Why People Find the Bible Difficult

THAT MANY PERSONS FIND THE BIBLE HARD to understand will not be denied by those acquainted with the facts. Testimony to the difficulties encountered in Bible reading is too full and too widespread to be dismissed lightly.

In human experience there is usually a complex of causes rather than but one cause for everything, and so it is with the difficulty we run into with the Bible. To the question, Why is the Bible hard to understand? No snap answer can be given; the pert answer is sure to be the wrong one. The problem is multiple instead of singular, and for this reason the effort to find a single solution to it will be disappointing.

In spite of this I venture to give a short answer to the question, and while it is not the whole answer it is a major one and probably contains within itself most of the answers to what must be an involved and highly complex question. I believe that we find the Bible difficult because we try to read it as we would read any other book, and it is not the same as any other book.

The Bible is not addressed to just anybody. Its message is directed to a chosen few. Whether these few are chosen by God in a sovereign act of election or are chosen because they meet certain qualifying conditions I leave to each one to decide as he may, knowing full well that his decision will be determined by his basic beliefs about such matters as predestination, free will, the eternal decrees and other related doctrines. But whatever may have taken place in eternity, it is obvious what happens in time: Some believe and some do not; some are morally receptive and some are not; some have spiritual capacity and some have not. It is to those who do and are and have that the Bible is addressed. Those who do not and are not and have not will read it in vain.

Right here I expect some readers to enter strenuous objections, and for reasons not hard to find. Christianity today is man-centered, not God-centered. God is made to wait patiently, even respectfully, on the whims of men. The image of God currently popular is that of a distracted Father, struggling in heartbroken desperation to get people to accept a Saviour of whom they feel no need and in whom they have very little interest. To persuade these self-sufficient souls to respond to His generous offers God will do almost anything, even using salesmanship methods and talking down to them in the chummiest way imaginable. This view of things is, of course, a kind of religious romanticism which, while it often uses flattering and sometimes embarrassing terms in praise of God, manages nevertheless to make man the star of the show.

The notion that the Bible is addressed to everybody has wrought confusion within and without the church. The effort to apply the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount to the unregenerate nations of the world is one example of this. Courts of law and the military powers of the earth are urged to follow the teachings of Christ, an obviously impossible thing for them to do. To quote the words of Christ as guides for policemen, judges and generals is to misunderstand those words completely and to reveal a total lack of understanding of the purposes of divine revelation. The gracious words of Christ are for the sons and daughters of grace, not for the Gentile nations whose chosen symbols are the lion, the eagle, the dragon and the bear.

Not only does God address His words of truth to those who are able to receive them, He actually conceals their meaning from those who are not. The preacher uses stories to make truth clear; our Lord often used them to obscure it. The parables of Christ were the exact opposite of the modern "illustration," which is meant to give light; the parables were "dark sayings" and Christ asserted that He sometimes used them so that His disciples could understand and His enemies could not. (See Matthew 13:10-17.) As the pillar of fire gave light to Israel but was cloud and darkness to the Egyptians, so our Lord's words shine in the hearts of His people but leave the self-confident unbeliever in the obscurity of moral night.

The saving power of the Word is reserved for those for whom it is intended. The secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him. The impenitent heart will find the Bible but a skeleton of facts without flesh or life or breath. Shakespeare may be enjoyed without penitence; we may understand Plato without believing a word he says; but penitence and humility along with faith and obedience are necessary to a right understanding of the Scriptures.

In natural matters faith follows evidence and is impossible without it, but in the realm of the spirit faith precedes understanding; it does not follow it. The natural man must know in order to believe; the spiritual man must believe in order to know. The faith that saves is not a conclusion drawn from evidence; it is a moral thing, a thing of the spirit, a supernatural infusion of confidence in Jesus Christ, a very gift of God.

The faith that saves reposes in the Person of Christ; it leads at once to a committal of the total being to Christ, an act impossible to the natural man. To believe rightly is as much a miracle as was the coming forth of dead Lazarus at the command of Christ.

The Bible is a supernatural book and can be understood only by supernatural aid.

Elsie,

Thank you for the link.

Knowing the chronological order of the books of the Bible is very important. One needs always to bear in mind, wherever one is in reading or hearing the Bible, where he or she is in terms of what God has already said. No argument on this whatever.

However, in His infinite wisdom God also allowed the books of the Bible to come to us, us meaning, “all the nations of the earth,” in a particular order. Here, I am especially thinking of the New Testament books, whose order is basically consistent through the centuries, unlike those of the Old Testament (the order of the Hebrew Bible and other Old Testament translations varies). There is no doubt, as your linked outline also indicates, that some of the Epistles appeared earlier that some of the Gospels. However, the Gospels have come to us as the beginning of the New Testament. God in His providential and gracious wisdom allowed, permitted, caused (choose whichever verb you will) this to be the case, whatever the mechanism of His allowance, permission, causation. Man did not do this of his own choosing, no matter what, for example, the Roman Catholic church or any other says.

The reason for this, apparently (I say, ‘apparently,’ because I do not claim to know the hidden will of God), is that the four gospels reveal God to His people directly. That is, they reveal Him who is “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very, begotten, not made, being of one substance of the Father, by whom all things were made; who for us men (people) and FOR OUR SALVATION,came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary ...” The Gospels reveal the incarnate God to us in like manner as the Torah of Moses reveal God to us before the incarnation. All of the rest of the Old Testament is divinely inspired commentary, explanation, of the Torah, and its revealed truths, to all who have received it, to the Jew first and also to the Greek (Gentile), to follow the understanding of Paul.

Similarly, the rest of the New Testament is also divine commentary, explanation of the Gospels and their revealed truths, to all who receive them. There is no contradiction between Old and New Testament. How could there be? The Author of both is the same. There is no difference in teaching. How could there be? One simply must bear in mind always the order in which God did things, and then also caused to be recorded and given to us. The teaching of the Old Testament is all to be understood in the light of Him who was promised and who was coming into the world. (see John 5:30-47, as just one of the places where this is plainly taught) The New Testament is to be understood in the light of Him who has come, and has never left us, something the first book of the New Testament assures us is most certainly true: “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)

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