Why is the Bible so difficult to understand?
Hi, welcome to today's Little Lesson and thank you so very much for joining me once again.
We want to talk about why it is that the Bible is difficult to understand.
That's the question that I posed at the outset of this Little Lesson.
I want to now rephrase that question because I don't think that that question is really
an accurate question.
It's not an honest question in one sense, because the Bible really isn't that difficult
to understand, generally speaking.
It's got stories, it's got Proverbs, it's got letters written to actual people who,
from all we know, understood what was written to them.
It's meant as a communication from God to humanity, to me, to you.
We don't want to really say that the Bible is hard to understand.
I think more accurately, we could say parts of the Bible are hard to understand.
Or maybe even better, small parts of the Bible are hard to understand.
You've got this class of scholars, we call them theologians, who spend their adult lives
studying the Bible.
We often think about how they don't agree and they interpret different passages differently.
Amongst the denominations and the various sects of Christianity, they debate and argue
over this and that and the other.
We often magnify the differences and then use that as a means to prove that the Bible
must be hard to understand because there's so much differentiation in its interpretation.
But may I suggest, and fairly boldly suggest here, that if you took all those people who
disagree on various parts of how to interpret scripture and were able to assimilate a sale,
put together, assemble, there's the word I'm looking for, everything that they agree on,
I think what we'd discover is that they agree on the important stuff, 99%, because the Bible's
not that hard to understand.
We learn about God in the Bible.
Well, everybody agrees that God is all-powerful and God is all-knowing and God is omnipresent
and that God has no beginning and God has no end and God is love, God is righteous,
God is a consuming fire, God is pure, God is holy, God is merciful, God is gracious.
All these important aspects about God's character and His personality and His being, everybody
who reads the Bible is going to come to the same conclusion.
It's inescapable.
Now, there might be some nuances, sure, and some people might empathize God's justice
and holiness over His love, and some emphasize more His love than His justice and holiness,
but they all agree that God's got both components of those aspects within His personality.
And God's attitude towards people and what the Bible has to say about people.
The Bible says people are sinners and they need the grace of God if they're going to
be saved, and God's merciful and He gives them time to repent, and He offers everybody's
salvation and so forth.
99% of all the people who read the Bible are going to agree on that.
I realize that there are some who say that Jesus didn't die for everybody and so forth,
and they've got their proof techs, and they say that God predestined some to be saved
and some to be damned, but those are actually the minority.
I've ministered the Word of God in, I think, about 40 countries many times in the past
to pastors and spiritual leaders and so forth, and those who subscribe to the idea that God
doesn't want to save everybody and Jesus didn't die for everybody, they're in the small minority.
Anyways, the big things there's a lot of agreement on.
Now, the small things are the things that people debate over, and we need to keep that,
for crying out loud, in perspective because we divide over these things and we put signs
in front of our churches to let everyone know that we're not like those people down the
road or that church right next door, we are this kind of a Christian because it's all
based on a specific doctrinal stance.
It's a shame.
It is a shame.
The average person reading the Bible can gain enough wisdom to have a relationship with
God and to know how God wants him or her to live.
Right?
Right.
Okay, so it's the little things, the little things that people debate over, there's disagreement
over, and then therefore we could say, "Well, okay, must be hard to understand because all
these smart people, these theologians, don't even agree on this."
All right, so I'll grant you that.
Now, why?
Why?
Why is that?
Why are the small portions of the Bible difficult to understand?
I submit that there are a number of reasons, and the one that I'm going to propose in the
remaining short time that I have left in this Little Lesson is that it's hard to understand
because we have a limited capacity to understand.
When you look at all the creatures that God has made on this earth, a lot of variety there.
We got butterflies and we got elephants and we've got bacteria.
A lot of creatures.
It's obvious that God gives each a capacity of understanding.
It's also obvious that the human species is by far and away superior in this sense.
People have a much greater capacity, a mental capacity.
It's interesting that scientists study animals, will often say, "Wow, this particular species
really is highly intelligent."
Like dolphins, for example, because they can learn things and remember things.
But even the dolphins compared to human beings, I never saw a dolphin writing computer programs
yet.
They're still subpar to human mental capacity.
But there's a limit to human mental capacity.
In fact, even within the human species, we know this is obvious, that individuals have
different capacities.
There are people that we term as geniuses who have an IQ that's higher than the average,
so they have a greater mental capacity.
I often find myself saying, however, that certain concepts are above my pay grade because
I know that I've got a limited capacity and that I'm not a genius.
Even some of the geniuses, I don't think they can understand some of these things either.
I'm going to close with this one passage of scripture, and then in our next Little Lesson
I'm going to go into it a little more deeply.
I'm going to do a part two on this, so don't miss it.
This is actually from the Apostle Paul and from 1 Corinthians chapter 13, he said, "For
we know in part and we prophesy in part."
So he's admitting we have a limited knowledge, and even if we prophesied, that is speaking
by the inspiration of God, even that's partial.
We're not speaking out everything that God knows.
Of course, God knows everything, so He allows us to understand so much.
Then the Apostle Paul gives this beautiful analogy, which I think is often ripped from
his context to make it mean something it doesn't mean.
We'll read it briefly here and then we'll pick up here in the next Little Lesson and
go into it deeper.
He said, "When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like
a child.
When I became a man I did away with childish things."
I think that Paul's using an analogy of how children, when you're a child, you have a
limited capacity to understand.
Children ask their parents questions at times, and the parent realizes, if I explain that
to you, you're not going to get it because you don't have the capacity yet to understand
that.
Maybe when you're a teenager or fully an adult, you'll have the foundational understanding
that then we can build upon that to answer that question you just asked.
All right, we're out of time for today.
Don't miss the next Little Lesson.
All right.
We'll talk more about why parts of the Bible are so difficult to understand.
Hope to see you then.
God bless you.