Transcript
What about the Bible?
First Baptist Richmond, September 6, 2026
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
2 Timothy 3:14-17
All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work.
Almost exactly five years ago I led a workshop here at First Baptist called “How to Read the Bible,” and before I tackled the first question—What is the Bible?—I asked “What is the Bible to you?” Maybe I should ask you to think about your own answer to that question this morning, because as I listened to the responses on that day I was reminded that our relationship to the Bible is often deeply personal, and that’s as it should be. What I say to children is that the Bible is the way God talks to us, and prayer is the way we talk to God. And what I say to grownups is that no relationship can thrive without that kind of regular conversation.
But it’s not an easy conversation to start.
If you sat down tomorrow morning and tried to read through the entire Bible you might stall out around the second half of Exodus where God is giving detailed instructions for how to make a tent. It helps to remember that the Bible is not just a book, but a collection of books—a small library—and just like the books on your own shelves it contains several different kinds of literature. Some of it is history, some of it is poetry, some of it is what we call “wisdom literature.” But there is also law, prophecy, gospel, epistle, apocalypse, and the stories of our how we got here in the first place.
Understanding what kind of literature you’re reading makes a difference in how you read it. My mother wanted to read the Bible literally, like a cookbook; if it said two cups of flour then that’s what it meant. But the Bible is not a cookbook, and poetry is not history. When David writes, “The Lord is my shepherd,” he doesn’t mean that the Lord is an actual shepherd any more than we are actual sheep. He means that the Lord is like a shepherd, and we are like the sheep he cares for. It’s a metaphor, and once you realize that the Bible can be metaphorical as well as literal you begin to read it in a whole new way. You begin to look for meaning that is deeper than the words on the page.
And that’s when it gets interesting. Personally. I don’t think there’s anything much more exciting than five or six people sitting in a circle, looking at a passage of scripture, and talking about what it means. And I think reading it together like that, in a Sunday school class for instance, keeps us from straying too far away from the truth. I remember the man who showed up at my parents’ house when I was a boy claiming that he knew where the Garden of Eden was. He’d been off on a solo retreat for almost a month, doing nothing but reading the Book of Genesis. He said, “It’s in Georgia! The Garden of Eden is in Georgia! Because it says here that four rivers flow out of it and there’s a place like that in Georgia!”
That’s how not to read the Bible.
But it happens all the time, doesn’t it? People come up with their own interpretations and then begin to tell you that you have to see it their way. If my dad hadn’t set that man straight he might have gone out and started his own cult—the Garden of Georgia—and there may have been some people who joined it. We human beings are fallible; we don’t always get it right. And that’s a good thing to remember when it comes to this book, because the Bible was written by people.
We like to imagine that it wasn’t, that it dropped out of heaven perfectly printed on ultra-thin pages with gilded edges and a Corinthian leather cover, but it didn’t. It came together over thousands of years, first through the stories that were told around the campfires of ancient Israel, and then through the messages that were delivered by the prophets, the psalms that were chanted by the priests, the letters that were written by the apostles, until finally we had this book—the Bible. But we call it the Holy Bible because the entire process was guided by the Holy Spirit.
The first stage of the process was inspiration. There’s a verse in Second Timothy that says, “All scripture is inspired by God.” The Greek word means something like “God-breathed.” If I close my eyes I can almost picture God breathing all his truth and beauty into the world and if I close them really tight I can almost picture some human being breathing them in: Isaiah, for instance, who wrote, “Comfort ye, O comfort ye my people, says your God”; or the Apostle Paul, who wrote, “Faith, hope, and love: these three remain, but the greatest of these is love”; Or John, who wrote, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with his people, and he shall wipe every tear from their eyes.”
That’s inspiration.
But then there’s the second phase in the process—preservation—where over the course of a thousand years people gathered up all the stories that had been told, all the scrolls and letters that had been written, and sorted them into those that continued to speak to them and those that did not. It wasn’t until the fourth century AD that we settled on the 66 books we now have in our Bibles: 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New. People sometimes ask me why we can’t have more. They say, “I thought your sermon last Sunday was inspired.” Well, thank you, and yes, I believe God can speak through any number of things, including preacher’s sermons and our daily devotions, but I don’t believe we need to keep adding to the Bible. With the 26 letters of the
alphabet we can say anything we need to say, and with the 66 books of the Bible God can say anything he needs to say.
There’s the inspiration of Scripture, there’s the preservation of Scripture, and finally there’s the illumination of Scripture, where the Holy Spirit helps us understand what we’re reading. But not only the Holy Spirit. If you have a good study Bible with footnotes you can see what the scholars have learned about a particular passage through the years. They can tell you what it meant then and there, in its historical context, so you can think about what it means here and now, in ours. If you have more time you can visit our resource room on the second floor and look through some of the commentaries. That is, you can benefit from the insights of those who have made the study of Scripture their life’s work and thank God for their scholarship.
But even before you begin to read you can bow your head over the sacred page and pray about it. You can say, “Holy Spirit, illuminate my reading of this text. Shine your light on it. Help me understand.” Because what does Jesus say in the Gospel of John? He says he’s not going to be with his disciples much longer, but the Spirit will continue to teach them. He says, “The Spirit of Truth will lead you into all the truth” (John 16:13). And that’s helpful. Because there were situations Jesus’ followers hadn’t encountered in the first century, things they wouldn’t have understood even if he had told them. There are things we are dealing with in the 21st century that the Bible doesn’t address, and yet I believe the Spirit is still able to lead us into all the truth, but we have to be listening, we have to be paying attention.
Which brings me to something else. Sometimes I will come across something in the Bible that seems frankly unbelievable, like that place in the Book of Joshua where it says the sun stood still (10:12-14). When I do that I’ve learned to ask: “NOT did it really happen this way, BUT what on earth is God trying to say?” Because the Bible is the way
God talks to us, right? In that story, where the army of Israel needed a little more daylight to finish up the slaughter of their enemies, Joshua said to the sun, “Stand still!” And apparently the sun stood still, and the author of the Book of Joshua says, “There has never been another day like it, when the Lord listened to the voice of a human being. Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel!” Regardless of what actually happened, this is the meaning the author wants you to take away: that the Lord was fighting for Israel.
But there are biblical literalists who will say, “No, the sun actually stopped in the sky. The Bible says it; that settles it.” But think about that for a minute. Based on what we now know about the physical universe, if the sun appeared to stand still in the sky it would mean that the earth had stopped rotating, and the earth is rotating at hundreds of miles an hour. If it came to a complete and sudden stop, everything that wasn’t bolted down would fly off the surface of the planet, oceans would slosh out of their basins. So maybe we could say this: that whatever happened that day Joshua and his army had enough daylight to finish the job. It seemed like a miracle to them. And when they told the story later they concluded that God had been on their side. That’s not the worst interpretation you could bring away from that passage.
But wait a minute, Jim. Are you saying the Bible is not inerrant? Yes, that’s what I’m saying. And if that sounds like blasphemy to you let me remind you that 1) the Bible never makes that claim about itself, 2) the so-called “doctrine of inerrancy” didn’t emerge until the nineteenth century, 3) a thing doesn’t have to be inerrant to be true, and 4) the Bible is not God; it is not the fourth person of the Trinity. As I said earlier, the Bible was written by people. And while people can be inspired, they cannot be inerrant.
I’ve tried.
In my experience, the people who insist that the Bible is inerrant are often people who are trying to use it for their own purposes rather than letting it use them. They claim the inerrancy of a verse like 1 Timothy 2:12, where Paul says, “I do not permit a woman to teach, or have authority over a man; she is to keep silent,” but they conveniently forget Luke 12:33, where Jesus tells his disciples to sell their possessions. Is that not in the Bible? Shouldn’t the teaching of Jesus be even more important to us than the teaching of Paul? And yet I do not see these people selling their possessions.
I’ve been thinking about it this way lately: Suppose we invited every member of First Baptist Church to come to the pulpit and say a few words about what God means to them. And suppose we asked them to write it down beforehand, and when they were finished we collected all those written testimonies and put them in a book. And then suppose we put that book in the church library, on a stand, and invited people to come by and look through its pages. Through the years that book would become very important to us, and some of its pages would become very well worn.
That’s what the Bible is, essentially: it is the witness of God’s people over the course of several millennia. And in a process that took roughly a thousand years God’s people collected those written testimonies and preserved them in a book. They didn’t keep all of them, but they kept the ones that spoke to them and continued to speak to them. So when someone reads a passage of Scripture on Sunday morning and says, “The Word of the Lord,” what they mean, really, is that these are words through which God’s people have been able to hear God’s voice through the centuries. And we who call ourselves God’s people now cherish those words. We hold them dear. We strain our ears to hear God speaking to us in a new time, in a new way, and when it happens we say, “Thanks be to God.”
I know that isn’t enough for some people. I had a deacon at my first church who would point to the dusty Bible on his coffee table and say, “I believe every word in that book is literally true.” And yet he didn’t seem to read it very much. He used to say, “The Lord said, ‘I’ll help those who help themselves,’” and I would think, “No, he didn’t.” He used to say, “Ain’t nothin’ free,” and I would say, “Yes, there is. God’s grace is free.” It made me think that for him it was easier to believe things about the Bible than it was to actually read it.
And I understand that.
The Bible is not easy to read, but if you can do it you might discover that this is the way God talks to us, and prayer is the way we talk to God, and in the end, that kind of conversation is worth whatever effort it takes, because it leads to a relationship that is both life giving and life changing.
I was at a memorial service last week where someone who didn’t seem to be all that familiar with Scripture stood to read the 23rd Psalm. I’m not sure what it meant to her but as she read I looked around the room and saw people smiling and nodding their heads, because it meant something to them. Even in one of those modern versions that left out all the “Thees” and “Thous,” it was the Word of the Lord. And what the Lord was telling them was this: “I know you’ve lost a good friend, and I know you’re grieving, but listen: I’m right here with you. I’m your shepherd. I’m going to take care of you.” And that’s the truth.
Thanks be to God.
–Jim Somerville, 2026