The Bible’s truthfulness and relevance do not depend upon man and his designs. If it makes us feel any better, this problem of hearing, understanding, believing and obeying God’s Word is not new. The disciples of Jesus illustrate the problem as well as anyone, maybe better. After all, they were in His presence. They heard the words themselves. They saw Jesus speak and act.

Lying somewhere in the home of each person reading this article is a Bible. Maybe more than one. The fact that nearly every Christian in the West has his own Bible is a rather recent privilege. For roughly the first fifteen hundred years of church history, Bibles were fairly scarce and protected. The printing press was not invented until the mid-1400s, and the ability for each Christian family to have its own Bible came much later. Our freedom to have them as we do was one of the great achievements of the Reformation. Thus, today, each Christian home probably has several Bibles; maybe more than one for each person. Yet for all those Bibles, how much time do we spend not just reading them but expecting to hear God speak in and through them? Surrounded by God’s Word, we rarely listen to Him speak. In this article, we will reflect on the great privilege that we have of not only hearing God speak to us in His Word, but also of praying God’s Word back to Him.

What is God’s Word? Too often, we treat the Bible as a book of stories about other people. Whether we realize it or not, we have been influenced by a modern (or postmodern) view of history. This view posits such a great distance between the then of the Bible and the now of our lives that the Bible seems to have lost its meaning and relevance. It is as though the Bible has been suffocated by history, and its vitality for many has been vanquished. Like the old, large family Bible, God’s Word often retains our respect, but it has been relegated to the hallway of history, where it has joined the dated pictures of those who went before us, but whose voices are no longer heard. I would like to suggest that it is time to remove the dust—not from our Bibles, but from our hearts and minds, and that we reread it as the living voice of the living God.

Let us consider 2 Timothy 3:16–17:

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.

The language of God “breathing out” His Word is noteworthy. It reminds us that God is a speaking God. He does not simply exist, nor is He the ultimate recluse who remains hidden; rather, He is the God who speaks. The Bible is replete with reflection on God speaking. It begins and ends that way, and is filled from cover to cover with God speaking to His people. It was by His speaking that God first created. In Genesis 1 we are told repeatedly that God “spoke. . .and it was so.” When God speaks, things happen. He could have simply created without speaking, and yet He spoke. We should not lose sight of the fact that there is always purpose behind God’s speaking. That purpose is ultimately His own glory. All that He does will ultimately bring glory to Himself, and all that He says will do the same. That is why He spoke creation into existence—for His own glory.

Another important connection between creation and 2 Timothy 3:16–17 is the creation of Adam in Genesis 2:7: “Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” It is a curious thing that when God first created Adam, he was lifeless. He had a body, but no breath.

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