Good Friday morning! Hows come I have no trouble knowing it is Friday, but had trouble with Thursday? It seems that my Friday radar is still working despite not being in the corporate world for more than a year now. Itsa Friday! I don't know how, but I just knows.
A few weeks ago the pastor bounced this one off us, and I posed it to the life group last week: How do you dispose of a Bible? Get past the 'why would you want to?' part and just assume that the Bible is so worn that it isn't salvageable. What do you do with it? The Internet had some interesting answers. In summary:
1. Burn the Bible as you would a flag - with ceremony and proper respect - scatter the ashes.
2. Bury the Bible with an appropriate ceremony and prayer.
3. Give the Bible away if it is at all usable. One suggestion for this was to a church, but most already have more worn out Bibles than they need. Pastor Doug also noted that it is much cheaper to print Bibles overseas than to ship our old Bibles over there. Also a lot of folks over yonder would have no use for a Bible printed in English in any case.
4. Toss the Bible in the trash as you would any other book. Not a popular suggestion, but it is a possibility.
5. Perhaps the best - recycle the Bible by wrapping it in plain paper and placing it in your paper recycling bin. One of the Bible societies recommended this one.
Almost all of the sites I found reminded us that the Word of God is sacred, but that the Bible is only our way of recording the Word, not the Word itself. I found one site with a complicated 11-step process involving burial, a small wooden cross, burning the cross, ceremony, holy water, blessing, display in the home (after burial!), and finally disposing of it. This seemed a bit far fetched to me and comes from a dubious source - a site claiming to be the voice of atheism since the 19th century. They, of course, claimed the formula came from somewhere else, but didn't cite their source.
I know the American Legion holds ceremonies to properly burn old flags from time to time; we might adopt a similar ceremony as a service to our communities. Of course, just thinking about disposing of a Bible causes us to realize how important a copy of God's Word is to each of us. I believe Sandy brought up the fact that she had the first Bible she had been given, and many of us seconded that. There is something special about being given a Bible when you believe in Jesus. Even secular folks, I suspect, might have trouble just tossing a Bible in the trash.
So, character test - two pedestals, one with a Bible, the other with a gold ingot. You can only choose one; which do you take? And no fair doing the old "I can take the ingot and go buy a bunch of Bibles!" Most folks would grab the gold without a second thought, but the choice does bring up the value of God's Word. In eternity, a copy of God's Word in this life will have far more value than any amount of gold. We know that, but not everyone has their values in the right order. Certainly gold is useful to anyone, but the Bible holds the words of eternal life. Which do you value more?
Have a loving Friday in Jesus!
Bucky
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