If you ask a number of believers in Jesus why they don’t put more effort and time into studying the Scriptures, one of the more common responses you’ll get is that the Bible is hard to understand. And that’s a fair point. Some parts of the Bible are not hard to understand, but many passages are. Even the Apostle Peter said so:
Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction (2 Peter 3:15-16).
So, not only are there things in Scripture that are hard to understand, but those are the very things that get distorted by false teachers. That’s a bit concerning, because this passage says that those false teachers are heading for their own destruction, and no doubt mine as well if I follow them!
God must want us to understand what he says. If he didn’t, why would he have said it? But if he does, why are some parts of the Bible so difficult to understand? When I looked more deeply, it turns out that there are several different answers to this question:
– The Bible was written in human languages.
– The Bible was addressed to specific people.
– Sometimes, the inability to understand God’s word is a sign.
– God is treating us as his children.
In this article, I’ll go over each of these reasons, and then talk a little bit about how they should affect the way we, as followers of Jesus, approach God’s word.
The Bible was written in human languages.
To state the obvious, everyone who’s ever read the Bible has read it in some language. For most of you reading this article, that language was very likely English. As I’m sure you all know, however, English is not the Bible’s original language. The Old Testament was mostly written in Hebrew, with a few sections in Aramaic. The New Testament was written in Greek. So not only was it written in human languages, it had to be translated into the language most of us read it in.
The fact that the Bible was written in human languages shouldn’t surprise anybody. Since God wanted to communicate with humans, it only makes sense that he would use human language. One of the basic truths about human languages, however, is that they are embedded in human cultures, and they reflect those cultures. For someone coming from a different culture, even when the words are understood it’s still quite possible to misinterpret what is being said. This means that translating from one language to another, as had to happen before you could read the Bible in English, is an art, not a science.
Those of you who are speak more than one language are most likely nodding your heads right now. You understand this concept. For the rest of you, think back to the last time you heard somebody who is bilingual struggle to translate something. Part of their difficulty might have been a simple lack of skill, but a lot of it was due to the fact different languages don’t just use different words for the same concepts, they reflect different ways of thinking about the world.
For example, Hebrew has a number of different words denoting specific kinds of destructive speech. The precise differences do not carry over into English words such as slander, rumor and gossip, but translators have to use the words English has, not words that it doesn’t have. You can see this if you look at different translations of Psalm 31:13:
For I hear many whispering (NIV)
I have heard the many rumors about me (NLT)
Both translations convey the same basic meaning – the psalmist is the subject of malicious gossip – but they use different words, neither of which precisely matches the Hebrew. Similarly, there are several different Greek words for servants that don’t exactly fit English categories.
One result of this is that there are some very real, and very legitimate, disagreements among Bible scholars about how to understand certain words in Scripture. None of these disagreements impact any critical doctrines, such as salvation by faith, or the person of Christ, but some of them do affect our understanding of other issues like, for example, the meaning of the word “creation” in this passage:
For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies (Romans 8:19-23).
The word “creation” here – Greek ktisis – can refer to everything God created, or it can mean the entire physical world, leaving out things like angels, or it can refer to just the entire human race, as it does in Mark 16:15. In all three cases, of course, the overall meaning of the passage is the same; when Christ returns, the world we live in will be restored to what God intended it to be. But just what that will look like is not as clear as perhaps we’d like it to be.
Other disagreements deal with how to understand the genealogies in the Old Testament, and what is meant by the word “day” in Genesis 1. Some of these disagreements have, unfortunately, resulted in quarrels and division within the church (although usually it’s not Bible scholars who are at fault, but others who don’t fully understand all the nuances of the disagreement).
So the differences between languages is one of the reasons we sometimes find it difficult to understand Scripture.
The Bible was addressed to specific people.
There’s a common saying among Bible scholars: the Bible was written for us, but it wasn’t written to us. This is clearly visible in the New Testament, where twenty-two out of the twenty-seven books are specifically addressed to some person or group of people who were alive at the time the books were written. But even when the intended audience is not named, there definitely was one. That’s just the way writing works.
As an author myself, I can testify that having an audience in mind is a necessary part of the process. If that audience is not chosen consciously, it will be chosen unconsciously. It’s simply not possible to write without an intended audience. That sounds like an extreme statement, I know, but consider this: suppose I were, for example, to mention in an article that the President met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss the war in Ukraine. If I’m writing for American adults, I may well assume that they already know who the President and the Joint Chiefs are (even if they don’t know the names of the latter), and have at least heard that there has been a war going on between Ukraine and Russia for the past several years. If I’m writing for children, on the other hand, I would probably explain in more detail what I’m talking about. But I either will explain further, or I won’t; there is no third way that covers both, and what I decide to write will depend on who I’m writing for. In fact, a writer’s understanding of who their audience is affects pretty much everything they write. That’s true of the people whom God used to write the Bible as well.
The reason this matters is that anybody who reads anything always begins with certain things that they understand about the world, as well as some things they believe are true. This is simply because they belong to a culture, they have a history, etc. In short, they are a full human being. And those understandings and beliefs, which language theorists call preunderstandings, influence they way each person interprets what they read. It’s the reader’s preunderstanding that writers are thinking about (consciously or unconsciously) when they choose their words.
Now, it is obviously quite possible to read something that was written for a different audience, with a different preunderstanding; people do it all the time. But the further removed the reader is, mentally, from the audience the writer was writing for, the more they need to look out for assumptions that may be different than what they’re used to, as well as things that the author did not explain because their intended audience did not need any explanation – the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Ukraine war, in my example. A good translation can do a lot to bridge this gap, but it can’t completely eliminate the problem.
A great example of this can be seen in the many Old Testament references to the mythologies of the surrounding pagan cultures. These can be found all through the Psalms, Job, and the prophets, and they pop up here and there in the other books as well, including in Genesis. For the most part, however, these references are not recognized by modern readers, who are usually not familiar with the myths. And sometimes believers become uncomfortable when they start to discover that these references exist, as though it meant that the Bible was just copied from pagan myth. What’s really going on, however, is that the Biblical authors used concepts their readers already knew as analogies to help explain the point they were making. Think of all the preachers today who use popular movies, TV shows or songs to illustrate their sermons. The original audiences for the Old Testament books understood this.
This, then, is a second reason some passages of Scripture are hard to understand; we don’t have the same preunderstandings as the people those passages were addressed to.
Sometimes, the inability to understand God’s word is a sign.
The third reason that the Bible is sometimes difficult to understand is more ominous. Sometimes, and for some people, the inability to understand what God has said is a sign to them that they are in danger of judgment. We see this in the book of Isaiah:
He said, “Go and tell this people:
“‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding;
be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’
Make the heart of this people calloused;
make their ears dull and close their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.”
Then I said, “For how long, Lord?”
And he answered:
“Until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant,
until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged,
until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken
(Isaiah 6:9-12).
The people of Isaiah’s time had refused to listen to God so, as a warning to them, they lost the ability to understand what the prophet was telling them. Jesus later quoted this passage to explain why he spoke in parables to the crowds in his era, while privately explaining everything to those who followed him (Matthew 13:11-15, Mark 4:33-34). This is also why the Apostle Paul told the Corinthian church that:
Tongues, then, are a sign, not for believers but for unbelievers (1 Corinthians 14:22).
I mention this for the sake of completeness, not because I think it’s likely to apply to anyone reading this article. If you’ve gotten this far you’re probably not an unbeliever, or one who refuses to listen to God. I will therefore move on.
God is treating us as his children.
Finally, part of the reason the Bible is sometimes hard to understand is that God wants to draw his children into a deeper relationship with him. That doesn’t happen when we just glance quickly at his word and go away thinking that we’ve understood what he wanted to say. It’s when we make the effort to wrestle with a passage of Scripture, asking questions, praying over it, and digging deeply into the text that, we start to discover parts of our Father’s heart that we had not seen before.
Believers, especially those of us who are Evangelical, sometimes make the mistake of treating the Bible as just a toolbox, from which we can pull out verses to help is deal with whatever situation we’re facing. It is a toolbox, but it’s also many other things. Most importantly, it’s a love letter from our Father, revealing to his children who he really is, and therefore who we really are.
The point of reading the Bible, then, is not to know God’s word, but to know God. It’s the person we should be seeking, not just the book. God reveals himself to those who take the time to linger, to study, to meditate on the Scriptures, not to the superficial verse-of-the-day reader. He wants his children to take time because, as unbelievable as it may be, God actually wants to spend time with us. He wants us to know who he is. God is infinite and we are not; we can’t possibly understand him completely. So there’s no reason to ever stop seeking to know him better. To stop drawing closer.
As amazing as it sounds, part of the reason the Bible is sometimes hard to understand is simply that God wants us to take the time to struggle with it, and in the process, get past our own prejudices and misunderstanding, the parts of our preunderstanding that get in the way of the truth. God wants us, in other words, to learn to look past our own expectation and genuinely see him.
Our Response
These are, then, several reasons why some passages of Scripture are hard to understand. And once we realize that one of those reasons is that God is prompting us to dig deeper, the proper response is obvious. Take the time to wrestle with the “hard’ passages. Find a quiet place to think about what you read, and lift it up in prayer. Get help from commentaries, study notes, and other references. Talk about the Scriptures with other believers, who may have seen something you missed, and also may have missed something you saw. Delight yourself in the fact that God’s word takes time and work to understand, because God is telling you by that fact just how much he longs to spend time with you. And do all this remembering what the Bible, at heart, truly is: not a self-help book, or a collection of encouraging sound bites, but God’s revelation of himself to us.