Bitter Scroll

This blog is in correlation with the quote from yesterday and Wednesday the 5th. Reading the Bible is so important in the life of the Christian. And I don't mean only turning to the passages that are near and dear to us. I mean going there and beyond. Looking also at the passages that stretch us. The passages that maybe we don't yet comprehend. The good, the bad and the ugly must be given equal amounts of air time. We must allow ourselves to eat the full text without fear of the sour stomach to come. This is something that we don't do quite often enough. In his book, Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell sums it up:

"The ultimate display of our respect for the sacred words of God is that we are willing to wade in and struggle with the text-the good parts, the hard-to-understand parts, the parts we wish weren't there.

The rabbis even say a specific blessing when they don't understand a portion of the text. When it eludes them, when it makes no sense, they say a word of thanks to God because of the blessing that will be theirs someday. "Thank you, God, that at some point in the future, the lights are going to come on for me."

The rabbis have a metaphor for this wrestling with the text: The story of Jacob wrestling the angel in Genesis 32. He struggles, and it is exhausting and tiring, and in the end his hip is injured. It hurts. And he walks away limping.

Because when you wrestle with the text, you walk away limping.

And some people have no limp, because they haven't wrestled. But the ones limping have had an experience with the living God.

I think God knows what he's doing with the Bible. But the better question is, do we know what we're doing with the Bible?"