The Bible: God’s Big Reveal

Well, friends, I am still revved up from my last blog post! How unique, how thrilling is the Word of God — altogether unlike any other book in our history.

Before we dive further, you may want to quickly blitz through my previous blog if you have not already, as I will be building on that today. As a matter of fact, I chose to go through that study on the Bible with you because I wanted to lay a foundation for the thoughts I’ll share here.

Recently I saw a hand-drawn comic that affected me. The single square cartoon depicted a man with Bibles in front of his eyes, blocking his view, and a talk bubble captured his frantic cry: “I can’t see You, God!”

How poignantly true for so many. With an unassailable book that points to Jesus Christ from cover to cover, how is it that a sad fraction of today’s biblically literate, religious crowd still misses Jesus in the day-to-day? It may be because they have also missed the message of my next sentence.

The Bible does not contain God; the Bible reveals God.

Think about it. An eternal God whose self-sufficient existence knows no beginning and will never know an end, whose sovereign imagination crafted emotions and dimensions and music and time, whose immutable holiness is nothing short of a supernatural profundity, certainly cannot be confined within the pages of a book. Were man even to attempt to contain our almighty God with mere language, the entire globe would not be a comprehensive enough library to record His greatness (John 21:25).

With what may have begun as good intentions, some God-followers limit God by suggesting that He can only move or act according to methods with which He has moved or acted in the past. How ridiculous, even offensively absurd, to suggest that we have already read the best of what God can do. In fact, to believe this is also to believe that God is not almighty, but rather has a small bag of tricks that He recycles again and again. (In relation to this, one of my favorite verses is Psalm 115:3: “Our God is in Heaven; He does whatever He pleases.”)

Instead, and let me excitedly say, the Bible reveals God! How marvelous!

He is not contained within our Bibles; instead, He has given earthlings His Word so our eyes might be opened to who He is. If I wrote a letter to you saying, “Meet me at my house at 2:30 tomorrow,” and you framed the letter and respectfully looked at it everyday, you have actually missed the point.

Indeed, within the pages of the Bible is life and truth… if we let the Holy Spirit use it to point us to God. God is not some butterfly to be caught and observed and understood. No, the Bible reveals to us a God who answers to no one, who has never known an origin, who will never know defeat. The Bible reveals to us a God who is unconstrained by limits we have made, who is undeterred by the powers of darkness, who is unabated in His dazzling strength. The Bible reveals to us a God who is feared by His enemies and adored by His creation. He will not be restricted and He does not need the permission our interpretation allows to exercise His might.

I don’t know about you, but this excites me to no end! What an incredibly significant tool the Bible is in revealing God!

The next time you sit down to read the Word, ask the Holy Spirit to illuminate it for you. Allow the Bible to springboard you into a deeper revelation of the Father. Don’t just know the Bible. Know the God who breathed the Bible.

From my heart,
Josh