The Bible In Our Lives..The Message That Leads To God

This weeks Sabbath School Lesson study present by Jonathan Gallagher on The Word in Our Lives was particularly good. I would recommend people taking the time to listen to it. Here are some of the quotes he uses in his notes, while the rest of the notes are not quite as good and the notes don’t really reflect what happened in the class they are a good starting point.

Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it befits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God. Johann Kepler.

The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts. A. W. Tozer

It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit, and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. C.S. Lewis

We are not to make the Torah into God Himself, nor the Bible into a “paper pope.” The Bible is only the result of the Word of God. We can experience the return of the Word of God in the here and now, the perpetual return of the actual, living, indisputable Word of God that makes possible the act of witnessing, but we should never think of the Bible as any sort of talisman or oracle constantly at our disposal that we need only open and read to be in relation to the Word of God and God Himself. Jacques Ellul

At some point we have to get past the “paper pope” type of thinking about the Bible and see that it is a tool to bring us to God rather then the magic answer book to life’s questions. What we should realize by now is that with all the many different Christian views out there we will not find the answers if we use the Bible as a code book. It seems the codes are all decoded based upon the many different traditions and perspectives of people. Christianity for too long has worked upon the idea that faith in our interpretations is the most important aspect of Christian faith. Our interpretations are always going to be faulty; we need to acknowledge our need to implement our God given human reason as well as being open to inspiration from God as we seek to understand our world and our God. Faith in God is different from faith in our doctrines about God.