Peterson's Dog

In my last blog A Gospel Culture, according to Scot McKnight, one of the ways to create a gospel culture in our salvation culture is to immerse ourselves into the Story of Jesus as much as we can. Over the years, an imagery has always been stuck in my mind whenever I lost the interest of reading, studying, and meditating on the Scriptures. This imagery comes from Eugene Peterson.

In Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), Eugene Peterson writes:

I always took delight in my dog’s delight, his playful seriousness, his childlike spontaneities now totally absorbed in “the one thing needful.” But imagine my further delight in coming upon a phrase one day while reading Isaiah in which I found the poet-prophet observing something similar to what I enjoyed so much in my dog, except that his animal was a lion instead of a dog: “As a lion or a young lion growls over his prey…” (Isa. 31:4). “Growls” is the word that caught my attention and brought me that little “pop” of delight. What my dog did over his precious bone, making those low throaty rumbles of pleasures as he gnawed, enjoyed, and savored his prize, Isaiah’s lion did to his prey. The nugget of my delight was noticing the Hebrew word here translated as “growl” (hagah) but usually translated as “mediate,” as in the Psalm 1 phrase describing the blessed man or woman whose “delight is in the law of the Lord,” on which “he meditates day and night” (v. 2)…But Isaiah uses this word to refer to a lion growling over his prey the way my dog worried a bone.

Hagah is a word that our Hebrew ancestors used frequently for reading the kind of writing that deals with our souls.

When Isaiah’s lion and my dog meditated they chewed and swallowed, using teeth and tongue, stomach and intestines: Isaiah’s lion meditating his goat (if that’s what it was); my dog meditating his bone. There is a certain kind of writing that invites this kind of reading, soft purrs and low growls as we taste and savor, anticipating and take in the sweet and spicy, mouth-watering and soul-energizing morsel words—“O taste and see that the Lord is good!” (Ps. 34:8). (p. 2)

The way we read the Bible should be the way Peterson’s dog plays with the bone. The dog licks it, plays with it, turns it over, and licks it again. Then, the dog moves it to another place and does it all over again.

The dog does it only because he loves the bone.

This is how we immerse ourselves into the Scriptures.