A Firm Foundation
Five years after I became a Christian, a series of painful experiences shook my spiritual life like an earthquake. When the dust settled, all that was left was a firm foundation and a few upright pillars. The foundation was the Gospel of Jesus Christ; the pillars were my conviction that the Scriptures are the word of God, true and sufficient. So, with Christ as my hope and Scripture as my guide, I determined to rebuild. I began by rethinking the methods I had used before. I wanted more than anything to ensure I didn’t make the same mistakes again.
In picking through the ruins I realized that one of my biggest mistakes had been in allowing God’s Word to lose its priority in my life. The shift had been slow and subtle. I had drifted gradually from the Bible itself to books, articles, discussions, and debates about the Bible and various doctrines. I’d read dozens of books about the Good Book—devotionals, books of theology, commentaries, and everything in between. I’d listened to hundreds of hours of sermons and seminary lectures. But, even though what I was reading and listening to was, by and large, solidly biblical, I was relying on hearsay, so to speak. Nearly all of my understanding of God’s Word was coming to me second-hand. Though I claimed to love the Bible, I had never even read it from cover to cover.
During those years my soul began to wither, and for a while I barely noticed. It wasn’t until that painful series of experiences shook me that I found out my second-hand knowledge and selected pet doctrines were insufficient to sustain my life and heart. I had created a caricature of God. Like an image in a fun-house mirror, parts of him were ridiculously inflated and others shrunk down to nearly nothing.
I desperately needed an accurate picture of God. I needed to hear from him for myself. I needed the Scripture, and I needed it first-hand.
Over time I came to see that it had been blasphemous of me to treat God this way, as if I got to decide what kind of God He should be. I also began to realize that the god I was worshiping was beginning to look an awful lot like me. Liking what I liked and approving what I approved, his personality was becoming strangely like my own.
It is destructive to us (and to those around us) when we think of God in this way. Every one of his attributes is essential to who He is. And, as beings created in his image, everyone of them is essential to who we are. Christ is the image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15), and it is through our union with him that God's image in us is being restored (Col. 3:10). This restoration takes place as "we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another." (2 Cor. 3:18)
In other words, our restoration in God’s image only happens when we see God as he really is. Christ has revealed God’s image and glory perfectly to us (Heb. 1.3), and his glory has been passed down to us through the teaching of his apostles. The teaching of the apostles comes to us through the Bible. This means our spiritual restoration is dependent on us knowing the Scripture–every word of it—first-hand. As we mature in our understanding of it, measuring everything else according to its standard, we experience the power of the Holy Spirit as he builds our lives (and our church) through it.
