IT is the time I prepare myself for worship on Sunday, by reading beautiful and poetic stories from the Bible.
Our knowledge of the Bible was limited to memorizing the Beatitudes, Psalms and part of the Story of Solomon, which my mother required of me to memorize. She considered those parts of the Bible as the most beautiful stories, to assuage my thirst for fulfillment of spiritual urgency that inspired my youthful soul when I began to read the Bible for myself.
Now, as everyone who has read the Bible knows, there is no better source for story, than this collection of verse and prose, song and lamentation, love and death, sin and punishment—fascinating revelation of the struggles of the soul of men and women to find the sources of being through its divine teaching.
All have some stories in common with other scriptures, whenever they are found.
The Virgin Birth is not unique to Christianity and loses nothing of its importance. The story of the great flood tells how the Lord smelled the sweet savor of Noah’s offering and pleased with what was in the good man’s heart. He vowed to never again curse the ground of man and destroy all life on Earth. Then he made a great arc of lovely colors to vault the sky, the rainbow, as a token of the vow between them.
David, the singing shepherd boy, was to be the mighty king of Israel. From David’s family came the Saviour of Mankind, a baby born from Bethlehem. Ruth, the Moabite woman who believed in the God of Israel, gave life to an Israelite family that led down through the years to Mary, Joseph and gentle Jesus.
A city named Babel where a tower was built, where the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there, the people scattered to the far corners of the earth to form separate nations each with a language of its own. Their pride was a sufficient sin.
The Sermon of the Mount, where the people were astonished at the Word, for He taught them with authority, and not as the old scribes who quoted the old laws: and not strange things as “Love your enemies, Bless those who curse you. Do good to those who hate you. Turn other cheek.” These ideas that were new to them, unlike the preachings of the Pharisee. The sayings of Jesus truly sounded as though they were the wonder of a merciful and loving God.
And there’s a lot more.
The Bible is a decided, whole library of many books, within a single volume, huge repository of history, law, religion, poetry, philosophy, for information, comfort, inspiration, sheer reading pleasures, with the length of smoothly flowering narratives and complexity of nearly one million words—inspired words of God in a written a written documents. It’s form of literary expression, of marvelous and stirring events is linked to a divine wall and purpose of compelling tales of men and women, caught up in a courageous effort to live good and godly lives. Every spiritual sage, agrees
The Bible was written for the heart, the mind and the will. Not written to us, but was written for us. It can enlighten, enable, enrich and encourage us if we let it.
Remember the reaction to the writings on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast? Old fashion, Old Testament—fear took the fun out of the feast.
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