Dig deeper

The Bible is God speaking to us. It’s like picking up a telephone and hearing your Creator on the other end of the line. It should be exciting, life-changing.

But sometimes it seems like a long-distance call and there’s static on the line and it’s hard to make out what our Father is saying. Maybe our interpretation is such guesswork that we’re in danger of putting words into God’s mouth.

Given that, we decided to write a book to help us all ‘correctly handle the word of truth’ (2 Timothy 2.15) so that we can experience God’s clear guidance in our lives, come to know him better, grow to love him more.

We’ve based the book on the idea of a toolkit. Sorry if that conjures up painful memories of failed DIY projects, or hours waiting for a mechanic on the hard shoulder of the motorway. But, don’t worry, you won’t find any spanners or screwdrivers, but a set of practical tools to help you get to the bottom of any Bible passage. Every chapter gives a worked example of each tool in action as well as opportunities for you to practise using them for yourself.

Below is the chapter entitled the ‘Who Am I?’ tool, to give you a taste of what the book is like. Other chapters cover tools such as the Bible Timeline, Repetition, Context, Structure and more.

Nigel Beynon & Andrew Sach

The ‘Who am I?’ tool

It’s true that the title of this tool implies existential angst. The point of it, though, is to work out which character (if any) we are supposed to identify with, in a given passage.

I (Andrew) was once in a church home group studying Exodus 3, which begins like this:

‘Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight — why the bush does not burn up”’ (Exodus 3.1Ð3).

We were working from published notes, and I still remember one of the questions: ‘What burning-bush experiences have you had?’

It was a silly question. I was 99.9% sure that no one in the group had ever seen a bush that was on fire but did not burn up, or heard the voice of God speaking from the middle of it. Not one of us had had a burning-bush experience.

Actually, that’s not quite true. I once went to a firework party at the house of a friend in East London. Not being very experienced in setting up fireworks, someone had pushed the rocket so far into the launch tube that the end stuck out the other side into the ground beneath, anchoring it a little too firmly. When we lit the rocket, it started ‘blasting off’, but without going anywhere. It was one of those split-second things, as we all realised that it was about to detonate at ground level. ‘Get back!’ Followed by boom! as fire flew in all directions. Followed by woof! as the large fluffy pampas-grass bush in the next-door-neighbour’s garden was enveloped by a fireball. We reached for the garden hose, but it was all over for that bush within seconds. Almost a burning-bush experience. But, sadly for neighbourly relations, it was not miraculously kept from burning up.

Those Bible study notes fell foul of the ‘Who Am I?’ tool. It was a story about Moses. And Moses isn’t me.

The Moses-is-me syndrome (as we call it) reflects my propensity for identifying myself as the hero or central character in every story; everything has to be ultimately about me and my life. If someone shows you an old photograph of your class at school, who do your eyes go to first? Yourself. Well, so it is with the Bible. We read the story of Moses and the bush as though we were Moses. We read about David and Goliath as if we were David: what are the giants that you need to fight in your life? We read the story of Elisha doing mighty miracles through the Holy Spirit and we are Elisha. And so on.

None of us is the king

But we shouldn’t have to think very hard before we realise that none of us is the king who defeats God’s enemies and rules over God’s people (David), or the mediator who led his people out of slavery (Moses), or the one with power to heal lepers or raise the dead (Elisha). There is someone else who fits those descriptions much better than we do! Indeed, the ways in which the lives of these men prefigure the life of Christ is often remarkable. Think, for example, of how Pharaoh orders all Hebrew infants to be killed, but Moses manages to escape. Compare Herod’s edict and Jesus’s escape in Matthew 2. Or how about David’s feeling of Godforsakenness as he pens Psalm 22? That psalm is so true to Jesus’s experience that we easily forget that it was first used by someone else.

Having said all this, sometimes we are right to identify with Moses and David. For example, David’s experience of God’s forgiveness is something that we may share:

‘David . . . speaks of the blessedness of the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works:
“Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered.
Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him”’ (Romans 4.6Ð8, quoting Psalm 32).

Again, Moses’s trust in God is something that the book of Hebrews encourages us to imitate:

‘By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose to be ill-treated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward’ (Hebrews 11.24Ð26).

Heroes and villains

Mind you, sometimes the characters we should identify with aren’t the heroes so much as the villains! For instance, we might be one of the grumbling Israelites whom Moses has to lead, rather than Moses himself (see 1 Corinthians 10.1Ð13). In David’s lament psalms, we might sometimes be the persecutor rather than the victim. (That’s how Paul applies some of these psalms to us in Romans 3.9Ð18.)

To sum up: often these Old Testament characters are pictures of Jesus and so we should learn from them about him, rather than about ourselves. However, sometimes these characters are role models (both positive and negative) for us. We just need to stop and think before we rush to put ourselves into the picture.

Worked example

What do you think the following verse means for us?

‘But the Counsellor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you’ (John 14.26).

If we assume that this was addressed directly to us, then we might conclude that we don’t really need to read the Bible because Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would teach us everything directly.

However, Jesus wasn’t addressing us in John 14. He was speaking to his apostles. What’s more, he can’t have been speaking to us, because he talks about reminding them of everything he said. We can’t be reminded, because we didn’t hear him say it in the first place.

The right question to ask, therefore, is: ‘What does it mean to me that Jesus said this to them?’ Answer: ‘I can trust the New Testament. Jesus promised to those who wrote much of it that the Spirit would guide them into all truth, and give them perfect memories for his teaching.’ This verse should make me want to read the Bible more, not less!

Having said that, there are other verses in the Bible that teach us about the Spirit’s work in us and how he enables us to understand what God has given us (see 1Corinthians 2.11Ð16). It’s a wonderful thing to grasp that the Spirit both guarantees the Bible’s trustworthiness and helps us to understand what was written.

Dig deeper!

Read Joshua 1.1-9.

The book of Joshua describes how Joshua leads Israel into the promised land, defeating their enemies. The Bible Timeline tool reminds us that this is a ‘minipicture’ of God’s rescue of us: through Jesus he defeats our enemy, the devil, and brings us to the promised land of heaven. Now let’s use the ‘Who Am I?’ tool.
We might be tempted to put ourselves in Joshua’s shoes, and so read God’s words to him as if they applied directly to us. What do you think of that idea?

What is distinctive about Joshua’s role in verse 6?

Instead of reading this verse as God speaking to all Christians, how could it be read as a picture of God commissioning Jesus as our leader?

So which group of people should we identify with in this passage?

Dig Deeper by Nigel Beynon & Andrew Sach (192 pages, £6.99, ISBN 978 1 84474 103 8) is published by IVP and is available in your local Christian bookshop or can also be bought online at: http://www.ivpbooks.com