The Unexpected Inspiration I Receive from the Holy Bible

Ah yes, the Bible. Other than fire or bomb few other words have the power to send a room full of people scattering for the nearest exit. Personally, I consider myself more spiritual that religious. The more I read the Bible for myself the more I realize that too many people use it to lead mankind further away rather than closer to their Creator. Too many use the words of the Bible to imprison rather than liberate, to shame rather than inspire. Some even think the Bible gives them the moral authority to pass judgment rather than a contract to love their neighbor. However if you are like me, willing to read the Bible and allow its words speak to you personally rather than to hear them through the filter of someone elses interpretation, you just might gain a whole new perspective of the world's best-selling book. And, if you are like me, you just might learn one of the biggest and closely guarded secrets held by those who would keep you ignorant, that it is a precious and powerful gift and not a curse of damnation to be human.

The first verse in the Bible that set off a little bulb in my head was when I was reading about Moses and the Ten Commandments. I had just watched the Cecil B. DeMille/Charlton Heston classic, The Ten Commandments and, being the inquisitive sort that I was I wanted to read the story myself and see just how far Hollywood stuck to the original script. Then low and behold, as things like this are prone to happen this way, something I wasn't even looking for smacked me upside the head like a revelation 2x4.

"Honor thy father and thy mother."

That's usually the first one we get to know as a kid. Parents have been beating children over the heads with that one since the day they were put to paper -- or pair of stone tablets. Actually there is considerably more to the story behind this fifth Commandment than you may know. Exodus 20:12, "Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you." Back then, this Commandment came with an incentive for obeying. Honor their parents and they'd get to live in the Promised Land for a long time. But this isn't the only place these words appear. In fact, this particular commandment is mentioned, and further explained, in many other places in the Bible. Reading this particular version was when my first scriptural epiphany took place.

Colossians 3:20-21, 'Children, obey your parents in all things: for this is well pleasing unto the Lord. Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.'

Did you catch that? Not the first verse but the second. 'Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.' Not only did this Commandment come with a reward for a child's compliance it also came with a qualifier to the father, who is considered to be the head of the family home and answerable for poor leadership. The definition of the word honor sheds even further light on this much shadowed passage. The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word as follows:

hon·or - noun : High respect, as that shown for special merit.

Ah HA! For a child who was being abused by her father, this was one of the most potent and empowering moments in my young, painful and guilt ridden life. Where I had only been taught that these words obligated me to obey him in spite of his abhorrent behavior, I discovered on my own that honor isn't something that was his right to demand of me simply because he had reproductive sex with my mother. Honor is something he had to earn through the course of emeritus performance of his duties as a father or that whole contract was rendered null and void. An understanding of that one little noun gave me something wonderful that day, my first real understanding of the adjective, 'joyful' and the little phrase, 'hungry for more.'

The next verse of impact for me was, in the beginning of the Bible while reading Genesis and the story of The Creation. Genesis 1: 3-4, 'And God said "Let there be light." God saw that the light was good.' He made day and night, separated earth from sky and water from water and again, He saw that 'it was good." God created plants and stars with sun and moon and he made the fish of the oceans and beasts of the land and every time He finished God would step back, admire His work and say once more that it was good.

Of course, the only thing missing was a witness, someone He could show it to and share it with. So, God created man. But, after time, as God observed man's progress and fascination with discovering what it was like to be an eternal soul housed in a temporary human shell, God saw for the very first time that something 'was not good.' Genesis 2:18, 'The Lord God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.'

Having grown up in the heart of the Bible Belt I had been taught in church and had it reiterated by the secular social order that a woman's place in this world is secondary to a man. I grew up in the bra-burning, era of the Women's Liberation era and I admittedly got caught up into the notion that women deserved to be seen as equal to men. Of all of the things God made 'in the beginning', and proclaimed as being 'good,' everything including man was created out of choice. Not only had woman been the only thing created out of need, to make right something that 'was not good,' she was made to provide the help man needed rather than the service he would later want. The realization of not just when but why woman was created gave me a life-altering perspective I had never even thought of before nor would I have found had I not read the Bible for myself. 'Seek and ye shall find,' which brings me to another thought.

Matthew 7:7, 'Ask and ye shall receive,' and Matthew 6: 25-26 'Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? '

When read separately and without being wrapped in the full context of the Bible, these two verses can be applied to almost any desire and expectation that if we want to receive it God will provide it. All we have to do is ask. However, if you add the entirety of the message of Matthew 7:7, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." the entire scope of these verses are changed. When taken out of context 'ask, and it shall be given you' can be interpreted as evidence of some sort of heavenly entitlement program. Inclusion of the word "seek" preceding the word ''¹..."find' changes everything. Yes, if you want it you can have it. It's out there somewhere. But just as God doesn't bring what sparrows need directly to their nest you have to get off your backside and seek for what He has provided you to find. Like any good Father, God also enjoys devising a few creative and challenging games to sharpen the skills of His children. Think of it like playing the ultimate scavenger hunt, only the prizes you find, while frequently not the ones you really wanted, will always be the one you never knew you actually needed. Sometimes those necessary things you find are friends

You've heard the old saying, "nothing happens by accident." Just as that urge to turn right when you planned to go left will take you to a place where you were really supposed to be, the people who pass through your life on your journeys from here to there are all a part of helping you understand your final destination. Where we are born to family, friends come purely by way of happenstance. Where I once saw family relationships as having the most challenging set of rules, as it turns out I was wrong.

Take the relationship of child and father and that whole, honor thing. The bonds of that moral contract can be cancelled if the father doesn't jump the high-bar of the standards set for his parental office. God even allows for escape from that "until death we do part' vow between husbands and wives should one of them commit adultery or if they attempt to interfere with or even compromise their spouse's relationship with God. But there is one relationship you enter into that doesn't have an out and it is the one that most of us seem to take for granted the most; Friendship.

According to the Bible, unlike other relationships where you are allowed a 'get out of jail free' card if the other person breaks the rules, Proverbs 17:17 says where a brother is born for adversity, 'A friend loveth at all times. "At all times. ' Not just when you are getting along or when it's easy or convenient or as long as they are living their lives in ways of which you approve but at all times. How many times had I abandoned a friend, given up on them before realizing or giving honor to the purpose behind why I met them? How many times had I passed judgment rather than loving? The humility was hard, my shame profound. The realization that I had fallen so short of the commitment I made when I called someone my 'friend' has taught me the true significance of a word I had before tossed about too lightly.

Reading my Bible is not a regular thing. But when I do read it I always find something else that I hadn't known before. The preamble of many verses for example are the words, 'and it came to pass.' Of all of the words strung together in the Bible, from 'in the beginning' to the word 'Amen', these specific five are repeated more than any other. In fact, those words appear in the Hebrew Bible a total of 1,204 times. Over time, as each horrid challenge would come and go in my life only to be replaced by another I remembered those words and realized that there frequency, above the words that would follow, had a meaning all unto themselves. "And it came to pass." No matter how bad and no matter how painful, whatever it is, it never comes to stay.