Audio Transcript

As we stand on the threshold of a brand-new year, we’re talking Bible reading. The question is from an anonymous listener, a man and a new believer. Wonderful! We love getting messages from new believers. Here’s his email: “Pastor John, thank you for this podcast. I’m simply overwhelmed at how much I don’t know about the Bible as a young Christian. I want to be knowledgeable about Scripture so that it can guide me and so that I can use it to guide others in the future. But there is so much. I don’t know where to begin. If I were studying for an exam in a class, I would start with a list of essential topics to be tested on. But with the Bible, I feel like the test is life, and I don’t know what I need to know to be prepared, if that makes sense. In other words, where do I start? What is the first and most essential thing I need to know to follow Christ by reading his word?”

Well, my answer is probably going to be a little bit frustrating because he’s asking for a particular truth in the Bible, and I’m going to say “Bible, Bible, Bible, Bible.” I have never met a mature, fruitful, strong, spiritually discerning Christian who is not full of Scripture, devoted to regular meditation on Scripture, and given to storing it in the heart through Bible memorization. And that’s not a coincidence.

So, what I want to do is persuade our new believing friend that it is absolutely essential, after coming to faith in Christ, to be radically, deeply, experientially devoted to Scripture, to be unshakably, unwaveringly persuaded that reading and meditating on and understanding and memorizing and enjoying the Scriptures is absolutely essential for the Christian life. This would include being in the word every day, with the aim that we will meet God there and, little by little, the glory of his truth will fill and transform our lives.

And that may seem obvious to him or to others, but it isn’t obvious, because I know fairly well-along Christians who don’t do this. They don’t do this, and they’ve been Christians for years. They’re lackadaisical. They think it’s optional because they know so much already, and they read so many other books. I don’t regard that as a very good habit at all. I think it’s dangerous.

I have ten reasons that I believe this, ten reasons to make Bible reading, Bible understanding, and Bible memory essential to the Christian life. Resist feelings of self-sufficiency that say, “I don’t need Scripture every day.” So, here are my ten reasons.

1. Salvation

Scripture saves: “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Timothy 4:16). Salvation has happened to God’s people. Salvation is, at this moment, happening to God’s people. And salvation will happen completely at the resurrection of God’s people. It is happening now by means. Paul says, “Hold fast to the teaching, and save yourself.” God saves us daily by Scripture.

2. Freedom

Scripture frees from Satan: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32). The context is that the Jewish leaders think they are not slaves, but Jesus tells them, “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires” (John 8:44). Satan is your enemy, young Christian. He’s a thousand times stronger than you are.

John writes to the young believers, “I write to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the evil one” (1 John 2:14). This is our only hope for defeating a supernatural enemy. Every time Jesus was tempted by the devil, he struck back with “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6:17). He had it memorized so that he didn’t have to carry a book in the wilderness.

3. Grace and Peace

Scripture imparts grace and peace: “May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord” (2 Peter 1:2). Knowledge of God gained through Scripture is not identical with grace, but Peter says that it is a means of grace. If we want to be made peaceful and powerful through divine grace, Peter says, it happens “in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.” That knowledge is found in one place: Scripture.

4. Sanctification

Scripture sanctifies: “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth,” Jesus prayed (John 17:17). Sanctification is the process of becoming holy — that is, becoming more like Christ and like God, who is perfectly holy. This is not optional. Hebrews 12:14 says, “Strive for . . . the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” We don’t become perfect in this life, but we do become holy. God sanctifies his people, and so Jesus prays to his Father, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” It couldn’t be more plain or more important.

5. Joy

Scripture gives joy: “You received the word in much affliction, with the joy of the Holy Spirit,” Paul told the Thessalonians (1 Thessalonians 1:6). Or Psalm 1:2 says, “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” Life without joy is unbearable. The Christian life is a life of many afflictions, but in them all God sustains joy, and he does it by the Scriptures.

6. Protection

Scripture protects us from destructive error: “Until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God . . . so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro . . . by every wind of doctrine” (Ephesians 4:13–14). How do young Christians keep from being leaves blown around by cultural and theological winds and opinions? Answer: “the unity of the faith” and “the knowledge of the Son of God” — knowledge that they experience not as the opinion of man, but as the word of God. That’s found in one place: the Scriptures.

7. Hope

Scripture is the hope of heaven, and what I mean by this is that full understanding, full enjoyment, of the truth of Scripture will be experienced only in heaven: “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). The knowledge of God — all the fullness that a created being can comprehend and enjoy properly — will not be withheld from us indefinitely. The frustrations of our present limitations of understanding and enjoyment will be removed. How fitting it is, then, that we be ever-growing now in what will be our final joy in the age to come.

8. Defense

Scripture will be resisted by some: “The time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions” (2 Timothy 4:3). In other words, we need to know the Scriptures so that we’re not taken off guard, knocked off-balance, or led away by false teachers. We need to receive the Scriptures regularly to be ready to meet those who refuse to receive the Scriptures.

9. Approval

The right handling of Scripture is approved by God: “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). It is a precious thing to be assigned to do a very important task and then to find the Master approving of what he’s asked you to do. We’re all assigned, in some measure, to handle the word of God, and what a wonderful opportunity to be pleasing to the Lord.

10. Life

Finally, Scripture gives and sustains life: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God,” Jesus said (Matthew 4:4). Spiritual life, eternal life — just like physical life — must be fed, though not by bread, but by the word of God. If you think that you have eternal life as a kind of vaccination against hell, which needs no nourishment, you don’t know what spiritual life is.

So, there are ten reasons for why young believers should resolve with all their might, with all the might that God gives them, to make reading and meditating on and understanding and memorizing the Scriptures an essential, nonnegotiable part of their Christian life.

Being admitted to the mental hospital didn’t feel like God’s mercy to me. It seemed more like a cruelty. I wanted to be “depression-free.” I thought that was a God-honoring goal to strive toward. With a household to run and a family to care for, there seemed no time to be downcast. I was tired of being sidelined by sadness.

But I was worn by conflicts and child-rearing challenges. Though I had tried so hard for so long to “keep calm and carry on,” the continual striving to be emotionally stable seemed futile. I would feel “fine” only for a time. Then I would crash.

Perhaps the worst sensation of all was the perceived absence of the Lord I loved. I couldn’t reconcile my sorrows with his apparent indifference. It seemed as if he had “forgotten to be gracious” to me — as if “in anger” he had “shut up his compassion” (Psalm 77:9). Surely God saw how hard I’d been trying and knew how long I had been crying. So why let me sit in a darkness that I’d been striving for years to stay out of? I felt so ashamed of my struggles. I felt like a God-forsaken failure.

It wasn’t until I was hospitalized that God let me hear how cruel my self-talk had become. I was so determined to be free from depression that the restless pursuit of that goal became my motive for living. In desperation, my hope shifted off of Christ and onto a change I couldn’t produce on my own. So, whenever hurt and heartbreak left me feeling overwhelmed again — whenever I couldn’t “snap out” of my miserable mood — I felt like an embarrassment of a believer. I despaired of life itself.

Unbeknownst to me — yet fully known to God — desperation had driven me away from his grace (Galatians 3:3; 5:4).

Unexpected Rescue

Understandably, what I wanted most in that season of motherhood was deliverance. But unexpectedly, God rescued me instead from my merciless mindset. He already knew I had no righteousness of my own to boast in; I was the one who had trouble accepting that fact. I couldn’t even leave the locked hall I was on, let alone escape the prison of darkness. I viewed my experience of depression as not only undesirable, but unforgivable.

God saw how I condemned myself. I had been treating my Savior’s blood as an incomplete covering for the dark night of the soul, as if I should have been able to suffer my sorrows without difficulty — suffer them perfectly.

That week in the ward, I came to see God’s compassion toward me more clearly, and not because he ordained a miraculous change in my circumstances. Rather, he showed me it wasn’t his voice that was roaring with condemnation. His words were, “Come to me,” not “Get over it”; “Take my rest,” not “Try harder” (Matthew 11:28). He was inviting me to take up a yoke I could manage in my weary condition — a burden far lighter than I had been forcing myself to carry.

Jesus wasn’t the one insisting that I pull myself out of the pit. He was the one calling me to take refuge in him as he walked me through the dark.

God Not Hurried

As I learned after years of fighting against despondency, what we count as God’s slowness or indifference is actually his patience toward us as he works redemptively in our lives (2 Peter 3:9; 1 Timothy 1:16). Yes, there are times when a fix-it-fast approach is an appropriate response to the problem at hand. But God’s methods for mending the hearts and reviving the spirits of his people are often less hurried. While the Great Physician can be trusted to do this restorative work according to his promise, he does so at a pace that seems good to him and suits his eternal purposes.

Despite our sense of urgency, there are no emergencies to him who holds our times in his hands (Psalm 31:15).

God’s unhurried pace can be a challenging reality for us to grasp, particularly in depression. When God’s help seems unbearably slow, it can appear as though he’s withholding it altogether. And when we fear he has shut up his compassion and forgotten to be gracious toward us, we may think we must climb out of the pit of despair on our own. Hurt by what seems like a lack of sympathy, we may groan to God as Job in his angst: “You have turned cruel to me; with the might of your hand you persecute me” (Job 30:21).

Feeling God-forsaken, we may double down on our efforts to be strong and steady in ourselves. Perhaps we’re even able to feel “fine” or “better” for a period of time. But ultimately, self-reliance proves itself unreliable. We crash and despair of life itself. We need outside help. We need rescue.

We need mercy.

Timely, Tender Mercy

I confess — I felt as if God had turned cruel to me in that sorrowful season of motherhood. But in the hospital, the Spirit helped me to reinterpret God’s dealings with me. Through his word, I was reminded that the Lord is never surprised by his people’s desperation. My Maker knew how helpless I’d feel on dark days before a single one of them came to pass (Psalm 139:16). He foresaw every hardship, conflict, grief, and pain I would endure. He knew every one of the ways I would sin in word, thought, and deed.

He knew I would need help, rescue, mercy.

Then the Spirit testified to God’s nature — that he loves to comfort (not condemn) the downcast (2 Corinthians 7:6). That he has pity on his weak and needy children (Psalm 72:13). That for the sake of his holy name, the Father of mercies sent his Son to suffer my sorrows perfectly. According to his “tender mercy” (Luke 1:78), the Lord stepped into my darkness to do what I could not.

“For the joy that was set before him [he] endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). At the perfect time, Jesus saved me from experiencing eternal darkness (Romans 5:6). He patiently worked himself to death to deliver me from perpetual sorrow. To see Jesus at the apex of his anguish is to perceive his mercy more clearly in my own.

Better Motive

According to God’s merciful plan, Jesus was raised to life from the deepest darkness of all. That meant underneath my pit of despair were the everlasting arms (Deuteronomy 33:27). And those strong and steady arms held forth the hands that knit me together — hands that were not embarrassed to be engraved with my name (Isaiah 49:16). These palms were pierced for me so I could have hope in my miserable-yet-momentary affliction (2 Corinthians 4:17). What more work was there for me to do but rest myself in them?

I still had the gospel to share and Christ’s love to give. There was no better motive to keep carrying on when the darkness wouldn’t lift.

The week I’d spent in the mental hospital didn’t feel like mercy to me at the time, but the kindness God gave me there led my heart to peace and repentance (Romans 2:4). I didn’t have to be depression-free before I could live for the glory of God; Christ’s sinless life and sacrifice freed me from the unbearable burden to be perfect in myself. Since Jesus obeyed God’s will unto death, I could die to my desire for quick relief and live for walking by faith, one small step at a time.

I couldn’t feel better fast, but I could entrust myself “to a faithful Creator while doing good” (1 Peter 4:19). I could learn to rest in Christ as long as the darkness lasts.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Tyrannosaurus Rex these days — and Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Velociraptor. I’ve also made the acquaintance of some less-familiar figures, like the long-necked, small-brained Diplodocus and the head-crested Parasaurolophus (which actually rolls off the tongue once you get the hang of it).

I’m no paleontologist or museum curator. I haven’t seen the latest installment of the Jurassic saga. I’m just dad to a 2-year-old boy. And like so many young boys, he reads, plays, and roars dinosaur.

Over the last months, his dino shirts and books (and figures and stickers) have dug up old fascinations, mostly buried since The Land Before Time and a book of Brontosauruses I thumbed through as a kid. They’ve also unearthed some new questions, especially as I try to help my son trace God’s design in the dinosaurs.

If the heavens declare God’s glory (Psalm 19:1), and his wondrous works proclaim his praise (Psalm 104:24), then surely these long-extinct giant reptiles say something spectacular about him. But what?

These Old Bones?

What we tell our children about dinosaurs will be shaped, of course, by whether we think they roamed the earth millions of years ago or relatively recently. Both perspectives have biblical merit; both also have their difficulties. I have my own leanings on the question, as most of us do, but for the purposes of this article, I’m going to sidestep that matter entirely.

I won’t mind much whether my son embraces a young-earth or old-earth view of creation; I will mind greatly whether he sees dinosaurs (and all the earth) in relation to the God who made them. And the most important lessons dinosaurs teach, it seems to me, have little to do with the age of their bones. Whether they lived in the Mesozoic Era or the days of Noah, much remains the same: Many were fierce. Many were fantastical. And many were absolutely enormous.

What then can we learn from such incredible creatures? Among other lessons, consider three.

Trust the God of Wisdom

Steve Brusatte’s popular 2018 book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs tells an absorbing history of the dinosaurs’ reign. Unfortunately, it also represents and reinforces the popular view that dinosaurs have nothing to do with God. Naturalistic evolution plays the deity in Brusatte’s telling — a blind and brainless force somehow endowed with tremendous foresight: “evolution created” beasts like the behemoth sauropods (108); “evolution assembled all of the pieces [and] put them together in the right order” (117); T. Rex and his ilk were “incredible feats of evolution” (225).

The naturalistic worldview may be relatively new; the underlying impulse on display here, however, is anything but. God’s people have always needed to confess God’s handiwork over against popular myths. In the ancient world, Israel’s Canaanite neighbors considered the tannînîm (fearsome sea creatures, sometimes translated as “serpents,” “dragons,” or “monsters”) to represent “the powers of chaos confronting Baal in the beginning” (Derek Kidner, Genesis, 54). Moses, meanwhile, writes in Genesis 1:21 that “God created the great sea creatures [tannînîm].” The Canaanites can say what they want. We know that even the monsters are God’s masterpieces.

In similar fashion, God’s final speech in Job takes a massive land animal, Behemoth, and a fierce water beast, Leviathan (another monster of Canaanite lore), and describes them as God’s creatures: “Behold, Behemoth, which I made” (Job 40:15); “Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine” (Job 41:11). Nor need we wonder if God would say the same of dinosaurs. Many scholars identify Behemoth and Leviathan with the hippopotamus and crocodile, but the poetic descriptions take on monstrous proportions. Behemoth and Leviathan could easily be mistaken for a sauropod or tyrannosaur.

“Divine wisdom adorns every creature, down to their very bones.”

Children growing up in a naturalistic age need to hear, often and joyously, the psalmist’s creation creed: “O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures” (Psalm 104:24). Divine wisdom adorns every creature, down to their very bones. In the first place, then, dinosaurs invite us to name and trust their true Maker.

Fear the God of Power

Imagine the largest of elephants, seven tons of flesh and bone spread from trunk to tail. Now imagine, if you can, a creature seven times this elephant’s weight and three or four times its length, lumbering across the land with a towering neck, barrel belly, and tree-trunk tail. You now have some faint sense of Argentinosaurus, probably the largest land animal ever discovered.

Now consider another creature, far smaller than Argentinosaurus, but also far more ferocious. At the same tonnage as our elephant (yet ten feet longer), he romps around on thighs thick with muscle, his massive head holding a jaw that snaps with six tons of pressure — literally car-crushing in its force. You now have some dim idea of T. Rex, probably the fiercest land animal ever discovered.

Now picture yourself standing before such beasts. We would be right to say of them, as God says of Leviathan, “None is so fierce that he dares to stir him up.” And we would be right to draw the corresponding conclusion: “Who then is he who can stand before me?” (Job 41:10).

Dinosaurs ought to make us tremble — but not mainly before dinosaurs. Like a hurricane, they preach the power of the living God, the very God in whom we live and move and have our being, and before whom one day we will stand. As Matthew Henry says of Behemoth, so we might say of every dinosaur:

Consider whether thou art able to contend with him who made that beast and gave him all the power he has, and whether it is not thy wisdom rather to submit to him and make thy peace with him. (An Exposition of the Old and New Testament, 223)

God made every tooth in T. Rex’s mouth; he added every ton to Argentinosaurus’s frame. Though dead, their bones still speak, and teach us not only to trust their Maker’s wisdom, but also to fear his power.

Praise the God of Wonders

In Christ, however, the most fearsome displays of God’s power become occasions for praise. Faith transfigures the terrifying into awe-inspiring: thunder becomes the voice of God (Psalm 29:3), the vast cosmos his finger-work (Psalm 8:3), the raging sea a pavement for our Lord (Matthew 14:25), the fiercest beast a glint of his glory.

The children of God know how to look at Leviathan (and, by extension, dinosaurs) and see not only his beastliness, but his “goodly frame” (Job 41:12). They can sit inside his footprint and worship the God of wonders (Psalm 104:31–32). They can trace his scales and, like King David beneath lightning, cry, “Glory!” (Psalm 29:9).

Psalm 104 gives a good sense of what dinosaur-inspired praise might sound like. Here, the psalmist marvels not only at the gentle beauty of God’s creation — flowing streams and singing birds — but also at its harder edges: the young lions roaring for prey and, strikingly, even Leviathan himself sporting in sea (Psalm 104:21, 26). Some may hold the bones of long-lost species and see only “a meaningless swarm of life,” Derek Kidner writes. But the psalmist teaches us to see them “as giving some inkling of the Creator’s wealth, and the range and precision of his thought” (Psalms 73–150, 405).

“Rightly held, the fossils of these ancient beasts are tuning forks for songs of praise.”

Paleontology allows us to sing Psalm 104 with a cast of characters perhaps unimagined by the psalmist, but long enjoyed by God and long awaiting our discovery. Rightly held, the fossils of these ancient beasts are tuning forks for songs of praise.

Evangelical Chisels

In the century before the first dinosaur discoveries (around 1820), pastor and nature lover James Hervey (1714–1758) responded to the new, Newtonian science of his day by saying, “We should always view the visible System, with an Evangelical Telescope . . . and with an Evangelical Microscope” (The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism, 150). Study the stars if you’d like: chart their courses; measure their distances. Study too the cells: mark their features; describe their functions. Yet study both as the handiwork of God.

In an age of dinosaur discoveries, we might add to Hervey’s evangelical telescope and microscope an evangelical chisel. Study the dinosaurs: learn their names; consider their age; read a few dozen children’s books about them. Yet don’t neglect the even larger lessons they teach.

My son’s dinosaur-mania may fade. But in the meantime, we’ll be tracing the wisdom of God in his Ankylosaurus figure, and the power of God on his T. Rex T-shirt, and the praise of God in his 2-year-old roar.