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When we fail to do justice to that story, we turn the Bible into a weapon. Something that all the peoples of the world are invited to share in. God forgives them, sustains them, and makes something new and beautiful out of the messes they make. But this God never gives up on that people. The story of the God who creates a people who continuously go on disappointing God. Every verse, every word of the Bible is embedded in the story of God and God’s people. Neither can we categorize passages by particular issue. We can’t randomly turn to a page and extract a lesson. So the wheel of morality approach is not good enough. To read the Bible is to participate in the ongoing story of God and God’s creation. It is the words of God about the lives of people. It is the words of people about the actions of God. The Bible makes a claim on our lives because it is the unsterilized memory of the people of God. And the Bible always refuses easy answers, instead choosing difficult tensions.
#Whale bullet points for word manual#
The Bible is less an instruction manual and more a wrestling match. It is an ongoing dialogue that isn’t always nice. Some of these books contain rules and some contain stories with morals, but the Bible goes so far beyond that. Then we could randomly open to a page and pull out our moral for the day.īut instead we have a collection of books from dozens of authors spanning hundreds of years. Something like a list of clear bullet points organized by subject with an easy to use index. We would have gotten something that was at least neatly organized. Had God wanted to give us a collection of rules and morals, God could have come up with something much better than the Bible. Because the Bible just isn’t either of those. Its just the Bible says this, therefore that, end of discussion.īut we can’t treat the Bible as a list of rules or even as a collection of stories with morals. As if we don’t have to acknowledge its place in the book we pulled it out of or that books place in the entire biblical narrative. So when an issue comes up, we turn to the “corresponding” text and read it in our most authoritative voice as if that settled the matter. This one deals with sex, that one with money, that other one with family.
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We label verses and cram them into neat categories. Once the rule is learned we close our Bibles at get on with our lives. But then I have to ask, why does so much of our ethical teaching resemble the wheel of morality? For a devotional or a sermon, we open our Bibles (seemingly at random) to a passage and draw out a rule from that text. Whatever the wheel spat out, that was the moral for the day.įirst, I have to acknowledge that this is a brilliant potshot at simplistic moralizing. It didn’t matter that it was shoehorned in and completely disconnected from the larger episode. The brothers (and sister) would spin the wheel and it would randomly generate the lesson of the episode. Sometimes, episodes of the Animaniacs would close with the Wheel of Morality ( Watch Here).