Jonathan,

It's a good question you ask, and an interesting observation you make. The tendency to decouple propositional truth statements from the personality of God in order to emphasize the latter is almost too ironic to bear.

By it's very nature, speech is propositional. When we speak, we say things that can be believed, doubted, denied. I suppose it's possible to engage in non-propositional speech, but hardly any of us ever do while we're in our right minds.

On the other hand, only persons engage in speech. Animals don't speak (though some engage in some forms of communication). Inanimate objects don't speak (though they may make strong impressions upon us). In the entire universe, only persons speak.

Which means that one of the most uniquely personal things any of us can ever do is open our mouths and start talking.

Now let's apply that insight to our thinking about God.

How do we know that God is a person, rather than a force or power? And how do we know that we can actually have a relationship with that personal God? We know it because that same God has spoken to us. So far from being distancing and abstract, God's propositional speech in the Bible, and through His Son, is intrinsically intimate and personal.

As a preacher, I have to understand and believe that, and then preach His Word in light of that truth. I have an obligation to deliver the truth of God from his Word, but I also have an obligation to deliver it as the kind of speech it is. It's not a systematic theology, though it contains truth that can and should be systematized. It's not a history lesson, though it contains that. It's not a story, though it has plenty of those. Rather, it's a personal message, indeed a revelation of a Person, who desires to be known by other persons. As a preacher, I need to convey that I'm delivering something other than a lecture or 3-step plan of action. No. I'm an ambassador, speaking for a King to his subjects; I'm a best-man, speaking on behalf of a groom to his bride; I'm a brother, speaking on behalf of a Father to his children.

I remember talking to a Hindu friend of mine in college freshman year. I was explaining the gospel, and I kept using the phrase, "the Bible says..." After a while, he stopped me and asked, "Don't you think that God wrote the Bible?" I replied that though he used people as means, that yes, I thought that ultimately, what the Bible said, God said. He then said to me, "Then why don't you say, 'God says... instead of 'the Bible says...?'"

I don't think we should stop using the phrase, "the Bible says...". But I took his point, and it's stuck with me over the years. I think JI Packer has summed it up well in God Has Spoken (3rd ed, Baker, 1994):

Why has God spoken?...The truly staggering answer which the Bible gives to this question is that God's purpose in revelation is to make friends with us. It was to this end that He created us rational beings, bearing His image, able to think and hear and speak and love; He wanted there to be genuine personal affection and friendship, two-sided, between Himself and us - a relation, not like that between a man and his dog, but like that of a father to his child, or a husband to his wife.

As pastors, we can get quite concerned with the fine points of our exegesis and the details of our theology. And we should be concerned about those things. But we also need to remember that those skills and tools are given to us to use in order to help people hear the Divine Lover speak to their souls and then respond to him with their lives.