Read Any Good Books Lately? - Part 1

As we have less time for social interactions these days, reading is a great alternative to television, Netflix, and other distractions. In the last chapter of his book, 5 Minutes in Church History, Stephen Nichols asks the question, "Read any good books lately?" I thought I would share it with you because it's a good reminder of what reading has to offer us. I'll spread this over two posts. Here is the first part:

In 2 Timothy 4:13, Paul writes: "When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments." We essentially have the voicing of the needs of a tired, old man. The evenings are growing chillier and he needs his cloak, and for once in his very busy life, he finds himself with time on his hands.

What we are seeing here is what matters most to Paul. As John Calvin says, commenting on the verse, "The apostle had not given over reading though he was already preparing for death." So Paul wants his books, and he especially wants his parchments. Much effort has been expended in trying to identify these books and parchments. Most assume the parchments to be Scripture, as Paul asks for these "above all."

As for the books, that's another story. Were they Plato? Aristotle? Rhetoric, perhaps? Or Logic? Or Nicomachean Ethics? Maybe there was a history, perhaps Paul's well-thumbed-through Thucydides. Maybe one of the books was Aratus; Paul liked to quote the poet, and he quoted him while he was on Mars Hill in Athens. We forget sometimes that Paul was a scholar.

Whatever the identity of the books and the parchments, we do know something for certain about Paul: he loved to read. Books lay out for us the whole breadth of the human condition, reflect the best of man's creative work as God's image-bearer, and point out our need for a Savior, to the glory of God. This concept may be somewhat foreign to us, as reading has fallen on hard times in our technologized culture - entertainment, preferably the visual kind, is in. What Neil Postman said two decades ago is probably all the more true in our day. We have "amused ourselves to death." We have anesthetized ourselves to where we are comfortably numb. Fahrenheit 451is, I'm afraid, off the mark. There's really no need to burn books. People aren't reading them anyway.

We'll finish this in the next post.