Christians are blessed with knowledge about the Bible. In a sense, we have never known more about the Bible. We live in an unprecedented era of access to great Biblical research. Millions of books have been written about the Bible – which was the first major book printed on the Gutenberg press in 1455. There is more information available about the Bible than any other ancient book. In a sense, Biblical research has peeled back the darkness of the Middle Ages to take us to the earliest sources. We are blessed by this knowledge.

Also, we have remarkable Bible study tools available. Gone are the days when you had to depend on Crudens Concordance for study – useful though it was! Now you can have the Bible on your smart phone – i.e. in your favorite translation. (It works great for a sword drill!) And you can search the Biblical text for any word combination in any set of books that you can think of. It really makes the Bible a “lamp to my feet and a light for my path” (Psalm 119:105 NIV).

With all of this great Biblical research available to us, you would think that our knowledge of the Bible as individual Christians would be awesome. Yet there are studies that suggest that Biblical literacy is on the decline. Stephen Prothero even has a test for it, and finds most Americans sorely lacking in this day and age. I suspect that this reflects the shift away from talking about religion in the public arena. The Church needs to do a better job of teaching the Bible. How is your Church increasing Bible literacy in your community? Are you using all of the tools, both in print and software? Or are you just sticking with an emphasis on good preaching?

There are multiple Bible translations in use, and that’s just in english. Which one do you display on your worship screens? All of them are valid translations. The preacher should get to choose, and he can choose different translations for the same sermon. Often times there is a subtle emphasis in one translation versus another. How many Bible translations can you support? Probably not all of them, but with advanced notice, you should be able to support most of them.

Growing up, I remember having sword drills with your Bible. The idea was that the Bible study leader would call out a verse, and you would turn to it as fast as you could. The first person to get there got to read the verse. You had to really know where things were in the Bible for that to happen.

In the context of a sermon, you could easily get in the situation where you are having a sword drill on screen. How fast can you look up a verse and put it on the screen? If you know it in advance, you obviously have an edge, but what about an extemporaneous reference to a scripture by the preacher? Your presentation software should be able to look up and format a verse reference on demand in real time. That way, you can deliver for the sword drill on screen before the sermon is over.

One of the amazing things about the Bible is the fact that we have so many ancient copies of it. This might be expected, since it was so revered. But the Bible in antiquity survived incredible persecution, as well as the ravages of time. No other ancient text has been so well preserved. The writings of the ancient Greeks have survived, but only just barely. The Bible is available in well preserved copies dating from the 1st century A.D. Indeed, here is a link to a copy of the Psalms dating to 40 A.D.

Psalms

Electronic copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls are available. The question is when would we need to project these, or interact with them in worship. In some Churches, the scriptures are read in their original languages, but usually we worship in the local tongue. This is one of the consequences of the Protestant Reformation. And the scriptures have now been translated into thousands of languages – i.e. thanks to the Wycliffe Bible Translation effort. But you could show the scripture passage in both the original language and in the local language. All it would take would be a well formatted screen. Would that add to the worship experience? Feel free to comment below.