Friday ~ April 27, 2012
For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the LORD, and to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments.
Here in Ezra 7:10 we see we are to "Seek the law of the Lord", what does it mean to seek? It simply means to study God's Word.
The question for me has never been “Why study the Bible?”, but “How do I study the Bible?” There are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of books written on this subject of studying The Book, and many of them are tremendously helpful. It has been a tremendous burden on my heart to diligently seek or study what it is that God wants me to know from His Word. So much so that I even have a color-coded highlighting system! And through studying, though I was taking the Bible very seriously, I was approaching it from a misguided understanding of what it was that I was actually studying.
This is what happens when we have a respect for Scripture, but not a right view of it. In my study, careful though it was, I stood over the Bible in interpretive authority. But what I didn’t truly understand was that it is not us who stand above Scripture, rather it is Scripture that stands above us as our authority. When we approach the Old and New Testaments it is crucial to apprehend that, in a sense, we don’t read the Bible, the Bible reads us! The end goal of Scripture is not a purely academic understanding and recitation of God’s living truth but to be both transformed and conformed to it, and our interaction with it should reflect that. When you approach Scripture remember that you are approaching the powerful words of the living God. Meet him in humility.
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