The Scribe

The Scribe is part of Francine Rivers’s Sons of Encouragement series.

A series of 5 novellas focused on 5 different biblical historical figures: Aaron, Caleb, Jonathan, Amos, and Silas.

In The Scribe, we follow Silas, who is The Rich Young Ruler. As some apparently believe. Silas is “The Scribe” who recorded some of the letters of Paul in the New Testament. He also accompanied Paul on his travels and was a believer himself who encouraged many others on these journeys. This is his fictional story.

The beginning of his story reminded me of the beginning of many in the bible because Silas is left to pick up the mantle when those who once led him are now dead.

I’ve never meditated on what it might feel like to be the one left behind to a legacy of love when you have just witnessed brutal atrocities against those you love.

Silas is weighed down by heavy grief, his life is in severe danger, and he is convinced that he is going to die, and he ought to accept it now.

Witnessing another crucifixion, he can’t help but see humanity’s action as one with the influence of the devil.

“Silas groaned. Oh, Lord. Even had I been blind, I would have heard the wrath of Satan against mankind in that arena, the lustful rejoicing at bloodshed. He murders men, and they help him do it!”

He’s haunted and traumatised by all he has witnessed. To the point of it silencing him. To point of wishing himself dead. He is a true grieving soul, discouraged by it all with a faith admittedly weakened by finally losing Peter and Paul.

“Can I dwell on the past without being undone by it?”

You’d think with all that time around men of God, having the privilege to record their words inspired by the Holy Spirit, Silas would pick himself up by his boot straps and launch forward with a confident faith.

Francine Rivers often tells stories in ways that address the fact that faith is not easy. She starts in the dark, and we end up okay. She displays God’s power and faithfulness when hardship of the very worst nature has occurred. You walk away knowing His is a power that transcends even death.

Silas ends up travelling to an environment that is not insensitive to his loss, nor does it seal its lips towards his new responsibility. He must continue to serve God.

Like most of the Sons of Encouragement series, it threw off my expectations by Rivers’s choice of execution of the premise.

I thought we’d be in first person with Silas as he lived alongside Paul and Peter. We are not.

I thought – first step in – we’d be full of zeal and faith. We’re not.

Most of what Silas experienced with Paul and Peter and before Paul and Peter is told as he writes an account of his life while recovering from their deaths. What he recounts are things of great difficulty. It’s not a sparkly optimistic Hollywood montage or something over brutalised. While it is full of death, beatings, and rejection… The feeling of hardness rises from this unavoidable fact that being a Christian was – and is – battle after battle. It put a lump in my throat. Not just knowing he could die (and by extension that we, as Christians, could die for our faith), but that after the joy of knowing Christ as He walked the earth, only hardship remained.

The remaining Christians only had each other, and they lost each other in horrific ways. They battled two cultures between the Gentiles and Jews, being hated on every side. That’s not exactly the life most of us live today. Also, Silas was down in the beginning, but goodness, look at everything he faced before Peter and Paul died!

As the reader, you have to literally sit down and prepare yourself, just like he does, to look back on all that and find a reason to stay faithful, to forgive, to love.

It was a hard read.

I didn’t want to be there.

What then about my own faith? When things get hard, is that what I’ll feel? An urge to go watch pretty, easy things that are always so readily available these days?

I wanted to stop reading.

Instead, I stayed. It’s important to catch it all. Uncomfortable as life is, we don’t run from challenges when we know the God we serve.

Francine Rivers knows how to keep pointing to God. Someone once said, “You know you’ve got a good friend if every time after you hang out with them, you want to be more like Jesus.” She’s that author for me.

Every. Single. Time.

Silas begins his personal account from the start of his faith journey. Before his conversion, before meeting Paul, before meeting Timothy, before travelling with Paul, and before preaching Christ the Messiah everywhere.

Do you have any idea what it might’ve looked like to build the church back then?

Silas writes of times when Jesus was rejected among the Jews and Gentiles, and order was just being formed. They stumble through the process, getting some things wrong here and then right in other places.

I don’t know why it never stuck it out to me that it was hard to deal with people. Persecution, you expect in a story such as this one. What I didn’t expect was the in-fighting, watching strong attachments form between men and women of no blood relation, and Francine Rivers’s version of Paul.

It’s so much simpler than you’d expect. By which I mean that the supernatural should be huge and epic, right? And it is, if you’re not blind to the miracle of those everyday moments where we are touched in small ways and it changes us in big ones. Things like supporting each other, older men teaching younger men the ways in which they should go, believers having Godly conversations, and people humbling themselves before others. That is miraculous to me. That is light and beauty.

Especially because it means dying to ourselves in the process.

I got to see what it cost these believers as well. They had very human responses when the people they preached to didn’t want to concede.

“How many times had I seen the Good News greeted with anger and scorn? Most people don’t want to hear the truth, let alone embrace it. To accept Christ’s gift means admitting that everything on which we based our lives before has gained us nothing. It means surrendering to a power greater than ourselves. Few want to surrender to anything but their lusts. We cling to our vanity and go on striving to find our own way when there is only one way.”

They were rejected.

Being written with a large focus on Silas’s account of the past, I yearned to see more of how it changed his heart to write it. As a reader, I am to suppose that Silas is being touched recalling all this, just as I am moved  while he writes it. Yet, with so few moments where we zoomed out of his accounts to see how he felt… I found myself longing to be in the present very much.

When we did come out of his accounts for air, it was Diana (a fictional love interest) that was on his mind. I like romance, but I wanted more focus on Silas’s other aspects of life. How he felt now and what recalling the accounts meant to him.

Was he gaining strength? Getting more depressed? Forming relationships with the other believers around him? We don’t get to see those relationships being built in real time!

The account, itself, was very heavy reading. Being an account, it did its best to show, not tell, but not in a way that the story read like fiction. It read like the bible, in a way, so it took more of my meditation, more thoughtfulness, which is not an issue when reading my bible. I expect to get deep like that; to see beyond and dig. But fiction can be hard to read like that. I wasn’t trying to rush through, but it was a struggle to engage with the ease that I often have in a fictional setting. Or maybe it was because I can’t understand what the characters are going through yet? The writing left me disconnected quite a bit.

But like the Word, having to look beyond and dig deeper, I was encouraged to seek God for understanding where my heart couldn’t comprehend.

Many of the parts that made me lose interest were scenes that were repetitious because they were constantly preaching Jesus, caring for enemies, full of concerns for safety, and praying without ceasing.

So much of it is repetitive, but that’s the truth! The emphasis isn’t dull. It ended up showing me something. Something I prayed that my heart would be soft enough to receive. May we never tire of hearing or spreading the Word. Paul, Silas, Luke, and Timothy spoke of Jesus many times, but some were hearing those words for the first time each time they spoke. It wasn’t for variety or novelty. I tried to keep recounting the events in their importance and their limitless splendour as they said the same things again and again.

Which is a valuable lesson.

As well as this:

“It was not your words that convinced me,” he told us. “It was your love…”

Remembering why they did what they did was important fuel to keep with the book. I wasn’t just reading about some hero’s quest to further his own glory or entertain me. I tell you, sometimes the eyes with which we read books decide whether or not we can determine their value at all.

I remember starting my journey with Christian fiction and hating so much of it. Every time I’d read reaching for the old secular enjoyments, I’d realise that it only highlighted my previous love for evil. I would not find what I once sought on these pages. Only then did treasures open up before me. My heart broke, and I would pray as I read and look to Him.

The Scribe clearly put me in a meditative state on the life of a Christian. Reading Silas’s journey is a great way to face some of the realism of Christianity and restore a broken faith.

It’s a story about Silas, but so little about Silas. But I think that’s also the point.

“It is not by your word or mine that men are saved,” Paul told him when he came to Titius’s home, “but by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

“But am I capable?”

I gave him what advice I could. “God has equipped you for the work. Remember: we can ask God for wisdom, and He will give it without rebuking us for the asking. But be sure when you ask Him that your faith is in the Lord alone. Don’t waver, Timothy. And don’t try to work things out on your own. Trust Jesus to show you the right path. Then take it! When He gives you the words to speak, speak them. Do those things and God will do work here in Ephesus.”

I definitely recommend this book. Especially to settle into some big ideas and big uncomfortable feelings. It’s not easy on the heart, but may it reinforce your faith and prepare your heart for every struggle of this miraculous fellowship we share in Christ Jesus.

The Scribe also came with a Seek and Find Bible Study, as did the other 4 novellas in the series. I read from a five-in-one collection called Sons of Encouragement.

I think almost all Francine Rivers books come with questions at the end. I used to skip them, but now I kind of like doing the studies. It’s wonderful to think at the end of a book or be encouraged to head into the Word and see what God says about what you just read. Books are an escape for some, but if God is your refuge, being pointed right back to His Word is the sweetest escape from all calamity.

Happy Reading!

If you have read this book, I would love to hear your thoughts about it as well! What did you like about it? What did you hate?