The Puzzle of Scripture

I enjoy reading fantasy, but whether it’s high fantasy or urban fantasy, there’s a trope that I find incredibly frustrating: the wizard who won’t tell people what they need to know. Even Gandalf sent poor Frodo to walk to Bree without telling him one tenth of what he knew about the One Ring. Instead, everything is need-to-know until something forces them to share their secrets.

I feel some of that same frustration at times with the Bible. Couldn’t it be, you know, ... clearer? Why do we have to work so hard to make it give up its secrets? Why didn’t God just tell us what we want to know?

If I had my druthers, the Bible would be organized something like this:
Part I. Systematic Theology
Part II. Plan of Salvation
Part III. Ethics
Part IV. Everything You Want to Know About the End Times

Instead we get something that looks to the casual observer like one part soap opera, one part stream of consciousness rules, and one part rantings by your crazy uncle. Why?

The last few years I’ve been reading Proverbs over and over. (Pro-tip: If you have it on your phone, you can read a handful of verses at a time whenever you have three minutes to kill.) One of the central features is its scatteredness; after the first few chapters, it’s just a jumble. There is no chapter on money; if you want to know everything Proverbs has to say about money, you have to read the whole thing. So you cannot read all the proverbs about money without also reading all the proverbs about integrity, sexual morality, and family.

The Law of Moses is the same way. It starts with the Ten Commandments, then we get rules about altars, servants, personal injuries, protection of property, sexual morality, foreigners, the poor, and food all within a couple of pages. Then it talks about the tabernacle. But it comes back to all of those other topics again, this time in more detail. Even though there are chapters with a lot of instructions about, say, sexual morality, there is no one section you can read and say, “I’ve got all the rules about sex right here.”

The whole Bible is that way. Why didn’t God make it simple?

First, I really think if the Bible was more like a textbook we would read it once and be done with it. As it is, we have to struggle to master the material. You can read it over and over and still come across a passage you feel like you’ve never read before. He doesn’t make it simple because he wants us to work for it. He wants us to make a lifelong project out of it.

Second, there are some parts that it seems better that they’re unclear. If the scriptures clearly said, “The Messiah will be the incarnation of God, born of a virgin, raised in poverty and obscurity, be an itinerant preacher, die for the sins of the world, rise from the dead, leave for a long time, then come back and set everything right”, would the events of the gospels have played out the same way? Jesus was put to death for claiming to be exactly who he was, but that happened because it was unclear what the Messiah would be. Similar things can be said for end times prophecy; we’d like to know all the details, but God does not seem to want to make it very clear for us. Instead we struggle to understand and try to live like he could come back any moment.

Isn’t that cruel, though? Does this mean people go to hell because they don’t have the patience to wade through the scriptures, figuring out what they need to do?

No. As the old country pastors would say, “the main thing is the plain thing.” It’s never been that hard to figure out what God really wants from us. Starting in Genesis, we see that “Abram believed the LORD, and he credited it to him as righteousness” (15:6) and God expected people to obey what they knew. This is the pattern throughout the scriptures: believe God and follow the rules you know.

But if you really want to seek him, if you really want to know his will, you’re going to have to do the hard work of combing through the Bible. He made it so that the only way to know all he has to say about anything is to read all he has to say about everything.


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