Quick reflection on the Bible inspired by Eddie Gibbs

As part of the graduation rehearsal and student facility at Biblical Theological Seminary we got a short talk from Eddie Gibbs, who will be the commencement speaker. The part of his talk that stood out to me the most was the part when he talked about the importance of the Bible and being rooted deeply in it. He also talked about marking up Bibles with notes and the personal problems that he started with it. The first being the need to throw out your Bible after every few years to prevent the notes from hindering his ability to read the text. The second being that he came to realize that it was the often the parts of the Bible that he didn’t mark up, didn’t like and even disagreed with were actually the passages that he needed to hear the most. While I personally don’t mark up my Bible because of how I don’t want my previous notes to influence previous readings, I found his observations of why he changed sides on the issue enlightening regardless of how one feels about marking up their Bible. He also briefly commented on the language masterpiece of the King James Bible, in how unlike modern translations it was the last Bible that was translated to be heard instead of read. Which is reflected in the rhythm of its language, which is lacking in the modern translation which according to him makes memorizing Bible verses much easier in the KJV than our modern Bible versions. I found it especially interesting observation but it seems to make sense as a few hundred years I know that most households would have only owned a single “family Bible” at most and how the thought of everybody having their own personal Bible would have seemed absurd throughout much of church history. Yet our loss of rhythm in our Bibles goes to show how we are no longer have much oral traditions within our society and how it might have affected the role of Scripture in our lives. Finally the last point that stood out to me was how Dr. Gibbs talked about how his reading of Scripture has changed over the years in the light of George Whitefield, who made an effort to pray the entire Greek NT verse by verse. As compared how our Greek, Hebrew and theology classes teach us how to dissect a Bible passage into little pieces to examine, but the problem is when you dissect something you kill it. He shared with us that he prays through a Psalm a day and aims to pray though the entire Bible once every three years. Honestly at first I was surprised that he read or should I say prayed through the Bible only once every three years, given the big emphasis by many on the importance of reading the entire Bible yearly. But than again it had me thinking about his earlier comment about getting deeply rooted in the Bible, and how spreading out one’s reading plan over three years instead of a year could likely be a better way of better understanding and talking to heart what they are reading.