“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.”
Mark 10:45
If you are maddeningly familiar with the Scriptures and you love Jesus, but you are stuck in a Bible-reading rut and looking for the next level of depth with God’s Word, let me suggest one word that has the potential to unlock a whole new layer of interest, engagement, and spiritual clarity for you: Design.
I grew up with some assumptions about the Bible based on my own experiences that wound up being a million miles from the truth. For one thing, growing up in the American South in the ’80s meant that the Bible itself was a ubiquitous thing in my world. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting a Bible. Copies of that book were absolutely everywhere. That fact led me to assume the first believers in Jesus had just as many copies of the Scriptures lying around all over the place as we did. I pictured first-century churches having tons of affordable paperback Bibles, just like every single room of my church did. I assumed writing the Bible was just like writing a letter, an email, or a text—in other words, something you simply throw together using whatever happens to be at the front of your mind at the moment. Again, I was way off. When the New Testament authors wrote their works of Scripture, writing itself was one of the most highly specialized and expensive activities an individual could undertake. To write a long-form work like one of the four Gospels would have required a deep education, tons of costly materials available only to skilled craftsmen, and a fairly significant capital investment from backers with expendable means.
What does all this mean? Well, for one thing, it means that no work of Scripture was some knee-jerk, haphazard thought jotted down in the heat of the moment on scrap paper lying around. These books required not only vast resources to come into being in the first place, but, from a content-creation standpoint, extensive care, intention, time, precision, and methodical composition. All of this points to one thought that can really change the way you read the Bible and has the potential to utterly transform what you get out of your experience with Scripture. That one thought goes like this: The Bible wasn’t thrown together. It was highly organized and intricately designed by people who not only followed Jesus, but who were themselves gifted artists who used their pens like paintbrushes and computer code. They fully intended to ignite your imagination and open the door for the Holy Spirit to run a program of change in your heart and mind. When you read Scripture, open your heart to the Lord, but also open your heart to these brilliant, artistic authors who know how to engineer an experience that can take your understanding to a whole new plane.
How does that work exactly? Well, let me give you one place to start with our last look at a helpless person who came to Jesus. It was the story of blind Bartimaeus, who received his sight on the border of Jericho. Books that are highly designed are meant to be read, reread, thought about, discussed, and read over and over again for the rest of your life. That’s what you do with the Bible. When you read the Gospel of Mark, you’re supposed to read about Bartimaeus, notice some things, write them down, talk to a friend about them, put them in your pocket as you live your life, and then, the next time you read through Mark, remind yourself of them as you read it again. If you did all that, what might you notice this time through? Oh boy…that’s where everything gets really cool.
Maybe the last time you read through Mark, you noticed that this scene with Bartimaeus is the last miracle before the resurrection. Is that weird? We are only two-thirds of the way through the book, and this is the last miracle before the very end? Why? Is this part of Mark’s design? Surely Jesus did a ton more miraculous things, but Mark has decided to skip them all. Why? Is he trying to show us something? Who knows, but if you carry that knowledge into your next journey through Mark, maybe you remember that fact right before you read about Bartimaeus. If so, you might notice that this very last miracle is situated directly after Mark gives us the single most critical and important statement in the entire Gospel. Bartimaeus isn’t just the last miracle Mark gives us before the cross; it’s the first thing he gives us after dropping the atomic bomb of his entire theme for the Gospel. What is this heart of the Gospel? What is Mark’s main theme about Jesus? It’s in chapter 10, verse 45, where Jesus says that He came not “to be served, but to serve” and give His life away to pay our ransom and buy us back for Himself. And after that stirring and electric statement, Mark gives us one last miracle to consider.
It’s a miracle where the most powerful being in all the universe humbly faces a broken, needy creature and says, “What do you want? Make a wish. I’m here for you. Your brokenness is why I came. Do you have the courage to admit what you need and say it out loud? If so, I have come to serve you and help you and rescue you, and nothing can stop me from doing whatever it takes to make you whole.” From that point on, we see God in the flesh on the long march to laying His beautiful life down for you and me. Mark designed this book in such a way that the more you read, the more you ask, the more you need, the more you will find. You’ll see Jesus declare exactly why He came, and, as if on cue, everything else He does from that moment on is His way of saying, “Watch this!”