Word Down*

This post is a continuation of a train of thought that left the station (and has been chugging along subconsciously for quite some time) over here.

The thing I keep wondering is…what if Jesus did write something? Something more, I mean, than whatever He famously mysteriously wrote in the dirt before and after He offered a pack of self-righteous men a chance to chuck rocks at an adulterous woman–if they could honestly claim sinlessness? What if maybe He didn’t literally write something else, but actually wrote something, all the same?

Last year I went to this six-day leadership training retreat for college students–not as one of the college students but as one of the staff. On the first morning we were all sent off to engage in some “personal quiet time,” and I found a dandelion-studded hill, sat down under a tree, and began to ponder. We were supposed to focus on John 1.1-18, where John the Evangelist tells us that Jesus is the “Word of God” and that Jesus was not only with God but was God. It’s one of my favorite passages, so I was assuredly contemplating it, but I was also contemplating the elective I would be teaching later on, which was called “Hide and Seek with Jesus: Finding Jesus in Every Part of the Bible.”

I contemplated the dandelions. I thought about creation. I thought about how John 1 intentionally riffs off of Genesis 1, which describes God creating all there is with a word (a Word?)–“Be.”

I thought about a quote I once read in a book by Donald Miller. I think (but don’t have the book with me to verify) the quote was from a biblical scholar named Tremper Longman III. (If I’m wrong about this, I’ll fix the reference once I have access to the book again. I’ll probably also have to fix the quotation.) He said something to the effect that the most loving thing a perfectly loving Being could do, would be to create other beings on which to lavish that love.

I thought about how much love that must have been, since, as a Trinitarian Christian I believe God doesn’t and can’t get lonely, because God is, God’s self, a community of perfect love which we know as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I thought, “God must have really been overflowing with love to create a race of beings in His own image, and then try so hard to communicate with them.”

So first, He created a world–which He also loves, and was an expression of His love–and through which to communicate Himself to us. Us? Seriously. But…well, we might’ve missed the point a little bit–gotten confused about who was God in the equation (ourselves? the rest of creation?) and done quite a number on creation itself.

So next, God got a little more specific, communicating with and working in and through specific people, inspiring specific people, over centuries and even millennia, so that the end result was not only His Word infused through the now-marred creation, but His Word written down in a book. Now we had something a little more clearly delineated, helping us get a glimpse more specifically of Who God is, what God is like, what God’s hopes are for His beloved image-bearers and the rest of creation. Most of us continued to miss the point (same confusion–or we might more honestly say rebellion), but through His written Word, God began to communicate with more and more people. And then…

⁴ But when the right time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, subject to the law. ⁵ God sent him to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that he could adopt us as his very own children.

–Galatians 4:4-5, NLT

Or, as it says in that John 1 chapter,

¹⁴ The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

–John 1:14, NIV

God couldn’t get more personal–enfleshing Himself, His Word. As Jesus, God showed us exactly how deep His love is, how far His love will go, and what love really looks like. He showed us in real life what His intention for us is, and how humans were supposed to be.

Just as we humans have ravaged creation, just as we misinterpreted and misapplied both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, so we denied His Word–Jesus the Messiah–and slaughtered Him. God knew we would. But He showed up in person anyway, because He loves us.

You may have noticed I quoted two different Bible passages using two different translations, above. There is a lot more to say about the Bible, regarding translations and versions and original copies (there aren’t any), regarding how we read it, how we understand different sections and the different literary genres within it, and how we take it into our lives. All of that aside for now, I think the Bible as a whole is pretty consistent in describing itself as the Word of God, and the New Testament at least (the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, too, depending on how you look at it) is also pretty consistent as describing Jesus as the Word of God, and as God.

And so I guess, even though I couldn’t tell you how God inspired the original writers of that book, I believe He did, in such a way that you could more or less say He wrote it Himself. This is why, though I believe we get it wrong often enough and that different passages in the Bible have (sometimes vastly) different purposes and implications for our reading and incorporation of them–and it’s necessary to discern these different purposes and implications through the “lens” of Jesus (with the help of the Holy Spirit in all of it)–I can’t quite bring myself specifically to weight the words of Jesus as recorded in the Bible as more valid than the other words in the Bible. Because in some way or other, I believe the whole Bible reflects Him. I believe it’s all His words–His Word. I guess I believe in some way or other, Jesus is the Word, who wrote a Book.

*I know. “Word Down” isn’t–and never has been–a thing, but it’s part b of the other post, and…I think you know what I mean.