The Message in the Dead Sea Scrolls

This week I trekked to Ft. Worth to visit the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. The scrolls, found in caves near Qumran by the Dead Sea, date back some 2,250 years and include fragments of 300 biblical manuscripts representing every book in the Hebrew Bible. I think it’s interesting our holy shepherd allowed a simple Bedouin goat herder to “accidentally” discover them back in 1947!

Now, the fragments are preserved behind glass.  They are precious, valuable and worthy of our attention. That’s why thousands of curious people flock to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary to marvel at the relics that give further confirmation of the verse in Isaiah 40, The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever.

With the Dead Sea Scrolls still fresh in my mind, I thought of them at Bible study yesterday when we sang the song, Lord You are More Precious than Silver. The first four lines go:

Lord, You are more precious than silver; Lord, You are more costly than gold; Lord, You are more beautiful than diamonds; And nothing I desire compares with You.

I thought, “We treat the Dead Sea Scrolls like this, “more precious than silver, more costly than gold” but do we honor the Lord like an expensive piece of jewelry? Do we put Him in a special place? Do we value our relationship with our Father in heaven above others?

When the Bedouin goat herders found the first urns containing the Dead Sea Scrolls, there were countless excavations after that as archeologists feverishly combed the caves hoping to discover more fragments from the Biblical scrolls. They were successful in their search.

Would they ever consider leaving anything in the cave or throwing it back after it’s discovered? NEVER!

However, sometimes we do that with our relationship with God, don’t we? We toss Him back in the cave and pull Him out when we have time. We don’t treat him like costly gold or a beautiful diamond. We don’t excavate the scriptures to dig up more of God’s word so we can grow in our spiritual journey.

Proverbs 2:1,2 exhorts us:

 My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding, and if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.

 The Lord is our treasure. He is worthy of our time and honor. He wants us to find Him and he wants us to keep digging to learn more about him. Nothing we desire compares to Him!

What about you? How valuable is God to you?