You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but you should judge a book by its purpose. Some books are meant to be read for fun; I devoured the Hardy Boys detective novels as a kid. Some books are meant to be used as guides; I used the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to look up the meaning of the word “colophon” (it’s a publisher’s identifying mark on a book, like the brand on a cow). There are lots of different kinds of books out there, and you have to know what each kind is if you’re going to read it the right way. Merriam-Webster would make a terrible crime novel! But what about the most important and popular book in world history? What kind of book is the Bible? Some people read it like it’s ancient mythology, more for curiosity’s sake than anything else. Some people read it like it’s a dictionary, where you flip to a certain page, read a sentence, and find a neat and tidy answer to your question.

But when we come to the Bible, we approach a different thing altogether. For starters, we’re reading a book about a being: God. The Bible is a book by God, about God. Since we wouldn’t know God without it, we call it revelation. It’s important to read the Bible with this in mind; after all, you wouldn’t read a letter from a loved one just to get what you want out of it. You’d read it to get to know someone better!

Because God is God, he has written his book with wonderful skill and an awesome purpose, like a symphony playing in perfect harmony. In fact, when we come to Bible we don’t just come to one book, we come to a sixty-six-instrument orchestra of books, written by many different people, in three different languages, over thousands of years. Since God tells us that he cannot lie, and that he knows all things, this means that we can trust the Bible to be without error, even as humans wrote it. As Moses, David, Isaiah, Matthew, Luke, Paul, John and others wrote, the Holy Spirit wrote through them. Men wrote, and God wrote, and both express themselves to perfection in Scripture. 

This also means we can trust that the way God said what he said is important. The cynic who says “I believe you” with a wink or a roll of the eyes means something totally different than the lover who says “I believe you” with tear-stained cheeks while clutching the beloved’s hands. Some of these authors were writing histories, some were writing letters or speeches, some were writing poetry, and others were recounting laws and genealogies. But all of those authors writing all those different ways over all those years weren’t just writing alone. They were writing under the inspiration of God himself, the Holy Spirit, with one purpose. 

God’s purpose, to reveal himself to us, is the key to reading all of the Bible. So, when Matthew, Luke, John, and Hebrews all tell us that all of the Bible is about Jesus, we understand every other part of the Bible in relation to him. God reveals himself to us in his Word, in Jesus Christ. By showing himself to us as the crucified and risen God-man, he shares himself with us; he invites us into life in his Word, and by grace through faith in Jesus we’re swept into life with the living God. The Bible is unlike any other, because it reveals to us a person unlike any other: the Son of God, Immanuel, God with Us.