This question started me on a journey to learn why I personally don't. We look at the scriptures as a good book, a beautiful piece of literature, but it truly is so much more. It is the very words of God. I suppose that it is ingrained within the heart of man to long to know what God says.
In ancient times, people would travel many days journey to a temple of a god that claimed to share his words with people. These oracles would hear your request and then after waiting for up to several weeks would hear the response from the "gods" which was actually the ramblings of a priestess who was kept drugged constantly and the person who received the message would go away deceived, in awe that his god would share his words with him. They built massive, intricate temples that took hundreds of men many many years, in some cases more than one hundred, to build in which they housed these oracles. They spent countless fortunes to purchase these oracles and to make sacrifices to satisfy whichever god had supplied it. People did whatever they had to do to obtain these words from their god.
Among the Hebrew people, the scriptures were always treated with love and respect, keeping the Torah scrolls locked away in a closet to protect it, spending countless hours copying it by hand, counting every word to be sure not one was missed. When read, the scriptures were reverenced and people loved to hear them. When king Josiah finds the book of the law within the Temple in II Kings 22 and 23, the people stand and listen to him read the whole thing for hours and hours, not only without complaint, but overcome with emotion because of their sin against God.
During the Reformation, once the Bible began being translated into the common tongue from Latin, people risked their lives to attain it, because to the Catholic mind, the Bible was too sacred to be written in the language of the people. The men who translated it risked, and very often faced and endured death because of their work. Once translations became accepted, they became priceless treasures, worth a kings ransom. Churches would have a beautifully decorated alter Bible chained in place so it could not be stolen. The invention of the printing press made purchasing a Bible possible for everyone.
During the 1950's till almost 1990 and even today in places like China, the presence of Communism made the printing, possession, and reading of Bibles illegal in many Eastern European nations. Many men risked their lives in defiance of the government, men like Brother Andrew who has been smuggling Bibles behind closed doors since the 50's. These people who receive these Bibles were and are ecstatic and overcome to think that they are holding God's word.
Today, when a Bible is translated into a new language, the people there rejoice and many cry when they hold their first Bible.
But in America today, we find a people who take the Word of God for granted. I am one of them. I can't even tell you how many Bibles I own, and I barely read it. I treat it as any other book, not the precious treasure that it is. God has given to us, His people, and because the sacrifices of so many others, He has made it available to billions of people across the globe. We let them gather dust on our shelves or on our coffee tables like they were some kind of picture book, and we either A, never read them to see what God has told us, or B, we read it because it is the "Christian" thing to do and we do not allow it to change us.
We need to realize that what we hold in our hands is not just a beautifully written manuscript that was penned thousands of years ago with no relation to our lives today, but a living book. A book given to us by God Himself. God's very words written down for us, that give direction, that give solace, that point the way to God. A book in which God Himself reveals to us His character and person. We hold the very words, the very oracles of the one true God, and they are complete and perfect. Why do we not treat them with the reverence and love that we should. We should be willing to pay any price to enjoy them, we should not let anything get in the way of studying them and learning all that they have to say about life.
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