Flute beneath the Gold: Reading the Bible and Speaking the Truth

As the legend goes, in the days when Moses worked as a shepherd, he carried a simple wooden flute on which he played a tune to call the sheep. After Moses died, according to the story, the flute became prized as a holy relic from the life of the great leader. Eventually, those who wished to preserve Moses' flute had it covered in layers of gold. Once it was gold-plated, the flute certainly looked more sacred and seemed more special, but, covered in all those layers of gold, it no longer made the music for which it was created.

The legend of Moses' flute might be seen as a parable of all those well-intentioned layers that have been added to the original music of the gospel of God. Acclaimed author and pastor Charles Poole's latest work, The Flute Beneath the Gold, asks the question: What if we could peel back some of those layers, look behind them and find our way back to the flute beneath the gold, the gospel without the guards? The fact is, we all will always read Scripture and seek truth through the acquired lens of Christian history and church doctrine, and we need the church to guide us in that quest. But if we could at least read the Bible, actually read all of it, and then speak the truth about what we have found, perhaps we could recover some simpler song; some less-encumbered tune that waits somewhere near the faraway place where the gold ends and the flute begins.