Suspicious

Have you ever gotten that skeptical look when people learn you are a Christian? An unfortunate reality of our times is that there are many people out there who are suspicious of anything even remotely related to Christianity, even if they have had little exposure to the Bible or true followers of Jesus. There is an impression that the Christian life is all about rules and regulations, that to be a follower of the God of the Bible means to become some kind of robotic slave to legalism with a conversion quota to fill. Yet, there is so much more to be found in the word of God than rules. The Bible is first and foremost a book of love, of compassion, of a living God who is desperately trying to bridge the gap between his creation and Him. Probably the best way we can help the people around us see this reality is if we ourselves are students of the word. We must so internalize its truths that when the skeptic confronts us with his misconceptions about the judgment of God we can point them toward the love and grace behind the laws.

Do we not often, too, read the Bible as if it were a book of law, and not the revelation of grace? In so doing, we draw a cloud over it, and read it as a volume written by a hard master. So that a harsh tone is imparted in its words, and the legal element is made to obscure the evangelical. We are slow to read it as the expansion of the first gracious promise to man; as a revelation of the love of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; as the book of grace, specially written for us by the Spirit of grace. The law is in it, yet the Bible is not law, but gospel. As Mount Sinai rears its head, an isolated mass of hard, red granite, amid a thousand desert mountains of softer and less stern material, so does the law stand in the Bible; - a necessary part of it, - but not the characteristic of it; added because of transgressions till the seed should come. Yet have not our suspicious hearts darkened this book of light? Do we not often read it as the proclamation of a command to do, instead of a declaration of what the love of God has done?

--from God's Way of Peace by Horatius Bonar