Walk away from the manual

If I hear another church leader refer to the Bible as a “Manual for life” I think I’m going to throw up in my mouth.  A manual for life; are you kidding me?  If the Bible is a manual for life it’s a very bad manual.  For example, today I made the decision to fix my 196,000 mile Camry rather than leave it alone and let it ride off into the sunset.  It would have been helpful to have a chapter and verse out the Holy Manual that would have helped me make a sure-fire, can’t miss decision, but it just wasn’t there.  Believe me, I looked. 

Aren’t manuals supposed to help us fix things when they break?  Therein lies one of the problems with this perspective.  Allow me to elaborate.

1. If the Bible is a “Manual for Life” we develop a mindset that we really don’t need it till something breaks with our life.  Honestly, when was the last time you read your refrigerator manual?  Do you even know where it is?  Manuals aren’t needed till something goes wrong, and unfortunately that’s how many people respond to the Bible.
2. When the Bible is regarded as a “Manual for Life” it makes “me” the center of life.  The whole reason for going to the manual in the first place is so that “I” can know how to live, so “I” can get things fixed in my life, so “I” can do better, so “I” can experience life to the fullest.  The manual becomes a means to an end and the end is always bettering self in some way.
3. Manuals are boring and irrelevent because they are informational, and informational is never transformational.  The Bible is one big story of God’s desire to connect with humanity for the sake of His glory.  The main character is God and He can be found on every page of the story.
    
4. There is a subtle legalism that comes with regarding the Bible as a “Manual for Life.”  Following Jesus is reduced to principles that we apply.  You have a problem, follow these principles!  If the problem persists, you obviously did something wrong becasue the principles work.  In the end the relationship and the mystery of following Jesus is taken out of the picture.

If you hold to the “Manual for Life” perspective of the Bible, my suggestion is that you walk away from the manual and ask the Holy Spirit to open the eyes of your heart to see that first and foremost the Bible is about God and not you.  And the thing about God is that knowing Him comes only through revelation, not information.  That’s where the manual just won’t cut it.

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