My best read ever!

Well, you might have guessed already, and if your are a returning reader then it shouldn't be too hard, anyway. Because I have loved this collection of books for thirty years now, and my infatuation in this case never seems to subside.

I own well over thirty of them, and if you count in all the various other Bible parts or New Testaments the tally will exceed fifty or possibly sixty. But why such a craze for just a book, and even one that is largely written off in today's postmodern culture as irrelevant or obsolete at that?

There are possibly hundreds of ways in which I could answer that question, so let me have a go at a brief but satisfactory answer.

NOT A RELIGIOUS CHORE, FOR SURE

First of all, I do not read the Bible almost always on a daily basis simply because I'm required to. It's absolutely no religious obligation that I feel weighing on my mind. I'm not trying to please God by leafing though, or delving deep into, pages that contain words penned two millennia or more ago. It's purely a voluntary thing - a thing of passion, actually.

And this passion, I believe, is produced by God himself. Because along with many other people, I believe (and for good reasons) that the Bible contains the very words of God. It's not merely religious propaganda, and it's certainly not a haphazard collection of simplistic, unscientific myths, either. It's is factually the greatest narrative ever told at various points in time by various people, later to be collected and edited by people equally convinced that what they had written down were the oracles of a living God, a God acvtively involved in human affairs because of an unending love for the human race.

Certainly, the Bible was completed in ancient times, but it's message is still experienced by millions as both relevant and fresh. But how can that be?

EVEN THE OLD CAN BE NEW

I have plowed through the Bible, both the Old and the New Testament, at least a dozen times, and although I by now am fully cognizant with the biographical details of King David's life, I can glean new and enthralling insights from pages that, certainly, relate old news. But at the same time these stories that are so well known, that have been commented on and scrutinized in thousands of volumes of literature, can yet be the source of great personal discoveries - truths that can have a massive effect on my life in the here and now.

Because these words can be made to come alive again, as it were. In a passage authored by the apostle Paul in the letter called Hebrews it says that the word of God is active an living. This means that although the Bible on one level is merely just another book, it has also got certain qualities that makes it vastly different from, and superior to, other kinds of literature that purport to inform and elucidate them human mind and heart.

THE READER IS BEING READ........!

God - it seems - intended for this book not just to be read, but also to have a certain, desired impact on its readers. It is as if I not only am the active, interpreting reader searching for something in the Bible that may comfort, guide or inspire me. Simultaneously, it is as if I am being read as well. The words I study seem to x-ray my motives and thoughts. And thus I am for however long it takes to finish reading a passage of Scripture a much loved object of scrutiny where it seems that God is flooding my inner being with light to check whether his dearly loved son is ok or not.

You see, the Bible is different. The original Scriptures were produced long ago, but their words live on in more ways than one. More to come soon!

Sorry, folks, that I failed again in making this a short entry. There's still hope, though?