The Book That Reads You

Truth just walked in, and it’s not taking questions.

I once asked Arnold Bell, on a ministry flight to the NFI training centre in Goa, India, what doctrine he valued most. “Scripture,” he said, without hesitation. “Because everything else flows from it.” He wasn’t making a theological point. He was laying out a conviction. If you lose the Word, you lose the compass. And if you’re off there, it doesn’t matter how much your effort - you’ll end up in the wrong place.

Isaiah says something that doesn’t get quoted often. “This is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.” Trembles. Not nods. Not agrees. Not uses it to win an argument. Trembles. That’s not about nerves. Neither is it a fear of judgement. It’s a posture. A person who takes God at His Word to the point where it shapes every response. That’s someone who doesn’t stand over the text, but under it.

Trembling is more than a reaction. It’s surrender. I found myself thinking about that recently. I was left unsupervised during a routine blood check at the nurse’s office and somehow walked out with a flu jab, a pneumonia jab, and a shingles jab in both arms. One of them decided to make its presence known at about 3am. I woke up trembling violently - as if I’d been asleep in a freezer. No fever. Just intense, uncontrollable shaking. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t pain. It was my body reacting to something it couldn’t ignore.

And that picture hasn’t left me. Because trembling before God’s Word is just that: a deep, involuntary response to something weightier than you. You can’t fake it. You don’t work it up. It’s what happens when something holy presses in and your only honest response is surrender.

It’s possible to read Scripture daily and never tremble. It’s possible to preach it, teach it, even defend it in debates, and still treat it as background. But when the Word is honoured - really honoured - it doesn’t just inform; it interrupts. It corrects your motives, cuts through your preferences, calls you out of patterns you’ve justified for years.

You see it in Josiah. A young king, handed the book of the law that had been lost in the ruins of temple neglect. When it was read aloud, he tore his clothes. Not for show. Not out of tradition. He trembled. He realised they’d been living by assumption instead of obedience. That single moment reformed a kingdom. It wasn’t leadership strategy. It was the raw shock of truth re-entering the room. And it changed everything.

And here’s where it gets subtle. The temptation may come not to disobey outright, but just to soften the blow a little. To reach for a translation that sidesteps the edge. One that wraps the challenge in warmer tones or looser phrasing - or fits our theological stance. That’s not reverence. That’s evasion. There’s a difference between reading a paraphrase to help you see something afresh, and turning to it to avoid what’s already been made clear. When any faithful translation comes too close for comfort, the answer isn’t to look for a softer rendering. It’s to listen. The goal isn’t less conviction. It’s deeper obedience.

Trembling happens when the authority of Scripture is not theoretical. When it makes decisions for you and when you stop asking, “What do I think?” and perhaps, start asking, “What has God already said?”

The church isn’t calling for louder voices. It’s calling for deeper ones. Steady ones. The kind that don’t panic when culture shifts, because they’re anchored to something that doesn’t. You don’t need to shout when the foundation holds. You just need to stand.

That’s why Scripture matters. Really matters. Not because it gives us answers to every modern issue, but because it roots us in the only authority that doesn’t shift with time. It’s why the church needs to recapture that sense of gravity. Not by retreating into slogans or waving alternative Bibles in the air, but by actually letting the Word speak. Not editing it. Not softening it. Just letting it be what it is - truth. And aligning ourselves with it.

Trembling doesn’t mean paralysis. It means reverence with action. A heart that bends quickly when conviction comes. A will that yields before compromise takes root. It’s a way of reading that says, “Whatever this Word says, I will follow, even when it’s inconvenient and even when it costs me.”

There’s no power in merely knowing Scripture. The power comes when Scripture addresses you. When you stop resisting the parts you don’t like or rearrange truth to fit your preferences. It’s when you let it run your whole life, not just the Sunday part. Sometimes that will come with pain, but will carry God’s blessing.

In these days there’s a big challenge where pressure is growing, clarity is rare, where truth is traded for comfort - that we need to remind ourselves, and those around us, that what we have before us, is not just a good book.

This is the Word of God. And we will obey. We will follow. We will trust both it and the Author. Jesus—the Living Word. We do not tremble because we are afraid of being crushed. We tremble because we’ve seen the weight of glory in the One who speaks. And we are not moving.