1. Treating with the Word of God

What Is the Bible?
The Bible is a record of God speaking to us. Inside that record is the history of God dealing with many different people down through the centuries of the human experience, and particularly with that family of people, the children of Israel, through whom He gave most of what is in the Bible. That record also includes the gospels that set forth Jesus, our Savior, His sacrifice for us, and the meaning of salvation and of the Christian life.

More than that, the many people through whom God spoke were very different from one another in time, place, and outlook. God even spoke through a number of people of other ethnic groups including Job and Balaam, Ruth and Naomi, Nebuchadnezzar and Xerxes. And through all, God fitted His own words into the very human personality and expression of each. God is eager to speak to us through many.

Yet Jesus said, “Seek and you will find” (Matthew 6). We could also say it this way. – “You will find whatever it is that you seek.” The Bible is to you whatever you want it to be, and you will find in it whatever you are seeking, for whatever you intend to do with what you find.

The real question you must answer, then, is not, what is the Bible, but rather you must give answer to two questions Jesus asked. The first answer required of you is – “What do you want?” Or even, “What do you want Me to create inside of you?” And the second is, “Who do YOU say that I am?”

Let’s go back to my initial definition of the Bible, changing only one word. – The Bible is a record of God speaking to me. – Regardless of any other thought we might add, it remains only an expansion of this initial thought. Thus, in approaching the Bible to know what it is, we begin with GOD. – God here, God now, God BIG, God all. As Paul said in Romans 11, everything that exists comes only out from this God, everything that exists, exists only inside of this God, and everything that exists returns only to this God.

Then this God whom we see – this God ACTS; He does something. God speaks. Yet God is not speaking “into the wind,” rather, this Vast God who speaks, speaks directly to me, His “Eyeballs” staring right into mine. If God is speaking to me, how do I respond?

We could define the Bible by the Gospel words on its pages, by what God actually says. Consider what the Bible says about the Bible.

The Bible says that the Bible will kill you. If you approach the Bible in the wrong way and for the wrong purposes, the words you read will destroy you (2 Corinthians 3:6-7). Thus another big question God asks you and me all through the Bible is this. “Do you want to die? Or do you want to live?” I don’t know about you, but since my teenage years, I have had only one desperate answer to this big question God asks, “I don’t want to die; I want to live.”

Out from that thought, consider something Jesus said with which we must grapple. “You diligently search the Scriptures, for you imagine that you will discover age-unfolding life in them. Yet the Scriptures also give witness concerning Me, but you have no desire to come to Me, that you might possess life” (John 5:39-40).

When Jesus said, “You search the Scriptures,” He meant studying your Bible, which can be a good thing to do. But then Jesus stated that there is something else in the Bible, something those who “search the Scriptures” miss entirely. That something else is a Person, the Lord Jesus, and life is found only inside that Person.

From my youth, I have studied the Bible mostly because I want to live. But in my early years I also toyed with the grandiose idea that I was going to “figure out” the Bible. That foolishness came to an abrupt end when I was 26. I was walking along a path, excited over my next idea for “figuring out the Bible,” when I saw a vision. In that vision, a bony finger was pointing straight at my forehead, and I heard in my spirit the harsh words, “What are you doing to My Word?”

From that moment on, the only thing I did with my Bible was plant it deep inside my heart, not knowing what any of it meant, but desiring with tears over decades that what God actually says in the Gospel would be the only thing I knew. I can say now that I seek for only one thing when I study my Bible. I look for the Lord Jesus Christ on every page, the One who dwells inside my heart, written there by the Spirit as “ink,” as every Word God speaks fulfilled, Christ Jesus, my only life. And guess what happens – to my constant and overwhelming astonishment, I find Him so clearly there on every page!

But then I look at all the things my fellow Christians find on the pages of their Bibles and I see that so much of it is NOT Christ Jesus at all, but anything and everything else. Each one of them, to my great sorrow, finds exactly what they seek. (Yet God always has a remnant who do seek for Jesus alone.)

This brings us to God’s first big metaphor of what the Bible is to us.

The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. – And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:8-9 & 16-17)

This clearing in the center of Eden is also the Bible. In the Bible are found two trees. We are never commanded to seek for LIFE in the Bible, but only invited. Nonetheless, God makes it very clear – if you read your Bible so that you might know good versus evil, right versus wrong, if you study your Bible as God’s instruction book to you, so that you can know how to order your life, then you will DIE.

Now, its not that the Bible itself will kill you, but rather your own mind and the purposes for which you use what you find on its pages. Here are the same “two trees” in Romans 8:6-7. – For death is the heart-gut thought of the flesh, but life and peace are the heart-gut thought of the Spirit. Because the thinking of the flesh [the thinking of separation from God], is alienation against God.

Yes, God is speaking of two minds, but Paul uses the word “phroneo,” that is, the heart-gut mind, which speaks of the purpose in your heart, what you seek as you study the Bible. This is so important, If the Bible kills so many of those who study it, how, then, do we live? God gives us a different picture of the same thing in the New Testament.

A young man named Saul knew the Scriptures, and he directed his life by God’s instructions possibly better than any other person in human history, or so he boasted. Then one day Saul was hit in the forehead by a two by four, figuratively speaking. In his perfect obedience to Scripture, in obeying all that God instructs, by that obedience, Saul was putting Christ to death.

In his blind confusion, Saul shrank to nothing in his own sight, thus going by Paul (little) from that day on. Obeying the Scripture had not taken Paul to Christ. For years Paul pondered this shocking realization and what it really meant.

And thus Paul, reaching deep into the revelation of God, found a gospel of life that none of the other disciples of Jesus had understood. And Paul, in a partial contradiction of the apostles, stated in so many words, “It’s my gospel and my Jesus against another gospel and another Jesus.”

John would have been in his mid-forties when he first heard Paul’s shocking claim that neither he nor Peter really understood the Gospel. John was the kind of person who would have been as stunned by Paul’s claim as Paul was stunned by Jesus’ claim that all of his “obedience” to the Bible had produced in him only death. Thus we see that John, after all the other disciples were gone and Jerusalem was destroyed, made his way to Ephesus where he spent 25 years with Paul’s closest disciples, coming to know Paul’s gospel, before he ever picked up his pen to write. For this reason, the majority of the LIFE verses in the New Testament were written by John.

Here’s the thing. In spite of all this discussion of “what the Bible is,” we cannot provide a true answer without knowing first what God means by LIFE. Yet we have a massive disadvantage, for all those who seek for death in their Bibles have given a non-Biblical definition of “life,” which they then impose on every verse in the Bible. – “Life is not here, life is not now, you will find life only after you are dead. Death takes you to Jesus; only when you no longer have a physical body will you know what life really is.”

Here is God’s picture of what has actually happened. – Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become as one who knows good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”— … So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life (Genesis 2:22-24).

The Bible is filled with LIFE verses. Life is defined so clearly in the Gospel, what it is and how we possess it. Yet those who eat of death in their Bibles cannot even see those verses. They never mention them. In fact the one verse in the Bible that is the Tree of Life, John 14:20, most “Bible students” simply do not see at all. Paul said in 2 Corinthians 3 that a veil is cast over their hearts so that they do not even know that the Life verses are there on the page. They read only death.

We seek for life. Here is God’s definition of Life, the only source definition of life in the Bible, spoken by Jesus in the prayer that birthed the new creation. – This is age-unfolding Life, to KNOW You, the One True God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent (John 17:3).

One verse in the Bible shows us the Tree of Life. – In that day you will know that I am inside of the Father and you inside of Me and I inside of you (John 14:20). (The Bible also tells us what day Jesus meant – Now is the Day of Salvation – Today, if you will hear His voice.)

One verse in the Bible shows us what we seek. – Jesus replied, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep, guard, and watch over My word, and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and will make Our home in intimate closeness with him” (John 14:23).

And one verse in the Bible shows us who possesses LIFE, right now. – This is the testimony, that the life unfolding the ages God has given to us, and this life is inside of His Son. The one who possesses the Son has the life (1 John 5:11-12).

Life is knowing the Father, in intimate closeness with us, through knowing Jesus Sent into us as our Life.

Only now that we know what God means by Life can we consider what the Bible says about the words God speaks, the words that we find on the pages of our Bibles. Let’s bring in some groups of verses.

In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and God was the Word (John 1:1). – Sustaining all things by His power-filled Word (Hebrews 1:3). – Learn of Me (Matthew 11:29) – The Spirit is giving life; the flesh [the intellectual mind seeking knowledge of right and wrong] benefits nothing. The words that I speak to you are Spirit, and they are life (John 6:63).

The Lord Jesus Christ IS every word God speaks; He is the all-speaking of God. Everything that exists is sustained every moment by these Spirit Words coming out from God’s mouth, that is, by Christ Jesus Sent into us here and now.

You must be conceived of God (John 3:3). The seed is the Word of God (Luke 8:11). The Word is living and energeoing, piercing through… (Hebrews 4: ) Out from His own desire, He gave birth to us by the Word of truth (James 1:18). You have been conceived from above, not out from perishable seed, but out from imperishable Seed, through the living and abiding Word of God (1 Peter 1:23).

Now I can give you my larger definition of “the Bible,” a definition that still comes out from “God speaking His Word to me.”

~ God unfolds Himself to be known by His creation first as Word, Jesus, the All-Speaking of God. This Word comes, by the Devoted Spirit, into the hearts and mouths of those to whom God reveals Himself.  That Word in their hearts and mouths remains the Lord Jesus Christ in Person.

These to whom God has given His Word speak that word into the hearts and mouths of their hearers; they also write it down sometimes. There the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ in Person, sits quietly upon the page.

Then I, Daniel Yordy, read those words.  They come into me by the same Devoted Spirit through whom they were spoken and written. As I look into the eyes of my Father, I hear Him speaking the creative Word of Christ into me. I believe that word, not as something on the outside of me that I must “perform,” but as Christ Jesus in Person on the inside of me now the only life I am and now fulfilling through me all the All-Speaking of God. ~

Therefore take heed how you hear (Luke 8:18a). The question for me is how do I hear Him? Let me explain further.

When a movie maker records a movie, he uses a recording system to turn the sights and sounds of the movie into a digital format, actually, a written language. The recording system then writes the digital format onto a DVD disc. If I want to watch the movie, I buy the disc. But having the disc really does nothing for me. I cannot see the movie by studying the disk. No amount of mental penetration can force that disc to give up its secrets. It is, entirely, a mystery. Rather, I place the DVD into a machine that is designed in the exact same format as the original recording device. That machine translates the “mystery” written on the DVD into a movie I can watch and enjoy.

In the same way, I cannot find life by studying the Bible any more than I can see a movie by studying the disc, even if I could read the language written there. The original “recording equipment” who recorded those words in the Bible is the Devoted Spirit. The Devoted Spirit knows God. I am filled with the Devoted Spirit; I am filled with the truth. The word of God as recorded in the Bible “plays” through the Devoted Spirit I possess from God, and I see and hear those words as the Lord Jesus Himself living now in me.

This is what Jesus meant when He said, “The flesh (that is, studying the Bible by mental understanding) profits nothing.” Knowing the Father through knowing Jesus in Person, sent into us as every Word God speaks fulfilled, is the only thing that is life.

Let’s now give an answer to the two questions Jesus asked. – “What do you want?” – I WANT to know Father at home inside my heart.  “Who do YOU say that I am?” Lord Jesus, You live inside of me; You are every Word God speaks fulfilled; You are my very and only Life; You connect me always with the Father inside of whom we live.

How to Approach the Bible:
Augustine gave the rule for all Christians to have fixed in their minds BEFORE opening the Bible to consider the words written there. Let me give you Augustine’s rule in my own words. Understand this, I have heard this same “rule” from the mouths of many, each in their own words, each saying the same thing. In fact, I have never read or listened to anyone who did not follow Augustine’s rule in all of their reading of and speaking from the Bible.

~ Before you read any word in your Bible, fix in your mind first all Nicene theology and the definitions we have carefully placed upon every word on the page. Then, when you read, you will not be troubled by all the verses that do NOT fit. ~ I have had it said directly to me in this way. ~ You need to go talk to a pastor about what the Bible means. ~

This was because I was doing the same thing Augustine was trying to prevent, and that is connecting directly with God through the many LIFE verses in the Bible and believing that, in them, God is speaking Truth into me, when we “know” that Jesus is far away right now, that only death takes you to see Him, and that we read the Bible now only to know the difference between right and wrong, good and evil.

The entrance of evil into God’s creation and the beginning of the “fall of man,” began with a Bible study. The words of the serpent, “Did God indeed say,” place the Bible at the center of the picture. Here is another way to say the same thing. “Let’s all open our Bibles to read. – What do you think God means by what He says?”

What just happened? The words of the Bible are God speaking directly into me, that I might receive those words as the Lord Jesus Sent  into me, that those words, being written all through my heart as Christ fulfilled, might cause me to be all that God intends – the Tree of Life.

The serpent’s words takes the eyes of those who “study the Bible” off of God and onto their own “interpretation,” making themselves the master over the Bible as their own source of the knowledge of right and wrong.

Now, I do agree with Augustine, who loved Jesus and is a brother with us in the Lord, that we must have a certain framework of thinking before we open the Bible to read what is there. But I reject the framework of thinking which he prescribed.

Let me give you a different rule for approaching anything you read in the Bible, the only rule I use. And I will give you that rule using what God actually says.

On this one will I look, on him who is poor and of a contrite spirit and who trembles at My Word (Isaiah 66:2). “Look at Me God, I belong to You, Let it be to me according to Your Word” (Luke 1:38). The Spirit is giving life; the flesh [the intellectual mind seeking knowledge of right and wrong] benefits nothing. The words that I speak to you are Spirit, and they are life (John 6:63).

What does Jesus mean when He says, “The words that I speak to you are Spirit, and they are life?” I CANNOT tell you. And you CANNOT tell me. Only the Spirit of Jesus inside of you can cause you to know.

So let me put this rule into our words. ~ Even as you open your Bible to read, place your forehead upon the ground in the presence of a Devoted and a Mighty God, with no sufficiency in yourself, no fake claims of how you are going to “obey” God or “do” His will. Be silent about yourself.

When you KNOW by the Spirit that Jesus alone is every Word God speaks fulfilled, then stand inside of Him, face to Face with your Father as He speaks His Word as Sperm into you, that you might be His son, that Life might come forth through you. As every Gospel word in the Bible comes to you, respond in this way. “Look at me God, I belong to You. Let this Word that You are speaking into me be in me as the Lord Jesus, as all that YOU mean by what YOU say. And having asked, I know by the knowing of the Devoted Spirit filling my soul, that Jesus inside my heart is my only life, every Word You speak already fulfilled.” ~

It is this confidence alone, that God is telling you the Truth, that pleases Him.

We never approach “the Bible.” We only ever approach God, whether we know that we are or not. It is to God that we give our word of account with every moment’s breath. It is God who causes us to live through the power of the Word by which Jesus Himself sustains us.

Thus we contend with God concerning His Word, the Lord Jesus, that Christ Jesus Sent into us would be all that God means by what He speaks, as God covenanted with us to do inside the Blood of His Son. When we approach God in this way, we live – that is, we know the Father. And then, in knowing the Father through His Word fulfilled as Jesus inside of us, we turn to the Bible and we behold wonders beyond all imagination.

The Bible is filled with the glory of our Salvation beyond anything any human has ever contemplated. And the revelation of that glory out from the Gospel verses on the pages of your Bible, will increase brand new every morning forever.