Why do we need numbers in the middle of sentences? Why should things happening in Scripture be broken into different chapters. Pick up any fictional book, at least one that is put out by a major publishing company, and look at the layout. Very rarely are chapters begun in the middle of happenings. There is always a break and the end of one chapter and the beginning of another is a way to let the readers mind grasp the fact that there was a break in the story. Often a chapter ends on what is referred to as a cliffhanger by those in the writing world. Something major happens and the chapter ends, often abruptly. This is a writers secret. The purpose in doing that is to make the reader want to keep reading. 'Just one more chapter'. It is the way publishers and writers create books that have people saying they couldn't put it down.
If a chapter ends in the middle of a conversation, only to have the next chapter pick right back up in the midst of the same conversation, it's confusing to the reader and, quite honestly, dull. If, on the other hand, the chapter ends just as the lights go out and gas fumes are smelled following the roar and crashing of a tornado tearing through a house... The reader is left in a state of suspense that has them quickly turning the page and starting the next chapter almost without them realizing they were doing it. It matters not how many times they told themselves they would quit reading after this chapter, the suspense of the story has sucked them in and they simply cannot stop reading. And if, for some reason they do manage to stop reading, the story stays in their head, filling their thoughts, tugging at them, making them anxious to pick the book up again.
That is reading at it's best. It's writing at its best. And it is only one of the secrets, and rules of writing, that writers know and employ to write, and sell, best selling books. Dull books do not sell. Readers don't read books so that they can fall asleep. They don't read them because they want something so dull that their minds wander as they read, they don't want their eyes reading a story while their brains mentally make out a grocery list or catalog Jr's closet to see if he needs clothes for winter. A writer wants a reader to read in a way that keeps them coming back. They want the reader to love their book so much that that reader will forever remember their name and buy every book they ever write.
It's another secret of the writing world that authors build a fan base that buys their name. They must write with a style that allows readers to identify the writer by nothing more than what is written. And it works. People read and buy books based on an authors name and nothing else. It doesn't matter what the book your favorite author writes, it only matters that the book was written by your favorite author. People, once fans of a certain author, will overlook and forgive a bad book so long as their favorite author wrote it, and so long as it doesn't happen with every book.
But Scripture wasn't put into book form based on those secrets. Men, whoever they were, picked and chose how the books of Scripture would go together, books that were never really books, they were letters, scrolls, parchments. And now we call them books within a book. The very way men refer to the different labeled sections of Scripture as books distinguishes them as something set apart. This is good but it can also be bad.
By labeling each of the books that Moses wrote as a different book, the people who planned and set up the layout of what we call the Bible, have caused our minds to see the writings of Moses as something other than what they probably were. On the other hand, by labeling the different letters that Paul wrote, those same men, or others like them, with the same job, have given us a way to distinguish one of Paul's letters from another. There is good and bad in the way our Scriptures have been sectioned out.
The book names can be misleading if you don't know or understand how the Bible is laid out. The book of Matthew isn't about Matthew at all, neither is the book of Mark about Mark, or John about John. We read those books to see the life of Christ. Reading the book of Luke tells us of our Savior not of a man named Luke. Why then are the books labeled the way they are? Because they are named for the author of that book. Only thing is...the author is not the important One in those books. Christ is but there isn't a single book in the Bible that has been named for Him.
Why?
I don't know the answer to that question. I may never know. It would seem to me that if you're going to label Scripture, to set sections of it aside, that Christ would somehow factor into the name of that book. But not even the name of the Bible reflects Christ. We do, thankfully, have the word Holy tacked onto the man made label of Bible for the Scriptures, but we in no way see Christ in that title.
But the confusion and hard to read issues of Scripture continue far beyond the name of the Bible and the names of the books in the Bible. Imagine knowing nothing about the Scriptures, nothing of Christ, and picking up a modern American Bible today.
You would have to muddle through all of the Old Testament, a wonderful and necessary part of Scripture, no doubt, to get to Christ. If you knew nothing of Christ or Scripture and simply stumbled upon a Bible...would you make it through the Old Testament to get to Christ?
What would you think of the Old Testament? Some kind of history book? Some kind of story book? Too sketchy to have detailed stories, too sparse to contain enough history, and too gruesome to be a child's bedtime story book?
And if you do somehow manage, without any prior knowledge of what the Bible is, to make it through all of that, or if you skipped it, or skimmed through it...whatever you read will more often than not be split into two columns on each page. That causes your mind to stumble as you read. Your brain identifies it as some sort of reference book and not as a story book no matter what your conscious mind may be thinking. You stumble as you read, your brain processes the words as disjointed information.
But even that isn't enough confusion. No, men have split Scripture into chapters in places that don't even make sense to have a chapter split. Why do we have a chapter end in the middle of instructions being given and the next chapter pick right back up with those same instructions? And that is only one example of chapter endings and beginnings in Scripture.
Oh, but it gets even worse than that. Our modern day, oh so helpful, Bibles add in numbers for footnotes, numbers for references, section headings, pronunciation guides... Reference Bibles, although great, add in columns of references that further break the text and distract the mind. And make no mistake about it, all of these things are distractions to your mind. You may think that you pay them no mind, skipping over them as you read Scripture, but your brain processes them. They cause your brain to slow down, not a bad thing when reading Scripture, and stumble, even ever so slightly, as you read. It is good to slow down to read Scripture but it isn't good to do so because your brain must process all this...stuff....in the midst of your text. The unconscious processing of all these numbers, letters, verse references, titles, subjects, chapter numbers, book titles, etc all work against you in reading Scripture.
Don't believe me? Pick up a reader's Bible and see for yourself.
I was amazed at the difference it makes when you take all that other man added...dare I say, junk...out of Scripture. Scripture just flows. It goes together in a simple way.
Oh for the simplicity of Scripture.
Since discovering, quite by accident, the ESV Reader's Bible, I find myself looking at Bible's in a whole different light. For me, I now see Bibles as Bibles to be read and Bibles for doing research. If I could own only one Bible I would want it to be the most simple one I could find with the least man added things in it.
Men, as in all of human kind, have a way of mucking things up. We make things that should be simple, difficult. We add all sorts of things into things that were fine to begin with. We take what was simple and under the belief of making it better...we make it worse.
Bibles with names, references, footnotes, commentary, cross references, pictures, chapter numbers, titles, and whatever else are fine. They're great. They are needed. But they take away from what Scripture is. They take away from what it should be.
Scripture tells us to focus on Christ. Paul said he taught Christ. Paul chose to know nothing, despite being a very educated man, but Christ. Christ is simple. Christ can be understood in the simplest terms. But man messes it up. We add things in. We make it difficult. We try to see Christ through our 'educated' minds. Scripture says we must believe as little children. We try and understand Christ as educated adults. And by 'we' I'm speaking of people in general, not a certain group of people.
Men can't even get the order of the books of the Bible right, making us jump all around in Scripture, reading things out of order of how they most likely happened. What if you picked up a book, a work of fiction, and tried to read it with the chapters in the order of 1, 2, 4,5,3,7,6... how much sense would the book make? How much sense would it make if a books chapters were arranged by order of how long the chapter was? So long chapters would come before shorter chapters, with no concern for when or how those chapters were written, or how they fit in the story? I can tell you it would make no sense at all. You read about someone dying in one chapter only to read of them being alive and well in the next. You would read of the birth of a baby before you read of its conception. It would be nothing short of confusion. And yet...parts of Scripture are arranged in exactly that way...based on the length of the book.
Oh, for the simplicity of Scripture.
Men have arranged things in the Bible as they made sense to their fallen, human, minds and have given us things that don't make a whole lot of sense when one stops and thinks about what they have done to the simplicity of Scripture.
Instead of a letter written out, by hand, to the recipient, in letter format. We now have something that doesn't come close to resembling a letter. I had read Scripture many, many, many times, over many, many years before I understood that some of those books in the Bible were letters written by one man to a group of people. And those letters...well, it just makes sense for them to be broken into chapters, headed with numbers, and then further broken down into verses that are broken in the middle of sentences. Some verses don't even make sense if taken on their own. I'm not speaking of understanding the verse in context of Scripture but simply in reading the words in the single verse. They begin and end in the middle of a sentence.
And yet...that is what men have done to the Scriptures. We have taken something that wasn't broken and 'fixed' it until it's 'better'. It may work for the sake of preaching, for the sake of teaching, even for the sake of telling someone to look at verse whatever, but it doesn't do such a good job for simply reading and enjoying Scripture.
Oh, for the simplicity of Scripture.
And if you want to know how my writing goes somedays... I started writing this post as part of my studies to Journeying with Paul and have somehow managed to get myself so off base that I have written an entire post on the less than simple version of the Scriptures that we call the Bible. Imagine a grinning smiley face here, or maybe one with it's tongue hanging out, because this was never what I intended to write today.
Now Paul and his journey's must wait for another day as I must once again focus on real life for a while.
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