The Magic Book

I don’t think I ever believed that the Bible’s origins were word-for-word from God.  The Book of Mormon supposedly came from engraved golden tablets that required special glasses worn by Joseph Smith to translate from “reformed Egyptian” to King James English.  And the Quran was recited by Mohammed after the angel Gabriel made him memorize this message from God word for word.  These are both examples of a Scripture’s exact words being credited directly to God through supernatural means, but I never thought of the Bible in those terms.  I never thought that God directly wrote the Bible word for word.

Nonetheless when I was young my view of the Bible was still pretty immature.  During my elementary years I felt it was written by very holy men from long ago who had incredible insight and they had hidden the secrets of the universe in the Bible.  There was a mystical and magical element that somehow infused the writings so that God himself was in the writings and reading and speaking it was akin to speaking some sort of incantation or spell.  I believed that the secrets were only revealed to holy men or perhaps geniuses who could crack the codes of the various symbols and numerology contained within.  It was one part secret code, one part Ouija board (one that really worked), and one part a book of magic spells. 

Shortly after I became a Christian in Jr. High I started to read the Bible for myself and my view of the Bible changed pretty dramatically.  I saw it differently.  I read almost exclusively from the New Testament and I saw that it held the account of Jesus’ life, some pretty deep theology (Romans), some practical living stuff (epistles), and then all that cool prophetic stuff was still there in Revelation. 

But good-sized chunks of my original view of the Bible as some sort of old, dusty, mysterious book of magic always lingered deep in my psyche.  And it was reinforced every time I heard someone proclaim the importance of the Bible.  It was “the Living Word”.  It was the “ultimate authority”.  It had the ability like no other book to somehow change what it said depending on who read it and what they needed to hear.  It had the power to comfort and soothe you.  It had mystic power to reveal things to you about yourself, about your life.  My first years in Christianity were spent with charismatics who always prayed “in Jesus’ name” for healing, casting out demons etc. because the Bible had showed us the correct words to string together for powerful effect.  People would sometimes close their eyes and randomly open the Bible and point to a verse to see special messages from God.  The Bible had a power all of its own, and in this way, my view of it being a “magical” book was confirmed though I quickly learned not to use the words like “magic” or “incantation” with it (but on a practical level it was the same). 

Along these lines my view of the Bible fit well and influenced what I believed about how people “got saved”.  I was taught that all anyone needed to do was to say a certain prayer (not a long prayer, and not every day or even more than once because that would be “works”), and to believe a few specific things (not a lot of things, just a few things otherwise that would be “majoring on the minors”).  In this way, a significant portion of my formative years in Christianity were spent learning about certain spiritual dynamics.  I was led to believe that these particular and specific dynamics were important to understand in certain ways and speak about in certain ways in order to have the desired supernatural results.  I learned that the particular ways in which I viewed the Bible, Christ, and salvation were critical to #1  Being saved  #2  Experiencing God’s power in my life  #3 Pleasing God.  All three of those things were vitally important to me, and so I was happy that God had put people in my life to show me the right way to think and believe.

And so I moved forward.  Wanting nothing more than to radically serve and know God.