Eat This Book

1. Eat This Book: Assimilating God's Word

I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll; and he said to me, “Take it and eat; it will be bitter in your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth.”

Beyond mere reading. The core metaphor of "Eat this book" (from Revelation 10:9-10, echoed by Ezekiel and Jeremiah) challenges us to move beyond superficial reading of the Bible. It's not about merely acquiring information or intellectual understanding, but about deep assimilation—taking the words into our very being, much like food is metabolized into muscle and bone. This process transforms us from the inside out.

A call to internalize. This command urges us to internalize Scripture, letting it permeate our nerve endings, reflexes, and imagination. When we "eat" the Bible, it becomes part of our worship, prayer, and writing, metabolizing into acts of love, justice, and adoration. It means letting God's word shape our syntax and actions unconsciously, just as healthy food becomes part of our physical vitality.

Formative, not just informative. The aim is not just to know about God, but to become more in alignment with God's revelation. This contrasts with treating the Bible as a source of gossip about God or a collection of facts. Instead, it's a call to allow the Holy Spirit to use these words to breathe life into our souls, deepening our access to reality and connecting us across centuries and continents.

2. The Bible: A Living, Formative Text for Life

What is neglected is reading the Scriptures formatively, reading in order to live.

The primary text. Christian spirituality, in its entirety, is rooted in and shaped by the scriptural text. We are not meant to construct our spiritual lives from a random assortment of favorite verses or personal circumstances. Instead, the Holy Spirit forms us in accordance with the revealed Word, making the Bible the authoritative guide for living deeply and well.

Countering self-sovereignty. The book confronts the widespread contemporary practice of taking personal experience—our needs, wants, and feelings—as the ultimate authority for living. This "sovereign self" approach often leads to dabbling in transcendence rather than lives of rigor, exuberance, goodness, and justice. The Bible must be re-established at the center, with personal experience placed under its authority.

Soul and Scripture. A genuine interest in the soul must be matched by an equally fervent interest in Holy Scripture. Both are primary fields of operation for the Holy Spirit. Without Scripture, our interest in souls lacks a formative text, leaving us without the material for the Spirit to work on, and without the revealed context of God's created, ordered, and blessed world.

3. God's Personal Revelation: The Trinitarian Core

The authorial character of the Holy Scriptures was established as personal in the persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

God reveals Himself. The Bible is fundamentally God's revelation—not merely telling us things about God, but showing Himself to us. Its authority stems directly from God's authorial presence, making it a personal, rather than impersonal, authority. This revelation is about God letting us in on what it means to live as men and women created in His image.

The Trinity's role. The early church, in bringing together the Old and New Testaments, developed the concept of the Holy Trinity to understand the single, personal voice of God amidst diverse writings. This imaginative construct helps maintain the coherence and wholeness of God's revelation as Father (creation), Son (salvation in Jesus), and Spirit (pulling us into God's life). Every aspect of this revelation is personal and relational.

Personal involvement. Because God is inherently and inclusively personal, we, as persons, are personally involved in this revelation. Every word, every unfolding story, pulls us into participation, affecting our core identity and actions. Christian reading is therefore participatory, receiving words in a way that makes them interior to our lives, shaping our prayers, obedience, and love.

4. Beyond the Sovereign Self: Submitting to Scripture

The most popular way of conceiving this self these days is by understanding the self in a Trinitarian way. This way of self-understanding is not as an intellectual interested in ideas or as a moral being seeking a good life or as a soul looking for solitary solace, but as a divine self in charge of my self. And this divine self is understood as a Holy Trinity.

The "Replacement Trinity." A pervasive cultural epidemic has replaced the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) with a self-centered trinity of "Holy Wants, Holy Needs, and Holy Feelings." This mindset, cultivated from childhood, teaches us to prioritize our individual desires, aspirations, and emotional states as the ultimate authority for our lives.

Bible as a tool. In this framework, the Bible and God are not ignored but are merely put to the service of these self-sovereign needs, wants, and feelings. We use Scripture to validate our personal preferences, gather information, or seek inspiration that aligns with our pre-existing desires, rather than submitting to its transformative power. This subtly undermines the true authority of God's word.

The danger of self-authority. This installation of the self as the authoritative text is both enormous and insidious, even within the church. It leads to a "devout indifference" where we honor the Bible but fail to live it on its own terms. We become "well-meaning but ineffectual," mired in our own subjective experiences, rather than being formed by the objective, revealing truth of God's comprehensive world.

5. Scripture as Story: Entering God's Grand Narrative

The Bible is basically and overall a narrative — an immense, sprawling, capacious narrative.

Life in story conditions. The Christian life unfolds within the context of a grand, overarching story—the Bible's meta-narrative. Story is the most accessible and inviting form of speech, drawing us into participation, allowing us to feel emotions, identify with characters, and discover deeper truths about being human. It respects our freedom, inviting us into God's spacious world of creation, salvation, and blessing.

Beyond information. Our contemporary preference for impersonal information over story often leads us to extract "truths" or "principles" from the Bible, reducing it to a manual for self-improvement. However, we don't live our lives by information; we live them in relationships within a personal God's context. Story, with its immediacy, concreteness, and relational plot, is the best way to reconnect us with our moral, spiritual, and embodied lives.

The form is formative. The way Scripture is written—its narrative form—is as crucial as its content. Misunderstanding its form leads to misinterpreting its content. The biblical story, with its reticence and "blanks," implicitly invites us to enter it as we are, finding our place in God's plot. When we submit our lives to Scripture, we realize we are not seeing God in our stories, but our stories in God's larger, defining narrative.

6. The "Unaccommodating" Bible: A Call to Deeper Engagement

It starts out sweet to our taste; and then we find that it doesn’t sit well with us at all; it becomes bitter in our stomachs.

Sweetness and bitterness. Our initial encounter with the Bible is often sweet, offering comfort, promises, and guidance. We delight in finding ourselves within its pages. However, the experience soon turns bitter as we realize the Bible is not written to flatter us, but to involve us in God's reality, which often challenges our preconceptions and tastes. It contains hard sayings and difficult truths that are uncongenial to our desires.

Beyond problem-solving. We often approach the Bible with a "problem-solving" mindset, seeking to smooth out its rough edges or reconfigure it to fit our comfort zones. This leads to becoming "text-nicians" who master the text to make it run smoothly for our own needs. However, the Bible is not one-dimensional or systematized; it's intimately linked to lived reality, full of questions as well as answers, both comforting and discomfiting.

Renovating imagination. Engaging with the Bible requires a complete renovation of our imaginations, moving beyond a condescending view of the biblical world as smaller than our own. We must abandon the "hermeneutics of suspicion" (Nietzsche, Marx, Freud) that narrows our perspective, and instead cultivate a "second naiveté" and a "hermeneutics of adoration" (Ricoeur), embracing the staggering largeness and splendor of God's revelation.

7. Lectio Divina: The Art of Spiritual Reading

Lectio divina is the deliberate and intentional practice of making the transition from a kind of reading that treats and handles, however reverently, Jesus dead to a way of reading that frequents the company of friends who are listening to, accompanying, and following Jesus alive.

A disciplined approach. Lectio divina is an ancient, time-tested discipline for reading Scripture that guards against depersonalizing the text. It moves beyond mere intellectual engagement to a permeation of our lives by God's revelation. It's a way of reading that makes the transition from treating the Bible as a static, historical document to encountering the living, resurrected Jesus within its pages.

Four interpenetrating elements:

• Lectio (Reading): Not just deciphering words, but listening for the living voice, understanding metaphor, and recognizing the inherent ambiguity and depth of language.
• Meditatio (Meditation): Moving from looking at the words to entering the world of the text, using imagination to become friends with it, and guarding against fragmenting Scripture into isolated oracles.
• Oratio (Prayer): Responding to God's word, realizing it's addressed personally to us. Prayer is our active participation in the dialogue, using the Psalms and Jesus' teaching as our school for honest, mature conversation with God.
• Contemplatio (Contemplation): Living the read, meditated, and prayed text in the everyday world. It's not a secluded monastic practice but the integration of God's word into our muscles, bones, and daily actions, realizing that "Word and Life are at root the same thing."

Beyond the "letter that kills." The written word, by itself, can be "dead." Lectio divina is the strenuous effort to "rehydrate" the Scriptures, restoring their original force and context so they can fuse with our lives. It's a way of life congruent with the Word made flesh, ensuring that God's words are heard, listened to, and rewritten in our blood.

8. Obedience: The Path to Understanding Scripture

The most important question we ask of this text is not, “What does this mean?” but “What can I obey?”

Knowledge born of obedience. John Calvin famously stated that "all right knowledge of God is born of obedience." This highlights that true understanding of Scripture doesn't come from detached intellectual study alone, but from actively responding to God's living word. Without participation, without living in active response to God, our interest in reading the Bible will likely wane or remain superficial.

Participatory reading. The author's personal experience with running illustrates this: he only truly engaged with running literature when he was actively running. Similarly, engaging with Scripture requires active participation in the "God reality"—the creation, salvation, and holiness reality—it reveals. A simple act of obedience can open our lives to the text far more quickly and deeply than extensive academic study.

Living the parables. The story of Anthony Plakados, the truck driver who told his wife, "Mary, you got to live 'em, then you'll understand 'em," powerfully encapsulates this truth. We cannot "figure out" God's word from the outside; we must get inside it, or let it get inside us. This means embracing the Bible not as a puzzle to solve, but as a script to be lived, allowing its truths to shape our daily actions and responses.

9. Reading Liturgically: In Community, Through Time

Liturgy is the means that the church uses to keep baptized Christians in living touch with the entire living holy community as it participates formationally in Holy Scripture.

Recontextualizing Scripture. "Liturgy" in this context extends beyond formal worship to encompass the entire life of the holy community, past and present, as it engages with Scripture. It's about recontextualizing our personal reading into a vast, millennia-deep, and globe-encircling community that is also "eating this book." This communal framework prevents our reading from becoming private or individualized.

Two movements of liturgy. Liturgy involves two essential movements:

• Into the sanctuary: Ordering our lives to adoration, listening, receiving, and believing before God, aligning all aspects of our being with God's revelation in Jesus.
• Out into the world: Ordering our lives as living sacrifices, obeying and loving in the world, participating in God's work of salvation on the streets and in daily life.
  This comprehensive understanding ensures that worship spills into the world, with no non-participants.

Embracing rhythms and connections. Liturgy integrates Scripture into the sweeping rhythms of the church year, connecting us to the story of Jesus' birth, life, death, and resurrection, and the ongoing work of the Spirit. This counters the disjointed interruptions of secular calendars and consumer culture. It ensures that our reading is not reduced to private consumption but remains connected to the visible and invisible communion of saints, making us aware that "a lot is going on all at once."

10. God's Street Language: The Power of Vernacular Translation

The Holy Ghost spoke absolutely in the language of the people, as we might surely have expected He would.

Language of the common people. Archaeological discoveries at Oxyrhynchus (Egypt) and Ugarit (Syria) revolutionized our understanding of biblical language and culture. Oxyrhynchus revealed that many "Holy Ghost" words previously thought unique to the New Testament were actually common street language, found on everyday documents like shopping lists and personal letters. This confirmed that the New Testament was written in Koine Greek, the vernacular of ordinary people, not elevated classical Greek.

Context of Canaanite culture. Ugarit provided immersion in the Canaanite culture that Israel inhabited, revealing a world "flowing with violence and sex and magic." While Israel shared Canaanite language and poetic forms, they fiercely maintained loyalty to one God, rejected magic, and told local, historical stories about God's presence among real people, rather than fanciful myths about distant gods.

Tyndale's "plowboy" vision. This evidence supports the intuition of early translators like William Tyndale, who aimed to make the Scriptures accessible to "the boy that driveth the plough." It counters the notion that sacred texts require a stately, ceremonial language. Instead, God's revelation arrives in a rough, bumpy, and earthy language, revealing His presence and action where we least expect it—in the soiled ordinariness of our culture.

11. Translators: Bridging Worlds, Not Just Words

Every translation is a messianic act, which brings redemption nearer.

Beyond literalism. Translation is far more than a literal word-for-word exchange; it's a complex act of interpretation that bridges entire cultures and ways of living. A literal translation often "lobotomizes" language, stripping it of its genius, emotional associations, and story-influenced connotations, making it inaccessible and lifeless. The goal is to convey the "life" of the original text into the "life" of the receiving language.

"What did she mean?" Good translation prioritizes "What did she mean?" over "What did he say?" It requires a poetic imagination to recreate the "world" of the source text in the target language, ensuring that the message resonates naturally and spontaneously with contemporary readers. This involves understanding the nuances of idioms, metaphors, and sentence structures within their cultural context.

A continuous act. Translation is a continuous, dynamic process, not just between different languages but also within the same language (intralingual). It's a defense against "sacrilege upward"—the tendency to inflate biblical language into pretentious abstractions that lose touch with everyday life. Translators, like "God's secretaries," are called to keep language current, ensuring God's word remains a living, accessible force that expands and deepens the original message.

12. The Message: Guarding Against Sacrilege in Translation

I wanted to somehow recover that original tone, that prophetic and gospel “voice” that stabs us awake to a beauty and hope that connects us with our real lives.

The pastor's hand. The author's translation, The Message, emerged from 35 years of pastoral work, driven by a desire to make the Bible's message livable for his congregation. He observed that many found the Bible either unfamiliar or dulled by clichés, leading to "nonreading." His aim was to bridge the gap between the biblical world and the contemporary American context, using everyday language to convey the Bible's transformative power.

Countering "sacrilege upward." The author recognized the danger of treating the Bible as an impersonal authority, a "verbal artifact" to be defended or admired, rather than a personal address from God. This "sacrilege upward" removes the text from its rootage in actual life. His translation sought to recover the "perspicuity" of Scripture—its readability for common people—and its original tone, which was often colloquial and earthy, reflecting Jesus' own street language.

A call to participation. The Message is an invitation to personal, participatory reading, encouraging readers to live their true selves in response to God's word, rather than merely gathering religious data. It aims to counter consumerist attitudes towards Scripture and replace them with a readiness to listen and obey, drawing people out of self-preoccupation into the spacious freedom of God's salvation. This work is part of a vast, ongoing collaboration to translate and live God's word in every language and street.