The Top of the Page

Rob has a good Bible. He would say that himself. It cost him proper money in 2021 and it has held up well, and he can find things in it now without looking at the contents.

The trouble is that he can no longer read it.

He can read about it beautifully. The edition he bought has notes at the bottom of every page, and maps, and little essays in boxes, and cross references in a narrow column down the middle, and introductions to each book that are, genuinely, excellent. He has learned a great deal. He is better informed than he was.

But his eye has trained itself, over four years, to drop.

He opens at a page, and before he has read a full sentence at the top, his eye has gone down to the small print to find out what the sentence is about. It is completely automatic now. He has caught himself doing it on the first line of a psalm.

He noticed it properly two Sundays ago because of his daughter.

She is seven. She had picked up a plain copy from a shelf, the one with nothing in it, and she was lying on the floor with her feet up on the sofa reading a chapter out loud badly, and she stopped and said, Dad, why did he go outside?

And Rob said, hang on, let me look, and reached for his own.

And she said, no, but why did he go outside?

She was not asking for a note. She was asking about a man in a story who had gone outside, which is a completely reasonable question, and it is a question you can only ask if you have read the top of the page.

Rob sat down on the arm of the sofa and realized he did not know. He knew four things about the historical setting. He could have told her about the geography. He did not know why the man went outside, because he had never actually read the paragraph without the small print running alongside it like a guide rail.

And the thing that got him was not guilt. It was something more like homesickness.

He used to read this book on a bus at nineteen out of a paperback with a broken spine, and it used to talk to him. It said things that unsettled him and cheered him up and once made him cry in a car park. He did not understand a great deal of it. He understood enough to be changed by it.

Now he understands a great deal more of it and it has stopped talking, and he has assumed for a couple of years that this is simply what happens as you get older and know more.

It is not what happens as you get older. It is what happens when your eye learns to go down before it goes across.

And you may know exactly where your own eye goes first, and how long it has been since a page said anything to you rather than about itself.

The text is alive and the notes are about something alive

Take this off before anything else, because you have been carrying it and it was never handed to you.

You are not disqualified from reading the top of the page. You never were. Scripture describes itself as living and doing its own work, not as raw material awaiting a professional, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the apparatus in the margin, who makes a sentence go into a person. Put that down. It has been sitting on you for four years and it is not your load.

Now hear how the book describes itself, because it does not describe itself the way you have been treating it.

For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow.Hebrews 4:12

Alive. Active. Sharper. Penetrates.

Every one of those is a verb the text is doing, not a verb you are doing to the text. The subject of that sentence is the word, and the object is you, and His Spirit is the one who sets it moving.

Which means the ordinary relationship is not you working on it. It is it working on you. And that only happens on the top of the page, because that is where it is.

You have this. Right now, in your front room, with a seven year old on the floor and your feet on the carpet. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who makes it living and active, and He has never once required you to be qualified before He does it.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch either side of this road.

Those notes are a gift. Somebody's whole life is in them. The person who wrote the introduction to that book of the Bible probably gave twenty years to it so that you could have four paragraphs, and the reason you can read any of this in your own language at all is that people took enormous trouble and some of them paid for it dearly. None of that is being knocked here, and a reader who scorns teachers ends up in a ditch of their own making, alone with their own opinions and very confident.

The point is order, not value.

Notes are a description of a room. The text is the room. A description is a wonderful thing to have and it is not the same as walking in, and if you read the description first you will spend the whole visit checking the room against it instead of looking at it.

Your daughter walked in. That is the only difference between the two of you on that Sunday. She had no description, so she looked, and she saw a man going outside and wanted to know why.

You are able to walk in. Not one day when you have read enough. Now, tonight, on the same page you have been reading around for years. Scripture says the word is alive and active, and the same Spirit who breathed it is in you as you read, so the life in it does not wait for your preparation, and it never did.

And here is the honest half, because it is the half that helps. Your eye does not drop out of humility. It drops because at some point reading the text alone started to feel presumptuous, and going down to the notes felt safe, and safe has slowly become silent.