Study Scripture like a Fire Hose
by Jared Johnson
“Drinking from a fire hose” seems to have been coined by former MIT President (1971-’80) Jerome Weisner. A decade after his departure, some cheeky types brought his metaphor to life.
Who’s thirsty?
Last week’s two pieces about studying Scripture were more about depth and detail in our study. Some amazing sermons and world-rocking insights come from such an approach. The Living Word is an inexhaustible well of infinite depth that we’ll never plumb fully, neither in this life or the next.
That said, I’m far more predisposed to drinking from a fire hose than to combing through crumbs. If you stand in front of a fire hose and just need a mouthful or two to rehydrate, you will get what you need! Yes, you’ll be a soaked mess otherwise, but what of it? Retention’s never perfect. When thunderclouds roll over your home or workplace, whenever snow melts, a portion always runs off into ditches, creeks, streams, rivers, and to the sea. Physical precipitation always makes runoff. Who reading this has perfect retention of everything they learned in high school? Learning will also always have “mental runoff.” We never learn anything with perfect, 100% quantity and quality retention.
My study pattern is decidedly high throughput. I try to go through my Bible twice in any given year, and in some years I have been able to get in more readings than that. Hearing entire books (i.e. minor prophets, shorter letters in the New Testament) in one evening’s listen was one of the primary drivers in changing how I understood God’s expectations of His people several years ago. I wouldn’t’ve caught God’s heartbreak over marginalized/poor/oppressed people if I’d fixated on what an individual word really, truly meant while ignoring over-arching paragraphs or chapters. Amos chapter 5 has many, many harsh words for people that we’d call “haves” and it’d be easy to miss those divine corrections if, instead, I wanted to really truly know what “professional mourners” means in verse 16, ignoring some 650 other words.
Hearing the stories of Israel’s and Judah’s various kings in their entirety with a chronological plan putting both Kings’ and Chronicles’ accounts in succession helped me understand their reigns and character in new ways as well, aspects I’d never see if I just read in “publication order” going cover-to-cover.
It comes down to a forest-or-trees conondrum.
In the image (in public domain by US Bureau Land Management/Alaska), there are myriad tree species. Being central-ish Alaska, I’d guess there are willow, aspen, alder, spruce and firs, which are all fairly interesting in their own right, but I’d rather see that whole scene than get nose-to-bark with any single one of them. A forest provides habitat for a rich variety of animals as well, habitat that a single tree can’t manage. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts ... and I can’t see nor attempt to comprehend the whole if I fixate only on parts.
What’s that old thought exercise about a bunch of blind fellas who are all touching an elephant at different spots? One says this incredible creature is like a tree (he’s hugging the animal’s leg), one that it’s like a fat snake (trunk), one that it’s a living wall (its side). Fixating on a phrase or verse at a time is like never getting beyond the proverbial elephant’s toenails.
I have been privileged to listen through the Bible in 90 days a couple/few times. One person on our church staff even did God’s entire Word in a month! We chatted about it in the hallway most or all of the Sundays when he was doing that. He read his Bible for hours a day. He would literally put his Bible on a treadmill screen and read while he was walking at the gym, he read instead of watching any TV in the evening. He read for his devotion and then just read some more before going to work. One morning, I got this text from him: “Finished the Bible this morning. Now, not sure what do to with myself! 😂” I doubt I’ll be on that schedule in the foreseeable future, but what a commitment and what a story! For a season, he gorged himself on the Living Word. (An audio Bible runs very roughly 80 hours; 80 hours ÷ 30 days = 2.67 hours per day.) As dad asked last week – can we ever be spiritually “overweight?” We don’t typically talk about God’s “glory” in these terms, but really, its Hebrew word has, baked into it, the connotation of “heaviness.”
I like firehose study because nothing ever sticks entirely so I might as well take in maximum content & I’ll trust God’s Spirit to stick something new to me each time.
It’s rare, but besides my typical 5-15 chapters on any given night, there is a “trickle” method of study that never fails to hit its mark: divine reading. In “Lectio Divina,” one reads the same passage multiple times, listening for God’s Spirit to prompt us to self-reflect on various ideas, phrases, etc., in a passage. I really need to hear the Word with my ears versus visually reading it with my eyeballs, so this has been a rare treat in my experience, but the Word “always produces fruit,” (Isaiah 55.11, NLT; “can’t return void” as it’s often paraphrased).
There are basically 2 repeating steps to Divine Reading as I experienced it in the past. Once you select a passage:
Read it – slowly, but still naturally (or listen to an audio Bible read to you).
Think about it – pause the narrator, slide your Bible aside. Think about what you just read/heard. Restate in your mind some of the phrases. Mull it over. Just sit there and think about it.
Read it again. If you’re reading, you can let yourself emphasize the words a bit differently. If you’re using an audio Bible narrator, this one’s a challenge.
Think about it again. Let God’s Spirit point out to you different ideas/phrases/words than what you just thought about after your first reading.
Read it again. Vary your pace significantly. Maybe paraphrase a thought here or there.
Think about it again...
If you looked up the link to “divine reading” above, you’ll notice that Wikipedia lists its four steps/movements as Read – Meditate – Pray – Contemplate. That's how wider Christianity understands it and I don’t discount that. Meditate/Contemplate/Pray, though, pretty strongly overlap on a Venn diagram. The movement of one and then other, one then other, helped me practice "divine listening” in a richer way than if I strictly did the 4 steps. Tides flow, then ebb. Night falls, day dawns. The moon waxes, then wanes. We inhale and exhale. I just like the feel of that rhythm: read, listen, read, think, read...
The greater my wisdom, the greater my grief. To increase knowledge only increases sorrow.
Ecclesiastes 1.18, NLT
My child, let me give you some further advice: Be careful, for writing books is endless, and much study wears you out.
Ecclesiastes 12.12, NLT
A cheeky, mischievous type – à la the water fountain engineers above – might say about Scripture study something like Solomon’s words from Ecclesiastes. “I’m gonna watch the game, then read a little Bible after that – after all, ‘much study wearies the body!’” Mm-hm. Yeah, well, Solomon finished horribly and he wrote Ecclesiastes at the end of his – and I mean this – miserable life. He spiritually prostituted himself to dozens, hundreds, of idols and pagan spirits because of all his foreign wives. Solomon’s end-of-life “advice” that wisdom brings grief and study wears us out should be filtered by all of God’s other words. First Kings chapter 11 has a few paragraphs’ commentary about how poorly Solomon finished his life spiritually. So we need to let that larger commentary of Scripture temper his few words quoted above. Solomon said, “wisdom brings grief,” but all of Proverbs chapters 1-9 would like a word. And here we return to the forest-or-trees contrast. Had I not listened to ½ of Proverbs in one stretch on some night years ago, it wouldn’t hit the same way and I wouldn’t’ve reconsidered Solomon’s Ecclesiastes words in context of his end-of-life beleaguered mental/emotional/spiritual state.
When we hear someone drop a mere nugget of Scripture into conversation about some topic or situation and it just doesn’t seem to fit, having that larger picture of God’s Words in mind – the forest view – is what can give us pause. Someone else on our church staff has memorized several New Testament letters! That’s not strictly “studying by fire hose” but knowing, intimately, all of that testimony allows him to filter people, behaviors, attitudes, situations, commentary and more in an instant while I, not having committed so much to memory, need to go digging. “Wait, was it Paul or Peter who said ‘_____;’ oh shoot, maybe it was James?”
So how ‘bout it: forest or trees? Trees are neat. Forests are better.
Let's put a bow on it. As you study Scripture, 1, don’t be cheeky. But also, 2, turn on the firehose once in a while. Don’t get hung up on how much is rushing by you. It doesn't matter at a water park, and it won’t matter right then and there with Scripture. You just might enjoy a good soaking.
