The Bible
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“For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Romans 15:4).
I love the Bible. It’s God’s Word, our ultimate source of truth. It contains not only the grand story of the beginning of time and space and our Earth, but also the intimate story of God’s people, and the glorious coming of God’s Son Jesus Christ for our salvation.
But even so, I find that there are times in my life when my daily Bible reading becomes merely routine, if I happen to do it at all. In fact, sometimes I wonder about the Bible: Couldn’t God have given us a more efficient manual? What I mean is it sometimes seems so complicated. Did you know that the Bible has 66 books, containing 1,189 chapters and 31,170 verses? Instead of 17 major and minor prophets, for example, maybe we could have been given a list of the top 10 marriage tips instead?
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Then I think: God didn’t want to give us the kind of book that you read once and put on the shelf. He wasn’t interested in giving us a pamphlet. God wanted to give us something that would engage us and continue to challenge us for a lifetime. He, in His infinite wisdom, gave us a book that was so deep that we could read it every hour of every day of our entire lives and still not exhaust its wisdom.
If you’ve spent any serious amount of time reading the Bible you can probably attest to how you’ve read a passage a dozen or more times before, but somehow this time, it hits you in a totally new way as God illuminates your mind to deeper meaning and fuller understanding. “How did I not see it before?” you think. And it’s so amazing how deep this book is!
God Himself is like that: Our great God isn’t someone of whom you could say, “Oh, God? Yeah, I met him once, I think.” God is so amazingly great that it’s a lifelong process to know Him. He wants us not to just know ABOUT Him, but to know Him intimately. And for that, a simple pamphlet won’t do.
God, we thank you for your Word, the wisdom of which can never be exhausted!
Questions: What has God been challenging you in your recent Bible reading?
About this Author Darren Hewer
i thank God for His word and being able to read it
Darren, thank you for this devotional. I’m currently at Matthew 15 and 16. May I reitorate what you have said? That ”but somehow this time, it hits you in a totally new way as God illuminates your mind to deeper meaning and full understanding”. This is happening me to me and quite frequently lately. I am in my third year of reading Scripture. From Genesis to Revelations the first year I was watching the words go by, the second year, I found myself not ‘skipping’ just to ‘finish’ for the morning. This is my third year and I’ve been brought to much emotion when I actually knew this time round what it was the Scripture was saying, what God was telling me. It truly is a euphoric feeling. I pray that with God’s grace and mercy, I will mature with each page that I turn.
Amen
(my apologies, near the beginning of my comment I meant to say, ”May I ‘collaborate’ on what you have said?”
What really bothers me is the amount of killing, all the things like “eyes all around the wheel” and other things that are weird (right mow I’m reading Ezekiel) – what does this have to do with our salvation?