The Bible: The Most Misunderstood Book on the Planet

Well, yes.  That's a hard title to defend. 

I have no evidence that the Bible is the most misunderstood book on the planet.  Many other books, particularly religious ones like the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita, are probably misunderstood as well. 

Religious books are prone to be misunderstood for two reasons. 

First, they are complex.  Like jigsaw puzzles, you can put together pieces of them in small sections, but the sections don't make sense until the whole puzzle is completed.  

But the second reason religious books are misunderstood is, I believe, more common.  These books are usually misunderstood because most people don't bother to read them.  And that's surprising to me, especially when you consider that at least one of those books is so amazing.

The Bible is amazing! 

It's been the world's best selling book every year since the invention of the printing press, and for good reason.  This book has had a bigger impact on cultures all over the world than any other one book.  That's a statement that's easy to defend.

If the Bible is the world's best seller, you'd think it would also be the best-read book on the planet.  And it just might be.  As of 2014, the whole Bible has been translated into 531 languages, with parts of it translated into 2883 languages.

But because the Bible has had such a pervasive cultural influence, especially on the development of our Western worldview, the actual words of the book have become lost in the milieu, and most people in the developed world who subconsciously embrace that worldview are biblically illiterate. 

I think it would be easy to defend the statement that after 20 centuries, the average citizen of any nation whose development has been significantly impacted by the Bible now has only a vague idea of what the book actually says.

What the average citizen "knows" about the Bible is now founded on second-hand opinions and rumors built up over the years since the time when first-hand knowledge of the Bible was considered an essential part of a responsible citizen's education.

I think this is a shame.  I love the Bible.  I love the actual, authentically translated words of it.  I love the amazing stories in it, both historical and mythical. 

I've just come, this morning, from an exhilarating read in I Kings, part of the chronicles of the history of the nation of Israel, and I've been struck by how applicable the theology of that history is to our current political situation.

The stories make no statements about the particulars of the presidential race in the United States.  They do not offer any solutions to our political problems today.  (I believe those solutions are found in other sections of the jigsaw puzzle!)  But this historical account of things that happened in the politics of Israel 2500 years ago sheds light on government in general. 

It's not a pretty picture.  The politics of Israel as recorded in the Bible seems to illustrate the apparent universal inability of human beings to rule themselves successfully.  But if you're tired of all the rhetoric about American politics--if you'd like to step back from it all and get a bigger picture of the whole situation from the perspective of human history as a whole, I highly recommend a careful study of the past as recorded in the book of I Kings. 

I read chapters 17 through 20 this morning and thoroughly enjoyed it. 

Six Encouraging Truths About Bible Mysteries

The Bible is astounding.  It's a collection of 66 books, written over a period of 1500 years by 40

different authors in three different languages, yet it reveals one consistent God, communicating one central theme throughout: The Creator loves and redeems and wants to be known by the human beings He has made.

So why is the Bible sometimes hard to understand?  Why do there seem to be contradictory messages?  If God wants us to know Him, why does He shroud himself in mystery?

No one has definitive answers to these questions.  We can say it's impossible to understand an infinite God with our finite minds.  This is true, for sure.  We can also say that what look like contradictions to us may be compatible truths in the realm of the eternal.  And we must also recognize that the devastating separation that happened between us and our Creator in the Garden of Eden did more to keep us from understanding Him than anything He might have done. 

He has not shrouded Himself in mystery.  He is simply who He is.  He is a God whose nature is beyond our understanding.  What else would we expect the Creator of the universe to be?

So we need to be content with the limitations of His revelation, assuming that He has given us all we need to know to come into relationship with Him, and trusting Him with the mysteries we can't understand on this side of heaven. 

We need to accept, and be encouraged by, these six truths about the Bible:

 1.  The Bible is full of mysteries that none of us, neither scholar nor layperson, can explain or understand completely.  The Trinity, the Incarnation, the relationship between God's sovereignty and our free will--mysteries such as these will remain unexplainable to all of us at least until we get to heaven.

2.  The Bible does not even try to solve these mysteries for us.  God's Word simply tells us that certain things are true without explaining how they can be. We should carefully analyze the Word for what it says about the great mysteries of the faith and embrace those truths, without trying to make it say more than it does. We should not give in to the temptation to overanalyze just to make us feel more in control of our understanding of the Truth.

3.  In his inscrutable wisdom, God has chosen to involve human beings in the revelation and propagation of His Truth.  He inspired human writers to record His Truth in the Bible, and we believe the Holy Spirit guided their thoughts and their pens as they wrote.  Though we believe He watched over the selection of writings to be canonized, and guarded the meaning of the message as it was passed on in translation, there have been human errors, both in translation and interpretation of the message.  But we believe that somehow, miraculously, the Truth about God has been preserved even in that process.

4.  Because of these limitations to our human understanding, we should be gentle with fellow believers who hold to interpretations we don't agree with.  We can debate interpretations with others, but only within certain parameters.  Our arguments must be based on careful, prayerful, objective analysis of the biblical text, and we should always debate with humility and love.

5.  We need to actively seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit as we read God's Word.

If we are humble and honest in our search for Him in His Word, every thought we have as we meditate can be covered by His grace and guided by His Spirit.

6.  God is sovereign.  His Truth will stand forever.  No amount of erroneous speculation on our part will destroy it, so we can relax a bit in that direction.  Yes, we must be careful.  We are called to "rightly divide the Word of Truth," but even when we are careful we will not be perfect in our understanding. 

One of the great and wonderful mysteries is that somehow, in his sovereignty, God works around and through our mistakes to reveal Himself accurately to us.

How awesome to realize that God wants to be known by us, and has made that possible through a Book infused with holy mysteries!

This post was first published June 18, 2014 in the Far East Broadcasting Company's blog under the title, "Six Truths Concerning the Bible's Mysteries."

Vampire Protection

So as for spending time in God's Word (see previous post), I'm in a dilemma. I KNOW it's important, and a good thing to do, so it should be easy, right? I should be jumping at the chance to do it. For pleasure, even.

But instead I feel driven, in an anxious way, to take time to read my Bible every day. It feels so legalistic. I should simply be able to relax into the joy of spending time with Jesus, but I can't. I'm driven to the activity, rather than being drawn to it. Kind of like a vampire is driven to suck blood, not for pleasure (it can't be that much fun), but because of an unhealthy addiction (unhealthy for the victims, at least).

Yuk! My apologies for the disturbing content of this post. Vampires are on my mind because my friend, Kate Zimmerman, reviewed a vampire novel in her column in our local paper yesterday.

So that's my dilemma. Here's my diagnosis: I think the drivenness comes out of a mixture of pride and fear.

PRIDE: Reading your Bible every day is what good Christians should do, and I want to maintain the image.

FEAR: The vampirish pull of the secular society around me is so strong I’m afraid it will suck out my soul if I don’t fight back with a daily dose of eternal wisdom. In this crazy culture, I need a daily reminder that God is sovereign, even though He seems to have given us an endlessly long piece of rope with which to hang ourselves.

Sigh. So when do I get to enjoy the healthier motivation? Maybe not until heaven. I can see myself sitting down with Jesus then, when the reasons for pride and fear have been dealt with once and for all, and enjoying a pleasant visit over a spot of tea.

Meanwhile, here's my frantically acquired dose of vampire protection for today:

“I give eternal life to them; and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of My hand. My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.”

So says Jesus, in John 10:28-30.