By David McGrew ~
I realised recently, perhaps like some of you, that I’ve been reading and studying the bible for nearly 50 years. I’m amazed when I pick it up and find something I’ve never considered before. I’m especially amazed, that after nearly fifty years, at what, and how much, I do not know.
Some of this is just down to the nature of learning. We first notice words and the ideas attached to them. Then we catch glimpses of phrases; like a subject and a verb and then bam! a whole prepositional phrase opens the universe up like never before. (I’ve apparently, often, felt like a mathematician because I mastered grade 1 arithmetic.) The main thing to remember is to not rest at having learned. It is to keep on learning.
If we keep learning, one day we will break through into a place where all the singular, pithy, thoughts we’ve grasped at become a whole, mutually supporting, system of truth. Perhaps then, tying the bible into God’s agreed upon universal thought instead of our own piecemeal understanding.
At different times in life I was sure I had Paul figured out. More than once I was confident I could explain the depth of my emotion better than my biblical name-sake. Thankfully, those seasons -somehow- didn’t last long. In all of those seasons of life, though, I didn’t ever feel I could adequately explain Christ or his teachings. Hmmmm.
Don’t get me wrong, I knew and do know him. I did teach his words, and the more I taught them the better I grasped his holiness. So, imagine my surprise this last month as I began to seriously restudy his truths, only to discover those little clauses and phrases I’d grasped so well were really just pieces of on-going, sometimes for chapters, long and big thoughts. They contained a wholeness I needed to see.
For in that wholeness, those thoughts bring a harmony and balance to the entire book. A bible thought that doesn’t lead to Christ, into and then through Christ, as it moves through the rest of the book wont have much of a shelf life. It’s a truth for sure, but a dangling truth can’t build the frame until it connects with another.
As we move into ‘24, especially mindful of when and where we are, let me encourage you to take this year to reexamine Christ and his teaching. Let him be the centre of your studies and of your faith, for in him all things…even things in that book….do come and hold together.
Christ will sustain you. Christ will enlarge you. Without him in the centre, from Genesis to Revelation, the powerful truths we hold and hope in would simply break down in our tryings and testings.