By Caleb Jenkins – Executive Pastor – Leawood Campus
Welcome to “With God”
You were made for life with God. Every longing is ultimately an echo of our eternal desire for that kind of life. The good news is that God desires to live with us too. From “In the beginning” to the final “Amen” of Scripture, God is inviting us to live into wholeness with him. Throughout 2026, our whole church is journeying through the entire biblical story, discovering how we can say a bigger “yes” to life with God today and forever.
If you find yourself in a mess or a wilderness, feel like your family is in darkness needing hope, or how God intends us to live with others, join us as we lean into life with God as he designed it and revealed it in his word.
One of the clearest ways we experience the “With God” life is through the Bible. Far from just black words on white pages, the Holy Scriptures are the “living and active” word of God (Hebrews 4:12). They speak to us God’s very words breathed out by the Holy Spirit (2 Timothy 3:16). If you want to be close to anyone relationally, you must listen to what they say. How much more true with God!
As we journey through the whole scriptural narrative, we will spend the first seven weeks focused on the discipline of study, improving our skills of reading, understanding, and applying God’s words to our lives, so that we can experience the “With God” life through his word.
What is the Bible?
To improve our study of Scripture, the first question is what is the Bible or Scripture? What sort of book is this? Every time you pick up anything to read, you have an unspoken assumption about how to engage what you read based on what it is. You don’t read a social media post as if it is a novel. You don’t look at a poem the same way you use a recipe card. Each time you engage with something written, you instinctively decide what paradigm to use to understand, experience, and apply it to your life.
The same is true with Scripture. What is the implicit framework with which you read Scripture?
For many of us, the Bible is a rule book. I once saw a church sign that said “B.I.B.L.E. Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” The Bible does contain many rules and principles from God. He desires us to live in this world he created and will one day make new in a way that honors him, but the Bible is so much more than a list of dos and don’ts. Whole swaths of Scripture contain no explicit command for us to obey!
For others of us, the Bible is a treasure chest. It contains many inspirational and encouraging gems of quotes and nuggets of wisdom to pluck out and treasure or meditate upon. That’s the thinking behind verses on calendar pages, picture frames, and phone wallpapers. While the Bible does contain many beautiful articulations of truth that we should meditate on, it is so much more than a treasure chest of religious one liners. The problem with this paradigm is that we can so easily shift through Scripture to find something encouraging, unknowingly skipping over so much of what God inspired to be written to instruct us.
And for others, the Bible is a dictionary of theological truth. It exists to tell us what is true about God and how he created the world. If you want to know how the world was created, turn to Genesis 1. If you want to know about Jesus, turn to the gospels. If you want to know how to have a personal relationship with God based on faith and not religious works, turn to Romans. The Bible is the first and final testimony revealing who God is, but it is so much more than a repository of theological abstractions. Last time I checked, the Bible wasn’t ordered in alphabetical order by topic, as convenient as that might be!
Bible as Literature
While the Bible does contain rules, encouraging passages, and the truth about God, fundamentally, the Bible is literature. It is a written story designed with skill and artistic creativity with a variety of genres to tell one epic narrative of how God created a good world, how that world was broken by sin, how God has been at work to redeem that world through Jesus, and how one day that world will be made right again. God chose to reveal himself not through an instruction manual, list of inspirational sayings, or even a theological dictionary, because we are meant to experience his beauty by engaging with it deeply over our whole lifetime.
The Bible is not just any kind of literature. We don’t read it like we would any other book, but there are particular principles that shape the paradigm and framework with which we read it. In our blog series over the next seven weeks in theFormed.life, we will unpack these principles. These are adapted from a podcast series done by our friends at the BibleProject. Each week we’ll reference the podcast episodes with similar topics as a “Going Deeper” resource.
Divine & Human Literature
The first principle is that the Bible is both divine and human literature. Every time you open your Bible, you are engaging a literary work of art whose origins are both divine and human. Our church’s statement of faith about the Bible begins with “We believe that God has spoken in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, through the words of human authors…” (EFCA Statement of Faith, Article 2).
Scripture itself claims that its human authors don’t speak from their interpretation, but they “spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:20–21). The Bible, because of its divine origin, is able to do things that supersede normal human limitations. For example, Galatians 3:8 says that “Scripture saw in advance that God would justify the Gentiles by faith and proclaimed the gospel ahead of time to Abraham, saying ‘All the nations will be blessed through you.’” It is striking that Paul says that “Scripture saw in advance.” Not the author of Genesis being especially inspired and having foresight, but Scripture itself knew things before they happened and so proclaimed this truth in advance about God’s desire to save all people, not just Israel. Scripture is divine literature.
At the same time, Scripture is also the work of humans. The Holy Spirit didn’t overpower the human authors and dictate verbatim what he wanted against their will, but instead chose to use the personality, life experiences, and culture of each author to create the very book that the Spirit wanted us to have. The writings of Paul, Peter, and John all have a different flavor and feel to them because God used a different person to author each of those works, and that was his plan! Scripture is human literature.
This divine human partnership on display in the Bible is unique among world religions. Muslims believe the Quran to be 100% divine and 0% human. They teach that the Quran existed in its exact verbal form in Arabic from before the creation of the world and it was dictated to Muhammad as he was pinned down by an angel, and he merely recited verbatim what he heard (Sahih al-Bukhari, Prophetic Commentary on the Qur’an). So to ask about Muhammad’s life situation or personality when trying to understand the Quran is nonsensical to Muslims.
The Bible, however, mirrors the Christian view of the incarnation. We believe that God became a human being in the person of Jesus Christ, who is fully, 100% both God and human simultaneously. Being God doesn’t make him any less human and being human doesn’t make him any less divine. In a similar way, the Bible as God’s word can be both divine and human, without one side negating the other. Scripture is divine and human literature.
Applying the Paradigm
There is so much that could be said about Scripture being both divine and human, but three ways in particular affect our reading of Scripture.
First, read the Bible under its divine authority. We can’t dismiss anything Scripture teaches by saying, “Well, that’s just Paul’s opinion (or insert any biblical author).” No, the Holy Spirit chose to speak through Paul, and all the other authors of the Bible, so whatever they say, when properly understood, ought to be trusted and obeyed. We need to have a fundamental posture of submission when it comes to reading the Bible, as it is divine literature.
Second, read the Bible using the tools we use to understand human literature. Since the Holy Spirit chose to use human authors in their full humanity to create Scripture, we can’t understand what God is saying in the Bible without attending to the human elements of it. Think back to your English literature class in school, and use those same tools (context, setting, structure, characterization, metaphor, symbolism, personification, irony, hyperbole, etc.). Think about what the original human authors were trying to communicate to their original human audience. When we read the Bible this way, we better understand what God is saying through it.
Third, read God’s word as a way to be with God. Isn’t it crazy that God inspired normal, everyday, messy, broken, fallen humans like you and me to be his chosen instruments to communicate his divine truth? Isn’t it crazy that God still speaks to us today through their words written thousands of years ago?
Whenever you doubt that God can be with us, just remember how he is always present in the divine-human partnership that is the Holy Bible.
Going Deeper:
https://bibleproject.com/podcasts/series/paradigm/
https://bibleproject.com/podcasts/how-do-you-read-bible/
https://bibleproject.com/podcasts/who-wrote-bible/
