One doesn’t know the Divine through the Scriptures but through love and bhakti, through his service, through meditation upon Him, through Yoga. Scriptures are at best pointers. They may help to awaken our interest in the Divine but to find the Divine we have to walk to His mansion.
Having said that there is a difference between the Bible and the Gita. The Bible, I mean The New Testament, has words of Christ but the actual Yoga has been lost to the Church and Christianity. In India the Yoga has been kept intact and even diversified through number of realised human beings. In the Christian and the Islamic world the initial spiritual impulse brought by the founder started running dry, stifled by its institutionalisation and not allowing it to grow further.
The more we institutionalise God, the more we put barriers between Him and the human soul, barriers of priests and books and rituals and customs. Sanatana Dharma being vast and plastic could never be institutionalized. Wherever it has been tried as in certain sects and cults, it has lost its vitality and vigour. Of course most people need God as an additional prop in their life and hence find support in organised Religion. But that is very different from a living contact with the Divine Reality which, in India at least, flourished always in the Ashrams where each Guru had his own scripture and teaching based on the same fundamental. One must therefore know the difference between finding the Divine and knowing Him through direct contact and a very indirect reflection through the Scriptures. It is the difference between the Sun and its reflected light through the moon.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
