Ultimate Reader's "Digest"
Theme of the Week: God's Word on His Terms
Eugene Peterson
Thursday, September 20, 2007
 1 of 1
Key Bible Verse: The voice from heaven called … "Take the unrolled scroll from the angel … and eat it" Revelation 10:8-9. Bonus Reading: Ezekiel 2:8-3:3
As a pastor and professor attempting to get people involved in the right reading of Scripture, I was dismayed that their reading of the Bible seemed no different from the way they read the sports page, comic strips, or the want ads. I wanted them to see the Bible Kafka's way (see "Thought to Ponder" below), as a fisticuff book, an ice-axe book. Now I realize that my strategy was mostly carried out by raising my voice. If what I had in mind was trying to guide Christian readers to receive the words of Scripture as food for their souls, force-feeding wasn't the best approach.
Then I noticed the most striking biblical metaphor for reading (in today's Key Bible Verses). Before John, Jeremiah and Ezekiel had also eaten books—a good diet, it would seem, for anyone who cares about reading words right. John ate the book—not just read it—he got it into his nerve endings, his reflexes, his imagination. Assimilated into his worship and prayer, his imagining and writing, the book he ate was metabolized into the book he wrote, the first great poem in the Christian tradition and the concluding book of the Bible, the Revelation.
—Eugene Peterson in Eat This Book
My Response: To really digest a section of God's Word, I'll …
Thought to Ponder: If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? … A book must be like an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.—FRANZ KAFKA (Austrian writer)
Adapted from Eat This Book (Eerdmans, 2006) by permission.
Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine.Click here for reprint information on Men of Integrity. 1 of 1
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