What Comes to Mind When You Think About the Bible?

The Grace of Scripture

The twentieth-century pastor and writer A. W. Tozer famously wrote, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. . . . Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God.” The shape of our worship and the course of our lives are dictated by our sense of what God is like. This conviction led Tozer to conclude that “the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like.”¹

I have often wondered if what Tozer said about our view of God is equally true regarding our view of Scripture, God’s word. What comes into our minds when we think about the Bible?

Imagine you are playing one of those word games that requires you to give one-word clues to describe something. The word Bible comes up on the next card. Assuming that you can’t use a synonym like Scripture, what other words would you use to describe it? Truth? Revelation? Rulebook? Law? All valid descriptions. I wonder, however, if the word gift would be the first, second, or third thing that comes to mind for many of us. Certainly, most of us would affirm that Scripture is a gift—and we may highly esteem it—but gift would likely not be the first word association our minds would make. Yet making that association is incalculably important if we are going to approach God’s word rightly.

I suspect that one of the main reasons we sometimes have difficulty putting God’s word into practice or submitting to it joyfully is that we don’t believe—in our heart of hearts— that it is good for us. If the Bible is somehow repressive or oppressive, why would we submit to its ways (especially if it actually does make life harder)? Behind our hesitancy regarding Scripture is often a cautious, though neither malicious nor brazen, distrust of God’s goodness. But even when our trust in God appears relatively intact, we can still find ourselves resistant to Scripture’s wisdom and demands. We fail to see it as a gift to embrace, as the grace of God itself and not merely a means of grace. We question if there is really a short- or long-term advantage to following God’s sometimes-peculiar ways. And so we stop short of giving ourselves over fully to Scripture’s teaching and, perhaps, pick and choose the elements of it that we, in our limited wisdom, see as making sense. In doing this, we cut ourselves off from the fullness of the grace that is Scripture—a grace that is manifold, rich, life-giving, and satisfying.

What comes into our minds when we think about God’s word may prove to be the most important thing about us.

The Theme of Our Song

The simple affirmation of the goodness of God’s word has been the refrain of God’s people throughout the generations. The psalmist writes,

Turn away the reproach that I dread,
     for your rules are good. (Ps. 119:39)

What underlies this affirmation is the basic belief that God is a kind ruler who gives good rules. As God and his word are inseparable (something we will come back to shortly), so the goodness of God and the goodness of Scripture are intertwined.

At the beginning of 2 Peter, we see the beautiful connection between the goodness of God and the gift of his word. Peter begins, “His divine power has given us everything required for life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness” (2 Pet. 1:3 CSB). God, in the person of Jesus himself, has equipped us with everything we need to live godly lives, but access to these resources comes only through knowing him. He calls us into this knowledge out of his own glory and goodness. Peter continues, “By these he has given us very great and precious promises” (2 Pet. 1:4a CSB). Animated by that same glory and goodness, Jesus gave us the promises of his word. In other words, the Scriptures are an overflow of God’s goodness and gracious disposition toward us. The “great and precious promises” have a goal: “so that through them you may share in the divine nature, escaping the corruption that is in the world” (2 Pet. 1:4b). God desires that we should reflect him—“share in the divine nature”— and this is for our ultimate and eternal good. To fulfill that goal, he gave us the Scriptures and its many promises. The goodness of God is expressed in the gift of Scripture.

John Calvin, after a careful exposition of how God reveals himself in creation, turns his attention to the Scriptures. He observes that while creation truly does furnish us with a knowledge of God, “it is needful that another and better help be added to direct us aright to the very Creator of the universe.” God gave us the “privilege” of his word so that he might “become known unto salvation” and so that we might be gathered “more closely and intimately to himself.” This, Calvin poetically concludes, “is a special gift, where God, to instruct the church, not merely uses mute teachers [i.e., the created order] but also opens his own most hallowed lips.”² Creation is a gift, and God’s self-disclosure in creation is a gift. But the greater grace is God opening his “hallowed lips” in Scripture to bring us into a clear-eyed knowledge of him. Scripture is the gift of clear sight to those who are largely blind.

Christians rightly acknowledge, extol, and even write hymns about the goodness of God in the gift of Scripture! The early twentieth century saw a number of such hymns written by evangelicals. For example, the second stanza of “Oh, Wonderful Word!” declares,

Oh, wonderful, wonderful Word of the Lord!
The lamp that our Father above
So kindly has lighted to teach us the way
That leads to the arms of his love!³

And another hymn, referring to Scripture, exclaims,

There Thy holy will we read,
There upon Thy grace we feed;
There find guidance for our way,
And correction when we stray.⁴

Notice the common themes of these songs. The wonderful word of the Lord was given out of God’s kindness and mercy to lead us to his arms of love. By his good word, we feed on his grace. The word resounds with the loving heart of God. The giving of Scripture is the grace of God in concrete form. This, among other things, has always been a theme of our song as God’s people.

God is present wherever and whenever his word is read, spoken, prayed, or sung.

God’s Loving Verbal Presence

In lauding and praising the Scriptures, are we giving to a book the honor due to God alone? Are we committing bibliolatry, the supposed idolizing of the Bible? These questions have already been answered to some degree, but they are worth addressing more specifically. Perhaps the place to begin is Scripture, listening to the way it speaks of itself and following the connections it makes between God and his word.

In a song seeking God’s protection from his enemies, the psalmist writes,

In God, whose word I praise,
     in the Lord, whose word I praise,
in God I trust; I shall not be afraid. (Ps. 56:10–11)

On the surface, this is a very odd and unexpected coupling of items. “When I am afraid, I put my trust in God,” says the psalmist. So far, so good. But rather than extolling the Lord who has delivered him, he repeats three times, “I praise God’s word!” (Ps. 56:4, 10 [2x]). Scripture clearly encourages, perhaps summons, us to praise God’s word. The question becomes, “How do we do this in a way that always honors the Lord?”

When we affirm that Scripture is the word of God, we are saying that whenever Scripture speaks, God speaks. When Scripture speaks a word of comfort, God is speaking that word of comfort. When the Bible proclaims God’s promises, we believe that God himself is proclaiming those words of promise. God is present wherever and whenever his word is read, spoken, prayed, or sung. But his presence is neither physical nor mystical; rather, his presence is verbal but no less real.

Imagine receiving a letter from a loved one who is thousands of miles away. While he is nowhere near you physically, every sentence of his letter makes him present to you. And his presence is neither merely imaginary nor in the form of memories that the letter evokes. Instead, because the letter is an expression of himself—his heart, his humor, his concerns—you are interacting with him as you read. The letter is an extension of him.

Or imagine waking up to a note on the kitchen table that reads, “Please take out the trash,” written by your mother. At the risk of asking an obvious question, “Who is issuing the command?” Certainly, it’s not the note itself commanding you to do your chore. Rather, there is a person speaking to you, making her presence felt in the form of a scribbled-down note. To disregard her instruction would be to disregard her.

In a similar way, Scripture, as an articulate, clear, deliberate, and sufficient letter or note from God, is an extension of himself into our time and space and circumstance. Therefore, as one writer puts it, “To encounter the words of Scripture is to encounter God in action.”⁵ Or as Augustine counsels, “Treat the scripture of God as the face of God.”⁶ God and his word are inseparable. This is why it is entirely appropriate to sing love songs and hymns to God’s word. God and his word together are our crown, our distinctive glory as his people. Do we believe this?

This article is adapted from The Goodness of God in the Gift of Scripture: 20 Meditations by Uche Anizor.

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