The Glow-in-the-Dark Bibles - More Thoughts on Intergalactic Communication

In addition to our screwed up conditioning that trained us to expect God to always come to us yelling like a madman armed with a baseball bat (if you are confused, you need to check out the blog entry The Bible and the Bathroom Scale - The Forgotten Art of Reverence), another problem we have in hearing Him could be the packaging.

I look at the many Bibles neatly arranged like sardines in a can on the bookshelf behind my back. Then, I look at the rest of my library. There is an estimated 10,000 other types of sardines, equally neatly (or NOT!) stacked next to and on top of each other on the bookshelves all around me. Looking from the outside, one can distinguish absolutely no difference between GOD's word and an average human blabber (some quite impressive blabber,I must say!). If I evaluated exclusively the attractiveness of the binding and cover, I would have to cast my vote for Encyclopedia Britannica or even The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (please, don’t ask any questions, I can see you shaking your head!). I probably have at least a dozen cheap (I apologize, God, for nothing about You is 'cheap' unless we make it so!) flimsy paperback Bibles with the coverpage graphics that don’t come even close to commanding the kind of respect God’s Word deserves! Not a single copy of the Bible I own glows in the dark! What’s up with that?!!! If I were God, I would make sure I catch people’s attention any way I can… I think it would be really cool if all the Bibles in the world had glow-in-the-dark covers. That would certainly ensure that people won’t get confused and pick Oprah or Dr. Phil as their main or even only source of soul food (nothing against Oprah or Dr. Phil!), right?

But, since I am not God, and my ways are not His ways, I have to scratch my head a little as to why He chooses such unpretentious ways of speaking to us. He is THE Almighty (capital A!), all the resources of heaven and earth stand at His beckon and call. He has the most important message in the universe to deliver to His doomed humanity. He has the RIGHT and the MIGHT to do whatever He wants. And He restrains Himself to an old, dusty, silverfish eaten pages of an ancient book?!!! That can be... BURNED! Using the words that can be twisted, misunderstood, taken out of context and worst of all – IGNORED! He might be God, but He must be crazy!

Unless, of course, unless… there is a method to His madness...