The other day I had a very frank conversation with a friend of mine. My friend is a brilliant seminary student who has a knack of taking everything I say and making it turn about to bite me. He rarely answers me straightout if it is a question, and if it is a statement he makes me question my own statement so that I am forced to dig deeper into my foundations of why I said whatever it was I said.
We were talking about tattoos and so we had entered into the Levitical terrain. Our conversation soon spilled from the tattoo controversy to a confession. I don't really like the book of Leviticus. I don't understand it, therefore I don't like it. Or, to make matters worse, I find it boring. Last year I read the Bible from cover to cover, but some of it, I'll admit, I skimmed across. For example, I love the Books of History. Last year I read them all through twice each and this year I've already read them through once. As for the Books of Poetry, well, that is another of my favourite areas to read. Job is one of my favourite books in the Bible and I read it through at least 3 times last year and once already this year. And I read all the other ones too - except for maybe Psalms and Proverbs. I sort of skipped around on those two books. Then I tackled the big Prophet books. I like those quite a bit, especially Isaiah and a few others so I read those and have already read some of them (like Isaiah) this year. On to the Minor Prophets. Those are hit-or-miss. Some of them I enjoy and feel comfortable around, others not so much. But since they are relatively short I think I read through all of them and I know I've read some of them already this year as well. But then we hit the Pentateuch. Oh boy! I enjoy most of Genesis. One of my favourite characters is tucked in its pages. Jacob. And Exodus isn't too bad. But then it goes downhill. I don't really care for Leviticus, or Numbers, and Deuteronomy is only just tolerable.
He laughed at me and said that by skimming those books I'd helped relieve my conscience. It's true and yet it is also true that I just don't really understand or enjoy those books. There is a lot of the Bible I don't understand but I enjoy and so that makes it easy to read. On the other hand there is a lot I don't enjoy but understand and so that makes it so that I have to read it. But when these two requirements (comprehension and pleasure) do not walk hand in hand I find I end up rather disappointed. Spiritual weakness on my part perhaps, I don't know. My seminary friend though admits that although he had an excellent O. T. class that opened up his eyes to the deeper beauties of the Scriptures he still had a hard time running through some of the same books (and others) that I had to run through.
This led me to thinking of a problem I had years earlier. Well, quite frankly I have it still. Years ago I was not having my devotions - at all! My conscience felt relatively appeased though because I would read great Christian books. On my agenda I had Ravi Zacharias and C. S. Lewis and John Piper and other great modern heroes of our faith. Upset - due to Piper - for my own spiritual inadequacy I spoke with a Pastor friend of mine and he said something that stuck with me.
We are supposed to grow in the Lord. To do that we invest in the Scriptures. The Bible refers to itself often as a type of food. Sometimes it's sweet and sometimes it's bitter, but it still needs to be eaten. On conversion we eat like babies because we are new in the faith. As we grow older we begin to eat more like grownups. The problem is sometimes we don't even eat right. We don't like to process the food of the Scriptures so we eat already processed foods, such as Christian books. They aren't bad, of course, but they are chewed up meals already. They have been masticated on by others and are served in small doses, in easy to swallow size.
That was a rough paraphrase of what my Pastor friend taught me. Recently C. S. Lewis presented the same idea in his own words as he prefaced On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius. He wrote, "There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books....He [the reader] feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him [the ancient author]. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that first-hand knowledge is not onlymore worth acquiring than second-hand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire."
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