My strategy in my quiet times is to slowly go through entire books of the Bible from beginning to end. Eventually I will have covered the entire Bible, and then I’ll start over. One big advantage of this method is that I don’t skip anything. On the other hand, the biggest disadvantage is that I don’t skip anything. Not even the passages that I’d like to skip.
I don’t think it’ll surprise anyone if I admit that there are passages of Scripture that I’d just as soon pass over. Often, this is simply because they tell me to do something I don’t want to do. But a bigger problem is those parts of God’s word that describe God in ways that don’t match my idea of who he ought to be. Passages that are violent, or that show God acting in ways that appear unjust, or arbitrary, or just plain cruel, or that have been used in the past to justify terrible wrongs. These are challenging passages to read and try to understand. They force me to confront the possibility that my understanding of God might be wrong. Even more disturbing, they force me to face the possibility that even my concept of morality, my basic ideas about right and wrong, might not be the same as God’s. After all, does not Isaiah say:
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9).
It’s tempting to use this passage to justify ignoring the difficult passages. If God’s thoughts aren’t my thoughts, why bother trying to understand? But these verses come immediately after a plea for Israel to return to the Lord and be forgiven. They’re saying, in essence, “stop thinking of God as just a more powerful king. Understand who he really is so you can receive his grace.” It’s not a call to stop investigating, but rather to start.
And in that spirit, I’ve slowly come to realize that the most important passages of Scripture for me to dig into are often the very ones that make me the most uncomfortable. The ones that make me question my understanding of who God is. They’re important because these are the passages that force me to stop and really study. To slow down and do the research to try and parse exactly what the Scripture is actually saying, all the while knowing that, once I do understand, it might cost me something to obey.
Let’s admit up front that there are things in Scripture that are hard to understand. The Bible itself tells us that (2 Peter 3:15-16). But the Bible also tells us that we, who believe in Jesus, “have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:16), and Jesus told his disciples:
“I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).
These two ideas do not contradict. Some things in the Bible are indeed hard to understand, but they can be understood if we make the effort to dig in. That means prayer and meditation on the Scriptures. And it means making full use of commentaries and other aids, because we are not expected to follow Jesus on our own; we were created to need each other. And what might be the hardest of all, it means studying the Scriptures with humility, recognizing that we might be wrong. More than that, it means accepting that we will sometimes be wrong. And it also means that we have to keep working and not give up. Like Jacob, we must sometimes wrestle with God to receive the blessing he wants to give us. As the Scripture says:
Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15).