First take, cold read, I love this stuff!!! The struggle, the struggle of faith comes out repeatedly in the scriptures, and reminds us that we are not alone in our own struggles. We are all united in our imperfections.
The great advantage of reading the scriptures aloud for the first time, and attempting to interpret their emotion on the fly, is that you must eventually surrender to your own intuition, and meet the text where YOU are. This is the only place from which any work can be done.
When we read quietly and slowly, attempting to understand the text, we encounter it with our minds, and attempt to master it before we speak it. There are two problems with this approach:
1) It does not reflect the experience of the speaker in the text, who is GOING THROUGH something, not analyzing it after the fact. We should not assume that the speaker is speaking from a place of having figured it out, in fact, quite the opposite.
This explains the repetitiveness of the Bible, which so many generations of intellectuals have blithely dismissed as annoying redundancy. But it is the act of witnessing the repeated errors of our elders, in spite of faithfulness, in spite of even great blessings, that invites us to draw the parallel to our own lives and be comforted and instructed along with them, lest we should worship them as idols.
To encounter the text without understanding, with innocence, as it were, gives a practical worship perspective on the verse, “whosoever shall not enter into the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.
Encounter the text as a child the first time — and every time!
2) Pride tells us that we can figure out the text before we read it. But the experience of the speakers in the text tells us that no matter how long a servant of the Lord follows in his way, he will still find himself begging for understanding. There are things which are not given us to know. From an acting standpoint, how many actors rob their performances of all vulnerability by “solving” the mystery of the text, and instead of delivering a living performance, render a static and stillborn “answer?” (At least one that I can think of.)
And pride’s greatest flatterer is the intellect. It is the intellect which can rationalize even our most depraved behavior. And it is the intellect which is attacked by the Deceiver. It is the part of us that is in league with Prometheus, and still envies the gods their fire, even after we have used it to create such destruction and havoc in our lives.
