Thursday, April 12, 2012

The Bible and the Baggage… Just admit it, we all have it…

Not to make any excuses for my lackadaisical treatment of God’s Word, but I must give myself some credit for entering into a rather complex family history with tons of skeletons in the closet, cultural fall-outs and associated baggage.

Numero Uno: When I entered into this intergalactic communication deal, the movie has already been well under way. It’s like starting at chapter 27. I have no clue what had happened before I jumped in, I have no clue who is the main guy, how it all started, the lovers and the traitors, the adulterers and the murderers - the whole nine yards. I have a ton of catching up to do! And, as if this is not already enough homework, I need to find out how do I fit in this unfolding, living, breathing, tragic, comic, out of this world, deeply personal love story. We could stop here but there is more….

Numero Due: Throughout history, some people have seen the Bible for what it is, God’s self-disclosure statement to His straying humanity, and were smitten by the sacredness of it. So, they treated the Word with such extreme reverence (now, some of you, like me, need a dictionary to find out what this word means, but I’ll come back to that in a sec) – namely, they sealed it like you seal a bottle of extremely rare and expensive perfume and tucked it away in a museum (or a bookshelf, or a nightstand). Now, the bottle itself is beautiful, and everybody knows that the perfume inside it very expensive and rare. But, God didn’t send His word for us to seal it away and stick it in a Museum of Rare and Expensive things to collect dust and silverfish. His desire is for us to crack the seal open and splash it all around, making our lives fragrant with it, so people can sniff it out and want to know where in the world we got it?!!

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