Wowsers! I wish I wrote this:-) LOL  A very objective look at bibliology which seems quite reformed in its foundations.  If only my church, fellowship and friends would endorse such a high view of the scriptures… and move from topical towards a full on expository method of preaching.  I found this very edifying to my understanding of the sovereign place of scripture in faith and life: fully sufficient and all-encompassing for all aspects of life–if only we all continually read it and understood it for what it was originally written for instead of picking and choosing what fits our appetite.

“You may have hopes that you can open your Bible and get a quick dose of spiritual wisdom but the Bible wasn’t written to you. You may want to claim a verse like “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth” but that verse isn’t a verse about parenting and its not about your children. “It is appointed to men to die once and then comes the judgment” is not a verse about death and judgment, it’s a supporting argument of a larger discourse discussing Christ’s atonement. “I pray that you may be active in sharing your faith” is not a verse about evangelism. Sounds like it in isolation but in the larger picture of the book it’s talking about Philemon’s generosity.

The Bible isn’t a fortune cookie that you can crack open and get out a pithy little message that’s going to help you through the day. Instead it is a collection of books, poems, histories, tragedies and more and if you want to “apply it to your life” you’ve first got to consider how that particular message was meant to apply to someone else’s life. That’s right, the Bible wasn’t written to you. It was written to the people of Israel, and Philemon, and Theophilus and the church at Corinth. But that ain’t you. So you’re reading someone else’s mail. Or listening in on one half of a phone conversation. If you want to apply it to your life, first you’ve got to approach the text carefully, even humbly and ask, “What was the original author saying to the original readers and why?” That’s not an easy question. You won’t be able to answer it in just five minutes of Bible reading a day. You won’t be able to answer that question by jumping from one section of the Bible to the next as you go through your Bible reading plan. Imagine reading the Sunday paper like you read your Bible. Monday you read one paragraph of the front page, then you read one paragraph of the sports section, now jump over to the opinion page and read a paragraph there. That’s all for today. On Tuesday you can continue reading the lead story and find out how the game ended and read some more of the op-ed piece. Is that the way you read the paper? Why not? Because chopping up the Sunday paper like that destroys the message.

…

The Bible wasn’t written to you, but it was written for you. Read it the right way and you’ll hear the voice of God.”

–Written by Lingamish, visit his blog for the full post.

(HT: Better Bibles Blog)