After reading about my book, The Sound of His Voice (originally titled Beyond the Sacred Page), a dear lady in Arkansas responded: "Please remove my name from gracEmail. I find that you are in opposition to God's Word. There is nothing 'Beyond the Sacred Page' -- only man's ideas and opinions! I study, read, believe God's Word, nothing beyond."

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It is one thing to say -- as I do -- that Scripture is the final test of all spiritual teaching and the canon ("rule") for measuring all messages which purport to come from God. It is quite another matter to say that the Bible is an end within itself, or the ultimate object of our allegiance and devotion. Unfortunately, that is the result fostered by an uncritical sort of fundamentalism which confuses the record for the reality and mistakes the book for its author. This good sister has been misled by a peculiar teaching of some in her church background who, having read that "the sword of the Spirit" is the word of God (Eph. 6:17), erroneously concluded that the Holy Spirit is the Bible itself.

Jesus affirmed the integrity and authority of the Jewish Scriptures (Matt 5:17-19). He did not tolerate those who hijacked its precepts for their own purposes and who plundered its contents to their own ends (Matt. 12:1-8). But he also made plain that all the Scriptures pointed to him, God's Messiah (Lk. 24:27, 45-47). On one occasion at least he went head-to-head with some whose noses were stuck so deep in the holy book they failed to recognize him (John 5:39-40). The Scriptures point to Jesus, and Jesus points to God (John 17:1-3).

God speaks to us in the Bible -- and part of what he tells us there is that he also communicates with people in many other ways. He speaks through burning bushes and through talking donkeys, through day visions and night dreams, through nature and through conscience, through wisdom and reason, through thunderous storms and soft still breezes, through oracles and through prophecies. Nothing he has ever said in any of those ways contradicts his written word of Scripture. And no Scripture -- rightly understood -- ever contradicts God's supreme revelation through the life and teaching of the Word-made-flesh, the man Jesus Christ. Our relationship is not with pages on a book. It is with the personal God who came among us in Jesus of Nazareth, and, since Pentecost, in the Spirit of the Risen Christ.