Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
I remember the days of black and white television. I used to sit in front of a small black and white TV connected to two rabbit ear antennae to watch after school cartoons. The day we got a new color TV was a big deal! It was a whole new experience.
Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
Color is a beautiful thing! The fact that we see our world splashed with green, yellow, pink, red, orange, blue, purple and everything in between is amazing. Color portrays life, vibrancy, uniqueness, depth, joy, growth, passion and so much more. Most of the time we take color for granted but imagine a life without it. Life without color would seem rather dull and unremarkable. It would be less than interesting.
I think this is the perception we sometimes have of the Bible. We see it in black and white, figuratively speaking and yet quite literally as well. The stereotypical Bible looks like a book with a solid black cover and pages and pages of black text on thin, almost see through white paper. The only splashes of color to be found are the gold letters of “Holy Bible” etched on the front and the short red ribbon bookmark peaking out the bottom. What would your first impression of such a book be? Dull. Boring. Uninteresting. Even if we do brave the expected dullness of the book, the challenges involved in understanding it suggest that its a book without color and not worth reading.
While that might be the impression you have of the Bible, I want to tell you that its simply not true! The Bible is a very colorful book, its just a little difficult to see at times. One of the things I do to help me see the Bible in color is color code. It is quite literally taking colored pencils and using them to highlight things I notice as I read, particularly that list of twenty things to notice I mentioned last week. The result: I see more clearly Paul’s concerns for the church, I discover the connections that the author of Hebrews makes to the Old Testament, I hear God’s heart in the Law, I feel the emotion of the Psalmist. It’s not about having an elaborate system of color coding in order to fill my Bible with color. It’s about discovering the color that’s already there behind the black and white pages of text. It’s about discovering the message of the biblical authors and the beauty and artistry of The Great Author.
Color coding is one way to do this. Try it out! Take that list of twenty things to notice, assign a color or symbol to each item on the list and then use that as a guide to color coding the next passage your read. You might just discover something you haven’t seen before and it might just help you see the Bible in color!
