A king hears the word of God today and answers it with a scribe's knife and a fireplace, slicing the scroll column by column and feeding it to the flames.

The scroll got rewritten with additions. The king got a footnote. You cannot edit God's word with a blade, but you can miss what it offered you. Read today holding your copy differently.

Jehoiakim's knife accomplished nothing and revealed everything. The scroll came back longer; the king's line lost the throne. Scripture has outlasted every blade, bonfire, and ban aimed at it, which means the only live question is never whether the word survives, but whether we let it in whole.

The officials trembled; the king trimmed. Two postures before the same reading, and every Bible reader repeats one of them daily, receiving the uncomfortable columns or quietly slicing them off. Two hundred and ninety-some days into this year, check your fireplace. What passages have you been feeding it?