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 #9 Eat this book

(Eugene Peterson's Eat This Book provided a lot of the ideas for this content)

Jeremiah and Ezekiel are the OT prophets who join John in being partakers of this unusual diet. It certainly is an unusual image.

Peterson notes that there is a passage in Isaiah that speaks of a lion growling over its caught prey — a little like a dog growls over a bone as he worries it and gnaws the meat off it.  The Hebrew word for “growls” in Isaiah 31:4 is “hagah”, which is a very interesting word because in other contexts it is also translated as “meditates”.  For example, in Psalm 1:2 we read “on God's law he meditates [hagah] all night”.

So, to meditate over Scripture is to gnaw on it, to rumble over it with a purring growl of contentment.  It is about eating the book.  To masticate, swallow and digest.  It means getting beyond the pleasure of attaining knowledge to the challenging reality of applying it to our lives (sweet as honey in the mouth, but turning our stomach sour).

One can read the Bible to accumulate knowledge or even to complete a challenge (like reading the Bible in a year) but we need to come to a point where we read as though our very lives depend on it — that we read because we are hungry and our nutrition can only come from Scripture's pages.  We need to gnaw on the bones of Biblical truth and feast on the honey of its life-giving light-to-our-path.  But we must realise that it will sour our stomachs as we subject our broken, sinful desires to Scripture's relentless authority.

Throughout his visionary tour, John has been writing down the Revelation that he had been seeing, but there came a time that he needed to internalise the vision.  When it comes to reading Scripture, there comes a point where we stop taking notes and we eat the book.