Is Your Bible Big Enough? Part 1

How many Bibles have I owned since childhood? Oodles! The first of them (white imitation-leather) was probably a gift from my parents or a Sunday school teacher and came as a payoff for memorizing Scripture verses.

In the years that followed, my Bible collection grew to include black, red, and navy blue leather- and calf-skin-bound Bibles. My prized possession? A most-memorable wartime military-brown Bible produced for soldiers.

My inventory grew to include pocket Testaments, red-letter Bibles (the sayings of Jesus in red ink), Scofield Reference Bibles, Thompson Chain-reference Bibles, KJV’s RSV’s, TEV’s, NIV’s, ASV’s, paraphrases (Phillips, Living, and Amplified). Oh, and I must not forget the plethora of study Bibles, which offer notes for youth, athletes, business people, women, contemplatives, and truck drivers, to name a few. Given my recreational inclinations, I have been waiting for a kayaker’s Bible.

In my early teen years I was given a special flaming-red evangelism Bible designed to be carried to public school and positioned on top of one’s textbooks so that other kids would notice and ask how to get saved. But I was never asked.

I met guys who, for five dollars, would draw a “reference ladder” on the edges of your Bible’s pages so that you could immediately thumb your way to obscure Bible books. Ladders would have been illegal, of course, if one were competing in a Bible search contest—sometimes known as “a sword drill” (I was once a record-setter in such competition). Today, ethics and scandals being what they are, all Bibles in a sword drill would have to be inspected for ladders just as baseball bats are inspected for cork implants.

Today there are software products available that offer Scripture in more translations than one ever knew existed. Every word, every phrase of Scripture can now be searched, compared, and matched in milliseconds. It’s scary to think of what Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, or John Calvin could have accomplished with such computer tools. It often makes me wonder if Saint Paul had any idea that his words would one day be sliced and diced, cross-checked and stretched, debated and defined as they have.

Bottom line: like many other North Americans, I have abounded in Bibles all my life, enough to start a small book store.

That fact was greatly impressed upon me 25 years ago when I visited China soon after it opened its doors to American travelers. My travel partner and I met a Christian woman who had not seen a copy of the Scriptures for two decades. When she spoke to us of the Scriptures, her recollection of certain stories was faulty or distorted. What could you expect from someone who hadn’t seen a Bible for that many years?

Since all Bibles in the possession of travelers entering China at that time had to be registered at the border, and since we did not sense a calling to be Bible smugglers, my traveling companion and I could not pass on the Bibles that each of us had with us. But, on the other hand, it occurred to us that we could tear out certain pages from our Bibles and offer them to her. At least we were brave enough to feel certain that Chinese officials would not check our Bibles closely enough to see if every page was there. (By the way, if you could only give someone 15 pages of your Bible, what sections would you choose? You have minutes to decide.)

I must confess that several times over the years I have dreamed of a middle-of-the-night knock on the door of my home and of a Chinese border policeman demanding to inspect my Bible. Of course, if that happened, I could respond with a straight-faced, “Which one in my collection would you like?” With my stash, I could keep him looking for missing pages for some time.

That experience in China nevertheless impressed upon me what it might be like to live in another world where the Scriptures are rare and therefore precious.

I can never remember a time in my life when the Bible has not been a dominant presence in the way I think and live. Sometimes I like to refer to myself as a biblical person rather than a Christian. The latter term, Christian, is becoming so innocuous, even pejorative in today’s world. It can mean many things that are actually counter-productive. But identifying myself as a biblical person seems to align my identity with the source documents of my faith. My faith, my life, I am saying, is grounded upon the God of the Bible.

Gordon MacDonald is editor at large of Leadership and lives with this wife, Gail, in Canterbury, New Hampshire. Part 2 of this article will appear next week.

To respond to this article, write to Newsletter@LeadershipJournal.net.