This was seriously suggested to me recently:

I believe that God speaks to us through the words in the bible. But there are sort of rules of engagement…
First instead of just picking up the bible and reading any old thing, you NEED to ASK God to Speak to you through it. You need to address Him as God and ask him to say something that is relevant to you personally After you do this, sit and wait for a minute or two. Then open the bible. Somehow God’s power helps you to open up to the right page. And there the words seem to speak to you about something you either need to learn, or need to know for some reason. Sometimes they are words of comfort, wisdom, etc… it is amazing how often God hits exactly the right spot in your heart, after you ask him to speak to you personally… May be you’d like to try this?? [blue bird]

I didn’t know that there was a word for this sort of practice, but apparently there is: Bibliomacy.

Bibliomacy is the practice of divining information from random pages of the Bible (or any particular book, given that the root ‘biblio’ literally means ‘book’). Wikipedia writes that “Sometimes this term is used in the same way as Stichomancy and Libromancy, which is a form of divination that seeks to know the future by randomly selecting a passage from a book, frequently a sacred text.”

Atheist Under Ur Bed found the following passages for me from Jackson Lears’s Something for Nothing: Luck in America:

“[M]any Puritans opened the Bible at random to discover if their sick child would live or if God approved an action they were contemplating. Decisions to emigrate to America were often based on bibliomancy” (p. 42)

and

“The practice of bibliomancy survived into the early nineteenth century, but it came under intensifying assault. To evangelicals and liberals alike, it seemed too much like ‘making a lottery-book of the Bible.’ However innocent the ritual seemed, the Panoplist opined in 1816, in actuality it was ‘really tempting God.’ To the anonymous editorialist, this was an outrage: ‘I know of no rite,’ he wrote, ‘termed religious in a Christian country, (that is) more profane, more dishonorable to God, and more dangerous to their souls, than this solumn, deliberate abuse of the Holy Scriptures.’ The Panoplist was outraged on traditional grounds: bibliomancy blasphemed Providence” (p. 78).

Nevertheless, this seems to work for bluebird. And she asked me to give it a try. So, being the type of person who likes to put claims like this to the test, I did.

I am using the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

I requested God to provide me with a message that would be relevant to me. That is an extremely general request, so I was being especially generous in that regard. Then I took the Bible and dropped it on the floor. It opened to what appears to be roughly the middle of the book, which happens to be the book of Isaiah. I selected the first chapter that caught me eye, which was chapter 39:

At that time King Merodach-baladan son of Baladan of Babylon sent envoys with letters and a present to Hezekiah, for he heard that he had been sick and had recovered. 2Hezekiah welcomed them; he showed them his treasure-house, the silver, the gold, the spices, the precious oil, his whole armoury, all that was found in his storehouses. There was nothing in his house or in all his realm that Hezekiah did not show them. 3Then the prophet Isaiah came to King Hezekiah and said to him, ‘What did these men say? From where did they come to you?’ Hezekiah answered, ‘They have come to me from a far country, from Babylon.’ 4He said, ‘What have they seen in your house?’ Hezekiah answered, ‘They have seen all that is in my house; there is nothing in my storehouses that I did not show them.’ 5 Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, ‘Hear the word of the Lord of hosts: 6Days are coming when all that is in your house, and that which your ancestors have stored up until this day, shall be carried to Babylon; nothing shall be left, says the Lord. 7Some of your own sons who are born to you shall be taken away; they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.’ 8Then Hezekiah said to Isaiah, ‘The word of the Lord that you have spoken is good.’ For he thought, ‘There will be peace and security in my days.’

In this chapter, Hezekiah, King of the southern kingdom of Judah, welcomes an envoy from the kingdom of Babylon. He shows them everything in his realm - all of his kingdom’s possessions. Isaiah then confronts Hezekiah and predicts the exile in Babylon, in which all of the kingdom’s possessions are whisked away. The purpose of the visit was to help form an anti-Assyrian alliance with Babylon.

I happen to already know some of the backstory to this. The Assyrians had already invaded the northern kingdom of Israel. Hezekiah figured that the only way to stop a potential Assyrian invasion of Judah was to form an alliance with Babylon. Isaiah, the prophet, however, wanted Hezekiah to simply trust that Yahweh would take care of everything. Of course, that’s not what he did.

So - what could God’s message possibly be in this passage? I don’t know. A king welcomes some diplomats and a prophet warns of gloom. If this is somehow relevant to me then I fail to see it. Maybe Satan is blinding my eyes again.

Of course, there are lots of passages in the Bible that could potentially be interpreted in ways that might seem relevant to anybody at a particular time. All that takes is a bit of creative imagination - no divine power required.

What do you think?

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