Growing up, I struggled with reading. I didn’t like it at all. I always took the easiest classes so I wouldn’t have to read so many books. Now, just imagine my dismay when I came to faith in Christ and was told the way to really know and hear from God was through a book! Do you want to have a good relationship with Jesus? You better get this big, thick book and read it. Every single day.
It’s not just that I didn’t like reading – and I should add, I don’t mind it anymore. In fact, I love to read. But it’s not even that the Bible is a book, it’s a big book. It’s hundreds and hundreds of pages long. And it can be confusing for some of us. Why are there books inside the book? Why aren’t all the books named after the person who wrote them? Why do some of them get sequels and some of them don’t?
Okay, so the Bible is big, it’s long, and it’s often confusing. In fact, I can tell you with certainty when people read the Bible we often disagree on what it means. There are books that are written to explain the Bible. And then other books are written to explain those books. Then there are books to explain why those books that explain the books are all wrong. It can cause quite a headache.
And yet the Christian community affirms the Bible is holy and authoritative. We use words like “divine inspiration” and “God-breathed.” If it were just any other book, we would tone the language way down. But instead, we dial it up. Because the book we call the Bible is important. It’s very important! It is the primary way that God has chosen to reveal himself to all of us who weren’t around when all of those things went down.
So what do we do with our shared belief about the importance of this book and our disagreements about what it really means? For one, we need to learn how to disagree in love. I think we need to slow down when it comes to calling someone a heretic just because they see things differently than us. The bar for calling something a bad doctrine needs to be raised a bit higher. Instead, we need to make an allowance for each other. You may not see it the way I do. I’ve spent some time studying it and you’ve spent some time reading it, too. With some respect, we can agree to disagree.
But the bigger issue, I think, is when we face certain issues in the Bible that don’t always square with what we know in our heart about Jesus. Take, for instance, times in the Old Testament when God seems to condone genocide. Or how about the whole issue of slavery? When Paul talks about wives submitting to men and being silent in the church, do you all feel a little nervous about that too?
The Bible does not always provide certainty. It’s not as clear as you and I want it to be at times. But it asks me to trust it. Somethings happen in my life I do not fully understand, but I trust that God is there. When I open the word of God, if God is present, then I can trust him to speak to me.
Part of the reason it’s difficult to read and understand the scriptures is that we come from a wrong perspective to being with. We bring our broken and limited selves into how we think about God, and that discomfort stretches us. We enter into a time of spiritual reading where we allow God to take over the text and through it, take over our lives. That is a danger to our egos. Our intellect may reject it. We get nervous when someone starts messing around in our space. But when that person is God, we need to allow it.
How are you allowing God to speak into your life? Do you need to be absolutely certain about every little detail? Or can you release your tension to God and allow him to move in the struggle? And it is a struggle, sometimes. Not just because it’s a big book, but we struggle to read it because it is important. But it’s worth that struggle.
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