I wrote the majority of this back in November of 2017, but now having seen my own book published and struggling for attention, it really hits home.

I was scrutinizing the text of 2 Corinthians in an effort to understand a verse in context. I was thinking about the density of thought and concept contained in Paul’s letters. Every line weaves together ideas and principles to build the points he makes. I considered the difference between studying 2 Corinthians and reading an average online article or even the latest book from a respected author. There is no comparison. Few people write at that level of complexity, and few will make the effort to understand them if they do. That is why I tried to make my writing “accessible.”

There are a couple of things to note here. First, the Bible is God’s written communication meant to facilitate the salvation and sanctification of humanity for millennia. One should expect that kind of work to be packed with a little more meat than anything else one might choose to read. Second, it is a collection of writings translated from old languages that are no longer spoken in the form that they were written in if spoken at all. We should expect to struggle a little to follow the thought process. The level of clarity that we do have is itself a testament to God’s hand at work throughout the ages.

Now here’s the other contributing factor that I think explains the difference. You see it in the overall quality of literature through time. I’m hardly a qualified critic. Just ask my English teachers. But I will make these observations. It takes time for a book to mature into a classic. It has to be read a lot, be unusually well written, and touch us in some deep place that most cannot reach. How hard will it be then, in a world overrun with words, to find those few that are worthy of extraordinary notice?

In basic economics, the more there is of something, the less value it has. The easier something is to produce, the more of it we will have. Words today are cheaper than ever in history. It might take me as much as an hour to edit this blog post depending on how careful I am about what goes into it. Yet with one click it becomes potentially available for the entire world to read. Anyone with a computer and a few extra dollars can self-publish their own book. The world is flooded with words. That is why I made an effort to find a publishing company to improve my chances of getting noticed.

Compare that to the effort required in centuries past. When the works that eventually became the Bible were produced, every stroke was done by hand with crude writing instruments. Every copy had to be painstakingly written out the same way. Whether it be a letter to a friend or an epic story, care was required to make every word count.

It is no wonder to me that even in the pages of writing from the past century we can find a level of depth and nuance rarely seen in anything you pick up today. We had the printing press, then eventually the typewriter, but it still required considerable investment of time and effort to get one’s words into print and in front of an audience. Now, words are cheap. It takes little effort to produce them and even less to publish them for all to see. We’re all a-twitter and saying little more than the birds from which we get the term.