The Prologue Somebody Else Wrote

His Bible falls open in one place. He noticed it the way you notice a thing about yourself that has been true for eleven years.

It opens somewhere around the letters, because that is where the spine has gone soft, and the front third of it is stiff and clean and smells like a new book, and he has had it since his fortieth birthday.

He was not embarrassed exactly. He was more curious about what he had been doing.

Because it is not that he thinks the first part is untrue. Ask him and he would tell you it is the word of God, all of it, and he would mean it. It is more that he thinks of it as belonging to somebody else, the way you think of a friend's family photographs. Real. Important. Theirs.

He respects it. He simply does not go in.

And it came to him standing at the counter one night that he had been treating half of his own book like a prologue that another family wrote, and that he had been reading the last two hundred pages of a story for eleven years and calling it the story.

He said it out loud to nobody. Half of this is a room in my own house that I have not been in.

You know that stiff spine.

Maybe your Bible falls open in the same place. Maybe you have read the letters forty times and Isaiah once, at a funeral. Maybe you have a vague sense that the front half is difficult, or violent, or for scholars, or for a different people, and that a person can be perfectly all right without it.

Nobody told you that in so many words. It came in sideways, the way most of what we believe about our own faith comes in.

What He did on that road

There were two men walking out of a city on the worst afternoon of their lives, and a stranger fell in beside them, and what He did next tells you what the first half of your book is for.

And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.Luke 24:27

Read what He reached for.

He did not comfort them with a new teaching. He did not tell them to look forward. He took them back through the oldest material they had, all of it, from Moses forward, and He showed them that it had been about Him the entire time.

Which means the front third of your book, the stiff clean part, is not the prologue. It is the long account of the One you already love, written before He arrived, by people who were waiting for Him.

You are holding one book about one Person, and the half you have been leaving alone is full of Him. That is what the road to Emmaus says out loud, that in all the scriptures He expounded the things concerning Himself (Luke 24:27), and it is the Holy Spirit who does that same expounding now, which is why nobody needs a scholar standing next to them to open it.

And notice who was doing the teaching in that scene. Not a man with a library. The risen Christ, on a road, with two ordinary people who were too sad to think straight.

This is not a room you were kept out of

Let me say the plain thing, because a page like this can quietly turn into a scolding and I will not let it.

Nobody locked that door on you. Your church did not hide the first half of the book, and the people who taught you were not withholding anything, and the reason your spine is soft in one place is not a conspiracy. It is that the letters are where a new believer is usually sent first, sensibly, because they are where a person is told what has happened to them.

There is no failure here to go back and find. Not yours, and not anybody's.

You have had the whole book the entire time and nothing was ever taken off you. Scripture says all scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16), and the Spirit who inspired the whole of it is the same Spirit in you while you read any page of it.

So what is on offer here is not a correction. It is a door in your own house.

The family in the front of the book is your family

Here is the thing that changes a man's grip on that stiff section, and it is not a technique.

The people in the first half are not a different family that you are permitted to read about. They are the beginning of yours.

Abraham is not their ancestor and your example. Sarah laughing in the tent is not their grandmother and your illustration. The songs David wrote in caves are not their hymns that you are allowed to borrow on a hard night. That is the whole claim of the New Testament about the reader, and it is stated in the plainest possible way.

You have been made family with these people, and their history is now the front of your own. The word says if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise (Galatians 3:29), and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Spirit of adoption, which is the mechanism by which a man in a kitchen at forty one becomes the descendant of people he has been treating as strangers.

Which does not mean anybody has been replaced. Nothing on this site says that and nothing here ever will. A family growing does not evict the people already in it, and a page that tells you otherwise has inverted its own passage.