In the process of knowing God’s word we are not alone. The very word we seek to understand works with us as a living partner. The Bible is alive, and engages us in a way no other text can. The written word itself performs a sort of miracle just in the way it communicates. In 1594 Miguel de Cervantes writes a funny situation involving the ingenious gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, and his squire Sancho Panza. Four centuries later I read what Señor Cervantes has written, translated from the Spanish of Calderon, to the English of E. B. White, and I laugh out loud. The written word performs this connective miracle as a matter of course, transcending time and language. E-books will soon have the power to engage and connect us across many and broader fields simultaneously (much like Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”). But this is not what we mean by calling the Bible a “living partner.” We are speaking of a completely different category.
You and I are living organisms, with the same essential life processes of other living organisms. We eat, reproduce, and eliminate waste. So do pilot whales, plankton, and paramecium. We humans are alive in another way though. We are eternally alive. Our souls survive the death of our bodies. The story of creation reflects how humans are unique among created beings. God spoke everything into existence: “‘Let there be light.’ And there was light” – everything but us. And Yahweh God formed man out of the dirt of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being (Genesis 2.7). We were sculpted by the hands of God and are alive with the breath of God. So also is the Bible alive. God’s law is described as written by the finger of God (Exodus 31.18). Scripture is described as being God-breathed (II Timothy 3.16). The Bible is fashioned by the hand of God – as are we. The Bible is alive with the breath of God – as are we. This is further illustrated by the fact that in Biblical Greek and Hebrew the words for “breath” and “spirit” are the same word. We are alive because of the part of God’s self he has put in us. The same is true of the Bible.
For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thought and intentions of the heart (Hebrews 4.12).
God’s word is not only alive, but it is actively engaging the life of the believer. Its work is surgical. It is a precision instrument beyond any of human invention. It doesn’t just lie there waiting for us to cipher out its mysteries – it ciphers us, and shows us the results. When you and I open our Bibles we enter into a relationship with a living thing – the word of God, His creative force, once embodied in a man called Jesus, now engaging us from these pages.