It depends on what “book lovers” means. If you mean collecting old books so that you can have a room full of books, then no. It’s probably prejudiced against them, not biased toward them.

But if you mean you are glad that God ordained to reveal himself and preserve that revelation in a book, then yes. It is biased toward you, in a good way. Because he did, and you should be glad about it!

If you say, “O, God chose to inspire a book? Writing? Words? Prepositions? Verbs? Adjectives? Paragraphs? God ordained, just like he would put his divinity in Jesus, that he would put his inspired word in prepositions?” and you don’t like that, then you’re against the Bible. You’re against God.

God did it this way. So those who like the fact that he did it this way are going to find themselves affirmed in the Bible. Those who don’t like that fact are going to find themselves chaffing the fact that they have to look in the Bible in order to find what God has to say.

It is amazing, when you stop and think about it, that God has ordained, first, to reveal himself in history, in the great acts of the Old Testament, and then in his Son—”In these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.” And then to ordain that there be prophets and apostles who would put it in a book, and this then, because it’s their word, would become the foundation on which we build churches and we build life. That’s amazing!

It has unbelievable implications.

Everywhere the Christian church has spread in the history of the world, it takes with it schools. Why? Mainly because you have to learn how to read, not to succeed in life, but to know this book.

It does help you succeed in life to be able to read. But the Bible is the most important piece of information in the universe, and it happens to be in language, language that was written down; therefore every culture should have access to that book. That’s why Wycliffe Bible Translators is so important, and all of the other commitments to Bible translation.

I don’t know if they wanted me to go that direction, but my answer is, if “book lover” means the kind of book lover I’ve been describing, then God is approving of your book loving.

If “book lover” means you’ve got this fetish where you need to have the smell of an old book in your room, and you like to tell everybody that you’ve got 10,000 books in your study, then the Bible has no kind of appreciation for that kind of idolatry.

John Piper is the Pastor for Preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This article is an edited transcript of an audio message posted on his blog, Desiring God, and is used with permission.
Source: http://www.desiringgod.org/Blog/