The Word of God · The Dipper, Volume IV

Gary W. Boyd, PhD · Wells in the Wilderness

This is a book about a Book.

Not a defense of it. There are good defenses, and they have their place, and this is not that place. A man who needs to be argued into believing the Bible is God’s Word will not be helped much by a devotional, and a man who already believes it does not need the argument. What he needs — what I have needed — is to be shown how much is actually in it.

Because here is what I have found, over and over, and it has never once failed. Take any single thing in Scripture and go down into it. A word. A doctrine. An image. A thread running from Genesis to Revelation. Go down far enough and you come back up staggered. Not entertained. Not merely informed. Staggered, the way a man is when he has stood next to something much larger than he had been told.

That happens because of what the Book is. And this volume is an attempt to let it happen on purpose, a day at a time.

How it is built

Each week runs seven days, and each day comes at the Word from a different angle. One day watches the Word do something to somebody — a king, a scribe, a crowd. One day takes an image Scripture gives of itself: fire, hammer, seed, honey, mirror, sword. One day plumbs a single word down to the floor. One day listens to a writer say, in his own words, what he thought he was doing. One day traces a thread the whole length of the canon. One day takes a single verse clause by clause until it is dry. And the seventh day asks what a man who believes all that is going to do about it.

The days do not depend on each other. Open wherever you are drawn, in any order, the way you would dip into a well rather than walk a road.

Three depths

Every day is written three times over. Springs is a few minutes — the thing itself, plainly. Wells is the full dip, where the day gets worked. Aquifer is for the morning you have time to go down, with the original-language words linked live so you can check the work yourself. Nothing here is quoted from memory.

Take whichever depth the morning actually has. A short drink taken is better than a long one skipped.

Two things on every page

Each week opens with a voice from outside Scripture — Jerome, Tyndale, Wesley, and others who were struck by this Book long before we were. Every quotation has been traced to a primary edition; where an attribution is contested, the page says so.

And every day ends with a question you cannot answer from your chair. Each one sends you back into the text with something specific to find. That is deliberate. This volume is not trying to give you my reading of Scripture. It is trying to get you into it.

Begin with Day One →   See all days →