In Hebrews 4:12, the Bible describes itself as being alive. Yes, alive as in living. It is this facet that gives the Bible its inexhaustible nature. But what does this mean, “alive” or “living”? How can a book be alive?
Let me give you an illustration: suppose you had a choice of spending every day for the next fifty years with your spouse vs. spending every day for the next fifty years with a stuffed animal.
After awhile, you would grow very bored with one (insert marriage jokes here) and fall more and more in love with the other.
What is the difference?
The difference is interaction.
Things that are alive, generally speaking, interact with us. That’s why we have pet dogs and not pet cement bags. Even live plants have some unspoken advantage over fake plants – they are interacting with us through our shared environment and stimuli we provide them.
Living things engage us in ways non-living things do not. There is something about life.
There is something about God’s Word that makes it different from any other book in my library – life. Interaction. Engagement. Because of this, people can devote their entire lives to studying and learning the Bible, never exhausting its resources.
Living things communicate, respond, interact with us.
The Bible is alive, and it speaks to us and teaches us as a living, breathing instructor before us.