What is the Bible here for? An unfinished response

It seems if we examined the Bible from an outsider’s perspective, we would have no reason to believe it is for us. If I steal my neighbors mail and find a bill yet unpaid, I am not concerned for myself. So, with Scripture, it seems we have stumbled across the mail of God, He as the sender, people of ancient tongues, tribes, and cultures as the recipients. Everything written is deeply rooted in place, time, and presuppositions that, frankly, have little or no sway on contemporary life. This, at least, is what one may observe without traditional Christian indoctrination.

Tradition has made it more difficult than ever to understand the Bible as no more than an answer book, a timeless, absolute collection of promises to treasure until Jesus takes us away to a better place. How much more advantage the unchurched have! They read Paul writing to the Philippians. “For I know that through your prayers and the help given by the Spirit of Jesus Christ, what has happened to me will turn out for my deliverance.” Not a formula of thanksgiving, not a complement to us as its readers, not an absolute principle for succeeding in times of trouble. The non-Christian reader might correctly perceive this. For the churched, it is all the above and working its way to a line of bumper stickers. We love to let the Scriptures speak to us, even though it seems they have no intent in doing so.

However, if we see Scriptures as providing a framework, a story, which they quite accurately do—an epic of the creator God with plans, promise, people, purpose for His world, yet uncompleted—the poems, the parables, the prophesy seem to fit together, they seem united in purpose. We see glimpses of God, often incomplete (just showing His backside, I suppose), but altogether true and living. And we, thousands of years removed from the actually events, find a story that we can’t help but to find ourselves in. we are there, in its midst. And we chose the roles—in Adam or in Christ?—and we get to experiment (“taste and see”) if the way of Jesus is really the answer to the whole thing. The Bible claims it is. Yummy.