The Final But Not Last Word

We need to read the Bible with cross-shaped glasses on seeing Christ in and even between the spaces of every written word within both testaments of the Bible. A fascinating book is Michael Hardin’s The Jesus Life: Reconnecting Humanity with Jesus. What does it mean to follow Jesus in today’s world? How might Christians start reading the Bible like Jesus did?  Here is one example from his book on seeing Christ and comparing Christ to texts that we often miss but easily falls into line with the way the early Jewish Christians read the scriptures.

ADAM (Genesis 1-3)          Christ (Phil. 2:5-11)

Made in the divine

image                        Being the image of God

thought it a prize      thought it not a prize

to be                         to be

grasped at to be        grasped at to be as God;

as God

and aspired to            and made himself of

a reputation              no reputation

and spurned being     And took upon himself

God’s servant           the form of a servant

Seeking to be in         and was made in the

The likeness of God   likeness of humanity

And being found in    and being found in

Fashion as a man      fashion as a human

(made of the dust)

He exalted himself    He humbled himself

And became                and became obedient

disobedient

unto death                 unto death

He was condemned     God highly exalted Him

And disgraced            and gave him the name

                                       and rank of Lord (p.259)

What we need is a bigger more glorious vision of Christ that contemplatively with a sanctified imagination that captivates the beauty and majesty of the resurrected Messiah. And when we have spiritual eyes more focused to see, the Bible may come alive in new and unexpected ways.

People will still ask hard questions like, why does the Bible not simply say, ‘Thou shall not have any slaves?’ The history of slavery throughout the centuries has been a messy one with Christians standing on both sides of the divide at times. Modern biblical scholars will simply say the Bible does not answer that question definitively one way or the other. But this shows the problem of modern scientific approaches to the Bible. They often come up short in giving satisfactory answers.

     

     What we can learn from the ancient Christians is a Christ-centered figural reading of the scriptures. The goal is not information but transformation into the image of God’s Messiah Jesus. Studying the Patristic fathers tells us to expect to find riddles and ‘enigmas’ within the scriptures. Michael Graves in his ‘The Inspiration and Interpretation of Scripture: What the Early Church Can Teach Us’ lists four powerful truths we often miss today when we come into contact with a difficult text to interpret.

1.  God wanted to conceal the deeper truths of the scripture from those who are unworthy. Only those who put forth the effort to understand the scriptures can grasp their truest sense . . . Only those who are willing to strive for virtue will succeed in unraveling the obscurities of scripture.

2,  The fact of Scripture has hidden meanings allows for different levels of teaching to reach people at different levels of spiritual receptivity . . . The more spiritual readers learn from the higher meanings, which addresses the healing of the soul. In fact, it can be harmful for people to take the teachings that are beyond their capacity to receive. It was wise, there-fore, for God to hide these more profound realities from those who are
not yet ready for them.

3. The presence of hidden meanings in Scripture encourages us to become     inquisitive and eager for discovery . . . Cryptic language was seen as a fitting      medium to express deep mysteries (pp.62-63).

So whatever troubling texts one discovers and simply crosses path within the Bible, the challenge is not to ignore it or sanitize it but to dig deeper into the hidden mysterious world of the Bible. Did you see the powerful spiritual answer to slavery in Philippians 2:5-11? We live in a world that is in bondage to so many different forms of slavery. We live in a world where there are more actual slaves in the world today because of human trafficking than any other tine in history, even more than the time when slavery was supposedly abolished. God in Christ takes becomes a slave to set all slaves free. For those of us who feel enslaved by the dark powers of this world, that is very good news!