by Katherine Harms

Created on: March 20, 2009

The Bible is truth. In the Bible, people meet the eternal, infinite, perfectly righteous God who could crush humanity with a single word. The Bible tells us, however, that he chooses instead to relate to us as his children, because he loves us. Further, it tells us that God does not abandon us, despite the fact that many of us shout, like teen-agers in an adolescent frenzy, "I hate you!" He loves us so much that he chose to take all the punishment Satan could dish out and die for us. This is truth.

Some of the Bible, however, is not fact. The creation story in Genesis, for example, is a fervent and loving testimony to God told by someone who lives in a deep relationship with God. It cannot be an eyewitness account, because no human was present at creation. Yet, as the angel Monica once said in the "Touched by an Angel" television series, "The story is truth." Truth and fact are not necessarily the same thing.

Many Christians are uncomfortable with the idea of calling anything in the Bible a myth. That word evokes the notion of imaginary tales of imaginary beings with supernatural powers. It wouldn't be unrealistic to say that for many Christians, Greek myth and Marvel comic books are equivalent. The vivid human imagination that creates stories of Superman and Wonder Woman presumably created the myths of Apollo and Thor and Bastet. Christians do not want the Bible equated with something they consider to be pure fiction.

They are right. The Bible is not fiction. Even though many of the memories preserved for us in the biblical text have come forward in the form of myth, they are, nonetheless, truth. That is why they are preserved. It isn't hard to visualize groups of families and tribes in the years before writing was developed carefully preserving the stories that go back to creation, because in each generation, wise people in relationships with Almighty God, recognized the truth in the stories. They saw God in these family memories, and they said to themselves, "This story is from ancient times, but it is for us. It is truth."

That sense that ancient truth is for our current time has motivated people through millennia to preserve the narrative that became our Bible. We know that, unlike some sacred texts, it did not spring forth in a single writing project. Rather, as people recognized the exceptional stories among the many stories, they gathered them together. The Jewish community confirmed the texts that make up the Old Testament canon only a century or two before the Christian community settled on the New Testament canon. In fact, to this day, some of the texts continue to be objects of dispute among the faithful.

To recognize this fact does not detract from the truth of the Bible. The Bible reveals God and calls us to relationship with him. It points unerringly to the Word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, who delivered healing and reconciliation with God to humankind, despite the fact that humans universally spend their lives trying to be God themselves. The Bible tells us the truth about God and the truth about people. God has preserved it through millennia by the work of humans who gave up themselves to His service. The fact that the Bible uses all the mechanisms of art to communicate the message of God's love only enhances our understanding of the truth. Read the Bible from beginning to end, and you will see one constant message: God loves people and yearns to live in a relationship with them that is best imaged as two people walking together in the cool of the evening through a beautiful garden, talking and laughing and sharing together. God loves people. This is the truth, and this is the Bible's message.

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