Ep.987: Why Didn’t God Make the Bible Easy to Understand? (Part I)
Unlocking the door of biblical understanding one step at a time
CHAPTERS
Theme Scripture: Isaiah 55:8-9
This is Part 1 of a 2-part series. Pick up a book or an article and start reading. If that book or article is well-written, it will bring you to some kind of conclusion, some kind of understanding or realization that you didn’t have before. Now, these realizations can be across a wide scope of subjects and learning, but the bottom line is you picked up that well-written book or article and now you have some greater knowledge or insight. Now pick up the Bible and start reading. It starts out all good and wonderful and then just six chapters later it seems like God gets mad and pretty much scraps His whole creation thing. Why? Read further and the confusion grows! So, what's up with this, anyway? How can we ever understand the Bible? The Almighty God, Creator of all things, surely could have written in such a way that it would be universally understood! Well the fact is, He didn’t! Why not? There is actually a really cool answer to this!
As you might expect, a cool answer is not necessarily an easy answer, and when it comes to the Bible a not-necessarily-easy answer leans towards just plain difficult. Why is that? Well, let’s start with the facts of the book. First factual degree of difficulty: the Bible is a book of history written over about a 1,600-year span by about forty different authors. Its contents include many historical records written after the fact. When Moses wrote the book of Genesis he recounted thousands of years of history that he didn’t see happen. Second factual degree of difficulty: the Bible is a book of current events. The book of Exodus, the letters in the New Testament, etc. all told you what was currently happening. Third factual degree of difficulty: the Bible is a book of prophecy, written by men who were chosen by God to not only speak to Israel at their particular point in history about living according to God’s will, but also to speak veiled words that would foretell some future events.
These three factual degrees of difficulty (and there are several more we won’t take the time to mention) all contribute to the challenging landscape we need to traverse to understand the Bible and how it all fits together. Okay, here is my point...because the Bible is so complex, varied and mysterious, and because there are obvious connections throughout all 66 books contained within it, we can have enormous confidence that the overall message of the book is the revealing of God’s ultimate plan for the human race! So, why didn’t God just tell us that? Because His plan dictates that everyone not be in the know about His purposes just yet. Is that really fair? Absolutely!
You've got to check out our September 18, 2017 podcast, “Why didn’t God Make the Bible Easy to Understand?” and see what the Bible’s hidden messages of hope are and see why God clearly does not want everyone to know about them just yet. These conclusions sound so strange and contradictory, but you will see that they actually make so much sense!
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