The Bible and Modern Man

One of modern man’s specialties is modern man! Never before in history has man been more adept at self-analysis or better equipped to look deep within his own predicament than at the present. Man in the nuclear age is painfully, agonizingly aware that something is wrong with him. He is nervous. He is afraid. On the one hand he is the slave to schedule, on the other, he is bored and lonely in his leisure.

Our playwrights by the dozens, our poets, novelists, philosophers and artists, our sociologists and our psychologists, no less than our men of religion, have been fairly screaming the weaknesses of modern man. Evidence is piled on top of evidence that man is sick. So exhaustive have been our analyses that even our symptoms have symptoms and our analysts rush to consult their analysts. But what is really wrong with modern man? Who knows?

Our difficulty seems to be that, while most of our analysts can describe our symptoms with great accuracy and even lay bare many of our basic ills, few of them indeed can provide us any clear understanding of the way out. In fact, many of them would feel that to suggest the cure would be to dull our understanding of the malady itself.

It is right at this point that the Bible jumps down off its shelf, dusts itself off and strikes back hard. No! shouts the Bible, the way out does not obscure the malady. Precisely the opposite! It is only as we know the cure that we are able to face up to and deal realistically with our sickness. Our malady, says the Bible, like a cancer in the vital organs, is so deep and threatening that it cannot be known for what it really is without some knowledge of its cure. Unaided man can no more understand, accept or cure his illness than an insane man can handle his mental derangement or a man with a ruptured appendix successfully operate on himself. It is only as God, through the biblical revelation, makes known to man who he is and what he can become that man is able to understand and accept himself as truly needy and ready to receive treatment. Our deepest human problem, then, can be understood only in the light of its solution and can be faced only by virtue of the hope given in Christ.

The Bible tells how the first man, Adam, was created whole and unbroken in a world pronounced good. It says further that, although Adam, and after him all mankind, by the assertion of self-will rebelled and shattered the wholeness of relationship, God has provided for man’s restoration by a new creation in Christ—the new man: Man as he was meant to be and still can, in some measure, become.

Against this background of original goodness and wholeness in creation and in the light of the new creation in Jesus Christ, man then, both ancient and modern, can be seen as broken: alienated from God, estranged from and at enmity with his brother and deeply divided in his inmost self. As alienated from God, man is guilt-ridden and painfully aware of shame and weakness, hiding, like Adam and Eve, from the God who made him. Breaking loose from the sovereignty of the Creator God, he goes forth to build his world after the pattern of his own self-centeredness, constructing one civilization after another as towers of Babel against the sky, monuments to his own human pride.

Man, as against the background of creation and in the light of Christ, is also seen as broken from his brother. Like Cain, he learns to envy, then murder, and then cover up his violence with an uneasy bravado. And so man becomes a fugitive and a wanderer in a world now turned against him, marked out for an endless chain of blood revenge.

Fragmented To The Core

Most serious of all, man is now fragmented to the very core of his being. He does not understand himself. In fact, he is no longer a true self. The things he would do, he does not, and that which he would not, that he does—at odds within himself, torn and harassed. His name is legion, for he is no longer a man but a bundle of conflicting emotions.

This is man, says the Bible, man at every stage of his so-called development, from the stone-age to the nuclear—but this is man only as understood from the vantage point of a solution already provided in Christ. This is modern man with all his sophistication and achievement, embarrassed by God, alienated from his brother and caught in recurring war, broken deep within and unable to cover up or cope with his anxieties and basic dreads.

But will the Bible really jump down off its shelf, dust itself off and talk back to modern man? No—of course not. And that’s the rub. Man must, of his own free will, pick the Bible up, blow off the dust, turn off his television set, and search through the book as eagerly as a hungry man grubs for food.

Coming Up For Air

A holy man of India was once asked by a young disciple how to find God. In response the swami took the disciple down into the river Ganges and forcibly pushed him under the water. He held him down for a whole minute, then a minute and a half, though the man started to struggle, and then, by dint of great strength he kept him under for two whole minutes, finally letting him up puffing and sputtering. “When you were under the water what did you desire more than anything else in the world?” he asked the half-drowned disciple. “Air!” gasped the youth, “air!” “When your whole being cries out for God as your body cried out for air, you will find him,” rejoined the master. When a man desires to know the biblical answer to man’s life with this same ferocity, he will find it.

The Book Of Life

The Bible is not an easy book. Indeed quite the contrary, it is difficult to read—full of strange names and stranger language. What is more, it often hurts and stings. Instead of speaking for man to soothe and comfort man, it speaks for God to judge and redeem man. There will be much in it that modern man may not understand, and indeed many of its puzzles still baffle some of our most brilliant intellects, but what man does understand may leave him uneasy and smitten, yet strangely warmed and lured into reading.

To get the most out of the Bible one should first secure a readable translation, preferably one that speaks the living English language of our day. Then one must read hungrily and extensively, and yet give the Bible time. Valuable guides to biblical reading and understanding are available at most any religious bookstore. But do not neglect the Bible itself. Return to it again and again from the reading of books about it, for it authenticates those books rather than the reverse. Read on and on in the Bible, keeping in mind that, for the Christian, Christ is the key to its meaning—not just the words of Christ, nor this or that one of his deeds—but the total redemptive purpose and accomplishment of God in Christ: his life, death resurrection and exaltation, Christ’s total place in the history of God’s dealing with men.

After mastering the central theme of the restoration of all life in Christ and his body, the Church, then embark upon a lifelong exposure to the various parts of the divine record: the epic stories of patriarchs, prophets, priests and kings, the strong emotions and sweet comfort of the poetry, the wisdom of the sages, the preaching of the great Hebrew prophets, and then in the New Testament, the incomparable power of the gospels, the exciting adventures in Acts, the practical churchmanship and enriching exhortations of the epistles and the climaxing drama of divine sovereignty depicted in the Apocalypse.

In the Bible, modern man is revealed as broken and needy and it is in Christ, who himself was broken on the cross for man, that wholeness can be restored and the need of modern man be met. For what man cannot know for himself apart from God’s revelation and what man cannot do for himself apart from God’s redemptive act are both known and done in the living Christ proclaimed in scripture. Modern man needs the Bible. The Bible can speak to modern man.

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