Friday, September 15, 2006

Purpose of the Bible

The editor in chief of Modern Reformation magazine, Michael Horton, wrote an article 'What are we looking for in the Bible' in 1996.

Ten years on it seems that a lot of people have ignored what he said. A lot of people today still view the Bible as a tool or guide or like a written life coach or a self improvement instruction manual especially when there are such books published like 'Your Best Life Now' by Joel Osteen.

However, is not the Bible so much deeper and more important than that? It is the revelation of the Grace of God in Christ.
"To preach the Bible as "the handbook for life," or as the answer to every question, rather than as the revelation of Christ, is to turn the Bible into an entirely different book. This is how the Pharisees approached Scripture, however, as we can see clearly from the questions they asked Jesus, all of them amounting to something akin to Trivial Pursuits: "What happens if a person divorces and remarries?" "Why do your disciples pick grain on the Sabbath?" "Who sinned--this man or his parents--that he was born blind?" For the Pharisees, the Scriptures were a source of trivia for life's dilemmas. To be sure, Scripture provides God-centered and divinely-revealed wisdom for life, but if this were its primary objective, Christianity would be a religion of self-improvement by following examples and exhortations, not a religion of the Cross."

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