“Christians claim to believe the Bible is God’s Word. We claim it is God’s divinely inspired, inerrant message to us. Yet despite this, we aren’t reading it.”
– Ed Stetzer, Christianity Today

If you google “biblical illiteracy” you will find numerous surveys and stats (largely from the US) about the lack of biblical knowledge amongst those who claim to love God and the Bible.

Not only does it seem that Bible reading is on the decline in churches, even some preachers seem to use the Bible as merely a springboard for their own human opinions. God’s Word has been silenced and replaced with self-help sound bites.

By contrast, I’m always challenged by the seriousness with which Muslim children approach the Quran. Many Muslim children memorise the entire Quran, even though they cannot understand what they are reciting because it is in Arabic! Those who have accomplished this amazing feat are called, “Hafiz” (a memorizer) and are highly respected in their communities. Hours of practice and endless repetition is required to be able to learn and recite the Quran perfectly in a language you may not know. Imagine passing a test where you have to continue reciting a passage that has been chosen at random from the Quran, and which you might not even understand! I’m told that in Pakistan alone, 1 million children have gained the title “Hafiz” over the past number of decades.

It has been shown that memorizers of the Quran who have never studied Arabic, actually perform better in demonstrating the rules of grammar than other groups of memorizers who first study Arabic! How is this possible? Through memorization alone, they learned patterns of grammar without even realising it! The study revealed:

This knowledge was not explicit; they could not explain how pronouns, verbs, and nouns worked, but they could judge whether a sentence they had not heard before was correct or not with accuracy. Surprisingly, the memorizers with no classroom Arabic did better than those who had had lessons.”
Source

What of our diligence, as Christians? Over the years, as I have led various Bible Studies, taught at a Bible college, etc. I have often conducted my own experiment to see how well we know the Bible. I will ask a group of believers to add up the years that they have been Christians. I then challenge them to give me 3-5 facts about a particular book of the bible – the author, some verses, content, characters, events, etc. and if they can do so, we will assume that they know what that book of the Bible is about. If not, we will mark the book as: unknown. Now keep in mind we are doing this as a group, not just as individuals. I then read the list of Bible books … Genesis … Judges … 2 Kings … Amos … Obadiah … 2 Corinthians … 1 Thessalonians … 2 Timothy … Titus … Jude. We simply see if we can list a few things about each book. In one group, the total years we had known Christ was 150 years. To our shock we discovered that we didn’t know what 80% of the Bible was about! We could only give a few facts about 13 of the 66 books of the Bible – the rest were pretty much unknown!

We claim to believe that, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness …” (2 Timothy 3:16-17), then why are we not reading, studying and preaching all of it? Are we not silencing the voice of God by neglecting certain books of the Bible?