Crumbs. Pieces. Fragments. Slices.
The Bible, when you think about it, doesn’t offer us that much. This book is, by its own attestation, God’s complete self-revelation, everything he believes is necessary for us to know about him, ourselves, and this world in order to live the way we were meant to. And all we have? Some history of an obscure people group in the Middle East, poetry, strange prophecies from even stranger times, and some random letters written by preachers on the run. Not much.
But this is everything. Life, truth, light. We can KNOW GOD through these seemingly-random desert scribblings. This is how the Creator and Redeemer of the universe has decreed it, and the fact that he used the vehicle of language is shocking. When you examine the Bible through the lens of humility, of knowing God, this is what you see.
Currently, I am staring at a dusty passage from the book of Daniel in efforts to craft a narrative sermon. I am peeling back layer after layer of these cursory verses that relay an odd story of food, eunuchs, and visions. I wish I had been there, to understand what the point of all this was. I feel sorely unskilled when handling this Word; I feel muddled and taken aback by the enormity of the task before me, on top of homework and writing contests and internship finagling and working and thinking and living and caring and wondering how this season will fit into the puzzle of my life.
The innocuous, the overwhelming, the grandiose, the individual threads that make up my story are always intertwining, by my Lord the Weaver, who has decreed from before time what this tapestry will look like and how it will fit together with every other tapestry on the wall. Everything always looks clearer in hindsight, and even at this point in my life, I can see how he worked events to make something beautiful. Like the Scriptures, everything makes sense when you peer into the pages wearing the appropriate lens, and that is Christ. Like a Gestalt experience, suddenly planes shift and you can….see.
Oh, how life and light are coherent when one knows the truth, Jesus Christ. The pieces do more than coagulate: they conform and sit perfectly, exactly when viewed from the standing point of Calvary. And so here we stand.
“‘I am the Light of the world…'” John 8:12
