It's Alive Part 1

New Series IntroductionWe are starting our new series called, “It’s Alive!” Now when I thought about the title for this series I had the image in my mind of Gene Wilder, Dr. Frankenstein, reaction when he sees his Frankenstein come to alive and he screams, “It’s Alive.” Because at that moment hope turned into reality and science went from theory to evidence. And that is how I feel when all of the sudden the Bible comes to life and we it seems to feel like it is alive!

But to be honest, I don’t just wake up, read my Bible and have this experience every day. Honestly, I feel like the lame man who used to sit by the Pool of Bethesda and just wait for an angel or Spirit of God to stir the waters so that I might get in and get healed. And, like the lame man who had tried unsuccessfully for 38 years to get in when the water was stirred, so I have left the pool of Bethesda many of days disappointed because the enchanted waters did not enchant me.

We have probably all been there. We read the Bible looking for answers to life’s most important questions and sometimes just our daily question. Many times we leave those times frustrated, uninspired and unsure about this thing we call the Bible.In those moments it is tempting to think, “Should we really trust the Bible to make sense of our lives?”

Can a book written to ancient people, to an ancient culture, to ancient problems and ancient needs really, really make sense of my life?

David never had to deal with the internet, car problems, private school tuition, staying married to just one wife.

I am sure Moses never had to deal with questions about abortion us a civic policy, about a two party republican form of Government, global warming, the stock market, legalizing marijuana, etc…

The problem is that most of us in this room were taught the Bible as children and given childish answers to these kinds of questions or you were probably taught the Bible by a person who was taught the Bible as a child and they are giving you their childlike answers to these incredibly complex problems and issues we face in life.Should we really trust the Bible to make sense of our lives?

Can it make sense of our lives and world? Most of the Bible was written over 2,000 years ago, the times were different, even barbaric, the rules seem irrelevant today and then there are those troubling passages about… Often times, these are the big questions that go unanswered.

Perhaps the real problem is that while we have been taught the facts of the Bible we were never taught how the Bible became the Bible and how it still helps us to make sense of life today.

Opening Story

Dr. Emile Cailliet was a French philosopher who eventually settled in America and became a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey. He had been brought up with a naturalistic, atheistic education. He had never shown the slightest interest in spiritual things. He had never seen a Bible. But World War 1 came, and as he sat in the trenches he found himself reflecting on the inadequacy of his world-and-life view. He asked himself the big questions: Where did life come from? What did it all mean, if anything? What value are scientific laws or theories in the face of reality? Cailliet later wrote, “I felt, not with my reason but with my whole being, that I was destined to perish miserably when the hour came.”

During the long night watches Cailliet began to long for what he came to call “a book that would understand me.” He was highly educated, but he knew of no such book. Thus, when he was later wounded and released from the army and returned to his studies, he determined that he would prepare such a book secretly for his own use. As he read for his courses, he would file away passages that seemed to speak to his condition. Afterward he would copy them over in a leather-bound book. He hoped that the quotations, which he carefully indexed and numbered, would lead him from fear and anguish to release and jubilation.

At last the day came when he had put the finishing touches to his book, “the book that would understand me.” He went out and sat down under a tree and opened the anthology. He began to read, but instead of release and jubilation, a growing disappointment began to come over him as he recognized that instead of speaking to his condition, the various passages only reminded him of their context and of his own work in searching them out and recording them. Then he knew that the whole undertaking simply would not work, for the book was a book of his own making. It carried no strength of persuasion. Dejected, he returned it to his pocket.At that very moment his wife (who knew nothing of the project) came by with an interesting story. She had been walking in their tiny French village that afternoon and had stumbled upon a small Huguenot chapel. She had never seen it before, but she had gone in and had asked for a Bible, much to her own surprise. The elderly pastor had given her one. She began apologizing to her husband, for she knew his feelings about the Christian faith. But he was not listening to her apology. “A Bible, you say? Where is it? Show me,” he said. “I have never seen one before.” When she produced it he rushed to his study and began to read. In his own words,I opened it and “chanced” upon the Beatitudes! I read, and read, and read—now aloud with an indescribable warmth surging within.… I could not find words to express my awe and wonder. And suddenly the realization dawned upon me: This was the Book that would understand me! I needed it so much, yet, unaware, I had attempted to write my own—in vain. I continued to read deeply into the night…as I looked through them, the One of whom they spoke, the One who spoke and acted in them, became alive to me. This vivid experience marked the beginning of my understanding of prayer. It also proved to be my initiation to the notion of Presence which later would prove so crucial in my theological thinking. The providential circumstances amid which the Book had found me now made it clear that while it seemed absurd to speak of a book understanding a man, this could be said of the Bible because its pages were animated by the Presence of the Living God and the Power of His mighty acts. To this God I prayed that night, and the God who answered was the same God of whom it was spoken in the Book.

Cailliet was saying that although the Bible was not written for me it was written to me and it is the only book that understands me.

This thing that we call the Bible is not what the ancients understood as the Bible. My first bible that I ever got was a King James Bible (Show it). It came wrapped in cellaphane, in a box and starts with a Table of Contents and Ends with Maps.

That is not how the ancients got their Bibles. They could not go to amazon type in their favorite Bible and have shipped overnight. They did not have the Table of Contents, Maps or Indexes. They had pieces, portions, sayings, rumors a memory of a text. During the first century very few had access to all the scrolls of the Hebrew Bible.

And the Codex did not get invented until the end of the 1st century AD and did not become popular as writing medium until the second and third century and then it really took off in the 4th Century AD. People had parchments with Scriptures, they had notebooks, rolled pages, some memorized sayings of Yeshua, maybe, maybe, a very small few had access to a Torah Scroll even fewer to the other scrolls of the Hebrew Bible or parchment with the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible.

For the earliest disciples of Yeshua, not just the 12 but the hundred and thousands who followed Yeshua in the first century, they did not have the Gospel of Matthew, Luke, John or Mark and no one certainly had all four of the Gospels.

What they had was the eye-witness testimony of the disciples who walked with Yeshua, some who turned away and came back to Yeshua, the 500 who saw Yeshua resurrected.

Those Jewish followers of Yeshua, we will talk about the Greeks and Romans soon, heard the good news about the Messiah, all the sudden the Scriptures just fell into place.

It is like when my daughter and I were playing the card game “Trash” the other night. I was dealt two kings and the kings turned up it caused me to get all the cards in the right order and win the game.

The Messiah was not another fact in the story of the Bible, he made the story of the Bible all come together. And when it all came together, all the pieces put where they belonged they didn’t just put the book on a shelf and say, “on to the next great literary mystery.” No, the Bible mysteriously came alive and understood them in a way they had never known before.

Before the revelation of the Messiah the greatest enemy to an honest seeker of God was “not knowing what all this meant.” We take that for granted because we live on this side of the Kingdom of God equator but for millions of Jews in the first century and before their greatest enemy was philosophical, “what does this really mean.” But, after Messiah the greatest enemy was internal, “what all this means for me.”

This where the letter to the Hebrews comes in. This ancient document that most scholars say was written sometime in the 50s contains the thoughts of a Jewish follower of Yeshua who knew his Hebrew Bible. I think this Jewish believer was Rabbi Paul and you can feel free to disagree if these are the kinds of things you like to disagree over. However, the one thing we all agree on is that whoever wrote this letter thought, “we should trust the Bible to make sense of our lives because it is the one book that understands me.”

The author does not quote one line from any of the four Gospels but yet he preaches the Gospel. He quotes from the Torah, the Psalms, the Prophets, and even Proverbs and all of he says makes sense because of the Messiah and it is alive. It understands me. He tells his audience the Bible is something more than a body of great stories and wise sayings, it is the voice of the living God and it understands me. He did more than just give us a Bible, speaks to individual through the words of the Bible and changes people internally. Somehow the living God speaks through its pages and for that reason it was to be regarded

Valuable & Reliable

Sacred & Inspired

Alive & Active

Scripture

He says in Hebrews 4:12:

Hebrews 4:12 TLV

For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword—piercing right through to a separation of soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

For the word of God is living and active…

I was taught in college something very important. I paid a lot of money for this and I am going to give it to you for free. It is this, “when you see the world “for” find out what it is there for.”It is the summary of a discussion that started in Hebrews 4:2 like this

Hebrews 4:2 TLV

For we also have had Good News proclaimed to us, just as they did. But the word they heard did not help them, because they were not unified with those who listened in faith.

Rabbi Paul then discusses for the next 9 verses the tragedy at Kadesh-Barnea because after Israel disobeyed God’s Word, God said, “Not one of them will ever see the land” (Numbers 14:23). The people then responded in essence, “We have made a tragic mistake. Let’s take our weapons and enter the land. We are now prepared to believe in God” (cf. Numbers 14:39, 40). Moses warned them not to go, saying: “Do not go up, because the Lord is not with you. You will bedefeated by your enemies, for the Amalekites and Canaanites will face you there. Because you have turned away from the Lord, he will not be with you and you will fall by the sword” (Numbers 14:42, 43). But they disregarded his warning and went up without Moses and without the ark and without the blessing of God, and they did indeed fall to the swords of the Amalekites and Canaanites (Numbers 14:44, 45). Here is Paul’s point: God’s Word is for you if you are for God’s Word.

Hebrews 4:12 TLV

For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword—

This sword is not a “broad-sword” like this one (get out of storage). This is a small knife. Now some have compared it to a dagger but there is one scholar who believes this knife is not a weapon at all but a knife that would have been used for medical purposes. More like the sharp two sided medical instruments used by romans that could have both “pierced” and “cut.”

He is saying this living and active word of God does surgery on me..

piercing right through to a separation of soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

It is a critic to the “reflections” of the heart. Paul is making this word picture. He says your heart is like this clear pond and as your think on something it makes a reflection, an image on your heart and the Word of God is sitting there next to the pond of your heart saying, “Why do you think that way about that person? About that passage? About that problem.” Or, “Have you ever thought about it like this?”We hear the word “judge” and “critic” and we think something very negative. Think of it more like Simon Cowell on America’s Got Talent talking to contestants about their performance.Paul says the Word of God so understands you that it sets at the deepest places of your heart and talks to you about your heart’s perfomance, how it is interpreting everything that it is seeing, hearing, smelling, perceiving.This is not just a book, it is a book that understands me at the deepest level.It is a surgical instrument that can heal, it can comfort, it can cut out what is toxic and bring in what is healthy.

But then Paul says it also is more than just a healer, it is a judge for the sinful thoughts we have in our hearts. He uses this word picture in Hebrews 4:13

Hebrews 4:13 TLV

No creature is hidden from Him, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.

Many Christian commentators at this points say, Paul thinks this knife cuts both ways. It exposes. They point to a judicial use of this word that was used in judicial settings for a criminal who was found guilty of a crime and they would put a knife under this chin against his throat so he could not hang his hand in shame as he looked at court and had to admit his guilt. He was forced to look at the judge in the eyes, to look at those he had hurt and tell the truth on himself.By force, guilt and same, they say, “The Bible threatens me tell the truth on myself. And then they obligate on how: The Word of God when it is active and living in your life it is one of the greatest sources of accountability.

He says that all the shams, hypocrisies will be revealed and no profession of faith, no matter how orthodox. He says all the masks will come off, all that time you thought you could just show the highlight reel and not the real footage, he is going to get the raw footage off the floor.

But there is a lesser known scholar named James Swetnam who said, “hold up, wait a minute, stop the execution.” The knife in v. 12 is a medical knife and all of Hebrews 4 was a commentary on the Kadesh Barnea situation. Where the people ignored God’s promise to enter the rest and instead tried to enter the rest by their own command. Swetnam said you can’t switch the metaphor. Paul is not leaping to a Roman court room. NO! He said we have to see the Hebrew roots of this passage, go back to the prophets, go back to Joshua 5:4-7.

Joshua 5:4–7 TLV

Now this is the reason why Joshua circumcised: all the people that came out of Egypt who were males—all the men of war—had died in the wilderness along the way after they came out of Egypt. Though all the people that came out were circumcised, none of the people who were born in the wilderness along the way as they came out of Egypt had been circumcised. For Bnei-Yisrael walked 40 years in the wilderness, until all the nation’s men of war who came out of Egypt died out, because they had not listened to the voice of Adonai. To them Adonai had sworn that He would never let them see the land which Adonai had sworn to their fathers that He would give us, a land flowing with milk and honey. But He raised up their children in their place. Joshua circumcised them, for they were uncircumcised, since they had not been circumcised along the way.

Paul is saying there was a generation that refused to let the Word of God circumcise their hearts and they died in the wilderness for a lack of faith. They were so hard hearted that they would not even circumcise their children who had faith and believed the Word of the Lord. That generation believed and followed Joshua, who Paul will compare to Yeshua in this letter. And for a moment, their faith caused their flesh to be naked and exposed before the one whom it mattered. They were not going into the promise land without first giving an account of their faith in God’s Word no different than any that came before them.

Hebrews 4:13 TLV

No creature is hidden from Him, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.

Paul says the Word of God is right now circumcising your heart and when God sees it what lies ahead of you is promises, is blessing, is the future God has made sure.That wound changes me, changes you.Paul says the Law, the Prophets, may not have been written to us but they were written for us. Because they are written for us the Bible is the only book in the world that understand me, gets me, can read me, can call me to truth when no one else can.

You/We

Paul did not have a copy of the Gospels on hand. He probably had access to a Torah Scroll some where and some parchments. He did not carry around with him a copy of the Bible in side pocket like we can.

These guys believed that although the Bible was not written to them it was written for them and it understood them.

And because of this it was

Valuable & ReliableSacred & InspiredAlive & ActiveScripture

And these guys kept passing on these words to other disciples and when the Empire of Rome turned against the followers of Yeshua during the reign of Nero and then almost every subsequent Emperor they kept on going back to what they were taught and what they heard. Then when Emperor Diocletian came along he issued in an edict against followers of Yeshua that resulted in the worst state sponsored riots ever.

Tertullianus who lived during this time said this about this period in history

“If the Tiber floods the city or

If the Nile refuses to rise or

If the sky withholds its rain,

If there is an earthquake, a famine,

a pestilence, at once the cry

is raised, ‘Christians to the lion.’”

Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus: Apology

And even though they did not have a copy of the Bible like you and I have they kept on saying to themselves we will enter into his promised rest, God’s Word will not fail us.

They did not abandon the faith but they held onto to it:

These guys believed that although the Bible was not written to them it was written for them and it understood them. And because of this it was

Valuable & ReliableSacred & InspiredAlive & ActiveScripture

It is easy to just put this thing up on a shelf and turn it into some kind of a relic or just another great piece of literature along side of George Orwell, Aristotle, Oprah Winfrey. It is so much more than that. It is the only book in the world that contains the breath of God. It is the only book in the world that can speak to you in a way that can change you for the better, change your life for the better.

We don’t just read it, it reads us. It encourages us, challenges us but ultimately it changes us if we allow it to speak into the innermost places of our heart.

So this is part 1 of “it’s alive” make sure you come back next for part 2, you are not going to want to miss it.

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