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God and His Agents of Oral Communication
The Bible, being so widely available today—even now on our digital devices—is easily taken for granted. It’s hard to imagine that for 1,500 years for the New Testament, and more for the Old Testament, individuals didn’t have access to anything of the sort. It wasn’t until a century after Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the 1400s that the first complete Bible in English was available in printed form. Since then, we’ve had the printed version of divine revelation in our hands and on our laps for almost five hundred years.
God didn’t write. Yes, he handwrote the Ten Words on stone tablets (the Ten Commandments are referred to in Hebrew as the ten “words,” or “sayings”: Ex 34:28; Deut 4:13; 10:4). But remarkably, beyond that God chose to reveal an entire host of heavenly truths—what we read in our Bibles—by speaking them.
God’s work creating a universe was framed by the repeated declaration, “And God said, ‘Let there be . . .” and there were: cosmic islands of stars (galaxies), nurseries for birthing new stars (nebulae), supermassive black holes (quasars), “mystical jewels of God” stretching across what is now estimated to be 93 billion light years of space and reportedly expanding every second. Can we conceive of that? No, not at all. But that’s the nature of God and anything he says.
Reflect on these questions as you hear the Word of God: What strikes you most about the power of God’s word to enact creation? What specifically stands out to you when you hear these words spoken rather than read?
Practice: Read the scripture aloud, then play the audio and listen without looking at the words. What did you notice when you listened?
读经计划介绍
What are you missing if you only read the Bible? We have long recognized that the Bible was written for us, but not to us, and requires us to make efforts to bridge the cultural gap between ourselves as readers and the writers of the ancient world. In this study, we will become aware of yet another gap that we must recognize and factor into our reading: we must bridge the modality gap between the written word and the oral word.
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