Brothers, Let Us Query the Text

Making sense of the Bible can be a daunting task. At first blush, the Bible appears to be full of contradictions and inconsistencies. We must be patient, spending as much time as necessary to understand what it is trying to tell us. We must go against the hyper-skepticism of our time by avoiding the temptation to assume nonsense where there is, indeed, sense. Finally, we must be brave enough to ask tough questions; God has no fear of our probing. What exactly is the Bible trying to say in the contradictions, "hard sayings" and difficult to resolve theological, ethical and metaphysical issues that crop up in its pages. As Pastor John Piper puts it:

There are hundreds and hundreds of such seeming discrepancies in the Holy Scripture, and we dishonor the text not to see them and think them through. God is not a God of confusion. His tongue is not forked. There are profound and wonderful resolutions to all problems. He has called us to an eternity of discovery so that every morning for ages to come we might break forth in new songs of praise.

In Second Timothy 2:7, Paul promises that if we seriously reflect on what he is saying, the Bible, God will give us understanding. Essentially, what Paul is promising is this: we are blessed and given understanding by God through the hard intellectual work involved in working out exactly what the Bible is about.