Throw Out the Instruction Manual

Imagine that you have just bought a Widget 2000. You bring it home, plug it in, hit the power button...and it doesn't work. No lights. No sound. None of the good stuff you were promised. You pull the instruction manual out of the box. You flip through pages and pages that tell you how to use it to get the lights and the sounds, but none of it works. Knowing how to use a widget is great, but it would have to be a working widget. Yours is defective. Also in the box is another manual entitled, “How to Use a Defective Widget.” You follow those instructions very carefully. You now have some of the lights, and some of the sounds, but it's still not all that a Widget 2000 was advertised to be. No matter the work you put in, the tinkering and jimmying and jury-rigging, the instruction manual can't change the fact that your widget is defective.

All too often, I hear Christians talk about the Bible as an owners manual, or an instruction manual. It isn't, really. The instructions in it are more of the “How to Use a Defective Widget” variety: they show us what we ought to do in the midst of the wreckage of sin-sick world. This is what the Law that God gave to Moses was meant to do: show people how best to live in the midst of their mess, and even that didn't work. The prophets and the New Testament writers tell us repeatedly that the Law couldn't be kept by defective widgets like us.

What we have in the Bible is not a rule book, not an instruction manual, but a story. A story that tells us we were created as the representatives of God on earth, to care for and steward it as he would. A story that tells that we chose to rebel. A story of the king who takes the punishment due these wicked rebels, frees them from their slavery to sin, and adopts them as his sons and daughters. Humanity is incapable of following the instructions, and so we have been called to participate in this story of rebellion, redemption, and adoption. This is what we mean – what we should mean – when we speak of the gospel. And it changes who we are. It changes how we live. There are things we ought to do and a standard to which we are called, but these are the fruit of the gospel's work in our lives, not the gospel itself.

If your Bible is a rule book, throw it away. Trying harder is not the answer. You'll never measure up. You're not good enough; no one is. But if your Bible is the story of the God who loves his creation, who loves you, beyond all measure, then drink deeply of that story that speaks salvation to us all.