Bible Study: Proverbs 2:10-15

When wisdom enters your heart,
And knowledge is pleasant to your soul,
Discretion will preserve you;
Understanding will keep you,
To deliver you from the way of evil,
From the man who speaks perverse things,
From those who leave the paths of uprightness
To walk in the ways of darkness;
Who rejoice in doing evil,
And delight in the perversity of the wicked;
Whose ways are crooked,
And who are devious in their paths;

Proverbs 2:10-15 (NKJV).

One of the rants I made on twitter a little while ago was about the usefulness, but not necessity, of the Bible. This passage echoes the sentiment as to why, in that when truth is internalized, cherished, retained, then how you act will be an outpouring of that.

In the "heat of the moment" you may not have a Bible handy. Or the internet, to look something up. The truths in the Bible are necessary, but the Bible itself is just a container. If all you do is pick stuff up, gander at it, marvel at it, and then put it back, then you are not understanding God's desire for you in reading scripture.

The purpose of reading scripture is to etch it into your mind, to not just experience it, but to know it and be able to share it and the understandings of it without it being present.

Think of it this way: how hard is it for you to describe attributes of a friend that you've had for a long time?

The longer you've known someone, the better you can get at predicting how they'd react in a given circumstance. While there are surprises sometimes, humans are terrible at behaving outside a pattern, and so once you learn someone's patterns, you know them in an intimate and personal way that informs how you communicate with them, the kinds of things you try to do with them, or even just which topics are good or bad.

So it is the same with the Bible and God, and us. The Bible is our second-most direct means by which the truth of God can be known, and through studying the Bible we are to grow in understanding of God's nature and heart for us in the same way that spending time with a friend does the same.

This is why the Bible is useful, but not necessary, because the Bible isn't the goal, God is, and the Bible is just the most reliable tool we have to communicate those truths. Sometimes those truths are made implicit in historical accounts, sometimes explicit in allegory or parable, but they are all working together to pain a coherent picture of God that enriches our relationship with God.

We do not hold the Bible in high esteem because it's the Bible and God inspired it, but because of what the Bible says about God. In some ways, the dynamic in which Jesus Christ humbled himself and yet was exalted by God is seen in how the Bible is handled, in that while it can be easy to see it as a single book, nobody sat down one day and said "hey lets write stuff about God."

The Bible was written over a period of time and contains the most accurate descriptions of God's actions and God's nature that we can get outside direct revelation (such as what Saul, not yet Paul, experienced on the road to Damascus). Studying the Bible is important, not for the Bible's sake, but because the result of studying the Bible aligns us with God.

Were we perfectly aligned, the Bible wouldn't be needed. After this life, in the next, I don't know what purpose, what role the Bible will play, when we have direct access to God and Jesus Christ to experience and enjoy them without barrier or hindrance. The Bible's value then would be greatly diminished, because why read about someone when you could just talk to them instead?

Wisdom is a subset of God's knowledge, of God's nature, and studying wisdom, gathering knowledge, is just as much a part of "becoming more like God" as the behavioral changes we make given what we newly understand.