The Greatest Gift You Are Not Treasuring Enough

There is a video that has circulated for years among missionaries and Bible translation advocates. It shows a tribe in Papua New Guinea receiving the New Testament translated into their own language for the very first time. After 47 years of labor by dedicated translators, a mission aviation airplane landed on a grass strip in front of the entire village. A package was delivered to the local pastor. Inside was the Word of God in a language these people could finally read for themselves, a treasure they could pass down to their children and grandchildren.

They wept.

And if you watch it, you will likely weep too.

Now consider this: you probably have three, four, maybe five copies of the Bible in your home. It is on your phone. It is available in dozens of translations, in audio format, in large print, in pocket size. You have never once had to wait 47 years for it. And yet, when was the last time you held it and wept for joy?

That contrast is a piercing one. Not because it is meant to shame, but because it reveals something true about the human heart. We undervalue what we take for granted. And when it comes to Scripture, we take for granted something that is, at its core, one of the most extraordinary gifts ever given to humanity.

God Did Not Have to Speak

The story of Scripture begins with a choice. God, the infinite, eternal, and incomprehensible Creator, chose to make himself known to his creation. He did not have to do this. He could have set the universe in motion and remained silent, distant, unknowable. Some have argued exactly that. But Scripture tells a different story entirely.

From beginning to end, the Bible is the account of a God who speaks, who pursues, who reveals himself. Theologians call this revelation, and it comes in two forms.

The first is general revelation. Romans 1:19-20 describes how God has made himself known through the created world, so that anyone who has ever lived has access to evidence of his existence, his power, and his design. Psalm 19 echoes this, describing how the heavens themselves declare the glory of God. Creation is not silent. It is a constant, unceasing proclamation that Someone made all of this.

But general revelation, as magnificent as it is, has limits. It can tell us that God exists. It cannot tell us who God is in personal terms. It can reveal a Creator. It cannot reveal a Savior. For that, we need something more.

That something more is special revelation, and its written form is Scripture.

Breathed Out by God

The Bible makes a remarkable claim about itself. In 2 Timothy 3, Paul writes that all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be complete and equipped for every good work. Not some Scripture. Not the parts we find convenient or comfortable. All of it.

This raises a natural question. How does a perfect, infinite God communicate through finite, fallible human beings? Was the Bible simply the best effort of well-meaning writers? Were the authors robots, their hands mechanically controlled?

The answer is found in 2 Peter 1, where Peter explains that no prophecy of Scripture came from human will, but that men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. The image is vivid, like a ship being driven forward by the wind. The writers were genuinely themselves, with their own personalities, vocabularies, and experiences. But the Holy Spirit moved through all of that, guiding them to record exactly what God intended. Theologians call this concursus, a simultaneous operation of the human and the divine, with the divine being primary.

The result is a book that is both fully human and fully from God. And because it comes from a God who is perfect, true, and without error, the Word he has given us carries those same qualities.

Authority That Needs No Permission

When we talk about the authority of Scripture, we are really talking about the authority of God himself. And God's authority is unlike any other kind of authority we encounter in human experience.

Human authority is always derived. A president has authority because voters granted it. A judge has authority because the law established it. A parent has authority because God designed the family structure. Every form of human authority traces back to a source outside itself.

God's authority traces back to nothing outside himself, because there is nothing outside himself. He did not inherit it. He did not earn it. He did not receive it from a higher power. Romans 13:1 reminds us that there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. In 1 Chronicles 29, David worships God with these words: yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours.

This means that when we open the Bible, we are not reading the opinions of ancient writers. We are encountering the Word of the One who holds all authority in heaven and on earth. We do not stand over Scripture to judge it. We stand under it, and it judges us.

A Love Letter, Not a Law Book

Here is what makes all of this more than an intellectual exercise. Scripture is not primarily a rulebook handed down by a distant authority figure. It is a love letter from a God who bent low toward his creation and said, I want you to know me.

Every page of the Bible points ultimately to Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word. John 1 describes him as the Word who was with God, who was God, through whom all things were made, in whom was life, and whose life was the light of men.

Isaiah 40 promises that the grass withers and the flower fades, but the Word of our God will stand forever.

The tribe in Papua New Guinea wept because they understood what they had been given. May we recover that same sense of wonder. The Bible is not a burden. It is a treasure. And it was given to you by a God who loves you and has gone to extraordinary lengths to make himself known.

Open it. Read it slowly. Let it read you.