The Book Of Eli - Study The Word Series

Anyway, I began to reflect on what if that were to happen today. What if there was some sort of a nuclear war and all the books were burned and all of them were destroyed including the Bibles? How would we view the last remaining Bible on earth? Would we value it as much as Eli did or even as much as Carnegie did? Would we see it as the ultimate source of truth and life and power? Power for living. Would we see that? I am not sure about any of you but I do know that the degree that we see it as a source of power, life and truth is directly correlated with the degree that we are willing to study it and to go deep into the word.

That is what we are going to look at today. We are going to look at a few characters from the Old and the New Testament to see people that are really interested in studying the word. We are going to look actually at a true character. It is a character called Ezra. Ezra is a true character from the sixth century B.C. He was actually a priest who had been taken off into captivity and because he was someone who was not willing to go along with the norms of the pagan world of Babylonia but to stay true to the word of God, to stay true to the scriptures. God rewarded him as the one who would bring spiritual reform back to Israel when they returned back to Jerusalem. He was put in charge of basically putting the people back on track. We know that God’s hand was upon him because it says actually in the book of Ezra 7:9-10, “He had begun his journey from Babylon on the first day of the first month, and he arrived in Jerusalem on the first day of the fifth month, for the gracious hand of his God was on him. For Ezra had devoted himself to the study and observance of the Law of the LORD, and to teaching its decrees and laws in Israel.” When he speaks of the decrees and the laws, he is talking about the early books of the Old Testament. Some would say it is the first five books and maybe some of the books of the prophets but that would be the law that he is referring to. Really what we see here is a priest that was in many ways the first true disciple or actually discipler because he did the exact thing that we are trying to teach everybody to do here; to study the word; to observe the word, which means apply or obey the commandments and then do the same and teach others. Ezra was a priest that was willing to do that. I can see how some people could read this and say well the guy was a priest and that is what priests do right? Priests and pastors are paid to study the word. They are paid to go deep into the word. They should be practicing what they preach and then they should be teaching what they preach. But I want to stop right there and say, if you buy into that, you will never ever experience deep-rooted discipleship because you are relying on somebody else to read the word and to spoon feed the word to you. I hate to pick on the Catholics but I think I can get away with it because I was raised Catholic. Like my father said, once a Catholic always a Catholic, and I can show you my baptism certificate to prove it so I can say what I want to say. I can talk as a Catholic because I experienced a lot growing up in the Catholic faith. One thing I did experience was that we didn’t read the Bible. Can anybody relate to that? I don’t think we owned a Bible. My dad went to church every Sunday but we didn’t ever read the Bible. Because that was the priest’s job. You go to church on Sunday and he gives you the homily and you get a nice little thought and you leave. That is not a good thing. Once you make the Bible the exclusive domain of a priest or a pastor, you will never experience deep-rooted discipleship. You will never experience it. That is why it is important that you understand from the very onset that the Bible is your Bible. It is not Chuck’s Bible. It is not the priest’s Bible. It is your Bible so you need to have your own personal Bible. When I say personal Bible, it is yours. A Bible that you feel comfortable writing in, marking on, marking the pages, spilling coffee on, writing the sermons notes on, whatever you want. You need your own personal Bible because that is your primary tool for discipleship. If you don’t have one, we will figure out how to get you one, but you need to have a copy of the Bible or several copies of the Bible because those are your primary tools for discipleship. That is what we learn from Ezra is that it is not just the domain of a few select people. The Bible is for the people. It is a tool for the people.