Shaken to the Core

I've been handling some of the more difficult subjects in Scripture lately. This may come as a shock to you, but I have not received universal applause for it. (I get a lot more emails than I get blog comments.) I feel like sometimes it looks like what I'm saying comes naturally, comes easily for me. I thought you should know that it doesn't. This stuff takes time, effort, diligence, careful examination, and long thought. Sometimes there seems to be the perception, "Well, sure, easy for you to say." No, not so much. The fact is that much of what I know today did not come naturally to me at all. The fact is that close scrutiny of Scripture has managed to radically reshape many areas of reality for me.

The thing is, if you don't find that to be true for you, I wonder what you're reading. Look, the Bible is supposed to be "God-breathed". That, alone, should take your breath away. God breathed it out and some of His people wrote it down in their own vernacular, guided by His Spirit. Now, God is not a man. In fact, one of the things of which He assures us in that God-breathed Scripture is "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts" (Isa 55:8). So if you find as you read through Scripture that it's all sweetness and light, that it simply confirms what you always thought, that God is just like you imagined and the universe operates just like you thought, I would like to suggest that you're not paying attention or you're not getting it right. Look, no one who ever encountered God walked away with a lilt in their step. No, it was always catastrophic. Equally significant, if you read the Bible and find it boring, you are seriously missing out, because these are words from God -- no small deal.

Now, it's true that you cannot measure truth by "It shakes my thinking." A guru who tells me "It's like the sound of one hand clapping" might shake my thinking for awhile, but then I realize it's because he was speaking nonsense. And I've heard more than once during the writing of this series, "Do you know how that looks to the world???!!!!" Frankly, how it looks to the world is also not a valid measure of truth.

I also need to point out that I am not suggesting that the Bible is hard to understand. That's not the problem. It's not that it's hard to understand. It's that we operate from a sinful mind. Paul commanded us to "be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect" (Rom 12:2). You see, sin rots the brain and sin is opposed to God and here we are in various stages of insanity trying to look at God's reality, as Paul put it, "through a glass darkly". It's not that it's hard to understand. It's that it is in opposition to Natural Man. Indeed, it is in opposition to the direct efforts of "the god of this world" whose aim it is to blind us. In fact, given the sinful nature of human beings and the attacks of Satan, we'd be out of luck if it wasn't for the fact that we have the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth.

Well, you've got your Bibles and you've got time. You ought to see if your world doesn't get shaken to the core as well when you let the Holy Spirit open your eyes to Scripture and let the Word of God shape your view of reality. I am certain it will shift your worldview. I guarantee you it won't be simple or easy. If it is, I suspect you need to meet the Author first.