Reading the Bible - Episode 4

Series Introduction

Hello, welcome to Reading the Bible. My name is Collin, I’m a pastor at Redeemer Anglican Church in Dacula, Georgia, and in this season of shelter-in-place, I want to help you and your family learn to love reading the Bible in your homes. I think many of us don’t really know how to approach reading the Bible. It’s a strange book written thousands of years ago, and though we’re told again and again that we should be reading it, whenever we try, we don’t feel like we get anything out of it. If that’s you, you’re not alone, and I want to help. Because while this is a strange book written thousands of years ago, I’ve come to believe it to be the most transformative work of literature the world has ever known; and I want help you discover that as well.

Episode Introduction

Last week, we began our exploration of the different types of literature that we find when we’re reading the Bible and how they contribute to the main storyline that runs throughout the Scriptures. We saw that almost half of the pages in the Bible are filled with stories or narratives as they are sometimes called. So if we’re going to learn how to read the Bible, we’ve got to learn how to read these stories.

This week, we’re sticking with the genre of narratives. If you remember, every story features some kind of challenge that must be overcome, and the people who have to face that challenge are what we call the characters. Characters are an incredibly important part of telling and reading stories, so today that’s what we’re looking at. So let’s get into it.

Characters in the Bible

The stories that impact us the most are ones with relatable characters. People who are like us, who are going through a struggle similar to ours, who are challenged by their world like we are. These characters function almost like a mirror, as we watch how they respond to this conflict in an attempt to overcome it. We see ourselves and our own conflicts in their story.

This is true of characters in the Bible as well. And yet, as you read the stories in the Bible, you’ll notice that these characters are different than what we read in many modern stories.

Limited descriptions of characters

For starters, we don’t get a whole of detail or description of characters in the Bible. Modern stories usually has long descriptions and background, biographical information whenever a character is introduced, but not in biblical stories. Have you ever noticed that stories rarely have any kind of description of physical appearances? What does Peter look like? What about Mary or Abraham? Contrary to modern authors, biblical authors aren’t interested in giving detailed descriptions of what characters look like, which means what information they do give is usually very important for the story they are telling.

For example: the Bible tells us that Saul is very tall, while David is the runt of the family. These are important descriptions, because as we come to find out, Saul loves to be in the spotlight and in control, while David is more prone to act in humility and let God exalt him instead. These descriptions serve to heighten their contrast and the way they approach power, which will become crucial to their story.

The importance of names

Names are also important in biblical stories, because they tend to tell us what role the character will play in the story. So Abraham means “father of many”, and he in fact becomes the father of the nation of Israel. Ruth means “refreshment,” which really describes her relationship with her bereaved mother-in-law Naomi, and Peter means “the rock,” and he becomes a central figure in the Jesus movement.

So you can see that in biblical stories, they are providing a good bit of description, but they are doing it in a very different way.

Limited details in stories

It often feels like a lot of important details are left out with regards to characters, and in particular their motivations for doing things. In modern stories we are often brought into the mind of a character and we get to hear their inner deliberations, or maybe an author will help explain a particular action or pattern of behavior by way of some kind of biographical context.

But in the Bible, we very rarely are provided with any kind of motivation for why a character acts the way they do. And on top of that, biblical authors very rarely comment on whether a character actions are right or wrong. They’d rather let character’s words and behavior reveal their motives, and then let us as the reader judge their behavior based on the consequences of those actions. The best writers or directors actually follow this method, because they’d rather show you a character’s motives rather than tell you. And there’s a reason.

A classic example of this is found in the story of Cain and Abel. Cain and Abel are brothers, and they both present an offering to God. God looks with favor on Abel’s offering, but not on Cain’s. We aren’t told why. We do learn that Cain becomes angry, and so God warns him that sin is crouching at his door, but that Cain should choose to rule over it. The next thing we see in the story is Cain kills his brother Abel.

In this story we don’t get much information that we might think important. We don’t hear the thoughts or internal struggle that led Cain to kill his brother. What was he thinking? God warns him that sin was stalking him like a wild animal, so what did that look like for Cain? How did it overtake him?

And as you begin to ask all these questions, all of a sudden you’re involved in this story in a way that you wouldn’t be if the author just told you all these things on the page. Now you’re invest. You’re participating in the story. You’re seeing yourself in Cain as you imagine how you might respond, how it may look like for sin to be crouching at your door, what it would take for you to be overwhelmed by anger. And that’s exactly why all that information is left out. To draw you deeper into the story so that it can work on you and shape you.

Characters are complex and compromised

But there’s another reason information that we’d call important is left out with regards to characterization in the Bible. In this story of Cain and Abel, we aren’t told why Cain’s offering was rejected. There’s no explanation, we are simply told that God looked with favor on Abel, but not on Cain, and it left Cain angry and his face fell. So at that our minds begin to wonder, “What was it about Cain’s offering that made it unacceptable? What was it about Cain’s motivation? What was it about the quality or method of his offering?” And all of a sudden we’re empathizing with Cain, because we are just as much in the dark about this as he is. But why would the author want us to empathize with the villain in the story?

And this gets us at our last point about characters. Very rarely are there heroes and villains in the Bible, and the reason is that this is not a children’s story. A children’s story has clean cut characters. This one is evil, this one is good. But in the Bible, even the characters that we’d traditionally call heroes of the faith are deeply flawed and compromised.

Israel’s greatest king, David, defeats Goliath and unifies the nation, he’s the man after God’s own heart, but he also sleeps with another man’s wife, gets her pregnant, and then kills her husband.

Moses is this paragon of God’s redemptive power because it was he who confronted Pharaoh and through his hand all the plagues came upon Egypt, but he’s also the guy who was too scared to confront Pharoah alone or talk to the people of Israel, so he had his brother do the talking instead, and it was he who had a pretty nasty temper that he killed an Egyptian, broke the first set of Ten Commandments, and disobeyed God out of frustration in the wilderness.

Everyone is compromised, a mix of good and bad, just like you and me. We are not meant to imitate the behaviors of these characters. Well that’s not entirely true. Because there is one behavior that is highlighted again and again in story after story. It happens when a character fails and is brought to the end of themselves, and they then look to God for grace, mercy, and rescue. Time and time again, this act of radical trust is what is presented as the behavior we are meant to takeaway.

Ending

So as you can see, characters are a very important part of narratives in the Bible, and we can learn a lot about ourselves, our flaws, and our God’s amazing patience and grace through the characters found in the Bible. The biblical authors want you to spend time thinking about these characters, to put yourself in their shoes, to ask questions about their behaviors, because this is what draws you into the story and allows it to shape you as you go about your lives.

Hopefully over the past two weeks you’ve learned a thing or two about reading biblical stories. There is of course so much more we could say, but this has been a good start. Next week we’ll tackle what may the best difficult of the three genres we’re looking at as we explore the wonderful world of ancient poetry. Between stories and poems, you’re looking at 75% of the Bible, so come back next week to see how these beautiful texts contribute to the great story of the Bible and how they invite us into it in a unique way.