So I've been away from this blog for a while and as I look back over a couple of posts, I think I was trying to rush it. I think it takes time to not automatically revert back to how you've been taught when reading the Bible.
And there's the whole thing about what exactly is the Bible anyway. I was always afraid to ask questions, afraid of being sacrilegious. My teenage son taught me it was okay but it took me a few years to realize it. He scared me when he did it, too. On the one hand, I believe God is perfectly capable of preserving what He wants us to know about Him in a book. But realistically, just how involved does He get in what is going on here on earth, without an invitation. On the other hand, these people were just people like we are. Oh, sure, a few of them were blessed to know Jesus in a one-on-one relationship, and surely they have a few insights that we don't have. And then you have Abraham, Moses, Joseph, David, and so on. But still....they're all just people. And we all know that 50 people can witness the same incident and you'll get 50 different accounts of what happened.
So what can we take away from the Bible? We can obviously catch a glimpse of people's perceptions of God and their relationships with Him. But I think we all have different relationships with Him. If you're a parent, do you have the same relationship with each of your children? We're made in His image, right? And yet we're all different. So it stands to reason that we all have different relationships with Him, yet He is within each of us and thus binds us all together. I think He relates to each of us in a unique way and that we cannot look at another person, past or present, and have any opinions regarding their relationship with God in comparison to our own. That doesn't mean that we can't learn from each other. But our primary teacher should be God Himself.
