New podcast cover idea, what do you think?

Actually never mind. I heard it can be a bad idea to change your logo.

ICYMI: Judging Angels (I Corinthians 6:3)

I know I haven’t had a newsletter for a couple weeks. My workplace had a major fundraiser last week, so it had tied up a bit of my extra time (and energy). And I don’t exactly have a rabbit trail to follow up on from this past week’s episode, but I do have some thoughts to share on Bible reading and interpretation today.

But first! In case you missed it, here’s a link to this past Wednesday’s episode: Do You Not Know that You Will JUDGE ANGELS? (I Corinthians 6:3)

How to Read Your Bible Like a Total Weirdo

Today I thought I would share some thoughts that have been swirling around in my head lately. Even though this podcast is less than two years old, my journey to studying the “weird stuff in the Bible” goes back more than a decade- probably closer to two decades.

(I really don’t like that I’m old enough now to be measuring my life in plural decades)

I can remember even as a teen, when I came across a confusing line of text in the Bible- something like Do you not know you will judge angels?- I would ask adults for help in understand what I was reading. And I would get answers like this:

• “We aren’t meant to understand everything in the Bible.”

• “That’s probably a translational error.”

• “You’re just supposed to have faith.”

As if people who asked legitimate questions about what they were reading were somehow lacking in faith.

Eventually I realized that if I wanted answers to these questions, I was going to have to find them myself. So I always paid close attention when I learned an explanation for one of these weird things I’d come across in my Bible reading time. I filed them away in some part of my brain; a part that I’m now accessing to do this podcast.

But I never, however, gave up on the idea that there had to be an answer somewhere out there. I just couldn’t believe that God would write His Word to us like a piece of Swiss cheese with a bunch of holes in it that we weren’t meant to ever fill.

So with that intro, I’m going to give you three principles I use when reading the Bible that have helped guide me in finding the answers I was looking for. However, I’m only sharing the first one today (so that this email isn’t so long that it takes you all afternoon to read it). The other two will come along in upcoming emails.

1. God did not put anything in Scripture to confuse us.

Most of the time, when we come to a weird verse in Scripture, our natural inclination is to just skip over it and keep on reading. If we stopped to analyze every passage that didn’t make sense initially, we wouldn’t get through more than a few verses every day.

If the meaning of a passage is not clear at first glance, don’t assume that the meaning is beyond your understanding or some inaccessible truth. This is a defeatist mentality that will cause you to give up before you even begin to open your understanding.

Yes, God’s thoughts and ways are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9), but all of Scripture was given to us to understand (II Timothy 3:16-17). God didn’t place things in the Bible that He didn’t want us to know. He placed them there for our understanding.

Bible scholar Dr. Michael Heiser was known for saying, “If it’s weird, it’s important.” Take those words as a personal challenge. If you’re reading through the Bible and the Holy Spirit tugs on your heart about a passage you don’t “get,” commit to spending some checking into it.

Sometimes when we encounter a verse that’s hard to parse, we might assume that it relates to some tradition that is lost to history, or that it might be a translational error, or that the historical context was too long ago for us to every discover what it really meant.

However, Jesus said that His Word would never pass away (Matthew 24:35). He said not a single jot or tittle would be lost (Matthew 5:18). That means God has taken it upon Himself to perfectly preserve His Words for us. If God takes that much care to preserve His Word, would He not also preserve methods for us to understand all of it?

That does not mean the answer is always going to fall right into our laps. We may have to do some digging and hardcore studying to arrive at the right answer. But I firmly believe that if you meditate on God’s Word and do your due diligence in researching its meaning, God will direct you to the answers you seek. He is not the author of confusion (I Corinthians 14:33).

So the first principle of understanding God’s Word more clearly is believing that.

He wrote the Bible for us to understand- all of it.

Part II next week!

And we’ll put a pin in that here for today. Next week, I’m going to share a second principle for how I read and interpret the Bible, and then a third principle in two weeks.

Until then, have a great week (and a Weird Wednesday)!

-Luke Taylor

Get in touch with me at [email protected]