The River

From Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi (1883):

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparkingly renewed with every re-perusal....

In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading-matter.

American writer Mark Twain's enduring love and respect for the Mississippi River are on full display in this passage from his classic memoir.

But the vivid descriptions above could also capture the extraordinary differences in Biblical interpretation between born-again believers and unregenerate men, no matter their Christian labels or credentials.

An unsaved individual with an entire lifetime spent accumulating a comprehensive knowledge of the Scriptures will still stumble over the most basic Godly insights grasped by regenerate believers.

In his first epistle to the church in Corinth (Chapter 2), the Apostle Paul wrote about this supernatural difference:

⁶ We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing.
⁷ No, we speak of God's secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began.
⁸ None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
⁹ However, as it is written: "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him"—
¹⁰ but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.

Also:
Born From Above