The God You Thought You Knew

In the literary world, the Bible emerges year after year atop the best-seller list, yet biblical literacy compares very poorly with the popularity of the Bible. One reason may be a perception that the Bible is about God. God is a mysterious, invisible, and distant Being that has nothing to do with the activities and concerns of ordinary human beings on this small planet, so involvement with writings about such a Being had best be left to the professional clergy who themselves carry an air of mystery. So people content themselves with a weekly one-hour visit to a place of worship, listen to a brief reading, accept what the clergy person teaches, go back to their regular lives, and return the following week. There is a perception of mystery around the Bible as if ordinary people are not equipped to read and understand it for themselves, and so people deny themselves the thrill and adventure of delving into this marvelous book, exploring its contents, discovering its riches, applying them to every aspect of their daily lives, and, greater still, encountering the God who is there.

The Bible is not as mysterious as is commonly believed. It is written in simple language for people with ordinary literary skills; its reading level is elementary, at about the fifth or sixth grade. It is true that the King James Version is somewhat awkward to read, and there are parts whose contents are foreign to our culture and experience, but we cannot condemn the entire book because of some of its parts. There are scores of other translations and paraphrases that make reading less challenging. Furthermore, the marketplace is loaded with supplementary help. There are Bible dictionaries, concordances, cross references, background history books, works from archeology and anthropology—enough to help a mature individual make a go at reading the Bible. It is inconceivable that people unravel and understand the complex language of knotty contracts, manuals of instruction for complex equipment, and information even in other than their first language, and yet they shy away from the Bible as too difficult and mysterious. Why not bring to the Bible the same level of intelligence and sense of purpose with which we approach other kinds of literature? What a difference it would make!

Let us assume we gear up to read the Bible. How does a mature reader read? We should come to the Bible with open minds, stripped of all preconceived ideas that made us shy away in the first place. We have been told with strong passion that the Bible is inerrant from Genesis to Revelation, that holy men wrote it as they were inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that there is doom and gloom to those who modify or amend it in any way. So whatever is written therein should be accepted and obeyed without question. Human beings are equipped with intelligence, but we cannot exercise it and benefit from it if we approach the reading with predetermined restrictions. We should also drop notions that we have picked up about God, particularly the God of the Old Testament—a God of anger and vengeance who gave the nod to the slaughter and annihilation of peoples, the stoning of a man and his entire family because he stole some money and some clothes, and who so terrified people that they were afraid to come near the place designated as holy. We cannot let baseless fears keep us from discovering all the riches that the Bible contains.

We approach the Bible then with a mind that is clear, free, inquisitive, and uninhibited. The first thing we will want to do as we start reading is to gather information. We seek out the bits of information, facts, beliefs, advice, and the like, that the selection (verse, chapter, or book) conveys. Information gathering is a necessary but superficial level of mature Bible reading. People who stop at this level are the ones who strike fear in the hearts of would-be readers, for they credit the Bible for irrational things they do and hurtful ideas and prejudices they shelter. They do that because they can only quote and repeat what is written, but they try to argue, debate, or pontificate.

Information is to be used. Yogi Berra was quoted as saying, “I didn’t really say all the things that I said.” We can turn this statement around and apply it to the Bible. The Bible does say a lot of things that it doesn’t say. There is plenty of information that lies hidden in what is written, but as mature readers, we have to search, probe, question, dig, read between the lines, converse, connect the dots, and compare. We will be amazed at what is there. Let us look at an example.

When Jesus was on the cross, he said, “Woman, behold thy son … behold thy mother” (John 19:26–27 KJV). There is a wealth of information in that statement, enough to make a story by itself. The statement is an indication that Jesus was concerned about the well-being of his mother, which in itself suggests that he had been her support all along even in spite of his busy ministry and his living away from home. (She lived in Nazareth, and he had headquartered in Capernaum.) We learn from cross-referencing that there were adult siblings in the home, at least four males, whose names are mentioned in Mark, and at least two sisters (Mark 6:3 KJV). In spite of that many people in the home, Jesus did not feel comfortable leaving his mother to their care; now that he was leaving, he wanted to take her out of that family situation. This suggests that Jesus did not have a happy home life, and that is underscored also in John 7:3–5. The brothers jeered and mocked him. Jesus was a dutiful son. He wanted to make sure that before he departed, his mother would be in the best situation possible, so he entrusted her to the care of the disciple who was closest to him, John, the disciple known for love and compassion. His mother’s well-being was so important to him that even though he was in extreme pain and had only a matter of minutes left to live, he made sure to attend to this piece of business. It was not until it was done that he cried in triumph, “It is finished.”