B - I - B - L - E

This week I happened to be in the fellowship room of an A.M.E. church in Philadelphia and there was a Bible on one of the tables, so I opened it instinctively. I discovered that it was the pastor's Bible, and on the cover page I saw scrawled vertically the word "Bible," written as an acronym: Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.

It's possible that I got overly excited about that. Maybe it's a trite and hackneyed play on words old as the hills that I just never happened to come across before. I hope the man made it up himself.

But even if he didn't, I like the man I see in that inscription. I surmise that he is a person who takes the Bible as it should be taken-a practical handbook for daily living and not a talisman. Moreover, I discern that he thinks the Bible is by and large clear. That means to me that he is not bogged down by unbelief in endless theological discussions that mask an unwillingness to obey its simple teachings.

As Deitrich Bonhoeffer observed in The Cost of Discipleship about the rich young man in Matthew 19:

"Eternal life is for him an academic problem which is worth discussion with a 'good master.' . . . The only answer to his difficulties is the very commandment of God, which challenges him to have done with academic discussion and to get on with the task of obedience. Only the devil has an answer for our moral difficulties, and he says: 'Keep on posing problems and you will escape the necessity of obedience.'"

By corollary, I derive from the pastor's inscription that he is a simple man, in the sense that Jesus likes simple men. He is a "child." He could have penned in the jacket of his Bible some ponderous quote from a ponderous theologian. But evidently, he was not ashamed that someday some random woman wandering into the fellowship room and snooping in his Bible should see that he was just like her-a fellow sojourner looking to live for Jesus.

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