At the end of September, Good News For Everyone (formerly Gideons UK) held an event in Wigtown Baptist Church, to tie in with the Wigtown Book Festival. There were various updates on the work of the organisation, and also interviews with Stephen, as well as Daniel Sturgeon (pastor of Stranraer Baptist Church). The Wigtownshire Branch is currently looking for new members as they seek to continue their good work of giving out Bibles in schools, placing them in hotels, and producing other helpful resources.
Bible Reading Notes - Galatians
The RP Church of Scotland produces Daily Bible Reading notes entitled Let’s Worship God.
They are currently covering the book of Galatians, with the notes based on a sermon series Stephen preached on the book.
Can you live without it?
What would be on your Christmas list if you could choose ten things and money was no object? In the lead-up to the World Cup, GQ magazine asked a number of famous footballers to name ‘Ten things you can’t live without’. Those they interviewed included Dutch defender Virgil van Dijk, Germany winger Serge Gnabry, and England trio Declan Rice, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Bukayo Saka. You can watch the results on YouTube. Some of the answers are predictable – football boots, trainers, fancy watches, and iPads for watching TV shows while travelling. There were also an eye-opening amount of grooming products mentioned!
One item most people wouldn’t have expected to be included was a Bible. However that’s exactly what Arsenal and England’s Bukayo Saka pulled out. He said that he tries to read it every night before he goes to bed. Sakha’s interview has currently been watched almost 2 million times, and that quote was picked up on at a press conference in Qatar. Earlier this month a journalist asked Saka if he was still reading his Bible every night. The 21-year old replied that he was, because it was ‘really important’ to always have the presence of God in his life. ‘The main thing for me’, he said ‘is having faith in God’.
For me, one of the great joys I have is seeing people who would never have picked up a Bible in a million years, starting to read it. To see homes in this community where there is now a Bible for the first time. To see people’s new-found enthusiasm as they read a physical copy of the Bible, read it on their phones, or listen to it. Not because Bible reading is an end in itself, but because it points us to Jesus. ‘The Scriptures’, Jesus said, ‘bear witness about me’. That includes not just the parts of the Bible written after he was born – but also the parts written beforehand. In fact, some of the most familiar parts of the Christmas story were written seven centuries before Jesus was born: ‘Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son’…’Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given…of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end’. The same prophet – Isaiah – also described in detail Jesus’ death in the place of his people and explained what it would all be about: ‘by his wounds, we are healed’ (Isaiah 53:5).
When he was interviewed on Desert Island Discs a number of years ago, Comedian Lee Mack said it was an odd thing that people didn’t read the Bible. One of the questions those on the show are asked is which book they would take to a desert island, along with the Bible and the works of Shakespeare. Mack said this about the Bible: ‘I'm glad you get the Bible, because I would read the Bible. I think it's quite odd that people like myself, in their forties, are quite happy to dismiss the Bible, but I've never read it. I always think that if an alien came down and you were the only person they met, and they said, “What’s life about? What’s earth about? Tell us everything,” and you said, “Well, there's a book here that purports to tell you everything. Some people believe it to be true; some people do not believe it to be true.” “Wow, what’s it like?” and you go, “I don’t know, I’ve never read it.” It would be an odd thing, wouldn't it? So, at the very least, read it.’
So let me give you an invitation for 2023: Would you be willing to read the Bible with me? One of my fellow football chaplains, John MacKinnon (Clyde FC), works for an organisation called ‘The Word One to One’. They produce little booklets containing John’s Gospel, divided up into different ‘episodes’. The idea is that two people will sit down together, for 30 minutes at a time, to read through this New Testament book which explains who Jesus is and why he came. Some helpful explanatory notes are included, as well as some questions to help get discussion going.
If meeting up seems too daunting, I can just give you a copy of the first booklet, and it will serve as a guided read through of John chapter 1. Or just look up the gospel of John or Mark online. In the words of Lee Mack – ‘at the very least, read it’. You might be surprised!
Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 29 December 2022
Textual Confidence
Has God’s word been deliberately tampered with over the years? Have verses teaching the deity of Christ been systematically removed from our Bibles? Are the differences between ancient, modern and Reformation-era Bibles so significant that some of us have completely different Bibles from our fellow church members? Does admitting uncertainty about any part of the Biblical text (as the KJV translators did in their footnotes), mean that we can’t be certain about any of it?
You can read the rest of this article by Stephen at the Gentle Reformation blog
The Gospel According to Leviticus
Statistically, if you’ve made it to February in your Bible reading plan, you’re past the time of year when most people drop off. Doubtless however it’s still a month when some begin to flag - as many reading plans take people through the last half of Exodus, quickly followed by Leviticus.
However the introduction to Andrew Bonar’s 1846 A Commentary on the Book of Leviticus, Expository and Practical (reprinted by Banner of Truth and also available as a properly digitised free PDF) may be just the shot in the arm that some need to keep going.
In fact, even the protracted nature of all these instructions for the tabernacle and its sacrifices should give us pause for thought before throwing in the towel. Bonar quotes Witsius’ remark that:
God took only six days [for] creation, but spent forty days with Moses in directing him to make the tabernacle – because the work of grace is more glorious than the work of creation.
But why do we still need types and allegories when we have the real thing?
Types were originally intended ‘to deepen, expand, and ennoble the circle of thoughts and desires, and thus heighten the moral and spiritual wants…of the chosen people’ (quoting Hahn).
Yet even today, according to Bonar they imprint in us wisdom which lasts ‘when bare words go but in at the one ear and out at the other’.
William Tyndale agrees that even once we have found Christ, we can use allegories and examples to open Christ even unto believers, and in fact ‘can declare [him] more lively and sensibly with them than with all the words of the world’.
Types not only simplify truth, they also help us understand better truth we already know. Indeed, ‘The existence of a type does not always argue that the thing typified is obscurely seen, or imperfectly known’.
Above all, the use of types shows us God’s grace. ‘Our Heavenly Father has condescended to teach his children by most expressive pictures; and, even in this, much of his love appears’.
How much did they know?
When it comes to interpreting Leviticus, we aren’t left to make it up as we go along, but find principles set out in the book of Hebrews. And in fact, the way the author of Hebrews writes ‘leads us to suppose that it was no new thing for an Israelite thus to understand the ritual of Moses’.
Bonar traces this understanding back to Anna and Simeon in Luke 2 who ‘frequented the temple daily in order to read in its rites future development of a suffering Saviour’. They were included in those of 1 Peter 1.10 who ‘knew that they prophesied of the grace that was to come to us, and, therefore, inquired and searched diligently’.
In fact, Bonar holds out the tantalising possibility that some of the priests may have had revealed to them the full significance of what they were doing:
Had Aaron, or some other holy priest of his line, been "carried away in the spirit" and shown the accomplishment of all that these rites prefigured, how joyful ever afterwards would have been his daily service in the sanctuary. When shown the great antitype, and that each one of these shadows pictured something in the person or work of that Redeemer, then, ever after, to handle the vessels of the sanctuary, would be rich food to his soul
He even goes as far as to say:
[T]he bondage of these elements did not consist in sprinkling the blood, washing in the laver, waving the wave-shoulder, or the like; but in doing all this without perceiving the truth thereby exhibited. Probably to a true Israelite, taught of God, there would be no more of bondage in handling these material elements, than there is at this day to a true believer in handling the symbolic bread and wine through which he "discerns the body and blood of the Lord.
Whether we'd agree with him or not, surely better to give these Old Testament saints too much credit rather than too little!
Christ Shines Through
Perhaps the fact that Leviticus was 'a much-neglected book' even in Scotland at the time of the Disruption is because of our tendency to forget the one principle of which Bonar said nothing 'is more obviously true'. That is, 'the belief that Christ is the centre-truth of revelation'. These Old Testament shadows are, after all, 'projected from Christ "the body"' (cf Col 2.17). From the beginning it has been this Messiah that has been 'the chief object to be unveiled to the view of men'.
The reason that 'many Levitical rites appear to us unmeaning' is because we're looking at them the wrong way:
As it is said of the rigid features of a marble statue, that they may be made to move and vary their expression so as even to smile, when a skilful hand knows how to move a bright light before it; so may it be with these apparently lifeless figures
And even if we don’t see it completely now, one day we will fully ‘learn how not one tittle of the law has failed’.
A word from M’Cheyne
Bonar is perhaps best known for his Memoir and Remains of the Rev. Robert Murray M'Cheyne. Amidst Bonar's own gems in this introduction is one from his recently-departed friend in what seems to have been an unpublished letter to Bonar himself. M'Cheyne used the example of a stranger wrapped in a veil ; if some of his features were pointed out you could get some idea of what he was like:
But suppose that one whom you know and love-whose features you have often studied face to face-were to be veiled up in this way, how easily you could discern the features and form of this Beloved One! Just so, the Jews looked upon a veiled Saviour, whom they had never seen unveiled. We, under the New Testament, look upon an unveiled Saviour; and, going back on the Old, we can see, far better than the Jews could, the features and form of Jesus the Beloved, under that veil.
So why struggle on with Leviticus?
To those beginning to flag, Bonar would urge:
But let us proceed to the contents of this Book. It will be found that it contains a full system of truth, exhibiting sin and the sinner, grace and the Saviour; comprehending, also, details of duty, and openings into the ages to come, – whatever, in short, bears upon a sinner's walk with a reconciled God, and his [conduct] in this present evil world.
It is "The Gospel according to Leviticus" and "the clearest book of Jewish gospel".
NB: A more recent (and a bit more technical) book on Leviticus that comes highly recommended is Michael Morales’ Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the LORD?