Biblical Illiteracy
Stacey Irvine ate almost nothing but chicken nuggets for 15 years. She never
tasted fruits or vegetables. She occasionally supplemented her diet with French
fries. One day her tongue started to swell and she couldn’t catch her
breath. She was rushed to the hospital, her airway was forced open, and they
stuck an IV in her arm to start pumping in the nutrients she needed. After saving
her life, the medical staff sent her home, but not before they warned her that
she needed to change her diet or prepare herself for an early death.
I’ve heard people call it a famine. A famine of knowing the Bible. During
a famine people waste away for lack of sustenance. Some people die. Those who
remain need nourishment; they need to be revived. And if they have any hope
of remaining alive over time, their life situation has to change in conspicuous
ways.
During normal famines people don’t have access to the food they need.
But Stacey Irvine could have eaten anything she wanted. She had resources, opportunity
and presumably all the encouragement she needed to eat well. Can you imagine
what would happen if all of us decided to follow her example and discontinued
eating all but non-nutritious foodstuff? If we happened to beat the odds and
live, we undoubtedly would suffer in the long run from nutrition-related chronic
illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease.
Like Stacey Irvine, we’re killing ourselves. It’s surely not for
lack of resources; nevertheless, we are in fact starving ourselves to death.
Christians used to be known as “people of one book.” Sure, they
read, studied and shared other books. But the book they cared about more than
all others combined was the Bible. They memorized it, meditated on it, talked
about it and taught it to others. We don’t do that anymore, and in a very
real sense we’re starving ourselves to death.
A Famine Of Bible Knowledge
Does this sound overly alarmist to you? People who have studied the trends don’t
think so.
Wheaton College professor Timothy Larsen comments that “it has been demonstrated
that biblical literacy has continued to decline. … Gallup polls have tracked
this descent to a current ‘record low.’”
In the book of Amos, people who experienced a “famine of hearing the words
of the Lord” are portrayed as undergoing divine judgment. Amos paints
a picture of people without access to God’s revelation searching for a
message from God like desperate people — hungry and dehydrated —
in search of food and water (Amos 8:11–12). In Amos they want it, but
are not permitted it. In our case, although we have unlimited access, we often
don’t want it.
When God commissioned Joshua (the son of Nun), he charged him with these words:
“This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall
meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to
all that is written in it” (Josh. 1:8). How often should you meditate
on it? Day and night. Why? So that you do what is in it.
The Old Testament book of Psalms leads off with these words:
Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in
the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in
the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a
tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its
leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. (Ps. 1:1–3)
And in another psalm: “Oh
how I love your law! It is my meditation all the day” (Ps. 119:97). Have
you ever wondered how it could be his meditation all the day? The psalmist didn’t
have the Bible on his smart phone. Did he carry around a big scroll under his
arm? No, he had memorized the passages he was meditating on and was thinking
about them. He had committed large sections of the Bible to memory..
The easiest way to memorize the Bible is to divide it into chunks and then read
one 10- or 15-minute portion over and over again aloud until you know the entire
passage. This method of memorizing is painless, edifying and only requires a
bit of consistent time. I know precious few who memorize any Bible verses at
all, much less large chunks of the Bible, and yet it’s not as hard as
most people make it out to be. And it can change your life.
In 1986, Neil Postman published an influential cultural essay titled “Amusing
Ourselves to Death.” He argued that personal freedoms would disappear
not when a totalitarian government imposed oppression from the outside (like
George Orwell pictured in his book 1984), but rather when people came “to
love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities
to think” (like Aldous Huxley depicted in Brave New World). Postman wrote:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that
there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted
to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley
feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity
and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley
feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we
would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture,
preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal
bumblepuppy.
As Huxley noted in a later book (mentioned by Postman), we have “failed
to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”
By Kenneth Berding
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