The immense world of the Bible

Eugene Peterson compares us to warehouse dwellers, who spend our whole lives in a warehouse and don't even know that a world exists outside. When we open the Bible, we enter the unfamiliar world of God. "Life in the warehouse never prepared us for anything like this," he says.

He tells us to stop thinking that the secular world (our warehouse life) is bigger than the biblical one:

We need a complete renovation of our imaginations. We are accustomed to thinking of the biblical world as smaller than the secular world. Tell-tale phrases give us away. We talk of “making the Bible relevant to the world,” as if the world is the fundamental reality and the Bible something that is going to fix it. We talk of “fitting the Bible into our lives” or “making room in our day for the Bible,” as if the Bible is something we can add on or squeeze into our already full lives…

As we personally participate in the Scripture-revealed world of the emphatically personal God, we not only have to be willing to accept the strangeness of this world – that it doesn’t fit our preconceptions or tastes – but also the staggering largeness of it. We find ourselves in a truly expanding universe that exceeds anything we learned in our geography or astronomy books.

Our imaginations have to be revamped to take in this large, immense world of God’s revelation in contrast to the small, cramped world of human “figuring out.” (Eat This Book)