(That's just a picture I found online—I'm not even sure the sign I saw had those exact words in that order.) I reflected on that sign for a while. I thought about trying to engage with each of those statements from the perspective of my Christian faith. But the more I thought about that, the less I thought that was a good idea. While a sign like the one pictured above is easily readible due to its few words, it also can raise a lot of questions because there aren't very many words. For example, what does the homeowner mean by "Science is real?" What does the signmaker mean by that? What do I think when I read it? Is it a statement about climate change, vaccination, subatomic theory, all of the above, none of the above? It can be hard to know what people mean when we condense our opinions down to something that fits in a tweet. I'm pretty confident each of the statements in the picture above could be explained in ways that I would agree with, and each could be explained in ways I would disagree with.
So I next started thinking about what I would put on a sign if I was going to post some sort of creed or statement of belief in my front yard. But that got tricky quickly. By my count, that sign up above has only 26 words. The shortest Christian creed I've learned—the Apostles' Creed—has 115 words in the translation I'm most familiar with. Even taking just the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism (What is your only comfort in life and in death?) gives me 120 words. I'm going to need a big sign or some small font.
Alright, so what if I pivoted away from helpful but humanmade summaries of faith and went straight to the Bible, God's Word? Well, what verse or two summarizes the message of the Bible? John 3:16 is a popular choice; it has 26 verses in my preferred translation (the NIV): "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." That sounds pretty good at first, but that verse doesn't stand on it's own as much as we think it does. For example, who is God's Son? What does it mean to believe in God's Son? How can believing in God's Son be enough for someone to receive eternal life? If we really want to understand John 3:16, we need to have a sense of at least the entire book of John—or at least learn from someone who does.
The thing is, the Bible isn't really tweetable. We're not supposed to engage it one verse at a time. I believe the Bible is different from every other book because I believe it is inspired by God. But like any other book, the parts of the Bible have to be understood in context. Taking a statement from the Bible like "God is love" (1 John 4:8 and 1 John 4:16) sounds wonderful—and often is. But we can't understand God's love apart from the stories of His faithfulness to His chosen people, His just anger against human sin, and His incredible grace in Christ Jesus. The Bible is a unit; the different parts help explain each other.
So often I think we Christians read and use the Bible in ways that are at least a little dangerous. We find a verse by opening the Bible or searching a corcordance or typing in some keywords online but don't stop to think about the context in which that verse occurs. We read short little sections of Scripture without considering how they relate to the bigger picture of their individual book, much less the whole Bible. I know I've done it. Certainly we can memorize specific verses to comfort and help us, and we can reference short sections of the Bible, particularly as a helpful shorthand in talking with other believers. But when we seek to understand God through His Word or to teach our faith to others, we owe to ourselves and to God to cover the whole story. The Bible doesn't read like a dictionary where each verse or paragraph is independent. It all hangs together. So before we put a verse on a sign or tweet a sentence out, let's seek to understand and be ready to explain what it really means.
Grace and peace,
BMH
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