The Bible always bores me.
That is, of course, until I actually read it.
Then, I am sometimes stunned by it.
Propaganda Galore?
But the problem with our inherited spiritual Neanderthalism, or at least with mine, is that while I am away from the Scriptures, nearly everything about the prospect of gleaning help from them seems laborious and dull.
After all, how can the Bible compare to a new Liam Neeson movie? Taken 27 will surely be released any day now! The Scriptures have no cool accents or special effects, at least not that we can see any way.
Weird names a plenty, sure, weirder perhaps than Jango Fett, Kylo Ren or Grand Moff Tarkin from various iterations of Star Wars. So there’s that.
But that’s about it, right?
Add to it, that though the Bible is definitely rated R, it’s arduous plodding sometimes. What am I supposed to do with Nehemiah’s aggression….pulling out the hair of men who married foreign wives? Go and do likewise? I doubt it.
Bible-reading.
It just doesn’t have quite the same ring as mountain-biking, or binge-watching BroadChurch on Netflix, or eating a pizza. It just seems, well, boring. Or at least irrelevant.
The First Rule of Criticism
Then of course, there are the belittling critiques and accusations of the Bible from Joe Plumber, PhD’s from Stanford, and blow-hards like Bill Maher. Folks like these, along with the rest of the peanut gallery who have stock “problems” with the Bible can be persuasive, even if they violate what Wendell Berry astutely notes is the “first rule of criticism of books” which is that “you have to read them before you criticize them.”
Not many of the Bible’s detractors have mastered that first rule of criticism.
But many have sure pronounced opinions about this book with which they have rarely spent an evening.
And the plump maraschino cherry on top of this giant sundae of impediments to Bible reading is the suspicion that King David’s adolescent gushing about God’s word being sweeter than honey is just a bit of religious propaganda.
That all this promotional material is akin to trying to convince me that eating quinoa is the culinary equivalent of a 16 oz. filet mignon; that a tofu and brussels sprouts combo are every bit as tasty as a stain-your-shirt-and-chin-with-barbecue sauce-slab-of-ribs that have been reclining in the 24 hour, low and slow, sauna of a Big Green Egg.
I suffer from all these afflictions from time to time. Especially, I notice, when I am away from the Scriptures, living on a steady diet of self-reliance, cultural lies, and fearing what everyone else fears.
Alien Powers and Internal Bathtub Bacteria
But here’s a secret I’ve learned, a tiny nugget of self-knowledge and an insight into alien powers in the universe – I only find myself thinking of the Bible in this jaundiced way when I am NOT immersed in it.
What does that make you think?
It makes me think there is more going on in our lives than we ever fully know about. It compels me to conclude that there are sinister forces conspiring against us when it comes to hanging out in God’s neighborhood.
Some of those forces grow like bacteria in the bathtub of my own heart, and some are outside of me with their subversive, terrorist plotting.
It’s as if there’s a nasty biological agent being spread all around me that causes my natural God-allergies to act up and then lulls me into the troubling, though always un-troubling at the time, thought that the Bible isn’t worthwhile and isn’t going to be nearly so good for me as old, dead guys from hundreds of years ago always tell me it will.
You know how I know?
Blast the Spiritual Wax from our Ears
Because I get re-surprised by what happens to me from inside the Bible’s antiquated pages all the time.
All the time.
I crack open the Bible reluctantly (not always, but sometimes!) and start to prayerfully read it. As I linger over words and phrases, a hand will reach out of the page and grab me by the arm and say “Looky here!”….“Can you believe this!”
When that happens, it’s not boring.
I’ll open up my Bible app on my iPrecious to do my time in the Scriptures dutifully, because, like intense exercise, or teeth brushing, I know it’s good for me.
After I ask the Spirit to blast the spiritual wax out of my ears, I start to listen attentively to the Scriptures as I read them aloud, like a wild-haired librarian at story hour. After a while, if I’m not careful, I’ll find strange impulses bubbling within me.
My inner-man starts to simmer like a tea-pot coming to a boil, only it isn’t steam coming out of me, it’s confidence. A steady, stream of intense confidence in Jesus to do things that I forgot I could count on him to do.
An energizing expectation that “everything IS actually possible for those who believe” comes over me, and then despair and dullness are chased around the corner of my heart’s house like frightened, stray dogs who’ve just been shot at by an angry neighbor.
Dullness dispersed, I find myself becoming re-convinced that God is acting and will continue to act to renovate, refurbish, and restore all the dilapidation I see in every direction I cast a glance.
Disbelieving My Disinterest
And to be frank, I like believing that. Because I always (or often anyway) believe it cognitively, but often, my cognition is pure abstraction. It’s when my inner-man gets engaged that I can take that belief to the bank. It’s then that joy starts trampoline springing within me.
Encounters like these make me suspicious of my natural dismissiveness toward the Scriptures. These surprises entice me to disbelieve my disinterest, and to be hypocritical to my emotions, so that regardless of whether I want to or not, or feel like it or not, I keep coming back to the Bible.
It has a way of whetting my appetite just enough for me to let it continue to read me. I mean to read it…well, you know what I mean.
Try Occasional Bible-Saturation In Conjunction with Daily Bible-nibbling
Our congregation, like many perhaps, is starting a new, but regular plan this year and next of regular Bible-nibbling. We have a modest goal of reading the entire Scriptures together every two years.
It’s a plan we stole, uh, I mean, um, appropriated for ourselves based on another’s work. This plan may be an approach beneficial for some who lay eyes on this essay.
And of course, periodically, you might find a full-course Bible meal useful as well.
Why not try, sometime in the next two weeks, to say, “I am going to take one 2 hour period to prayerfully read through as much of the gospel of Mark as I can. If during that time, I encounter something interesting, I’ll linger and mull it over.”
“Watch with Glittering Eyes….”
Here’s what I would predict, if you take this course of action:
You might start to see the world differently. You may surmise that God is up to stuff on this planet. You may just find renewed impulses and desires, ones you thought had died, jolted awake as with a spiritual defibrillator.
It’s what happens when we connect with God. It’s what happens when faith starts to swell within us.
Now it may not happen with just one time, but who knows?
AND, if this saturation becomes an occasional habit, then the idea of daily Bible-reading might also become a more appealing daily discipline.
You will, as in all endeavors of learning, have to adjust yourself to what you are studying. James Houston is right when he says, “to understand a matter, one must first stand under it.”
The Bible dictates that a certain posture of humility is required along with the glasses of expectation, if one is ever to “get it.”
So perhaps children’s author, Roald Dahl gives us the last, best piece of advice we can use on ourselves as we approach this peculiar, meddlesome, and magnificent book:
“..Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
Should you expose your life more regularly to the Bible, you might find a healing sort of divine magic hidden within. You may happen upon a marvel that the constantly chattering twitter-sphere doesn’t have “glittering eyes” enough to notice.
You could wind up at last, stumbling across something, or Someone for whom your heart has so long been so terribly restless.
Who knows?
Maybe you’ll find, as keeps happening to me, that, when you read it, the Bible isn’t so boring after all.