Cheap Salvation

I made of point of never forgetting something I observed two years ago, and I think I still have most of it; unfortunately even the most arresting mind ramblings fade over time like everything else. Let me take you back to August of 2007.

I’m sitting at a student World View conference about two weeks before I begin my official college career. I’m in a fevered frenzy of pen scratches and underlines, trying to capture everything the speaker says; it’s all gold and may one day be incredibly applicable, of course.

In a moment of rest for my clamped fist and brain, I notice the boy sitting next to me with Bible closed and balancing on his lap. This would be ordinary, only I’m not used to seeing Bibles with a proof of purchase and retail price plastered on the back. This particular copy of God’s inerrant, infallible word cost a mere $2.99, I believe, a real bargain of a buy.

$2.99. That was it. This wasn’t a Christian bookstore Bible; it wasn’t even a Gideon Bible. It was an honest to goodness cheap Bible, if such a thing can exist without being oxymoronic. I could just see it on the Dollar General shelf, haphazardly tossed in among Sudoku games and jumbo crossword puzzles, just south of the cotton candy romances and east of the condensed Disney stories. There, tucked away like any other thick and daunting book, you can find your very own paperback KJV.

At the time, I was shocked; God’s word, His Spirit-inspired, holy, living-and-active word is worth far more than three bucks! It’s worth my life!

Well yes. It is that. But I was missing the point when I put a price on it, or rather, felt like there should be a greater price on it. Had I dared to touch that Bible (I was suffering an acute attack of Bible racism at the time) and opened it to John 20:31, I would have found that it said, “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

Odd. That’s what it said in my state of the art, Christian bookstore Bible.

The point is this: I could go buy a $60 study Bible with all the bells and whistles, but at its core it would be no different. The treasure whose value I was trying to quantify couldn’t be quantified. I was being an uppity snob about the Bible, of all things. I was looking at it as a thing, a gem, and wanting it to have the price tag of a gem attached to it.

The treasure found in the Bible is great, far greater than I remember most days, but it is also free to us, thanks to a sacrifice (also unquantifiable). The last thing Christians are entitled to do is make this treasure inaccessible to the “everyman” by stuffing it full of extras and binding it in every color of the religious rainbow. Christ came to penetrate hearts and transform lives, and while the affluent believers my fail to remember it, this includes the underprivileged. They ought to be handed this treasure, not forced to dig deep into their pockets because well-meaning Christians have marketed their Bible.

I am now convinced that Dollar General shelves are where the Bible is supposed to be, and that $2.99 is not too small a price. Leather bounds, map indexes, and gold lettering on our Bible covers have yet to make the words of Jesus more powerful. If the story of our salvation is going to be sold, let it be cheap.