The Bible Comes Alive

Up until that moment it had been stories. Most of them good stories with heroes, action-a-plenty, miracles and happy endings. Some of them weird stories like strange sacrifices or herds of pigs running off cliffs or bears attacking children. But suddenly it had become something altogether different. Something better.

Which is a funny thing, because since that moment, I’ve read other great books—Dickens, Milton, Shakespeare—and they are just stories. Stories very well told, but still stories. And even books from the same era—Homer, Plato, Aristotle—beautifully structured and overflowing with wisdom. But this book is different. Very different.

It doesn’t flow like most of the other great books. In fact, it’s an incredibly disjointed read. At times it’s a step-by-step law book, at times a poetic romance, and at other times a letter to a friend. But it has an overarching, or perhaps an undergirding, narrative which at that moment captured my soul in warm, tender, living hands.

Words were leaping off the page

I was 14 and earlier that night I was the first in a hall of 500 other teenagers to stand for the altar call. I was shaking in my typically-’90s baggy jeans. I went forward and prayed with a counsellor. I didn’t feel any huge change but the counsellor suggested I go home and start reading Romans.

I had read it before, at Sunday school and church, and this part of the book was always boring. There were no stories. But this night was different. Something had clicked.

I read that ‘all have sinned’ and ‘all are justified freely by [God’s] grace’—and the words miraculously connected the dots between all those stories I had read: the stories of humans making a mess of things, of God pursuing us, of Jesus dying on a cross and rising to life, and of humankind returning to God. They all meshed into one complete story. And, most importantly, God showed me that that story was (and still is) my story.

The words ‘we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ’ grabbed hold of my heart like nothing else could because they became my words. I was a character in the story. I was being pursued by God. I was being won over to him.

There was nothing particularly magical about the words in Romans themselves, but what made them so compelling was that the eternal God was using those ancient words to speak to me in that moment. No other book can do this, because no other book is written with the reader (that’s you and I) specifically in mind. And no other book can always have the author (that’s God) present when we read it. And—this is the ultimate clincher—no other book includes the reader as one of the pivotal characters in the story.

That book is, of course, the Bible.

This year marks 400 years since the King James Version of the Bible was published. And because 17 July is Bible Sunday, now is the perfect time to celebrate the unique gift of the Bible. So what better way to celebrate than by inviting God to show you what your part is in The Story, for the thousandth time … or for the very first time?

By Hayden Shearman (abridged from War Cry, 16 July 2011, p3)