Troublesome Topic: How Can People Trust the Bible if They Can’t Understand It?
Lesson 4 of 12Do you fully understand the atom? Do you possess complete understanding of the components of an atoms such as quarks, anti-quarks, neutrinos, leptons, positrons, muons, pions, mesons, and tau particles? Neither do I. Actually, no one fully understands any of these things. We believe most of what we read or hear about atoms despite not understanding them. Like God, we cannot see atoms, yet we believe what intelligent, yet fallible people tell us.
So why is it that people struggle to trust the Bible?
Life is complicated. God is hard to wrap our minds around. Spiritual issues are hard to nail down. The Bible has much to say about life, God, and spiritual issues so we should expect the Bible to be hard to understand, not easy. In fact, if someone gives us easy answers to the hard questions of life, we usually assume those answers are overly simplistic and are ignoring something important.
I don’t encourage uninformed faith, rather I encourage you to read and dig and study the Bible. There are things that need to be questioned and things that need to be taken by faith. Knowing the difference is the challenge. As long as you have the right attitudes in your heart, God will guide you to know the difference. It is His word, and He wants you to understand it. However, He won’t give you full understanding all at once. That is because He cares as much about the journey as He does the destination. We want to arrive quickly and with very little struggle. He uses those struggles to make us stronger and to allow us to prove our love and commitment to Him.
So keep studying and your love for His word will grow.
The next lesson is Is There Such a Thing as the Most Accurate Translation?