Put Down Your Bible

I recently realized I have been living a purely imaginary life.

I have always been a huge proponent of the power of reading, imagery, fiction, and the like to enable us to see God more clearly. Anyone who has read C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia or John Piper's Desiring God could easily attest to their power to stir the heart toward God in ways we barely dreamed of before.

So what do most of us do? What do I generally do? I read; I am stirred; I am moved; I am energized; I thank God for speaking to me so clearly.

Then I close the book and forget everything. 

Oh, sometimes I manage to continue floating in the feeling of the book, in what some call a "book hangover"—that feeling you get the morning after finishing a good book, when the way it made you feel the night before is still lingering. But the particulars soon grow fuzzy. I'm left with a vague memory that I briefly heard the voice of God, and I am happy for the experience.

Except that happiness, that vague memory, that book hangover, has no real bearing on my life at all. I still go on loving the things I loved before; I still go on acting the way I did before. Somehow, what I call "experiences with God" have become nothing more than entertainment: a moving way to spend a few hours on a sunny afternoon, but going no farther than the end table to which I returned my book when I was done.

Don't we all do this? And what's even scarier: don't we all do this, even with the Bible?

This is exactly what Christ reproached the Pharisees for: knowing the Word inside and out, and contenting themselves with that. Their biblical knowledge was of an intellectual richness most of us will never experience—which only served to whitewash the tombs that they were (Matthew 23.27). 

The emotional experience of being moved and even inundated by good, biblical literature is not the same thing as knowing the Savior of the world. The emotional satisfaction of reading the Bible and understanding it is not the same thing as knowing its Author. If all I gain from my Bible study and prayer is the emotional satisfaction of a moving experience, I should just have a glass of wine and watch The Help.  

There was one Pharisee named Nicodemus who, as it's recounted in John 3, at one point took his nose out of the scrolls of the Torah and went to meet Jesus face to face. He spent time with him; he asked him questions; he exchanged with him. This was the one Pharisee to whom Jesus explained what it is to be born again; this was the one Pharisee who truly gained insight. Suddenly his knowledge wasn't a hindrance, as it was to the other Pharisees, but a help. But only once he went to meet Jesus face to face.

It is a good, necessary thing to read the Bible—to know it, to study it, to love it. But at some point I'm going to have to put down my Bible and go meet Jesus. I'm going to have to keep the conversation going when I walk outside. I'm going to have to take the clear pictures of God I read in C.S. Lewis and start seeing those pictures in the leaves on the trees I walk under; on the crazy, divinely ordained shapes made by the clouds; on the faces of my colleagues and friends and family and neighbors. I'm going to have to get to know the real, living Jesus even better than I know his image as it is (so exquisitely) painted in the Gospels.

If I don't, I'm dead; I'm a whitewashed tomb.

"And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness'" (Matthew 7.23).