Rediscovering discovery... again

Huw Williams | 20:23, Thursday 07 March 2013 | Turin, Italy

It's not just Mozart that I enjoyed rediscovering recently. In my Bible read-through last week, I hit the book of Jeremiah. I'll be honest, I've never found Jeremiah an easy book to understand. Sure, you get some purple passages, but the book as a whole has always been a bit of a difficult one for me to get to grips with. So I went looking for a little help.

"How to read the Bible Book by Book" (Fee and Stuart) is becoming a good friend of mine these days – it's a wonderful book to help you with your Bible reading. Just reading a few pages of this resource (with no academic jargon, just simple-to-understand context) gave me the background I needed, and a bit of orientation to the text so that all of a sudden, the book of Jeremiah came alive, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time with the prophet.

There's a danger and a beauty here. The danger is that of falling into the trap of thinking we can't possibly understand some of these less-thumbed sections of our Bibles without the cleverness of other people. I wonder whether we Bible teachers sometimes encourage this kind of thinking – even inadvertently. You know how it goes, a sprinkling of Greek or Hebrew, or references to extra-Biblical context and all of a sudden listeners and readers can feel like they can't understand God's Word for themselves, at least not without going to Bible college. I'm not anti-scholarship, and I'm not against contextualisation, but let's use these responsibly, in ways which encourage and not exasperate the 'regular' Bible reader.

But now for the wonderful thing – what I noticed in the case of Fee & Stuart's wonderful little book, was that all of the context which they provided and which helped the text of Jeremiah come alive so vibrantly was from the Bible itself. My problem was that I didn’t know my Bible well enough to place the text in all the correct political and historical settings of 2 Kings, Ezekiel, and others, but of course they are there to be read. If I had joined those particular dots, I could have done that work for myself – all I needed was my Bible, and to know it.

The more we read the Bible, the better we know it, and the more it will come alive. And that's a motivating thought, not an exasperating one for us as Bible readers isn't it? Let’s rediscover the joy of discovering God's Word.