In 2 Chronicles 34, under the reign of the boy king Josiah, the book of the Law is rediscovered within the Temple. Which, on the face of it, seems pretty surprising.
Judah is in a state where they rediscover Deuteronomy (or the whole Torah) and don’t recognise it or know it. Josiah’s response to having it read to him is to tear his clothes in grief and repentance. He fully expects disaster to befall Judah because of their behaviour and for the wrath of God to fall on them.
My friend Simon Argent likes to ask: how did they get there? And, even more pertinently, could that happen to us? Could we get ourselves in a state where we are also essentially without the Bible?
There’s so many of them printed we are unlikely to lose the Bible in a physical sense, but perhaps we could end up in a place where we find ourselves with Bible’s in the pews but never open on our laps. It’s not that wild an idea that we might find ourselves surrounded by Bibles without knowing what’s in them, and certainly without using them and putting its content into practice.
The Book of Law is found behind money and other treasures. It is possible to give lip service to the importance of the word but allow other things to become the primary treasure for us as individuals and churches. We need to be the sort of people who treasure the word in order to treasure Jesus.
But of course, no evangelicals disagree. Few Christians disagree. The question is: could it happen to us and what would that look like? Of course, it could, which is one of the reasons this is reported to us in scripture in the first place.
The text invites us to speculate on why this might be the case. We’re off the back of years of Manasseh’s awful reign following after other gods. The word has not been passed on generationally and has faded due to lack of use.
We see exactly the same thing in the church. If we don’t pass on our theology carefully, the next generation will not believe it. The general thrust is that what the first generation contends for, the second assumes, and the third denies: we have to continue to contend for scripture if we expect to impact the generation after us.
What are the things that we have lost?
The problem with this sort of question is that it becomes a place for me to write whatever are my personal bugbears and say that everyone has forgotten the scriptures. The true sting-in-the-tail would be the thing that I’ve forgotten as well.
I might want to point to a truly 1 Cor 12–14 kind of worship with dynamic praise contributions, and the practice of the Lord’s Supper as an encounter with Jesus. But, of course, I would say that, everyone should be a eucharismatic.
Equally in our day, basic doctrines of humanity, marriage, male and female, the purpose of sex and ‘sexuality,’ have been challenged. We have lost the Law and our reverence for it.
More challengingly though, I think many of us have little sense of what’s even in the Old Testament, let alone how to understand that in light of the revelation of Christ and what therefore we should do in our lives and church as a result.
How do we contend for the scriptures?
We sing them.
No, seriously, sing them. If you want people to remember things, to ‘murmur’ them in their hearts (Psalm 1) then set them to music. We should sing the scriptures.
Of course, you probably aren’t going to sing songs about head coverings or Christian business practices or the purpose of sex. Nor should you, church is for worshipping God.
If my trite answer doesn’t work, which it may not for a lot of the things we’re most likely to lose in whatever the specific cultural pressures are, we need alternative strategies. Saying that, though, most of those things we’re likely to lose do sit on theology that we can sing and can be deliberately aimed to allow us to communicate into the place our culture needs to hear it. It is much easier for me to say that than to write those songs, but lofty goals will bear fruit when worked on my many artists over time.
Our alternative strategies won’t be clever. We need to teach the Bible, to our children, in such a way that they want to read it, understand it, and do it.
Be teachers of the word, particularly the bits that are most unpopular.
Photo by Ethan Sykes on Unsplash
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