Words are windows. Some people treat them as bricks. They throw them around to knock things down. Others treat them as blocks. They stack and build and measure. For others, words are fine-cut glass panes—perfectly marked and settled to do only certain things and not others. There’s truth to all the metaphors, of course. But I say, words are windows.
Jesus is the Word (John 1:1) upon whom all human words depend. But He said that when we look at Him, we see through Him to His heavenly Father. “Whoever has seen me,” He says to Philip, “has seen the Father” (John 14:9). The Word is our window. And so, our words are windows.
We may not see it, but this has lots of implications for how we live and how we read the Bible. In many ways, the modern Western world has been sapped of supernaturalism. We operate with an ossified rationalism—bone-dry reason. Physicalism is a Pharisee judging everything spiritual, even though Paul tells us that the opposite should happen (1 Cor. 2:15). The reality of the miraculous—so central to a God-centered view of the world—is no longer assumed by our culture. People associate miracles more with myth than with majesty. All this affects the way that we read the Bible.
What I want to focus on is the rift we’ve opened between the heart and the head, between imagination and doctrine, between inhabiting the world of Scripture and merely drawing propositions out from it. In light of how post-Enlightenment rationalism has pushed us all to be mostly “reasonable people,” it’s clear that we’ve lost something. We’ve separated ourselves from the Word of God rather than finding ourselves in it. So when we read the Bible, we stay at a distance. We try to discern meaning, extract principles, and critique human behavior. These things are not bad by any means. But there is so much more. If words really are windows, Christians need to develop the habit of staring through them, of getting joyfully lost in the pages of God’s living oracles. When we do that, we may find that soul growth has far more to do with our imagination than we thought. Put differently, we may find that reading the Bible is not enough; we must also imagine it. If we don’t, then something else is going to capture and rule our imagination.
The Power of Imagination
What is an “imagination”? Let me set out a definition before I talk about what “imagining the Bible” looks like and what it can do for our spiritual growth.
By imagination I don’t mean our ability to dream up the next best science-fiction book or Netflix series. At root, our imagination is not about how many castles we can build in the clouds or how wildly strange our thoughts can be—utterly detached from reality. At base, our imagination is simply our ability to represent things in our mind. Our imagination is what lets us picture internally what is not physically in front of us. This includes other objects, times, perspectives, events. Imagination is what allows us to sympathize with others, to connect Scripture to everyday happenings, and to take joy in what we have not seen, which is the heart of faith. Just look at how the writer of Hebrews describes faith:
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible. (Heb. 11:1–3)
Things not seen. A universe created by words. The visible made by the invisible. Do these phrases not immediately bring imagination into view? In truth, faith has much more to do with imagination than we think. That doesn’t mean our faith is imaginary; rather, it means that we cannot have faith without in some sense accessing and using our imagination. In the context of faith, our God-given capacity to imagine—to represent things in our mind that are not directly in front of us—is an amazing gift. And it’s intimately tied to words as windows. Using our imaginations, we look through words to see what is not immediately in front of us.
Think of this practically with respect to reading the words of the Bible. When I read the story about Jesus and the raising of Lazarus in John 11, is Jesus standing in my living room? Are Martha and Mary sitting on the couch? No, not physically, but yes, in terms of my thoughts. I cannot read a single page of Scripture without using my imagination, without looking through the window-words of God to see what He wants me to see.
Can you see how much broader and bolder our imagination is, how it pulses through the moments of every day? The poet Malcolm Guite wrote:
The power of imagination does not just come into play when we are making up stories; it is the imagination which allows us to grasp the whole, the meaning, the pattern in what we perceive, to draw lines that connect the dots, to glimpse the pattern that suddenly makes sense of disparate and apparently random things. It is by the forming and perceiving power of the imagination that the constant stream of data flowing into us through our senses is shaped into a tree, a mountain, a sunset, the face of our beloved. (Lifting the Veil, 12–13).
Without our imagination, we cannot represent anything internally, including the meaning of all that is precious to us. Without imagination, we have no access to the unseen riches of human life: love, beauty, hope, joy, and faith. Without our imagination, we can’t access a single word of Scripture. Where there are words, there must be windows, and where there are windows, imagination lets us see the unseen.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. This is not a call to imagine your way into wild places found nowhere on the pages of Scripture. In using our imagination, we must change nothing of Scripture. Rather, we let it change us. Looking through the windows of the words, we find ourselves shaped and shifted, beckoned and broken, doubting and daring. The power of Scripture is not only what it teaches us (but praise God for all it teaches!). It’s what it does to us, what it does inside us, what it does through our imagination.
This is hard to grasp without an example. Let me give you two: wheat and doors.
Imagine with Me
Let’s start with wheat. Jesus once said, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). Don’t just read those words; imagine them. Slow down and picture it.
You are set high on a rod of wheat, drifting lazily in the sun and wind. The breeze caresses your outer shell, shouldering you back and forth. You love these days, these cycles of light, water, and darkness. Yet the ground beneath you whispers of a terrifying difference. If you should fall there, what would happen, in that dark place beneath the soil, where light is uninvited? Does it not scream of loneliness and isolation?
Ah, but then Jesus tells your seed-self something that you desperately need to hear. You think that it’s lonely down there in the darkened dirt. But Jesus says you’re misunderstanding. Staying here atop this stalk of sun-soaked wheat is isolating. Up here, you are by yourself. Down there in the earth is where the company is. Down there is where new life bursts forth. “Unless you fall into the earth and die, as I will do for you,” Jesus says, “you will remain alone. But if you die with Me, in Me, you will bear much fruit.” In Jesus, our seed-selves fall down into a holy gathering.
Malcolm Guite was moved to compose a poem about this very passage. In part of it, he writes,
Oh let me fall as grain to the good earth
And die away from all dry separation,
Die to my sole self, and find new birth
Within that very death, a dark fruition,
Deep in this crowded underground, to learn
The earthy otherness of every other,
To know that nothing is achieved alone
But only where these other fallen gather.
Imagine it: The crowded underground with a future of fruition—a place of darkness where the light of Christ shines, where darkness will be soon dispelled, for darkness is as light to God (Ps. 139:12). He uses the dark in His process of raising a brilliant harvest.
We started with a grain of wheat. Now we’re here, in a place of longing, hope, and peace. How did it happen? Imagination. And the spiritual growth that results is immeasurable. I can’t express how comforting this passage was to me as someone who as a teenager lost his father to cancer. I had such a shaking fear that my father was going into dark and silent loneliness, a separation from those he knew and loved. But he wasn’t. Jesus tells me so. He was going into a community, a “crowded underground,” a “dark fruition” destined for daylight. He was going to a great family of faith, all gloriously kept by his sovereign, seed-loving Savior. I can testify already that my father’s death has borne much fruit in me and in those who knew him. As long as he remained a seed on the top of that wheat stalk, he was alone. But now? Now he lives among the fruit bearers, fixed to the true vine (John 15:1). The life-giving Savior cares for every one of His fallen seeds. And He knows exactly what it’s like to fall from the heights and into the depths.
Now for the door. Jesus once said: “I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture” (John 10:9). Do it again: Slow down and picture it.
You’re a sheep in a room with no windows. A candle sits on a plain table in the center, giving just enough amber aura for you to see your predicament. In front of you is a large and heavy wooden door. But it’s bolted shut. You can’t get out unless it’s opened to you. Behind you is a great darkness, so black that it steals your breath. You could wander, but you don’t know what you’ll find—certainly nothing inviting. Your stomach is churning. It’s not only that you’re nervous and pleading for a way out; you’re also famished. You’re tempted to start chewing on the table legs. Maybe the candle wax is edible.
But then you hear it—the bolt on the door lifts. The hinges start to whine, and pink-golden light sneaks in through the smallest crack, the welcome of a soft sunset. You move forward one step, testing the situation. But the door continues to open. It opens all the way. The country in front of you is fragrant—sweet, like cinnamon and honey. And the grass: just the sight of all that green fills you with gratitude. The choice is so simple, so plain. Wander back through the darkness, or step forward into a strange freedom. A deep and melodious voice greets you from beyond the threshold. Somehow you recognize that voice. You’ve heard it before. You trust it. And so you step into the entryway, never for a moment looking back. Wherever this leads, it must be home.
It’s hard not to think of those haunting lines from George MacDonald at the end of Phantastes:
Many a wrong, and its curing song;
Many a road, and many an inn;
Room to roam, but only one home
For all the world to win.
We have one home. And Jesus is the door. Now, tell me: Will you ever open a door the same way again? I won’t. Scripture has changed me. I have seen too much through these window-words to ever go back. Every handle that I pull this side of paradise is reminder that God has opened His door to me: The person of Christ is the pathway to paradise.
Conclusion
It is not enough to read the Bible; we must imagine it. We must inhabit the world into which we’ve been given windows. When we do, find our souls changing in ways that they never could have if we searched only for a propositional meaning. That doesn’t mean that we discard the riches of propositional meaning. It just means that the Spirit of Christ beckons us to much more when we lay hands on the Bible. To adapt Bilbo’s words to Frodo from The Lord of the Rings: “It’s a dangerous business, Christian, picking up your Bible. You look through the windows, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
If we don’t imagine the Bible, we aren’t left with a void. We simply fill the space with something else. Imagination tolerates no vacuum. Imagine the Bible, or something else will steal your imagination.