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Why you Shouldn't have your Bible on your Phone

  • Celeste
  • Oct 27, 2016

Please enjoy my first rant I ever posted.

Full disclosure: I do not own a smartphone, no one in my family owns a smartphone, and I have never used a Bible on a phone. These points are based on observation and assumption. Judge for yourself.

Whenever I am in Church, and someone says, “Turn with me to…”, and I see someone pull their phone out of their pocket, I have a gut reaction that says, “This can’t be the best way.” Then, after paging through my Bible in search of Galatians for four minutes, I find myself wondering how much they cost.

But to quote one of my favorite homeschool speakers, “Good can be the enemy of Best.” There are lots of ways having your Bible on your phone can be good. Ease of access, thorough searches, and availability can be some of them. But I want to look at some of the ways where scrolling to a Bible passage can be the enemy of best.

1. Inevitably, you will approach the Scripture with a phone mentality. These are the same few square inches where you see news from yesterday, faulty, ill-thought-out messages, and even some things that are completely false. To then see God’s infallible word in the same space will make it difficult to have the mindset that it cannot and will not change and is utterly reliable. And when it comes to that, how do you know that the Bible says the exact same thing every time it is downloaded? All of the sudden, reading through Genesis 6, it might say, “Then God brought all the animals but the Unicorns to the ark in pairs….”

2. A picky note that I think would bother me, and, perhaps, other highly visual learners, is that when you scroll up or down a page and the verses always appear to be in the same position, it would take away the handy visual cue of remembering where a certain passage or verse is on the page. For example, I can picture right now that John 3:16 is on the right-hand page, in the inside column, about two-thirds of the way down. This helps me to remember which passages come after which, and it helps me with memory somewhat.

3. I’ve heard a preacher touch on this subject directly; and that is, that when they are speaking, and the teens in the back row are all looking at their--well, he said ‘telephones’ but I think he meant smartphones--it is hard to have confidence in the fact that they are not texting or looking at other things on the sly. Indeed, it is a temptation to quickly check the other things on your phone, excusing that it will only take a minute. The result being that the Bible suddenly doesn’t seem so exciting anymore. The preacher suggested that if one was going to be using one’s phone to read the Bible, that they should talk to their pastor and explain what they’ll be doing, if only to ease the speaker’s mind that they are not being ignored.

4. And lastly, the more gadgets and programs one has on their phone, the more dependent on it they will become. When your phone is your all in all, or even if you can’t leave the house without it, you should consider the importance and Lordship of Jesus in your life and whether He is getting His proper place.

We should be seriously thinking through decisions that seem as small as what medium to read the Bible with. I’ll advocate for the hard copy, and I don’t hope to see it die.

 

An Open Letter to its Reader

  • Celeste
  • Oct 25, 2016

I wrote this in my diary one evening. Enjoy!

Apr. 18th, 2016

I suppose I can be just as proud and amazed to be able to truthfully write that date, sitting in a bright, many-windowed room with the glowing screen of a computer before me and the hum of a digital printer beside as I think the people two hundred years ago should have been to be able to truthfully write “Dec. 20th, 1816” with brown ink on thick paper.

Mercer, my brother, age eighteen, brought out an old, old, book with brown, faded pages and the binding no longer existent. He sat down on the couch beside me, asking,

“Have I ever shown you this?” He had to hold it carefully, and, every once in a while as we went through it, to take out whole sheafs of paper and replace them, right-side-up.

All the writing was in one hand, with beautiful curving script and a tendency to discard clarity for style. We spent the last hour or more poring over this ancient manuscript, and we are convinced we have found a treasure.

It was two different notebooks, one appearing to belong to a certain Philip Marsh, the other to a man whose name we could not decode; but the writing was all in the same hand. There was some math, copywork, Bible verses, sermon notes, diary entries and an ongoing history of births, deaths, marriages, baptisms, first sermons and major historical events. This last was of the keenest interest to us, and we read it ponderingly, marveling at the age of the document. The dates of this chronicling of events spanned from 1763 to 1845. Alas, I will not have the privilege of crossing from one century to the next in my lifetime.

I cannot hope to have a discoverer, two hundred years down the road. I am glad - overjoyed; the full impact has not yet been realized - to be that discoverer for someone else. Obviously that was what he had in mind - the importance of documentation, because future generations will otherwise lose the information. He thought that the words we held in our hands were precious, needed, necessary, and so he took valuable time and even more valuable paper to write it all down. He wrote it for the reader.

I will not, most likely, have any reader other than myself. But I put the words down because I believe it is of utmost importance; because I know it will be enjoyed and useful. I think, I dream, and then I write with a purpose. He and I are the same. We put thought into words, we carefully form them on the paper, we read them over to ensure they are the right ones - the ones we intended to say - and then we close the book, put it away, stand up, and continue to think and dream; we speak to the people around us, we laugh and remember yesterday, we lead vibrant and FULL lives. Only a portion ever gets down on paper, and by that snippet the reader must try to recreate us, to imagine us into being once more. O reader! The thought of you gives us joy, makes us ponder, replenishes the material. Be what you are to the full. We want you to invest in us like we invested in you. Think of the time it took us to write to you. The time it takes to dream about us and preserve us is not too much!

In this respect I write to myself as reader, not imagining I will have one to call my own.

And so instead I write to the man of the eighteen hundreds. I live in an exciting time, O 1800. The days are so full of fascinations and ideas that when I find your words, written on parchment strange to me in a pen stranger, I look at it, I exclaim, I imagine I am intrigued, that my life has changed, that this discovery will make me study it for years, and then I put it down, walk up the stairs, undress (I don’t wear a corset, although I wish I could and probably should), hop into bed, fall asleep, and forget about you, about your writing, and about your book, for there are very few things in the world of my day that are intended to hold the attention for more than a few hours, and there are plenty of things intended to snatch the attention away from what is good and place it somewhere else. O 1800 Christian, you thrive. We of the twenty-first century are turning belly-up in the waters of technology (I’ll explain that later) and comfort.

The hour is late. The human race of 2016 is used only to going to bed because they are grumpy. I and my family try to buck the trend and instead go when we are tired. Good night! (And think of what I do afterwards.)

 

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