SOLA SCRIPTURA

I finally had The Talk with my daughter – the one in which I told her I didn’t actually believe in a literal six day Creation. It felt a little like handing her wings, kicking her out of the nest, saying, It’s safe for you to fly – it probably shouldn’t have been so terrifying. She took it the way I expected her to. She asked if I was even a Christian. She administered The Test. She's by nature a literal thinker.

Since I was a girl I have loved the Bible. I’ve been told that it makes my eyes light up. I feel it that way, like illumination – like wrestling with Holy, and being seared from within. I remember getting my first Bible – the whole thing, not just the condensed for kids picture version. I cracked open its hard cover and went right for the words lettered in red – all the stuff that Jesus actually said. He was there, written in red, In the Beginning, but I didn’t yet have sight to see Him.

I immediately discovered that Jesus only featured in five books out of the whole Bible, and that four of those books seemed the same story told four different ways. I remember being upset. I wondered why the Bible was so very long – why there were so many words in it that weren’t God’s.

I looked at the maps in the back. I tried to read the Principals of Translation and the Explanation of General Format at the front, and I began to think that this book was a little bit bigger than I was ready for. I spent three adult years learning its languages, its context, I’ve read through it cover to cover, and I still feel exactly that way. It’s always just a little bit bigger than I’m ready for.

Red letter reading, and scanning the titles, I somehow found my way to The New Heaven, The New Earth, The New Jerusalem. If you asked me at ten years old if I was reading my Bible, I could say absolutely, yes. Yes, I’m reading Revelation. Over and over, the same words:

And the material of the wall was jasper; and the city was pure gold, like clear glass. The foundation stones of the city wall were adorned with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was stone was jasper; the second sapphire; the third, chalcedony; the fourth, emerald; the fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, topaz; the tenth, chrysoprase; the eleventh, jacinth; the twelfth, amethyst. And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; each one of the gates was a single pearl. And the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass…. And in the daytime (for there shall be no night there) its gates shall never be closed.  Revelation 21:18-21, 25

My parents bought me a book about rocks. I thought a lot about how gold could look like clear glass, about how exactly a giant, round pearl could be formed into a gate, and about why God would bother building walls around the city at all, if the gates were always going to be open. I wondered what God was afraid of.

Children have a way of asking the most startlingly obvious questions, like – If God only came to earth one time as a man in baby Jesus, how is it that grown-up God was walking around having conversations and arguments and lunch with Abraham, and why does nobody ever talk about that in Sunday School?

Why, if Love is all-powerful, couldn’t God just forgive the Devil – love him so much that Satan would repent? Why couldn’t the Devil become one of the redeemed? God is omnipotent. Love is all-powerful. Why can’t I pray for him? God can do anything. God. Loves. Everybody.

Where exactly at the bottom of the ocean are our sins, and did God put a sign there that reads, NO DIGGING? Because telling somebody not to do something is just asking for trouble, which was kind of lesson number one of Genesis.

If God is good and loving, and if He was going to do it anyway, why didn’t He reconcile Himself with Adam and Eve right there in Eden? Why didn’t God just stop walking around in the garden in the cool of the day, cut down that tree of knowledge of good and evil, use it to build Himself a cross and hang Himself on it? Really. Why not?

To this day, I only have a good answer for one of those questions.

Despite my deep passion for the Bible, I have a hard time actually reading it to my children. Cain and Abel; Noah and the ark; Abraham and just about everyone he interacted with; Sodom and Gomorrah; Lot and his daughters; Jephthah’s daughter; David and Bathsheba – a lot of what I read as a child was simply inappropriate for children. A lot of it was spiritually traumatizing. I asked my father flat out, If God asked you to kill me, would you? I took an anticipated comfort in knowing that my father didn’t always obey God.

The Bible is ancient, sacred text – it is not a collection of bedtime stories. It isn’t God’s Chicken Soup for the Soul. It’s full of tear you up inside truth, and Truth is a sword – a razor sharp, double-edged blade. If it isn’t illumined by Spirit – if we ever try to wield it carelessly in the flesh – we could cut off our own toes and completely lose our balance. We really do need to be wise.

But then sometimes we might get to being too wise in our own eyes, and miss the point all together. We might get really hung up on the Greek. We might think scripture is a pointed weapon to stab people with, dead between the eyes, in their heart or their gut, to take them out at the knees, to sever their head from their body, to have the victory. We might claim pieces of it to make justified our own sin. Even the devil knows how to quote scripture.

It takes innocence to see the obvious – I  can get so mired in the words. I need my children’s ears, my children’s eyes, my children’s questions. Does Jesus get bored sitting around in our heart not even having a television? Does God get mad when I worry?

Going back to the Greek is really not the place to find answer – we are not People of the Book, but of the Living Word and of the Spirit.

I tell my daughter to punch the air really hard, and then I ask if she thinks that she hurt it. I ask if she thinks the air is offended. I tell her God is Spirit – like air, like wind, like breath. You are in God, and God is in you, and there is nowhere to go from His presence. God moves into everything that gives Him room, filling every bit of room that is given. Worry is like holding your breath, trying to conserve the air that’s inside you. That doesn’t make God mad – God just wants you to breathe. I don’t give her chapter and verse for that, but when she looks for it I believe she will find it.

Sometimes I have to chew solid food for my children, and drop it into their mouths – like God still does for me. I want them to feel how Truth feels in their bellies, to see how it strengthens their bones, how it lights up the eyes. I want them to taste and see that the Lord is good, so they won’t hide if Truth comes like a sword.

I still contemplate closely the words in red, the ones that Jesus spoke, but I see Jesus so much larger now. I find Him all over the Bible. I meditate on the Truth in His metaphors – what Jesus said about being the Door and the Vine and the Light, and about how we are sheep and salt and fragrance. I try to make sure my children don’t gag on the literal. Truth doesn’t have to be literal. Truth can grow loftier and clearer and more transformative in power when It’s not root bound and choked out by literal.