The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place. Rob Bell
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For some odd reason, I have not been able to get that phrase out of my head lately. “He stinketh.” It’s working on me. It’s teaching me. I’ve been meditating and reflecting on it and turning it over and over in my head and my heart. Inspired words have a way of getting under our skin and taking on a life of their own. They work on us. We started out reading them, but they end up reading us.
This is what happens when the Bible becomes living and active. The strangest dimensions of these stories grab us and won’t let go.
And this phrase continues to swirl around in my mind and my heart. Where is there death in my life? Where am I dying because of decisions I’ve made? Where do I “stinketh”?
“He stinketh” is written on the wall of this room because it is my story.
It happened in John 11.
It happens for me every day.
The reason the Bible continues to resonate with so many people isn’t just because it happened. What gives us strength and meaning and direction is something in addition to the historical events: It is the meaning of these events. Some call this the more-than-literal truth of the Bible.30
We live in the metaphors. The story of David and Goliath continues to speak to us because we know the David part of the story—we have lived it. The tomb is empty because we have met the risen Christ—we have experienced Jesus in a way that transcends space and time. And this gives us hope. We were in darkness and God brought us out into the light.
The Word is living and active and it happens. Today.
Real, Real, Real
In order to bind and loose, we must understand that the Bible did not drop out of the sky. It was written by people. People who told stories and passed on oral traditions and sat down and wrote things with a pen and paper. The Bible originated from real people in real places at real times.
It is poems and stories and letters and accounts. It is people interacting with other people in actual space and time. It is God interacting with people in actual space and time. We cannot ignore this.
To take statements made in a letter from one person living in a real place at a moment in history writing to another person living in a real place out of their context and apply them to today without first understanding their original context sucks the life right out of them. They aren’t isolated statements that float, unattached, out in space.
They aren’t first and foremost timeless truths.
We may, and usually do, find timeless truths present in the Bible, but it is because they were true in real places for real people at real times.
I heard somebody recently refer to the Bible as “data.” That person was in an intense discussion about what the Bible teaches about a certain issue, and he disagreed with someone else so he said, “I don’t see the data for your position.”
Data?
The Bible is not pieces of information about God and Jesus and whatever else we take and apply to situations as we would a cookbook or an instruction manual.
And while I’m at it, let’s make a group decision to drop once and for all the Bible-as-owner’s-manual metaphor. It’s terrible. It really is.
When was the last time you read the owner’s manual for your toaster? Do you find it remotely inspiring or meaningful?
You only refer to it when something’s wrong with your toaster. You use it to fix the problem, and then you put it away.
We have to embrace the Bible as the wild, uncensored, passionate account it is of people experiencing the living God.
Doubting the one true God.
Wrestling with, arguing with, getting angry with, reconciling with, loving, worshipping, thanking, following the one who gives us everything.
We cannot tame it.
We cannot tone it down.
If we do, then we can’t say it is the life-giving Word of God. We have made it something else.
So when we treat the Bible as if it floats in space, unattached to when and where it actually happened, we are basically saying that God gave us the wrong kind of book. It is a book of ancient narratives. We cannot make it something it is not.31
When Jesus talks about divorce, he is entering into a discussion that was one of the eight great debates of his day.32 He is interacting with a specific tradition and other rabbis of his day who had said specific things about divorce. The great rabbis Hillel and Shammai had specific yokes in regard to divorce. When Jesus is asked questions about divorce, what he is really being asked is, “Who do you side with, Hillel or Shammai?” People are asking him to enter into the current discussion. And in Jesus’s answer, he sides with one of them.33 To grab a few lines of Jesus and drop them down on someone 2,000 years later without first entering into the world in which they first appeared is lethal to the life and vitality and truth of the Bible.
Real people, in real places, at real times, writing and telling stories about their experiences and their growing understanding of who God is and who they are.
This does not in any way discount the power of reading the Bible with no background knowledge at all, which is why these words are so powerful. We can enter into them at any level and they speak to us. Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does.
For example, the book of Deuteronomy is patterned after treaties that were common in its day. The writer essentially took a common legal document and changed the content and the names but kept the form the same.
The end of the book of Mark is arranged according to the coronation ceremonies of the Roman emperor. Maybe Mark witnessed one of these ceremonies, because he is very intentional about the order of events leading up to Jesus’s death. His readers would have been familiar with these Roman coronation events. They would have read between the lines right away. Mark wants you to see Jesus as a king like Caesar, but at the same time totally unlike Caesar.
The first three miracles in the book of John are directly related to the three major gods of Asia Minor, the region John writes his gospel to. Dionysus was the god who turned water into wine, Asclepius was the god of healing, and Demeter was the goddess of grain. So how does John begin his story? With Jesus turning water into wine, healing, and then feeding thousands of people. John has an agenda. He wants these people in this place and this time to know that Jesus is better than their gods.
When Paul writes to Timothy about women being saved in childbirth, he is making a direct reference to the goddess Artemis, whose temple was just down the street in Timothy’s hometown of Ephesus. Artemis’s followers believed that Artemis saved women from dying in childbirth, which is significant in a city where one out of two women died giving birth. Paul’s statement here has huge political, social, and religious implications. He is implying that Artemis is a fraud.34
The first chapters of the book of Revelation follow the sequence of events of the Domitian games, held in honor of the caesar who was in power at the time Revelation was written. Domitian would address the leaders of the various provinces, then his choir of twenty-four would sing worship songs to him, and then there would be a horse race. John is writing Revelation to people who had seen the Domitian games; they know exactly what he is referring to. He wants them to see that Domitian is a fake and Jesus is the real King.
The writers of the Bible are communicating in language their world will understand. They are using the symbols and pictures and images of