Eat This Book

The number one best selling book of all time is The Holy Bible with approximately six billion copies in circulation over the past five hundred fifty years. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (The Little Red Book) comes in a distant second with nine hundred million copies sold. What makes the Bible the best selling book of all time? What makes it different from all the other bestsellers? The Bible is God’s revelation of himself. Through the Scriptures God reveals his reality and his relationship with human beings in the story of his actions from creation to the cross and beyond. The Bible, as God’s revelatory word, demands a method of reading that is compatible with the story it tells. In Eat This Book, Eugene Peterson asserts that the Bible demands “…the kind of reading named by our ancestors as lectio divina, often translated ‘spiritual reading,’ reading that enters our souls as food enters our stomachs, spreads through our blood, and becomes holiness and love and wisdom.” Peterson takes the title of his book and the image of spiritual reading from the book of Revelation.

I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll; and he said to me, “Take it, and eat it; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth.” And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter. (Revelation 10:9-10)

Our tendency is to read the Bible for information. When we read for information we gather data that we can use for our own purposes—to support our doctrinal position, to exert pressure on others, to justify our behavior. Informational reading is safe reading. Informational reading is safe because it requires little of us. However, spiritual reading requires us to “eat the book”—chew on it, digest it, metabolize it. With spiritual reading, we assimilate the Holy Scriptures into our lives in a way that draws us into God’s world. It makes us participants in God’s reality. When we read spiritually, we read not to gather information for our purposes but so that our lives may serve his purposes. Spiritual reading is not safe reading. It is not for the faint of heart but for those who seek transformation through God’s word, who seek to live in harmony with God’s world, with his saving grace, and with his church. Is that you?