Have you ever had a dream that focused entirely on the Bible? You are not dreaming of a theme contained in a story in the Bible. Instead, your bible dream meaning involves the totality of the book itself.
I’m talking about the physical copy, not the teachings as well as the stories contained in that book.
If the main focus of your dreams involves a physical copy of the Bible, you are probably wondering what your Bible dream meaning is.
It’s actually quite deep and inspiring.
What Does It Mean to Dream of the Bible?
When the main image of your nighttime vision is the complete Bible, which includes both the New and Old Testaments, this is a projection from your subconscious that you are looking for inspiration from a deeper source.
The Bible is a written record of divine inspiration.
It is not just a compilation of the teachings of wise people throughout the ages.
Instead, it is the manifestation of teachings as well as historical experience under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
It is not just another book off a shelf.
Instead, it is a revelation of the character of God and his will for people, not just throughout the ages in terms of historical records, but also in terms of salvation and the ultimate meaning behind the human condition.
In total it is a compilation of human knowledge to the extent that the Eternal, the Unformed, and the Infinite can be somehow grasped by limited human understanding.
On the one hand, it is inspiring and awe-filled but at the same time, it demands trust because our understanding is limited.
While we can be counted on to make sense of a large number of things in the universe, at some point there is a dividing line between the divine and human perception and our ability to understand.
Any analysis of dreams involving the bible must involve these themes.
What Is the Meaning of Dreams About a Bible Library?
When you dream of being inside a library containing old and new Bibles, it just indicates that your subconscious mind is beginning to develop a deep, spiritual hunger and curiosity.
Maybe, you haven’t been much of a spiritual person, but things have changed to the point that you have developed a deeper level of spiritual curiosity.
I’m talking about asking yourself why and looking towards the purpose of existence and how people, regardless of our surface differences, are united by our common desire for meaning and transcendence.
You have developed an internal curiosity that goes beyond the physical and the temporary.
You’re looking for the essence of what it’s like to have lived, to live, to survive, and to exist throughout eternity.
What Is the Meaning of Seeing a Bible Burning in Your Dream?
This is a very conflicting image.
On the one hand, you acknowledge the knowledge and the power contained in the words of the Bible.
This is not just a compendium of human understanding and wise sayings throughout the ages.
Instead, it is a physical publication of the Word of God as expressed to His chosen people throughout the ages.
It represents the intersection between the things that we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell and the things that we can barely grasp with our imagination.
It occupies that intersection or that thin line between things that can break down, get sick, fade away from memory, and the eternal.
Seeing that physical manifestation go up in flames, either in the form of a Bible being burned by itself or a stack of Bibles, indicates that you are looking beyond physical manifestations of faith.
You understand that faith drives existence.
Here’s a practical application of this insight.
If you’re reading this sitting down, pay close attention to the chair that you’re on.
Chances are, you didn’t look at the chair and examined it carefully before you sat down.
In fact, if you’re like most people, you just sat down in the blink of an eye because you’re getting ready to go to work or you’re getting ready to check out websites on the Internet.
But for a split second, you’d look at your chair.
What is the connection between looking at your chair for that one brief moment in time and then sitting on it?
This is faith!
You look and in that instance, you got enough information to support your assumption that it is safe to sit on that chair.
After all, you’ve sat on it before and you didn’t fall down or hurt yourself.
So since nothing has changed based on what you’ve seen in that split second, you decided to sit and do what you do normally.
You decided to sit and do what you’ve done countless times before.
This is faith!
Faith is the belief or a set of assumptions and the action that you take based on those beliefs and assumptions.
When you’re dreaming of Bibles burning, there’s a part of you that is waking up to the fact that there are many things in life that you assume to be true.
But you don’t believe all of them to the extent that you actually live your life assuming that they’re true.
This is the difference between book knowledge and second-hand knowledge and actual faith.
Faith is belief in action.
Another example of this is the difference between having a basic understanding of the physics behind a pendulum swinging and actually putting your body in danger by swinging a bucket full of concrete.
If you truly believe in the Law of the Pendulum, then you would know that once it swings one way, it will never swing all the way to where it began because of the diminishing range of motion it has.
That’s the Law of the Pendulum.
But we can all accept this on a mental level, but it’s a totally different thing for you to put your chin against a swinging bucket of cement and trust the Law of the Pendulum.
The same goes with the Law of Gravity.
This is the difference between head knowledge and actual faith.
Many people who claim that they don’t believe in God still act like people who believe in divine intervention and divine laws.
There’s a disconnect, as Jordan Peterson brilliantly pointed out, with people who talk like they’re convinced that there is no God and their actions.
If you truly believe that there is nothing out there and there’s nothing governing behavior and ethics, then why are you behaving like a person who fears divine consequences?
When you see books burning, your level of curiosity about morality has reached this level.
You’re beginning to understand how faith works, not just in your life but in the universe.
What Does It Mean to Dream About Reading the Bible?
Depending on the context, if you’re reading the Bible because of a disaster that has happened or you’re fearing some sort of bad situation from getting worse, this indicates that you are feeling so desperate that you have set aside your ego and have allowed yourself to understand that you know that you don’t know.
This is actually a very positive dream image.
As we get older, our egos tend to take a stronger hold on who we think we are, what we think we can do, or where we can and cannot go — that kind of thing!
We can even get really stubborn.
But when you have a dream where you’re facing a situation that is so difficult that you just break down and just trust the Lord enough to read His Word, this is an act of submission.
You are basically saying to the Universe:
“I know that I don’t know.
I know that I am limited.
I know that I am ultimately powerless so I am going to submit to this greater knowledge that far exceeds my understanding.”
Seeing yourself reading the Bible can have an alternate meaning which indicates temptations to test your faith.
Please understand that faith is not needed if there’s nothing to be faithful about.
If you know that things will work out just as you had hoped, why have faith?
Why hope for things that are unseen?
It doesn’t make any sense?
If the world operates on a simple equation where everything is measurable, why have faith?
Temptations occur within this context because when temptation appears, it looks permanent.
It plays on our sense of weakness.
When you see yourself reading the Bible, you are trying to immerse yourself in the confidence and assurance of the words of that book.
The words of the Bible are God’s Words, the same words that called everything into existence.
These are not just mere sounds translated into letters and characters.
No!
These have power.
In fact in Jewish tradition, words have power.
In the Kabbalah, Jewish scribes talk about using certain words sparingly.
In fact, the name of God isn’t spelled out completely out of respect but for the power that God’s name contains.
When you dream about reading the Bible in the context of temptation, you are trying to draw the power of God’s Word to help give you the strength to stand up against your fears and desires.
What Does It Mean to Dream of a Torn Bible?
It is very tempting for many people to focus on the unanswered prayers in their lives.
Whether you are a believer or not, you should understand that when people focus mentally on their desires, for either relief or deliverance, many times things don’t come to pass.
Many times despite your prayers, your best efforts, and your surrendered heart, your prayer doesn’t get answered.
We tend to focus on these instead of the blessings that we experience on an almost moment-by-moment basis.
In fact, if we’re not careful, we define blessings based on what doesn’t happen.
That is the standard we set up for faith in our day-to-day lives.
But in reality, God is actually blessing us moment by moment.
How would you know?
Well, if you’re reading this, you obviously didn’t get hit by a bus.
It is also obvious that you’re not suffering from some fatal disease that would have prevented you from reading this.
I could go on and on.
In fact, if we were completely honest with ourselves, every single breath we take is a miracle.
Why?
We don’t deserve another breath.
The Bible is clear.
The wages of sin is death.
All have fallen short of the glory of God.
The apostle Paul writing in his letter to the Romans made it clear that the human condition is wrecked by sin, and sin brings death.
But God in His infinite grace and mercy continues to bless us with one moment after another.
Every single breath and every single moment that passes is a blessing.
God is not a murderer if He decided to enforce His justice.
If he decides to kill me and you right now, he would be fully justified because the wages of sin is death.
But we’re still alive!
You’re still reading this.
I’m still writing this.
What’s going on?
What’s going on is grace, not because we earned it, not because we’re good people, not because we’ve done so many good things in the past that we somehow earned God’s love.
No!
He already loved us to the point that “He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.”
When you are seeing a torn Bible in your dream, you’re having issues with this.
But the good news is you only need to trust in God’s grace.
You may not know what’s around the corner.
You may not know ultimately how your end will come.
But you can trust that God, as the prophet Jeremiah wrote, “does not seek to harm you but to prosper you.”
He has a better plan for you.
What Does It Mean to Dream That Your Bible Is Missing?
You may have grown up in a household that believed in God.
But you’ve seen in the lives of your parents as well as the people you trusted that there’s a disconnect between what they say and how they actually live.
For the longest time, you just assumed that this is just the way people navigated the day-to-day realities of life here on Earth and what we say we believe in.
But it’s actually having a deep and profound impact on your life.
And it’s often manifested in creeping mental laziness, so to speak.
You can’t be bothered with a deeper understanding of Scripture.
In your mind, you’re saying: “Why bother because people don’t follow it anyway?
We say we believe in Jesus, but is it really reflected in how we live?
When you dream that your Bible is missing, you are finally confronting this type of internal struggle between how you behave and the things you normally think about and how you feel you should behave as a child of Good.
And this conflict is a struggle just as Jacob was blessed by God and he changed his name to Israel, the one who struggles with God.
A lot of people are under the mistaken assumption that if they accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, their lives instantly get transformed from one of struggle to one of peace, calm, and blessing.
That’s not true!
In fact, if you didn’t know Jesus, the Devil has no reason to touch your life.
Why bother?
You’re already lost.
You’re already his.
But the moment you accept Jesus, that’s when the Devil goes to work, and believe me, he works very hard.
He will shake your household.
He will shake your health.
He will shake your finances.
He will shake your identity.
He will shake your addictions and make them worse.
He will move everything to make you doubt and finally disown God.
And he does so not in your face.
Instead, He deals in half-truths and deceptions.
That’s what you’re up against!
So when you see your Bible missing in your dream, you are struggling internally with your life of faith.
The first step in dealing with this is to admit it.
Just because you have doubts doesn’t mean you are less of a Christian.
Just because you can only see the disconnect between what you say and what you actually do along with how others do the same, doesn’t mean that you have fallen out of faith.
Instead, your eyes are open how.
You’re not doing things on autopilot
See this for what it is: a blessing!
Why is it a blessing?
Because it’s an opportunity for you to fully accept Jesus, not because your parents assumed that you will go to their church or you would grow up with their faith.
That’s not real faith because faith is personal.
It’s not hand-me-down clothes that are passed on from generation to generation.
It is not some sort of census identity where you check the box and say Catholic, Protestant, or Muslim.
No!
It’s personal.
It must make sense to you.
And when you’re having doubts and you’re seeing all sorts of issues about your parents and the people who surround you, it’s your opportunity to discover what it’s like to really have Jesus in your life.
I remember when I was going to college in Northern California.
I went to college at this notoriously secular if not atheist institution.
It was after all the birth of the free speech movement in the United States, which spread throughout almost all college campuses in the 1960s.
To say that the university that I went to fostered critical thinking and free intellectual exploration would be an understatement.
But it is in this environment that I, the child of first-generation immigrants from a third-world Catholic country in Southeast Asia, started having doubts about my Catholicism and faith in Jesus.
I was also a member of a predominantly white fraternity, and I noticed something odd.
The more secular my brothers are, the wealthier they seemed.
There seems to be a connection between the level of faith one has, and one’s success in life.
Of course, this is not real success.
We were still in college.
I’m talking about the wealth that they got by extension from their parents.
Still, that was enough to impress me.
My parents migrated to the US with just a shirt on their backs with a few bucks.
So I remember going to the parish, St. Joseph the Worker, going to confession.
I told the priest:
“I’m going to make this quick.
I don’t want to waste your time, Father.
I’m beginning to believe that there is no God.”
That’s all I said.
Part of me was hoping that he would condemn me because to me that would be the signal and the cue, that I was looking for to finally just cut out faith from my life.
If he condemned me, that would just reinforce in my mind this oppressive nature of religion because that was what I was taught.
I was raised Catholic.
I was raised to believe that God is this angry, abusive father that either you followed or who damned you. He was an angry father who demanded perfection from you.
He modified your behavior through the eternal consequences of violating his law.
In other words, it was a religion of fear, at least as my parents understood it, punctuated by repeated prayers to a variety of saints.
So I was ready for the condemnation.
I was ready for the verbal religious Inquisition.
But the good Father said something that threw me off.
He said:
“This is good!
This is good that you doubt.
Because when you doubt, you are given the opportunity to truly understand what you choose to believe in.
Do you choose to see the real Jesus?
And if so, do you choose to question why you see Jesus a certain way or why you choose to believe in the first place?”
It was that moment that kept me in faith.
While my personal search for spirituality continued past that point where I left Catholicism, that Catholic priest’s attitude kept me in faith.
It didn’t keep me in Catholicism, but it preserved me as a believer in a Higher Being because I was this close to atheism.
I was very big into Marxism and other secular philosophies in college.
In fact, I was very big into this philosophical movement called Deconstructivism.
And what that priest said in the parish of St. Joseph the Worker in Berkeley, California, opened the gateway for me where now doubt is not something to run away from.
Instead, it’s something to welcome because that’s the moment when you actually choose your faith.
Faith is not imposed on you by your parents.
It is not something you do out of obligation.
It is not something that you just have to do out of some sort of autopilot behavioral system.
Instead, it’s a personal relationship.
It’s a personal choice with a personal meaning manifesting itself in acts of faith in your day-to-day life.
I invite you, as you read this, to do the same with the things that you say you believe in.
You’d be surprised as to where that initial door opened by doubt will lead you.
It can lead you to a deeper relationship with the real Christ, not the one that’s buried under tons of religious dogma and dead tradition.
If that’s what you’re working with, then it’s easy to see the hypocrisy.
It’s easy to look at the human leaders in your church and mistake that for Christ.
Sometimes I agree with the old saying that “the problem with Christianity is not Christ, but those who say they follow him.”
I wish you the best in your spiritual journey.
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Dream interpretation and symbology have fascinated me ever since I read Freud’s classic, “The Interpretation of Dreams.” Ever since, I have explored Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Buddhist as well as Jungian psychological ideas about the meaning of dreams. Thanks for joining me in my exploration of the amazing intersection between our conscious waking world and the rich expanse of our subconscious-the home of our intuition, instincts, and hidden potential.