Why Do We Read The Bible? (Part 2)
January 8, 2010
Since many of us have begun reading through the Bible in 2010, I wrote last week about why we read the Bible, namely, to be shaped by God’s story more than the values we imbibe from our culture. As crucial as this is, it stands next to an equally significant purpose in reading God’s word: to know, love, and worship God.
Just as our pursuit of a biblical worldview is articulated in our core value about being “shaped,” so is our pursuit of a relationship with God. Our first core value is, “We prayerfully seek to be awed by the glory of God and the mercy of the gospel.”
In other words, when we read the creation account in Genesis 1-2, our worldview is not the only thing that should be affected. Our hearts should be as well. We are not only to think well about our times because we see God’s sovereignty, ownership, and purpose in creating the cosmos. We also are to feel the weight of God’s creativity, power, wisdom, and care in crafting his world, and this should lead us to expressions of worship, gratitude, and adoration.
Identifying God’s praiseworthy attributes and actions in the opening pages of the Bible should not be challenging. But what about the gospel? How are we to be “awed by…the mercy of the gospel” when we are reading of times thousands of years before Jesus’ birth? The answer should become apparent when we remember what exactly the gospel is
The gospel is the news of what God has done through Jesus Christ to bring sinners into a relationship with himself, as central to his redemption of all creation. In its most fully developed expression, this was accomplished through Jesus’ perfect life, his death on the cross, his resurrection, and his return to rule as King forever. Even though these events are still millennia away as we read of Eden and the Flood and Abraham, we see God working to bring sinners into relationship with himself from the moment his people became sinners in the Garden of Eden. And God’s redemptive, reconciling activity centers on promises regarding the woman’s seed, traced carefully through the line of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, and on down through King David.
In other words, the fully-revealed gospel we know is anticipated from the moment God promises that Eve’s descendant will crush the head of the serpent. Knowing this allows us to appreciate the expressions of the gospel throughout the Old Testament. We read of the LORD shutting the door of the ark before the flood waters came and are awed at his mercy to Noah in doing what Noah could not do for himself. We read the promises God gave to Abram of land and descendants and his own presence and are stunned by the riches of his undeserved grace. We read of God opening Sarah’s womb and are amazed by his kind faithfulness to always keep his promises. While these are not “the gospel” in its narrowest sense, they are aspects of God’s proactive grace to bring his people into closer communion with himself.
Pray with me that we might remain in awe of God’s undeserved kindness toward us and joyfully worship him as we see pieces of the gospel throughout the pages of Scripture.
Pastor Chris