The Bible is Not News

It seems every week now news sources give us something different to talk about.

“Did you hear about that?”
“What do you say to that?”

Though some people talk about “good news”, the Bible is anything but new. It is old … really old.

The Bible is dismissed, and God with it, as having nothing pertinent to say about current events. After all, the words in the Bible have not changed. Reading the Bible is like reading a foreign culture. What new wisdom can it provide?

Answer: exactly the unchanging, stablished, everlasting, absolute, spiritual wisdom from God that we need; the kind not from this world (1 Cor 3:19-20).

The danger of imbibing too much news is the risk of thinking, in the face of the most important current event, that God does not know what he is doing when he tells us to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, preach Christ and him crucified, and stand fast in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Lord knows the end from the beginning and knows the headlines years before they make the news. Having this knowledge, his purpose for us is clear: he gave us a ministry to perform and a message to speak (2 Cor 5:18). All we must do is open our mouths to speak what we ought (Col 4:4-6), even if it sounds foolish (1 Cor 1:18).

Knowing the news is not the same as understanding. It is not the same as knowing what is important.

Speaking God’s words consistently will strengthen your faith and help you see the temporal nature of the news.

The Bible is not news, and that is a good thing.

Hold fast,

Justin “old-fashioned” Johnson