Psalm 119:24

Your testimonies are also my delight,
My counselors [the men of my counsel].

I like to say that we tend to go to the Bible for information, while God is there for conversation. I don’t mean that there is no information there. We tend to think in binary terms: Either the Bible is a source of data, or it tells stories. So many sorts of both information and conversation fall through the cracks when we think of it this way.

I recall one gentleman at a church I attended who told us we should think of the Bible as something like the Boy Scouts Manual. I told him I thought that anyone who considered those two books to be similar must not have actually read either.

There are certainly rules and procedures in the Bible. But the stories that surround those are even more important. For example, as Christians we don’t carry out the rituals of the tabernacle and temple service as outlined in Torah. But those rituals still have things to teach us, as do the stories in which they are embedded.

As I was thinking about writing this meditation, I was reading some notes about a library and how one can be drawn into stories and worlds that are new, distant or even imaginary, and how those experiences found in the pages of books can enrich our lives.

I long to help people find in the Bible a library of places distant and even just imagined, with that hope that imagined worlds may be more real than the ones that boring people assure us are “reality.” I would like to see us find that “reality” is more flexible and adjustable than even we can imagine if we just join the conversation that God has for us instead of just looking for answers for our rather ignorant and limited questions.

I’d like to see people (including myself!) more and more find in scripture the real questions, the important questions, the ones that engage our minds more fully.

The psalmist delights in the testimonies, but instead of calling them a rule book from which he learns a list of commands, he calls them counselors. To him they are alive and active (Hebrews 4:12). They are powerful.

And this is not limited to the words contained in the book we call the Bible or scripture. God’s mind is displayed in the entire universe, and we can discover not final answers, but questions beyond any imagining.

We might consider that our problem with God’s law isn’t, or isn’t just, an inability to do everything we are told to do absolutely correctly. It might be more that we can’t even grasp what it is.

I think we’re invited on an infinite journey of learning and discovery. It’s not God who puts the limits on it. It’s our lack of imagination, especially of the ability to imagine a landscape completely outside of our current scope.

Do you hear God calling you to glory?

(Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)