the bible meets us where we are
To grab a few lines of Jesus and drop them down on someone 2,000 years later without first entering into the world in which they first appeared is lethal to the life and vitality and truth of the Bible.
Real people, in real places, at real times, writing and telling stories about their experiences and their growing understanding of who they are. This does not in any way discount the power of reading the Bible with no background knowledge at all, which is why these words are so powerful. We can enter into them at any level and they speak to us. Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does.
For example, the book of Deuteronomy is patterned after treaties that were common in its day. The writer essentially took a common legal document and changed the content and the names but kept the form the same.
The end of the book of Mark is arranged according to the coronation ceremonies of the Roman emperor. Maybe Mark witnessed one of these ceremonies, because he is very intentional about the order of events leading up to Jesus’ death. His readers would have been familiar with these Roman coronation events. They would have read between the lines right away. Mark wants you to see Jesus as a king like Caesar, but at the same time totally unlike Caesar.
The first three miracles in the book of John are directly related to the three major gods of Asia Minor, the region John writes his gospel to. Dionysus was the god who turned water into wine, Asclepius was the god of healing, and Demeter was the goddess of bread. So how does John begin his story? With Jesus turning water into wine, healing, and then feeding thousands of people. John has an agenda. He wants these people in this place and this time to know that Jesus is better than their gods.
When Paul writes to Timothy about women being saved in childbirth, he is making a direct reference to the goddess Artemis, whose temple was just down the street in Timothy’s hometown of Ephesus. Artemis’s followers believed that Artemis saved women from dying in childbirth, which is significant in a city where one out of two women died giving birth. Paul’s statement here has huge political, social, and religious implications. He is implying that Artemis is a fraud.
The first chapters of the book of Revelation follow the sequences of events of the Domitian games, held in honor of the Caesar who was in power at the time Revelation was written. Domitian would address the leaders of the various provinces, then his choir of twenty-four would sing worship songs to him, and then there would be a horse race. John is writing Revelation to people who had seen the Domitian games; they knew exactly what he was referring to. He wants them to see that Domitian is a fake and Jesus is the real king.
The writers of the Bible are communicating in language their world will understand. They are using symbols and pictures and images of the culture they are speaking to. That’s why the Bible has authority – God has authority and is present in real space and time. The Bible is a collection of stories that teach us about what it looks like when God is at work through actual people. The Bible has the authority if does only because it contains stories about people interacting with the God who has all authority.
The point in the book of Acts isn’t the early church. The point is the God who is at work in and through the early church to change the world. When we take the Bible seriously, we are taking God seriously. We believe that the same God who was at work then is at work now. The same God in the same kinds of ways. The goal is not to be a “New Testament church”. That makes the New Testament church the authority. The authority is God who is acting in and through those people at that time and now these people at this time.
The point is to ask, what is God up to here, now?
What in the world is God doing today?
How should we respond?
How did they respond? What can we learn from them that will help us now?
Bell, Rob. (2005). Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. Zondervan: Grand Rapids.