Quotable Quotes

I never looked at Habakkuk much when I was a kid. It just didn’t register on my radar of things to read. Even now I hardly ever think to revisit the story. After all, it’s just 3 chapters in the middle of the Minor Prophets. They’re like the Minor League, right? The ones that just couldn’t make it in the Majors?

I imagine I’m like most people in the world. We just don’t pay much attention to some books of the Bible. They seem too insignificant or too difficult to understand. Habakkuk seems to fly under the radar, even though we use phrases from the book fairly often. For example: The just shall live by faith, and, He makes my feet like hinds’ feet and sets me on high places. Ok, well, that’s all I could find. And that last one is a stretch.

It just so happens that Howard Hendricks was still teaching first year Bible Study Methods at Dallas Seminary when I started in 2001. Part of the program was to dissect Habakkuk and chart the book in great detail. Until then I had been satisfied to depend on the verses I had memorized as a kid. So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that to understand Scripture it’s not enough to be able to quote a few random verses from a few random books of the Bible.

We have a quotable quote Christian culture. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I know my Redeemer lives. Be kind one to another. For God so loved the world. The greatest of these is love. We depend on these verses and pull them out to address different situations we face. Trouble with your boss at work? God gives grace to the humble. Death in the family? To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.

In the 70s and 80s the Bible Church movement was known for its commitment to getting beyond the self-help, quotable quote Christian Culture. Believers Bible Church was, and still is, known for digging deep into Scripture and finding the unfathomable truths that can be found on every page of the Bible. But the temptation to be satisfied with quotable quotes at the expense of understanding context, nuance, and the author’s intended meaning remains strong.

Don’t misunderstand me. All of the verses we most love to quote are on my list of favorites. But it’s our tendency to use quotable quotes that allows misunderstandings and even heresies into our mindset. It’s this tendency to cherry pick verses that leads to proof-texting and justification of our own wrong thinking. It leads to a confusion of the actual message of books like James and Hebrews.

The word of God is living and active and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. (There I go. But I think I may be well within the interpretive range in this one.) If we are going to really experience the life that God desires for us to live, it is necessary for us to get beyond the quotable quote approach to Scripture. The Bible is God’s communication of Himself to us. If we really want to know Him and the power of His resurrection, then we must dig deep. If we want to realize the unfathomable riches of His grace, we must be committed to the daily study, not of someone else’s thoughts about Scripture, but of Scripture itself.

It starts with just reading. I hope that even if you’ve gotten behind in our Bible reading plan, you are sticking with it and discovering new truths every day, because this is how we deepen our faith and get to know the Almighty God of the universe who has made Himself known to us.