Reconstructing Our Faith In The Bible.

This might make you think less of me, but sometimes I google my name. I know, I’m so vain. There is a little bit of truth in that, but it’s also to keep an eye on who’s preaching the messages that I post online and also to track where my books are being mentioned. And yes, I am a little vain; the last time I checked, there were over 260,000 results.

A number of years ago, I stumbled on a website promoting a book called, “O’Habits: 40 Success Habits of Oprah Winfrey and the One Bad Habit She Needs to Drop!”

One of the pages on the website was called “What people say about Oprah.” On that page, there were a number of famous people quoted, people like Roseanne Barr and David Letterman. And then there was this ringing endorsement, Ordained Wesleyan Church minister Denn Guptill surmising what Jesus would say to Oprah: I think that Jesus would say, “Well done, Oprah.”

And I did write those words; they were part of a message entitled, “What Would Jesus Say to Oprah?” that I preached at Cornerstone in 2008, but they were just 9 words from a 2912-word message, and they were 9 words taken out of context. The very next word after that quote was the word . . . “but”, and we all know what comes after the but.

It is interesting that the author of the book, Warren Cassell is a lawyer specializing in Intellectual property. Hmmmm.

This is week five of our reconstruction series as we talk about ways to strengthen and rebuild, if necessary, our faith and relationship with Christ and His church.

Sometimes, in talking to someone who has walked away from their faith and the church, they will say that their process of deconstruction began when they began to question the bible.

They either found it confusing or disturbing. They had seen memes about the bible highlighting verses that seemed to promote slavery, racism, sexism, and genocide. They had heard the media and celebrities ridicule the bible as being anti-science and full of weird laws and regulations. And, as a result, they chose to walk away rather than look for answers to their questions.

When we started this series, Pastor Rob recommended a book for the preaching team called “How Not to Read the Bible” by Dan Kimball. And many of the ideas that I’m sharing today came from the book. And maybe you are thinking, well, Denn, couldn’t we just read the book? You probably could, but you probably won’t, so just consider this the Coles notes version of the book.

If you want to go deeper, we are actually offering a video study on the book over the next several months in various groups.

So, this morning, we are going to deal with three principles you need to recognize as you read your bible.

The first thing you need to recognize is that The Bible is a Library, Not a Book. When we talk about the Bible, you’ll hear people refer to it as the “good book”, and we often think of it the way we would think of any other book. It was a front cover, and it has a back cover and a bunch of pages in between. All the things we think of when we think of a book.

When we call it a Holy Bible, the word Holy means set apart for a sacred use, and for Christians this defines the bible. And the word Bible comes from the Greek word, Biblia, which means books. And that’s books plural and not book singular. The word bibliophilia means a love for books.

But the Bible is more than a single book; it is a library of books. It’s a library that contains a broad and diverse range of books, from history books to law books to books of poetry. It is a library that consists of sixty-six books written in three languages by more than forty different authors over a period of 1500 years. Some of the books of the bible are separated by more than a thousand years.

And in the digital age, that’s even more difficult to get our heads around. When we open the bible on our phones or tablets, it seems to flow seamlessly from Genesis to the Revelation.

I love libraries and have ever since I was a kid, school libraries, public libraries, bookmobiles, and impromptu libraries that spring up on cruise ships, hotels and the little birdhouse libraries on the side of the road. They are awesome. And they are all laid out with different types of books in different places; at least, that’s the way they are supposed to be organized.

If you find a book of poetry in the history section, it’s in the wrong place. And if you found a book of poetry in the history section, it would be a mistake to read it as a history book because it’s not a history book. It is a poetry book. And it’s meant to be read, interpreted and understood differently than a history book. So if you were in the history section and found a book called Songs of a Sourdough and flipped through it, it might seem to be a book about the history of the Yukon. But when you started to read,