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.