MaryBeth LaMont

How well do you know the Bible? Such a question generally means, “Do you know who Methuselah was? Do you know who Adam, Eve, Noah, Moses, and David were? Do you know who Jesus was? Who Paul was? Peter? Do you know who Lois and Phoebe were?
That is, do you know just the main celebrities and are you also aware of many of the lesser known characters.

What about Biblical stories? Many outside the Jewish or Christian faiths have an awareness of the Garden of Eden and what happened there, the parting of the Red Sea is commonly known as is the story of David and Bathsheba. Many even inside those faiths are unaware of a floating axe head and a chariot headed to the heavens.
those outside the faith often can retell the Christmas story as well as those inside the faith.

Knowing the Bible is not being able to recite stories or recognize characters. It isn’t even reading the Bible and remembering what it says about God, about us, and God’s expectations of us. One cannot truly know the Bible without having an awareness that it is to be read repeatedly. Done so over time these characters and stories speak to us
differently when we read them again. We too are different than the last time we read them, the times are different, and how they speak to us is differs with each passing year.

Too many of us depend upon listening to the reading of scripture in worship as our Bible reading time. The Bible read to us, is different than the Bible read by us. The Bible read to us sometimes is influenced by the biases of the reader; the Bible read by us can also be influenced by our own biases. These are not bad things. Both have a way of addressing us; one from the “outside” the other from the “inside.” Both have a way of bringing God’s speech, God’s word, to us in our own life situation.

What I am really getting at here, is regardless of how often we read the Bible, it seems the Bible knows us better than we know the Bible. As a word of God the Bible is free to address us how God wants us to be addressed, how you and I need to be addressed by God, with a word of correction, condemnation, or a word of affirmation, release and relief. The Bible comes to us as what we need rather than always what we want. If we have not had some Biblical reading or writing hit us between the eyes at times, there is most likely some misunderstanding of how to read the Bible and what the Bible as a word of God is all about.

To know the Bible is to understand we have a need for what it has to say to us: us as individuals and us as those of this time. It is a good thing to remember words of scripture and quote them as meaningful. It is a far more important thing to allow the words of the Bible to speak to us in all our present times and in all our life stations. The Bible knows us. Reading and listening with ears of faith opens us to having God speak to us.