I was reading the Bible before I became a Christian. It just made sense to me – if there was a God then I needed to find out about him, and what better way than reading the book that was about him. And because I didn’t know any better, I started at the beginning, Genesis. The problem was, the more I read the more questions I had. Wasn’t this book supposed to be answering my questions? I pressed on though, reading Genesis and Exodus, but getting stuck in Leviticus. How was Leviticus supposed to help me understand God? I gave up.
A few months later I became a Christian at a beach mission in the UK. Now I was directed to read the New Testament, and I jumped in enthusiastically. After six months of reading I decided to give up being a Christian. It was not that I no longer believed in God, it was because what I was reading in the New Testament was not what I was experiencing in the church that I was attending. The miracles, the healings, the wonderful works of the Holy Spirit that I was reading about seemed to be totally lacking in any of the churches that I tried. Then this mature Christian couple invited myself and some other youth from my church to their home for the weekend. The lady was a great cook, so I put off giving up being a Christian until after the weekend.
That Saturday evening I was filled with the Holy Spirit for the first time, and my Christianity came alive. I had dipped my toe into something great, and there was going to be no turning back for me. The discrepancies between what I was seeing in the church and what I read in my Bible still bothered me, but now I had received a taste of what I hungered for, and I knew the only way to receive more was to follow hard after the Lord.
It still seemed logical to me to read and study the Bible, if I wanted to get to know God better. Over the years I have read through the whole Bible dozens of times, and yet I continue to learn new things. I have several different versions because it seems that when I use the same one all of the time I find myself skipping over some of what I read. I think that I know it already, and don’t need to read it again. But in a different translation I find myself pausing, and reading things in a fresh light. I check in my New International Version, to see if it says the same. And often it is similar, but being slightly different is making me think afresh about what is being said.
It used to bother me when there seemed to be errors in the Bible. Now I wonder if people who strongly insist that there are none have they actually read the book much. Please don’t be offended. If that’s what you have been taught then I have no problem if you continue to believe it. I have simply found that when I read something like the parable of the mustard seed, I don’t need to agonise over why Jesus said it was the smallest seed on the earth when that is not the case. Instead I want to lean into what the Holy Spirit wants to teach me in this story. Jesus was not trying to be a botanist, he was trying to teach his disciples that if they were obedient and shared the truths of the gospel, the Holy Spirit would take their words and bring incredible fruit from them.
When I read the gospels I don’t need to ask such questions like were there one or two men who had demons cast out of them in the region of the Gerasenes. Mark writes about just one man, and when I read Mark I want to learn what the writer was trying to communicate with his rendition of the story. Matthew has two demon-possessed men who were helped, although otherwise it seems to be the same story. From our western way of thinking we may conclude that one of them got it wrong. The differences no longer bother me. The Bible is not trying to be an accurate history book, or a science textbook, or a biology book. Rather it is teaching us about how God has worked in the past, through men and women like us. And in reading these stories we are to learn, and grow in our own relationship with the Lord.
At a church that I used to attend, I asked the pastor what we were. He said that we were fundamentalists. A fundamentalist is someone who believes that everything written in a holy book, such as the Bible, is completely true. The question I now have is what do we mean by completely true? For example, if you read the early chapters in Genesis you will discover two different creation stories that cannot be meshed together. For some reason the writer put both in Genesis, without comment, and left them for us to read. What do we do with that? I suggest that if it didn’t bother the writer, then maybe it shouldn’t bother us either. And if at this point you are rushing to Genesis to see how you can get the stories to follow the same order of creation, then you have missed what I am wanting to say here. What is the writer wanting us to learn from these stories? What does the Holy Spirit want to teach us?
It would be so much easier if the Bible were a manual – how to live the Christian life. Turn to page 273 for rules on whether we can play cards if we are not gambling. But it isn’t. And that’s why we need the read the Bible carefully, to study it, to make use of teachers we know and trust. And maybe sometimes too to read teachers who say things differently, teachers who have an alternative view to us. Most of all, we need to ask the Holy Spirit to guide us.
If you want to get to know God better then I strongly suggest you make the time to regularly read and study the Scriptures, and I mean both the Old and the New Testaments. It’s worth the effort.
Mary Foulger - Author, speaker and intercessor 