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One of the things I love about a good Bible study is the perspective that comes from it. Have you ever finished a powerful time of Bible study and noticed that, at least for awhile, the world looks completely different? I’ve had that experience many times, some more powerful than others. My latest one came Thursday night after the men’s group Bible study at the local Calvary Chapel we are fellowshipping at.
The feeling kind of reminds me of a scene from The Matrix, oddly enough. Right at the end of the movie, the main character Neo finally is able to see the world as it really is… sees the programming behind it all. He suddenly sees everything for what it is rather than how everyone around him perceives it to be. That’s how the world feels to me after a powerful Bible study. As I walk back out into the world, people look different to me. I can just begin to get a glimpse of how God must see them. The things they are doing look different, too. Suddenly I can see the real reasons they are so caught up in doing their jobs, driving a nice car, being seen with a pretty girl, or trying so desperately to look cool. The thing that is most striking about it, though, is seeing the need for God literally everywhere around me in this world. It’s written across the faces of nearly everyone I meet. It’s crying out from all the ways people are trying to create peace and happiness for themselves.
It’s a hard feeling to describe, as is probably evident from the lacking way I’ve described it. But there is no greater feeling than, even for a short time, understanding things the way they truly are. Suddenly everything is clear. Everything makes sense. The problem is, it doesn’t last long. Before too long, I turn back into the guy who is just kind of wandering through this dreary world like everyone else. I guess the only difference might be that I know how to keep going back to that place of perspective… that place that gives me peace, understanding, truth, and hope.
I remember playing a sort of game during Science class when I was a kid. The teacher would show us a series of pictures of things and we would have to describe the objects in the pictures. We didn’t know it at the time, but they were all pictures of very plain ordinary things (a banana, a table top, an eraser) only they were taken with a high-powered microscope. The pictures didn’t look like anything we could identify, and we were left just basically describing the characteristics of what we were seeing. Lumpy. Jagged. Bubbly. Messy. Spikey. Things like that. After the game, the teacher showed us pictures of the items in regular size. He went on to explain that both images were accurate images of the items but, in order to fully understand a thing, we must attempt to look at it from every possible perspective. Seeing a table top only as a bumpy, pitted, irregular surface in a microscope would not allow us to understand the table top as the smooth clean surface that we use it for. Seeing only the smooth peel of a banana would mislead us about the incredible detail and complexity that actually makes up the banana peel. We tend to have this same perspective problem with the Bible.
There are 66 books of the Bible. My Bible has 863 pages in it. There are 1,189 chapters in the Bible. There are 31,103 verses in the Bible. These 31,103 verses make up one complete story. But we tend to look at the Bible with a microscopic view. We have our favorite verses that inspire us, uplift us, give us hope, and speak peace to us. We have our handful of verses prepared for battle, so to speak… those that back up our beliefs and doctrines that we whip out of our holsters when challenged. We have verses that we plaster on billboards, bumper stickers, and signs at football games. While still an accurate picture of the Bible itself, they are but a microscopic view of it. In order to fully understand any verse or book of the Bible, including the Bible as a whole, it must be viewed from the larger perspective. In other words, we must not only understand individual verses, chapters, and books, but also how they fit within the context of the entire Bible.
A person who was only exposed to the microscopic picture of the banana may indeed come to learn much about bananas that would be accurate, but he could never comprehend the whole banana. A person who consistently examines only the same handful of verses will also come to learn much that is accurate about God, but he could never understand God as fully as he is intended to without seeing the bigger picture.
Have you ever walked into a movie late? I mean really, really late? Most movies are about an hour and a half… about ninety minutes. Have you ever just caught the last thirty minutes of a movie? If you have, you know that you spend most of that half hour wondering what in the world is going on. Without seeing the first 2/3 of the movie, you are lost. You have no idea who the characters are, what their motivations are, what has happened in their pasts to bring them to the place they are now, or really even what is trying to be resolved. Sure, if it’s a stupid movie, it may not be too hard to key into. But what if it was a really complicated movie? What if it featured really in-depth characters, lots of plot twists, and numerous story lines? You would simply be clueless.
Okay, suppose now that you were really intrigued by the last 1/3 of the movie and really wanted to understand what was going on. What would you do? Of course you would come back at another time and watch the whole movie, right? That only makes sense. What you wouldn’t do would be to come back over and over again to watch just the last half hour of the movie repeatedly until you figured it out. Ridiculous. You could watch the same part over and over again until you had every word memorized and still not really understand what was happening, why it was happening, or what the whole point of it all was.
Yet this is what we do so often with the Bible. The New Testament is literally the last 1/3 of the Bible. It’s the last half hour of the movie, so to speak. It’s the part where all the conflict is resolved, all the really exciting things happen, and the story is brought to a close. But the Old Testament, the part of the movie that so many Christians miss, is the foundation for the New Testament. It is in the Old Testament that we get the background to understand what is happening in the New Testament. By ignoring the Old Testament and focusing only on the New Testament we are simply watching the last 1/3 of the movie over and over again and trying to figure out why so much of it is hard to make sense of. Granted, the first 2/3rds of a movie is never as exciting as the conclusion, but it’s absolutely vital in order to understand the whole plot.
I admit that the Old Testament is sometimes very difficult reading indeed. There are dry parts, confusing parts, and parts that make you scratch your head about why they are even included. But I can also tell you that nothing has helped my understanding of the New Testament more than delving into the Old Testament. Just as if I am finally going back to watch the first hour of the movie, it is filled with AHA! moments that suddenly cause things I’ve always struggled with to fit perfectly into place.
