A
short leg from the New York Public Library off Madison Avenue is what's called
a "Library Walk." For the length of a whole city block, on both
sides of the street, are quotes from famous artists embedded in sidewalk
squares on engraved bronze plaques.
I
was exiting a Starbucks on this unusual block the other day when I decided to
take the "Walk."
Some
of the quotes really make me think of the King James Bible.
For
example, Rene Descartes is quoted as saying, "…the reading of books is
like a conversation with the best men of the past centuries."
I
think that's a lot of how it becomes when you familiarize yourself with the
writings of guys like Paul, David, Solomon, John, Moses, Peter.
Suddenly
you find yourself thinking about them as they really were and you're going
through exactly what they were going through with them. It's like you're part
of their life journey and you experience vicariously through them what was
going on in their space of history.
A
sidewalk quote from Francis Bacon reads, "Some books are to be tasted,
others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested…"
This
sums up the Bible! It's a living Book, just as it tells us it is. It's organic,
not static. It literally alters your life by the reading of it and believing
it's from God. God literally communes with you as the reader. The more you
consume, the more it fills up your heart and mind. In fact my pastor is the one
to first tell me that the Words of the Book are stored up in your soul.
In
the Book of Revelations, John actually talks about literally eating a book
given him from an angel. He writes that he "ate it up; and it was in my
mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter."
Jesus
Christ is the one who said, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of
God."
Emily
Dickinson is quoted on the sidewalk as saying, "A word is dead when it is
said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day."
Jesus
Christ calls himself the "Word made flesh." The first verse in John
reads, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God." The word "word" is capitalized.
Virginia
Woolf's sidewalk quote speaks to why God would absolutely not be who He says He
is and would be a total fraud if His Book didn't completely represent Him and
be wholly accurate.
Her
quote reads, "If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell
it about other people."
If
you think about all the information we have about Jesus Christ--how He lived,
what He said, the miracles He performed—it all comes from the Bible. And none
of the four separate accounts contradict one another in any way.
I
think one of the reasons God gave us four different write-ups for Jesus' life
is that He wanted us to see how each of the men, coming from different
backgrounds, wrote in a different style and included different details of the
same stories, but they all matched in what they said happened.
The
Bible is the only objective standard for truth. It's the authority on truth and
it's where truth is defined in all its forms.
Tom
Stoppard is quoted on a plaque as saying, "Information is light.
Information in itself, about anything, is light."
In
Genesis 1 we're told God said, "Let there be light: and there was
light." It says he divided the light from the darkness. Jesus Christ said,
"I am the light of the world:
he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life."
In
the Book of Acts the reader is told Paul was commanded by the risen Jesus
Christ to be "a light unto the Gentiles."
Muriel
Rukeyser says on one of the plaques, "The universe is made of stories, not
atoms."
Thousands
and thousands of different stories are contained within the Old and New
Testament and represent the history of the universe. The stories that emerge
from those written stories are endless.
On
a plaque dedicated to the words of Ernest Hemingway, he says:
"All
good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened
and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to
you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy,
the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If
you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."
This
is exactly what the Bible delivers on things that really did happen. God makes
it clear He's the author of His Book. In Hebrews, Jesus Christ is referred to
as "the author and finisher of our faith." The Apostle Paul assures
us, "For God is not the author of confusion."
I
look at the King James Bible as my most intimate possession. It's where all
insight into what God's about and how He thinks is found. The more I examine
it's ins and outs, the more I know Him and the deeper my kinship with Him goes.