Ephesians 6:17; Looking at the precious and infinitely powerful word of God.

Sunday May 22,2022

God’s word is wonderful and infinitely powerful because it is God’s expression of Himself to mankind.

Today we will examine the preciousness and wonder as well as the infinite power of the word of God.

We possess the greatest treasure in the visible world in the word of God.

Our personal faith in the word and Spirit brings truth to life within us.

We must not mistake our analysis or hermeneutic of the word of God for the Word itself.

We have to analyze the word of God so that we can get as close as possible to being the original readers, in other words, we try to become them: immersed in their language, their culture, their background, and environment. But one of the problems that can happen, and the devil uses this scheme quite well, is that we can spend all of our time analyzing the word of God and never really looking at it – seeing it for what it is and hearing it as God writing or speaking to us now, in real time. The word of God is the voice of God speaking to us right now. It would be odd if someone were talking to you about something important and you began to break down his verbs into voice, tense, and mood; person and gender – then differentiating his use of nouns and participles and infinitives – and then comparing all this bits to other bits that the person said to you in the past at another time. He would think you mad and you would miss the whole point of what he was saying. But if his words were written down, all the words that this important person with his important messages ever said to you, you would do all of that analyzing at some times to make sure you didn’t miss anything, but when you did, you would read his words again like a listener, in real time as if he were there again talking to you, and soak up the further meaning of what he said with the further knowledge from your analysis.

For instance, you cannot love and think about loving at the same moment, for when we love we are looking at love’s object, but when we interrupt that to look at love itself as a virtue. We need to look at love, and do so over and over throughout our course so that we gain a deeper and deeper understanding of it, but God’s overarching command is to love one another. If we don’t do this, all our insights into the meaning of love are useless, and in fact dangerous self-deception, since we may think we have the fruit of love when we don’t.

We do both. The science of interpretation (hermeneutics) is necessary so that we know the true meaning of the Scripture, and the hearing of God Himself talking to you in real time from the Scripture is necessary for looking at God in a real relationship with Him.

And we cannot be beholding God without losing all sight of our old selves. I wouldn’t say that we forget ourselves completely, which I have said before, but more so that Christ is the center of our new selves, which are created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.

We must look right at the Bible and not only alongside it, i.e., contemplating its value. There are times when we have to look away from it in order to contemplate it so we can look at it again and understand what we’re looking at.

The spiritual life must be analyzed or enjoyed, but not both at the same moment. Its ultimate design is to be enjoyed.

The spiritual life is enjoyed when it is lived in real time with real experience of God Himself. However, we rightly enter Bible class and analyze it and read our Bible’s and contemplate it, and we have to so that we ensure that we are not fooling ourselves and enjoying (or trying to enjoy) something false, which is what the devil wants us to do. But through our analysis of the word of God under the teaching ministry, the tutelage of the Holy Spirit, we sharpen the sword of the Spirit, so to speak, and we cut through the falsehood that would have us living outside of communion with God while thinking we should be satisfied.