Restore Voice: The Written Word of God (Volume 3)
A friendly Car Guard at the Milnerton Flea Market showing me how to correctly form the ‘click’ in the isiXhosa language.
“The Bible is the written word of God, and because it is written it is confined and limited by the necessities of ink and paper and leather. The Voice of God, however, is alive and free as the sovereign God is free. ‘The words that I speak to you, they are spirit, and they are life.’ The life is in the speaking words. God’s word in the Bible can have power only because it corresponds to God’s word in the universe. It is the present Voice which makes the written Word all-powerful. Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book.”
(A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God, p. 74)
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Have you heard the latest Bible joke? The one where the pastor says, “Open up your iPhones and your preferred Bible app, and find John 15 with me…I’ll wait for you to stop checking your Instagram feed first…” The growing proliferation of a variety of Bible apps on our collection of screens, be they smartphone, tablet, or laptop, has made the Scriptures ever more accessible, available at the click of a push notification. In fact, I just read a description of the YouVersion Bible app’s most recent update for the iWatch, which syncs with the iPhone to push daily Scripture verses via a short vibration to the screen of your iWatch, able to be read with a simple glance. Incredible!
Check out the following YouVersion Bible app graphic I took a screenshot of on May 11th, 2015, at approximately 13:00pm in the afternoon. I mention this date and time because the cumulative installs continually scrolls higher throughout the day, leaving the totals dwarfed by the time of publication of this blog only a few days later! In the past 7 years, the following stats have been reported explaining the astounding use of the Bible app across our devices worldwide, including the following:
179 million installs of the Bible app.
1,092 versions of the Bible currently available, in 780 language translations, all for free!
622 million verses highlighted with 322 million “bookmarks” left to be returned to.
23 million reading plans (several days to a year in length) completed.
The mind-boggling stat: Over 126 billion (with a B!) minutes of the Bible read!
To say that the digital world has left the Bible behind, increasingly irrelevant in a virtual, on-demand society, is not only factually untrue, but dangerously misinformed. We aren’t engaging the Scriptures less. Rather, we are engaging them differently as technology advances, and the availability of the Bible draws ever closer, accessible at the tap of a fingertip. On a personal level, I can attest to this, as the ease by which I can access a passage of Scripture without carrying a bulky study Bible around has caused me to increasingly leave my paper Bibles on the shelf, for use at home or when I want a more analog devotional/study experience.
All of which begs the question, why do we continue to think the Bible is the written word of God? Tozer would have shaken his head in wonder at the world of biblical engagement I described previously, unable to conceive of an experience reading the Scriptures that wasn’t “confined and limited by the necessities of ink and paper and leather.” (The Pursuit of God, p. 74). A thousand-plus versions of the Bible in hundreds of languages, sitting comfortably in the palm of my hand, accessible for free through a simple Wifi signal? What in the world This is why I so appreciate his insistence that the Voice of God and the written word of God are two vastly different, yet related, things. His profound conclusion bears repeating: “The life is in the speaking words. God’s word in the Bible can have power only because it corresponds to God’s word in the universe. It is the present Voice which makes the written Word all-powerful. Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book” (p. 74), to which I would add, or buried within an app folder on my iPhone home screen.
If the Voice of God cannot be confined by the nature of the written word, be it of ink and paper, or pixels and touch screen, then why do increasing statistics continue to describe a contradictory trend – that as we engage the Scriptures more, we seem to understand them less? That the immediate access of the Bible within an app on our phone doesn’t seem to correspond with a growing biblical literacy, and maturing following of Jesus as Lord?
The creators of NeuBible, an elegantly simple mobile app for the Bible, have a fascinating perspective on this. Speaking with Fast Company Design, former Apple designer Kory Westerhold described the user experience behind NeuBible’s intentional simplicity:
“Their goal, Westerhold says, was to ‘get rid of everything between you and Scripture.’ That pursuit of ‘beautiful utility,’ as designers like to say, stands in contrast to their less design-minded competitors. Papyrus scrolls, blazing crosses, clouds like by diving beams of light – the App Store is chock-full of Bible apps with enough skeumorphic, Christian-kitsch to give Jony Ive permanent nightmares. Even worse, many are riddled with design flaws, from feature-overload to poor navigation. But NeuBible stands apart, with a pared-down structure that puts the text front and center. The font choices are modern – no italicised cursive, here – and the left-side navigation disappears from view while reading. Apart from verse numbers and chapter headings, the content is unadorned. ‘After banging my head against a wall a few times, it hit me: This is just a reading experience,’ Westerhold says. ‘I set the content aside for a while, and just tried to create the most beautiful reading experience that I could.’ Martin chimes in: ‘Our lack of features is an intentional feature.’”
“This is just a reading experience…I tried to create the most beautiful reading experience that I could.”
If the written word of God is changing form, from ink to pixels, from paper to touch screen, what remains the same is this critically unchanging element: To respond to the Voice of God, whether within the written or digital realm, one must read – and experience – the Voice of God through the word itself.