Top Highlights

• For modern readers who are steeped in naturalistic thinking, a supernatural gap opens up when they discover that they can’t replicate the miracles of the Bible in a modern, scientific setting. Miracles can’t be repeated in a test tube, nor should we expect them to be. The very point of a miracle is that God is intervening in human history in a supe...
• For the ancient recipients of Scripture, the expectation of super-natural activity was quite different from that of most modern readers. In the world of the Bible, God’s immanence was assumed, and the question was not whether God would intervene in the affairs of human history, but how. In our modern world, bridging the supernatural gap is ultimate...
• To bridge the supernatural gap, we must read with the expectation of divine activity, accepting that God is immanent in human history. The theological gap, however, is based on the premise of God’s self-revelation in his Word. It is one thing to expect the miraculous in the Bible, but it’s another to read Scripture with an eye trained to discern th...
• Although we read the Bible in a quest for God, we don’t attain to a comprehensive understanding of God’s revelation of himself all at once. Rather, the multifaceted nature of God is revealed in Scripture, and in this sense a gap exists between the reader who seeks after God daily through studying the parts and God who reveals himself through the wh...
• A new believer can pick up the Bible and God will use it mightily, but our knowledge of God derived from our reading of Scripture is only partial. At every stage in our spiritual journey, as we study portions of the Bible, like Pilgrim in John Bunyan’s famous work Pilgrim’s Progress, we’re gradually progressing in our knowledge of God. Even those w...