12 Things I Wish Everyone Knew About the Bible (Part 1)

One of the topics I speak about most frequently apart from women in ministry and digital ministry is on how to read the Bible well. I love teaching on this subject because, well, I love the Bible. I enjoy helping people understand how to read it well and helping them break free from misunderstandings or assumptions that have brought into their reading of the Text. So I want to share twelve principles I wish everyone understood about the Bible in order to read it well. The first five are a part of this part one, while the remaining will be published next week.

1. The Bible actually is difficult to understand sometimes.

One of the conversations I have most frequently with people in the local church is feelings of shame or guilt that there are parts of the Bible they don’t understand. At a popular level, we’re told that we can simply read the Bible at face value and that God wants to speak to us through the Bible—so it must be easy right? After all, why would God want to speak to us and then make it difficult for us to understand? This results in an odd sort of paradox within many local churches where people feel the need to simultaneously reject any interpretation that feels more than a “face value” interpretation and feel stuck with insufficient answers and feelings of guilt and not being able to “get it.”

But the funny thing about it is that the Bible itself admits that it can be hard to understand! Speaking of Paul, Peter makes this statement:

Don't forget that the Lord is patient because he wants people to be saved. This is also what our dear friend Paul said when he wrote you with the wisdom God had given him. Paul talks about these same things in all his letters, but part of what he says is hard to understand. Some ignorant and unsteady people even destroy themselves by twisting what he said. They do the same thing with other Scriptures too. (2 Pet. 3:15-16 CEV)

Peter admits some of what Paul says in his writings is hard to understand while at the same time calling his writing Scripture. The hard truth for us is that Peter and Paul lived at the same time, in the same culture, spoke the same language, and had the same basic religious background—and Peter still found Paul’s words hard to understand at times. How much more is it understandable that you and I, who do not share a common background, language, or culture—we who live 2,000 years later, many of whom live in a completely different part of the world—might need more than a face value interpretation when approaching the Bible.

This doesn’t mean the Bible is impossible to understand. It only means that sometimes it takes effort on our part to seek out understanding. That’s where some of the principles that follow come into play. But understanding this should liberate us from feeling guilty for not always understanding and should encourage us to seek out deeper answers.

2. The Bible was written for us, not to us.

I borrow this line from my late friend Michael S. Heiser because I love how truth-packed such a statement is while being wrapped in such a punchy, singular sentence. The Bible was written for us in the sense that the Bible is God’s gift to his covenantal people. It is a timeless treasure passed down to us by the Hebrew patriarchs and prophets, through the apostles, and stewarded throughout the centuries until at last it is resting on your bookshelf or on your smartphone. It was written for you because, as a follower of Jesus, you partake in this great inheritance and are entrusted in your generation to steward it faithfully and passing on the wisdom we derive from it onto the next generation.

But the Bible was not written to you. It was written to people who lived over a 1,500 year timeframe across three language groups, multiple ethnic groups, and compiled by at least 40 attributed authors. So while we can benefit from its wisdom and it remains living and active (2 Tim. 3:16), it was written to a very different cultural, socio-economic, political, and linguistic system than we have today. And understanding that is crucial to stewarding the Bible well. (I discuss differences between our cultures and those of the Bible, as well as many people groups around the world today here.)

Because the Bible was not written to us, we cannot rightly say that Ecclesiastes 10:2, which says, “The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left,” is about American partisan politics (regardless of how many knuckleheads insist that it is!). Because the Bible was not written to us, we cannot say that the voluntary sharing of possessions in the church of Acts is an example of socialist economics in action…because those early Christians lived in a patron-client socio-economic system. Because the Bible was not written to us, we cannot rightly say that there are helicopters in the book of Revelation. We have to respect the time and place of the peoples—our spiritual ancestors—to whom the Bible was first written in order to reap the benefits of wisdom it has for us today.

3. You need more than “just my Bible.”

One of my favorite memes of all time is this little gem:

It underscores a valuable truth that I alluded to in the previous principle. The Bible is our gift because we are a part of the family of God. That does not mean that, as in centuries past, the institutional church is the sole official interpreter of the Text. But what is also doesn’t mean is that I, as a lone-ranger exegete, am the sole authority of the interpretation of the Text either. One of the beautiful things about the Bible’s age is that we benefit from centuries upon centuries of interpretive wisdom from those who have gone before us. We’re only doing ourselves a disservice if we reject that. We rightly benefit from reading Scriptural studies (especially ones from saints who have since fallen asleep in Christ), commentaries, books, and more instead of attempting to figure it out alone.

4. The Bible was meant to be interpreted in community.

This is one of my spicier takes because we live in a highly individualized culture and, among us evangelicals and Pentecostals, places significant emphasis on private devotional time. While I don’t suggest you shouldn’t read the Bible in private devotions, what I am suggesting is that this is not the way the Bible was originally received and interpreted—and that’s important.

We must remember that the Bible was first disseminated to people, most of whom could not read. So for most Christians throughout history, the only time they engaged the Bible was when it was read aloud in the Sunday gathering.

Over the last 200 years, literacy rates have dramatically improved all around the world—driven in large part by the work of missionaries translating the Scriptures into indigenous languages and teaching literacy so people could engage Scripture. That is a very good thing. But as with any development, there can be unintended consequences that aren’t as good. While the ability for the masses to read Scripture personally is a fantastic (and fairly recent) development, we must also reconcile with the fact that it has resulted in the unintended consequence of people no longer hearing Scripture in community, discussing it in community, and discerning its meaning in community. We retain remnants of that in local church Bible studies and around Bible College and Seminary classrooms (and discussion boards). But it would benefit us to consider how to regain some of that lost element of communal interpretation of Scripture that can exist alongside personal devotional time.

5. There’s more than one way to engage the Bible.

Because most of Church history has had to address spiritual formation and Scripture engagement in ways that people who could not read could understand, we have a rich history of multi-sensory ways of engaging the Bible. The Psalms provide us with the ancient prayer book of our faith and were sung by ancient Jews in any number of life circumstances. Scriptural stories were told through art and symbols in churches and cathedrals. Prayer books like The Book of Common Prayer are saturated with Scripture, allowing people the ability to recite Scripture daily, committing it to memory. I’ve dabbled with transcribing portions of Scripture as a part of my regular prayer and Bible reading time. We can sing the Scriptures. We can memorized the Scriptures. But perhaps one of the best modern gifts given to us is the ability to “read” the Bible via audio, whether from the YouVersion Bible app, or any other number of digital resources—allowing us the ability to engage the Bible in a way that is both convenient, but also similar to how the first Christians would have encountered it.