'Tis So Tweet to Trust...

A “Twitter Bible,” anyone?

For the uninitiated, “Twitter” is a web-based service that allows users to send messages of up to 140 characters to whoever is “following” the sender via a computer or cell phone. A lot of folks love Twitter, and there have been times, such as the recent disaster in Haiti, when this technology proved invaluable. But as a rule, there’s no one I find sufficiently interesting--myself included!--that I wish to know whatever free-floating association passes through their mind every hour or two.

But what if one could receive “tweets” (messages via Twitter) throughout the day . . . from God?! That’s the idea behind the Twitter Bible.

Some German Christians summarized key passages from the Bible into terse, Twitter-sized messages. Some of the imagined tweets from Jesus include, "40 days without food. Satan doing a full court temptation press. Does he really think he can win?"; "5 loaves + 2 fishes x the power of God = Fish and Chips for 5,000! Thanks for your lunch kid!"; "Watching my disciples as I ascend to heaven. They look helpless. Will send Holy Spirit soon."

The German language “Twitter Bible” fits over 31,000 verses of the Bible into just under 4,000 rapid-fire messages. For someone who made it though high school, CliffsNotes in hand, I must confess a certain appeal. But if Mrs. Lithgo, my English teacher, was right--that reducing Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native to a soulless summary guts the work of its majesty and power--how much more so the Bible?

In fact, though Tweets are new, reducing the Bible to snippets of folk wisdom is not. Very few Christians have read so much as a single Gospel, much less the whole Bible. For far too many of us, our “Bible” consists of a few memorable sayings we think came from the Bible. Here’s a hint: “Time heals all wounds” and “Money is the root of evil” are not in the Bible.

For serious Christians, the Bible is our primary source of knowledge about Jesus. It is difficult to know, love, and follow Jesus without a working knowledge of the Gospels that tell his story, the New Testament letters that think through the implications of his claims, and the Old Testament that was Jesus’ Bible.

That’s why at the First Baptist Church of Christ, we are listening to the whole of the New Testament during the 40 days of Lent. And that’s why this Sunday night, we are beginning a three- Sunday night series on “How We Read the Bible about Moral Issues.” Because we want to do more than tweet the Bible. We want to learn how to plumb the “whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27) in finding direction and meaning for our lives today.