It is no accident that God is the subject of the first sentence of the Bible, for this word dominates the whole chapter and catches the eye at every point of the page: it is used some thirty-five times in as many verses of the story. The passage, indeed the Book, is about him first of all; to read it with any other primary interest (which is all too possible) is to misread it. (Derek Kidner, Genesis, Tyndale Old Testament Commentary Series)
Tim Keller from last Sunday’s sermon at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York:
There are two ways to read the Bible. The one way to read the Bible is that it’s basically about you: what you have to do in order to be right with God, in which case you’ll never have a sure and certain hope, because you’ll always know you’re not quite living up. You’ll never be sure about that future.
Or you can read it as all about Jesus. Every single thing is not about what you must do in order to make yourself right with God, but what he has done to make you absolutely right with God. And Jesus Christ is saying, “Unless you can read the Bible right, unless you can understand salvation by grace, you’ll never have a sure and certain hope. But once you understand it’s all about me, Jesus Christ, then you can know that you have peace. You can know that you have this future guaranteed, and you can face anything.”
The sad fact is that many of us are simply not biblical in the way we use the Bible! Being biblical does not mean merely quoting words from within its pages. Being truly biblical means that my counsel reflects what the entire Bible is about. The Bible is a narrative, a story of redemption, and its chief character is Jesus Christ. (Paul David Tripp, Instruments In The Redeemer’s Hands, p. 27)
A great quote from a book review by Katie Galli in the April 2008 issue of Christianity Today:
Yes, we’re Americans. We multitask all day long. Efficiency is one of our top cultural values. I, too, am pragmatic. I’d like to use Sunday morning to worship God, to get a few pointers on how to improve my relationship with Jesus, and to reconnect with community. But every Sunday, the first words I hear are, “Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” And I’m reminded that we gather weekly not to hear a practical talk on how to better live out our faith or to provide a venue to tell our friends about Jesus. We gather to corporately worship God, to celebrate the redeeming work of Christ on the cross, and to remember that our lives are not about us.
I used to subscribe to the tape ministry - remember the days before digital downloads? - of a large church. I remember getting the Easter Sunday message one particular year. The main idea of the sermon was something like, “You’re good, but you could be better.” The preacher used the illustration of Tiger Woods’ golf swing. It was good, but Tiger went back and and learned a new swing to be even better. We can do the same with our lives when we come to Christ, he said.
I remember being shocked. The message of Easter isn’t that we’re good but Christ came to make us a little bit better. Earl Creps has said that Jesus didn’t come to make bad people good, or good people better. He came to make dead people live. I agree. Dead people need the message of Easter, and nothing else will do.
At Easter we get to proclaim the timeless story of God in Christ taking the place of sinners so that we who were dead could live. There are so many riches within this story, so many angles, so much depth, that we don’t have to drift from the meaning of Easter to be relevant.
Let’s stick with the message of Easter. It’s far better than any other message we could offer, and it’s one that people desperately need to hear.
Proverbs is a book that’s concerned with everyday life. It covers parts of life that we don’t normally label spiritual. It may be tempting to approach Proverbs from a human-centered perspective, concluding that while most of the Bible is about God, this book is mainly about us.
It doesn’t take long to realize that even in Proverbs, the core of the message is centered on God. Proverbs 1:7 encapsulates the theme of the book: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.” Edward M. Curtis and John J. Brugaletta comment:
For the Israelite the search for wisdom had to begin with a deep commitment to God and a genuine submission to God’s authority and truth. The theme of the book of Proverbs is that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom/knowledge. The fear of the Lord is the essence of piety in the Old Testament, and it begins with a recognition of who God is - the all-powerful, sovereign Creator of the universe - and a contrasting recognition of who we are - creatures made by God. As a result of this awareness, those who fear the Lord live under the full acknowledgement that God’s authority is over them. (Discovering the Way of Wisdom)
Derek Kidner writes, “Wisdom as taught here is God-centered, and even when it is most down-to-earth it consists of the shrewd and sound handling of one’s affairs in God’s world, in submission to His will.”
Even the most practical of books in the Bible has as its core who God is, and who we are in relationship to him. It’s also proof that you can be God-centered and practical at the same time.