in our homiletics class that we thought at the time were somewhat silly. We had to memorize little ditties and poems like, "Thou clear pure heart and bright, one by one like two hailstones, short words fall from my lips fast as the first of a shower. Now in twofold column, I am troche, dancing along now and sprightly. Your spring lane is dancing, lusty, titillacs, and the musical cadence goes on." [00:16:24]

And when the person comes to me and said, "I break down in my Bible study because I get bored," I say, "How can you get bored? The blood is flowing in the streets. The sexual impulses of men and women burn like fire throughout the Scriptures. Anger, hatred, hostility…" Again, I think of Kierkegaard who said about his own age in the nineteenth century in the church of Europe at that time, he said, "My complaint is not that this age is wicked. [00:18:40]

Now that's what I mean, that we get in touch with the lifeblood of Scripture as we read. If we practice looking for the drama, there's no way that we can be bored because I'm convinced, dear friends, that this book is the most dramatic book that has ever been written. I remember back in the forties, there was a radio program borrowed from the best-selling book by Fulton Oursler entitled, "The Greatest Story Ever Told." [00:19:43]

I can remember one last example that I'll give you. I think of reading in later on in the book of Leviticus where we read in the thirteenth chapter the following instructions. Listen to this as Leviticus thirteen and see how interesting Scripture is, "And the Lord spoke unto Moses and Aaron saying, 'When a man shall have in the skin of his flesh a rising, a scab, or a bright spot, and it be in the skin of his flesh like the plague of leprosy, then he should be brought unto Aaron the priest or to one of the sons of the priests. [00:20:48]

Even go from the Old Testament to the New and think of the drama that surrounds Jesus' ministry to the leper, how the leper comes down the street and sees Jesus and he cries out in a loud voice, "Jesus, have mercy upon me," and that wretched man is begging on the street, and Jesus walks over and breaks all the laws that are set forth here about contamination and contact with somebody involved with the scourge of leprosy. [00:24:34]

How would we understand it if we didn't first take the time to see the drama even in Leviticus, even in the dietary laws as we read the dietary laws and we say, oh, what could be more boring than what are we supposed to eat things that chew with their -- chew their cud, or how many hooves or cloves they have in their hooves, and all of that business. [00:25:35]

We wouldn't understand the drama if we didn't understand the crucial role that the diet provisions have for the one who is chosen of God to be special. It's all there. It's there in passion. It's there in drama, but for us to catch it and have it touch us where we live, we have to see the flesh, the humanity of the people in their existence and touch them, let their existence touch our existence. [00:27:01]