The Book Connects Us
It calls for our energy and involvement as we invest effort and initiative in seeking to understand him, bringing the ideas off the page. So we read. We study. We exert mental energy. We take part in the process of finding God.
The Book brings God’s friends together. If I had a private link with the perfect God, I might shun interaction with his imperfect people. Instead, we are linked together to cooperate in our search for understanding.
The Book—here are 66 individual books, written by 40 authors, in three languages, in several different countries, over hundreds of years—yet, taken together, it reads as one unified Book, authored actually by God. But with such human involvement!
The words of The Book passed as stories from generation to generation. The scrolls hand-copied who knows how many hundreds of times. The manuscripts circulated, read, explained, collected, ultimately printed and distributed, translated and retranslated as we learn more of the language and culture and as our own language changes over time. The Book—those words—over generations, read and studied and explained.
We would not have God’s ideas without the help of God’s other friends. Obviously, God values all this connectedness of his people, his family, his kingdom, his priesthood.
God could have conducted unending individual spiritual conferences. But he does not want us connected only to him; he wants us connected also to one another.
The Mind of God
Yet there is that personal connection too, an intense individuality in our emerging spiritual perception. There is ultimately a face-to-face accountability and a sense of divine conversation as we contemplate the thoughts of God.
“’No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him,’” Paul reminded us. “But God has revealed it to us by his Spirit. … We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us.”
And what has God freely given us? Open secrets about his way for us to live and his agenda for all our tomorrows, in time and throughout forever.
Yet, in some mysterious way, as open as God has made his secrets, people who do not know God do not understand his ideas. The secrets seem stupid; too silly to be wise. “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God,” Paul says. “They are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. … For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.”
We who read with understanding have work to do.
