Dr. Bruce Waltke is a renowned Old Testament scholar, so I was amused to hear his very pedestrian exposition of a verse that has long puzzled me.

This illumination came to him, not in his study, but in a Philadelphia snow storm many years ago. He went out to shovel his walk, and when he was done, decided to shovel the walk of the ninety-year-old woman who lived next door. That completed, he thought he should proceed to the snow-covered sidewalk of the Italian couple across the street, also in their nineties.

There was a third nonagenarian on the other side of his house (I know, this sounds like the set-up for a joke but that’s what the doctor told us.). At this point Dr. Waltke had already been out for five hours and was weary. Suddenly a verse with which he was long familiar but whose meaning had eluded him popped into his mind:

“Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself?” (Ecclesiastes 7:16)

He picked up his shovel and went home.

I see at least two morals to this story: (1) Be filled with the Scriptures, so that at any time the Holy Spirit can fire the synapses that quicken dormant knowledge into working revelation; (2) The Holy Spirit may skip steps in logic to give inspiration as He pleases, and is not bound by the quasi-scientific means we have supposed must be adhered to; (3) There is an aspect of mystery in the understanding of Scripture that calls for fear and respect; (4) Corollary: Understanding of God’s Word is for children as well as scholars.

Now here’s one worth reading.  Jacques Berlinerblau, Georgetown professor and author of Thumpin’ It: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Today’s Presidential Politics, discusses how candidates on both sides are using the Bible to defend this or that policy idea (as WOW writer David Innes suggests in this column, the Evangelical left sometimes likes to proof-text its own policy suggestions).  Berlinerblau explains how difficult it is to use the Bible as a proof-text for policy-making:

[E]ven if the Bible did possess a clear, unequivocal, God-given message on any given issue, that would not change matters much. For history has shown, again and again, that Christian polities cannot agree on what that message is. The epic 19th-century debates over slavery provide a case in point. As is well known, both pro and anti-slavery factions adduced their proof texts. (The argument could even be made that the former were dealt the stronger scriptural hand). After decades of exhausting, scripturally centered disputes, neither side could convince the other. As Mark Noll phrases it, “It was left to those consummate theologians, the reverend doctors Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, to decide what in fact the Bible actually meant.”

This problem (where people on opposing sides uses the Bible to prove this or that point) is often used to justify throwing out the Bible entirely.  But hey, literary critics have been using Shakespeare to prove contradictory ideas (feminism vs. colonialism, etc., etc., etc.) for 500 years, and nobody’s throwing out Shakespeare.  Anyway, I digress.  The article is good for reading, and for reflecting on the place of scripture in the public square.

I am reading Willa Cather’s My Antonia, and I want to share the boy narrator’s description of his quiet Midwestern grandfather:

Grandfather’s prayers were often very interesting. He had the gift of simple and moving expression. Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use.

Since I deal in words, I am particularly attuned to this danger of wearing them dull. When you write and speak all day, sometimes you begin to feel, if you have an ounce of introspection in you, that you are somehow cheapening the ideas, that all your chatter is striving not to illuminate truth, but to distract from it. Sometimes you become enamored with your own turns of phrase, your own cleverness, and before long you lose sight of precisely why you are writing, other than because you are, well, a writer.

I suppose preaching carries a similar danger. It’s probably more accurate to say that weak and sinful man, whether writing or preaching, is prone to think his crowing is somehow responsible for the sunrise. Or we are given to believing that our words are themselves the blessing, rather than frail and inaccurate vessels that at best, sometimes, by the grace of God, point to the blessings we had no hand in crafting. In that state of mind, we spill them out everywhere, a clever word in every setting. I wonder sometimes if we — if I — don’t wear them dull.

And then there are those who can read the Bible aloud — no contrived speeches or pithy aphorisms — and send a chill down your spine. Has that ever happened to you? I once attended a prayer service where a visiting pastor got up to speak. Seeing him take the pulpit, I expected some good sermonizing; a stranger in our midst, he surely had to make his mark, it seemed. Instead, he simply opened his Bible, and read a Psalm. But the thing was, you could tell he not only believed every word, he believed that they had been breathed out by the awful, Almighty God, and that this same God was in our midst. It makes a difference, I think, how you read those words we’ve heard so many times before, when you truly believe that they were first fashioned by the Word himself, and that in reading them you are inviting into yourself the mind of the Creator. Even though the words most of us read are only shadowy translations, they still convey this power, I think.

But when we traipse over them, either in our own study, or our essays, or from the pulpit, that magnificence gets lost. We dull them with our constant use. I have a devout Jewish friend who refuses to utter the word “God.” There is a reverence there, I believe, that we might all learn from. I’m trying now, when I read the Bible, to linger over the words, to remember that they are God-breathed. And I am praying more, when I write, that I am at my best when I am at my least.