HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, February 22, 2025 – The Bible is our constant companion, or so it should be for us born-again believers. We should always have a Bible at hand and should be reading it every day. When I say we should be reading it, what I actually mean is that we should be letting God read us the Bible every day, because without God reading it to us, we’re not getting the intended message.

Anyone can read the Bible. Even the most committed atheists can pick up a Bible and make some sense of it. But because they’re not reading it through the power of God’s Holy Spirit, they’re only getting words, not context, not a deeper meaning or personal relevance or revelation that can only come from God.

How the Bible came to be is an interesting story in itself and goes a long way to explain why we need God reading us the Bible rather than reading it on our own steam. Particularly fascinating is how the Gospel came to us. God, through his Spirit, inspired Jesus to orally teach certain principles and truths to his disciples and followers, who memorized the teachings, whether verbatim or not. Some time after hearing the teachings (months? years? decades?), a few of the disciples wrote them down to the best of their recollection. Note that most of the writings were in Greek, though Jesus had given his teachings in Aramaic. As time passed, the Greek was translated into Latin in most cases (though not all) and then, centuries later, into English and other languages. These versions were then revised and re-revised as the languages evolved. And with each translation and revision, changes in nuance and context were introduced.

So, you see how the communication of God’s Word from the source (God) to the intended audience (us) via the Gospel is not unlike the game of gossip we used to play as kids. In that game, we’d sit in circle and someone we’d designate as “it” would whisper something to the person next to him, who in turn would whisper it to the person next to him, and so on and so on around the circle until it arrived back at the person just before the “it” person, who would then say out loud what had been whispered in his ear. The difference between the original message (e.g., “I love you”) and the final reported message (e.g., “Elephant shoes”) was usually so extreme, it was hilarious, which is the reason why we played the game in the first place, even knowing that some of the kids along the gossip line purposely changed the words to make it funnier.

Now imagine the gossip game happening to the words in the Gospel, because it actually has happened pretty much that way. No, the Gospel is not gossip, but it’s been handed down to us just as precariously and as prone to “mishearing” as gossip, and in some cases has even purposely and maliciously been changed to make it “juicier”, like gossip

Which is precisely why we born-again believers need God reading us the Bible. Without God reading it to us, we’re only getting words, not his Word.