Scrabble Or Jenga?

Scrabble or Jenga?

Board games may be making a comeback. If Americans are looking for more family-oriented entertainment, then classic games like Monopoly, Scrabble, and Life fit the bill. And I for one couldn’t be happier. I love Scrabble. I love that the tiles—one hundred of them in all—are still made of wood and not plastic and that every game offers its players brand-new arrangements of seven letters to work with. Really good Scrabble players will tell you that they can “see” the words in their tiles from long experience of studying rack after rack of them, game after game. But the original one hundred tiles and their corresponding values never change.

Jenga, on the other hand, is not a game I particularly enjoy. Jenga players construct a tower of interlaced wooden slats, and then slat by slat, player by player, the tower is deconstructed. The aim of the game is to see how many (and which) slats can be removed before the tower is compromised and falls.

Scrabble is a game of rightly appropriating raw material. Jenga is a game of taking it away.

When it comes to the Bible—the holy, inspired word of God—are you a Scrabble person or a Jenga person? Do you, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, strive to see the spiritual truth contained in its perfect wholeness and apply that truth correctly in the context of your life, or do you attempt to see which of its “slats” can be removed, leaving something that manages to stand?

The most joyful, infectious, compelling men and women I know are those who believe in the wholeness and mystery of the Word of God; submit their own thoughts and actions to its unchanging truth; and do not attempt to deny, remove, or disregard the parts of it that most offend or challenge them. I don’t want to mishandle an instrument sharper “than the sharpest two-edged sword” (Hebrews 4:12). I want to study it carefully, day after day, year after year, until my eyes more easily see the truth that it holds, and I am able to faithfully apply it to the game board that is my life.

The word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

Hebrews 4:12, NASB