Reading the Bible

A new installment of Journey of a New Christian. Click the “subscribe” button at the end to receive free weekly updates by email. New to the series? This introduction provides an overview.

Setting out to read the Bible in 2020, at age 71, I felt a surge of enthusiasm that reminded me of when I’d started my doctoral program 25 years earlier. Here was a new challenge, something entirely different from anything I had tackled before. The Pastor believed this was God’s explanation to us of His plan for mankind. I was eager to see for myself what that amounted to.

I already knew something about God through examination of my personal history and through prayer. Before I was even aware of Him, He had watched over me and shielded me from danger. He had call me out of a tumultuous life of radical activism and set me on course to the tranquil life I lived now.

Since the fall of 2002 I had prayed regularly, in the process learning about God’s will, his timing, and what pleases and displeases him. Through prayer, many of my plans flourished, but a few failed spectacularly. Over a 2-year period (2010-2012) I applied for Dean’s jobs at colleges and universities, prayed over every submission, and was turned down 28 times before being hired on the 29^th. But what a blessing it turned out to be, moving across the country to take that 29^th job! It was at that destination that I met my wife. It was there that I started attending church and the Pastor opened my eyes to the importance of the Bible. From my experience of prayer I recognize that God not only can see into the future, He is orchestrating my life life in ways I would never have dreamed of.

What I did not understand was why people believed Jesus was His son. In the hope of filling that gap in my Christian knowledge, I started my reading not in Genesis, as someone setting out to read the whole Bible would normally do, but rather with the first mention of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew.

The story of Jesus’ life was familiar. Every Sunday at my Episcopal boarding school, the Rector would read a passage from one of the gospels. In five years there, I had probably heard nearly everything in them. But now I was reading them on my own, in sequence, to try to understand what I’d missed. I wasn’t studying for a test or waiting for the Rector to stop reading. I was searching for meaning. It was a very different experience.

As narrative, I find the gospels very engaging. Even if you’ve heard them or read them before, you find yourself carried along by the story. But that very fact makes it difficult to dig beneath the surface and figure out what you’re missing.

I didn’t have any particular plan in mind to find what I was searching for. I did, however, have a study Bible—the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, a thick volume my wife had carried with her for years and now offered as an aid in my reading. It included extended notes on the text as well as pictures, maps, and brief historical essays explaining the geography, culture, and history for each book of the Bible. For Matthew, there was a discussion of the importance of genealogies in ancient Jewish culture, a map tracing Mary and Joseph’s route from Nazareth to Bethlehem to Egypt and back, and a photograph of a first-century Roman house key.

Notes and resources like this are not divinely inspired. From a Christian perspective, they’re only as reliable as the human authors. Even so, I found value in them. We can’t know the past in the same way that we know our own lived experience, but learning about a place and time different from our own can make them come alive. Learning about the culture, economy, and politics of 1^st-century Judea and Samaria gave me a window into Jesus’ life and helped me appreciate the testimony of the apostles in a new way.

This new knowledge did not answer the critical question of whether Jesus was God. Seeing His ministry more vividly did not bring about any abrupt change in my theological understanding. My thought pattern was probably much like that of the apostles when they first witnessed his miracles. This man could turn water into wine and calm turbulent waters and raise a man from the grave. They, and I through their testimony, witnessed something holy. But what exactly?

When Jesus asked his apostles, “Who do you say that I am?”, not all of them could have answered as Peter did: “You are the Christ, son of the living God.” I didn’t recognize it at the time, but Jesus’ answer to Peter helps to explain why I struggled so long with this exact issue. “For flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 14: 15-16). I was disappointed that my doubts still remained after reading the New Testament, but I sensed I was making progress, and tackled Genesis with a renewed sense of purpose.

Discovering how much I had missed at Groton, where I first heard the Gospel.

In my education at Groton, I had learned little about the history of Israel before Christ. I remembered Moses and the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea, the gift of manna, and the golden calf. The rest was new to me: the journeys of the patriarchs, the wars with Assyria and the Philistines, the division of the two kingdoms, Babylonian exile, and return and rebuilding of the temple. With so much history and geography to absorb, I needed the Cultural Backgrounds Bible more than ever. Ever so slowly, the 2100 year chronology of God’s chosen people to the birth of Jesus took shape in my mind, and along with it a mental map of the Ancient Near East and the people that lived there.

Five years later, my first encounter with the Old Testament has become a blur. What I learned then has gradually been amplified, corrected, or replaced by Pastor’s sermons, Bible study groups, and my own reading of Bible commentaries. Two principal lessons from that first reading remain vivid.

The first is the parallels to my own life, especially my early 20’s, when I was enmeshed in a radical activist movement bent on destroying America. I had recently begun writing about this dark period of my life, acknowledging the great evil that I had been drawn into and helped to perpetrate. Looking back I could discern many points at which God guided and protected me, gradually leading me out of the turbulence much as He led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. After I’d written out this confession, I heard a small voice at the fringes of consciousness tell me to put down my burden. I felt a deep sense of forgiveness. I was sure this was God, especially when I heard the small voice add, “Follow me.”

I had long wondered how He had chosen me to draw toward Him, out of all the hundreds of thousands caught up in Vietnam war protests. This now made sense to me as I considered God’s choice of unlikely figures to carry out his plans: David, the unprepossessing younger son who became king; Ehud, the left-handed man who slew the Moabite king Eglon; the prophet Hosea who married a prostitute and preached against wayward Israel. Still unsure of my faith at age 71, I was the epitome of an unlikely vessel to fulfill God’s purpose, and yet here I was. The correspondence of the Biblical narrative with my own life strengthened my trust in its authority and made the idea that it was divinely inspired more plausible. When I read Isaiah’s plea to the Lord, “Here I am. Send me!”, I could imagine myself voicing exactly the same sentiment.

The second lesson impressed on me in that initial reading was the vividness and detail of Old Testament prophecies about the coming of Christ. Groton had taught me only that the Jews were expecting a Messiah in the form of a political leader who would overthrow Roman rule. Based on that information alone, the status of Jesus could be viewed as debatable. The actual prophecies provided far more information about who the Messiah would be, where he would come from, what he would do, and how the world would respond.

Genesis and 2 Samuel identify Christ’s lineage (Abraham, Jacob, Judah, and David). Hosea predicts the virgin birth. Micah locates His birthplace in Bethlehem. Hosea mentions His residence in Egypt, where Joseph and Mary fled to avoid Herod. Isaiah foretells rejection of His message; that He would preach in Galilee; that He would convert the Gentiles; that He would be preceded by a man calling in the wilderness (John the Baptist); and that He would be despised and rejected. Zechariah predicted that He would enter Jerusalem riding on a colt, the foal of a donkey, as well as the exact price of His betrayal (30 pieces of silver). Psalms describes the piercing of His hands and feet and the casting of lots for His clothes.

Taken together, all this was overwhelming. These were not the prophecies of a single person. They spread out across the span of the entire Old Testament, from the first book, Genesis, to the last, Malachi. Authors who could never have met one another predicted unrelated circumstances of the life of the Messiah. If Jesus were simply a man, except for riding into Jerusalem on a colt, he could not have controlled any of these circumstances. No human agency could have coordinated all these predictions and engineered their fulfillment.

When I came to chapter 53 of Isaiah, this point was driven home by a powerful memory. When I was at Groton, I sang in the choir. At Easter each year we sang excerpts from the Messiah, including the passage:

Surely, surely, he has borne our griefs,

and carried our sorrows;

yet we esteemed him stricken and smitten by God and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions,

He was crushed for our iniquities;

Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,

And with his wounds we are healed.

Over my five years at the school, I sang all the parts, tracing my adolescence through soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone, leaving this majestic, heart-rendering music engraved in memory. Yet despite this moving experience, there was something important about the words I sang that I wasn’t aware of. I didn’t know they were written by Isaiah.

I thought this passage was Handel’s or someone else’s paraphrase of the gospel. I had no idea that it was written more than 700 years before the crucifixion. I had no idea it was fulfilled prophecy. This gap in my education did more than cause me to be misled about the composition of Handel’s oratorio. It blinded me to a key piece of Biblical evidence that Jesus was God.

Looking back now, I’m puzzled that Groton didn’t do more to impress this on us. Why neglect ¾ of scripture? The gospel writers certainly understood its importance. Maybe our teachers thought the frequent references and quotations in the New Testament were enough. But as I struggled through history, poetry, and prophecy, I found myself thinking how much we had missed. Matthew reports Jesus admonishing his disciplines, “Do not think that I have abolished the law and the prophets. I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them” (5:17). Without knowledge of the Old Testament, Christians can have only vague notion of what it was that Jesus came to fulfill.

Around the time I read Zechariah, the 2^nd-to-last book of the Old Testament, Louise and I were driving to church one Sunday morning and she commented that several months had passed since I talked to her about doubts. We stopped at a light, and I glanced at her in puzzlement. Where had those doubts gone? I hadn’t thought about them recently. What had become of them?

I was surprised and a little uneasy to hear myself admit to her that the doubts that had preoccupied me for several years simply weren’t there any more. Reading the Old Testament with its many parallels to my own life and its detailed predictions about the Messiah had convinced me of two things: first, the Bible really is God’s explanation to us of his plan for humanity; and second, Jesus is God.

At some point during this process I had learned something from the New Testament, too. When the voice told me to put down my burden and follow Him, I had assumed this was God the father. But now, having read both Testaments and compared the voices of Father and Son, I realized it couldn’t have been. God the father didn’t speak to men like that. It had to be Jesus.

We were almost at church now. Louise had been listening in astonishment. She knew I was reading the Bible, of course, but she’d had no idea what I’d been thinking. Now, as we turned into the parking lot, she asked if I was ready to go to the Pastor and tell him my doubts were resolved and I was ready to follow Jesus. I hadn’t quite gotten this far in my thinking. I wasn’t even sure yet what “follow me” meant, except that because of what I believed, it was no longer a choice now.

I felt a little at sea, but I knew enough about God to trust He would guide me. Pastor would too. He’d done so before. I’d text him. We’d meet again for coffee at the modest chain restaurant near his house, and I’d watch him eat pie. Where my uncertain path led, I’ll describe in the next episode.