Just tomorrow reading through the Bible for the year will bring me to books of the New Testament. With fewer than four complete months left in 2016, I am reminded how much the Bible depends on the Old Testament and how beautifully the New Testament harmonizes with the Old. After you meet Jesus, then you see Him in the Creation, walking in the Garden, eating with Abraham under the oak trees, standing before Joshua as the Captain of the Lord’s Army, and walking with the three Hebrew children in the furnace. Jesus incarnates the Old Testament: a second Adam, born like Samuel through a miracle, David’s royal heir, the Son of Man, and the Suffering Servant.
There is one book and Jesus is the key to interpreting every word, story, and image.
Yesterday creates today and then today gives life to what was good about yesterday: the Old Testament births the New Testament and the New Testament completes the Old making both one textual family always living. This ancient wisdom is never dated, because the Word was, is, and is to come: Jesus is alive and speaks to us through the Written Word by the power of the Spirit.
He is the Word that spoke the eternal, perfect Word of God in ancient times and then came and spoke the Word in a human body: Jesus. After He defeated death, the Holy Spirit spoke the Word to the apostles and their servants and so gave us a complete, living Word.
It is complete, because it says all that it should say. It is living, because in the church, Christ’s Body this Word is applied to us. We are alive, Christ lives within us, and so the Words on the printed page can be spoken in us and if God gives us grace through us. This is not a mere image, but a beautiful, daily miracle if we will make use of it.
In a perfect world, our spiritual senses would be clean. We would see God and His will clearly and hear His voice perfectly. That is not the world we inherited or that we make for ourselves. Noise drowns out His voice, because He finds no need to shout. In the same way, if we only had a perfect record of His Word, then there would be little hope that we would ever understand it correctly. God’s Word is dangerous to our pride, to our broken desires, and to the devils and so while the book would be perfect, our broken understanding of it would be deadly dangerous.God has given us both His Spirit within us to guide us, His Word writing on our hearts, and a text external to us. Our inner understandings are checked by the external Word and our reading by the promptings of His Spirit in the community of His people (the Church).
Yet as nobody needs to remind me, even so we mess up the message! We drown out God’s message for our desires. He says to love our enemies and we try to figure out when we can kill them before we learn to love them. He says to crucify our desires and we look for reasons to follow our hearts. He says: “die to self” and we say “we aren’t that bad.”
The good news is that all over the world, people hear God’s Word. They mostly got it . . . and have gotten it . . . and will get it. They reject the libertine and the pharisaical . . . a Word primarily based on now and a Word that is not applied to now. It is hard to tolerate those who look for something new, but cannot be bothered to take time to read the Bible, a book that God will make new to me in the context of the times it describes. It is a book of history and as history repeats in each generation: tyrants boast, the rich oppress the poor, virgins conceive, and God is with us.
Tomorrow Blessed Matthew will have a chance to speak to me the new word that is the old word with skin on it. May the Word within me take the Words I have read and will read and make them life to me.
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