Request your free, three-month trial to Tabletalk magazine. You’ll receive the print issue monthly and gain immediate digital access to decades of archives. This trial is risk-free. No credit card required.
Try Tabletalk NowAlready receive Tabletalk magazine every month?
Verify your email address to gain unlimited access.
I did not grow up reading the Bible, nor do I recall ever seeing a Bible in my home. I vividly remember receiving my first Bible when I was a teenager, but I had trouble reading it because it was the King James Version. I later came to appreciate the beauty of the KJV, but it took some years. When I was fourteen years old, I began to study the Bible on my own. It was the first time in my life that I came to understand the purpose of my life and the purpose of everything.
In my teenage years, I was under the pastoral preaching and teaching of men from the Mennonite, independent Baptist, Bible church, and Southern Baptist traditions. Some of those men are still friends and mentors to this day. They taught me to love Scripture. They taught me not merely to read Scripture but to study it, memorize it, and meditate on it constantly. And even when we later came to have differences in our interpretation of Scripture, our mutual love for and affirmation of Scripture and the divine inspiration of Scripture were the basis for our mutual love and respect. Those men helped me see the beauty, unity, and clarity of Scripture. They helped me learn not to complicate my interpretation of Scripture, not to teach beyond what God has revealed, and to recognize that God as the ultimate author of Scripture has woven a beautiful tapestry of redemption from beginning to end.
I taught my first Bible study when I was sixteen years old. While I had no business teaching, I began to see for myself the individual threads running through the rich tapestry of the entirety of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation. Yet it was only when I was introduced to the teaching of Dutch Reformed theologians such as Geerhardus Vos and Herman Bavinck that I came to see more fully how God had sovereignly woven the tapestry of Scripture through human authors over the course of 1,500 years.
To that same end, we strive in Tabletalk to help God’s people know and love Scripture more and more and to see the glorious unity of Scripture so that they would worship and serve Him, the God of Scripture, and not the god of their own imaginations. For when we see the beauty of Scripture, we see more clearly the beauty and glory of our triune God as we live and die coram Deo.