In a word...

I love words.  I love to play games with them.  One of my favorite amusements is to see how one word can morph into another, and then compare the meanings.

Like denomination, which, with only a couple of alterations, becomes demonic nation.  What a fun study that is!

Or, consider how easily heaven becomes leaven, which, in the language of Scripture, is not a good thing at all.  Of course, the optimists among us can point out that leaven converts to heaven just as readily.

And then there's legion.  Easily transmuted to leg iron.  From there, it's a small step to leghorn.  And as anyone with a working knowledge of art and culture will remember, Foghorn is the most famous leghorn ever.  But, beware - foghorn is not too far removed from frog porn, and no one wants that!

Sometimes it's fun to compare denominations with demonic nations, or to issue warnings (or encouragements!) about how easily heaven and leaven can change places.  But it would be really stupid to accuse organizations using "legion" in their names of producing pornography.  Amphibian or any other variety.

Yet sometimes I think we go nearly that far afield in the way we attempt to "interpret" what we read in the Bible.  Because we see God's Word as a book, we believe that we can find His truth through literary exercise.  We play with the words, the phrases, the contexts, until we can finally make ourselves comfortable with what it says.

Of course, we wouldn't phrase it that way.  We would say we have arrived at the correct interpretation, or that we have heard the truth of a particular passage.  But along the way, how many times have we decided that the front half of a verse is literal, and the remainder poetic and symbolic?  How many words have we retranslated and redefined and rethought and reimagined and re..., re..., re... ... ... until we've re-everythinged the life out of them?

By what standard have we determined that some things are literal, others figurative; some are timeless, others locked to historical application; some are contextualized for this group, some for another, and others for everyone?  Unfortunately, the standard we often (maybe always!) apply is the one that leads us to the place where the Bible says exactly what we want it to - nothing more, and nothing less.

As long as we view the Bible as a book, no matter how great a book we think (or claim to believe) it is, we will always promote the use of human tools to excavate heavenly truth. We assert by our actions, if not by our doctrine, that the human intellect is not fallen with the rest of the human constitution. That we only need beware the sinful flesh, and the wayward heart. But not the mind. How do we come to believe this? Well, we find it in Scripture ... or, rather, we cajole the words of a book into agreement with this belief.

But the truth is not a book - Truth is Jesus. The Bible isn't full of words, it breathes with the Word - again, Jesus. If we look between its covers to find stuff about God, we fall short of Scripture's potential to allow us to see God. The book can be the medium of Jesus' manifestation, bringing him to life in us. Or it can be a fossil-record of his passing, to which we apply scientific tools in order to deduce what he must have looked like, how he may have acted, what he might have eaten and drunk.

God may be old,  but he ain't no fossil!