Here’s a question I’ve wondered about when I’ve found myself stuck on a difficult passage I can’t seem to figure out — and I bet you’ve wondered it as well:
If the Bible is God’s Word, and it exists because he wants to reveal himself to us, then why are some parts so hard to understand? Why do there have to be hard parts? Doesn’t God know people will argue about those sections and get distracted from the heart of the message? Why not just make the whole thing easy?
We’re in good company when we ask those questions. At the end of his second epistle, the great Apostle Peter shows he’s wondered about those things as well when he admits that the parts of the Bible written by the Apostle Paul are complex and challenging.
“He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.” — 2 Peter 3:16 NIV (my italics)
A couple of observations. First, it’s fascinating that Peter identifies Paul’s work as Scripture. Paul’s writings belong on the same shelf as Moses and Jeremiah and the great prophets from the past, which speaks to the authority of the New Testament authors. That’s obviously a big deal.
Second, and more to the point of this article, Peter gives a nod to the brilliant density of Paul’s thought. The fact that bad actors take advantage of Paul’s complex writing to obfuscate and confuse doesn’t change the fact that it’s Scripture. These hard, often-twisted parts of the Bible are still entirely “God-breathed” and “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). Even Paul’s toughest-to-understand passages are part of God’s Word that “endures forever” and won’t “return void” (Is. 40:8, 55:11).
It helps to know that someone as brilliant as Peter (who himself wrote two books of the Bible) also thinks some parts of the scriptures are hard. But you’ll notice he says “some” — meaning he thinks the really hard parts are the exception, and that most of Scripture is easier to understand. If you’ve read through the Bible a time or two, I bet you’d agree with Peter’s assessment.
Easy vs. Hard Parts of the Bible
Here are some examples of easy-to-understand parts and hard-to-understand parts:
Pretty Easy
- The story of Ruth.
- Proverbs 15:1 — “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”
- Romans 3:23 — “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Pretty Hard
- Revelation.
- The story of Jephthah’s vow in Judges 11.
- Jesus’ preaching to “spirits in prison” in 1 Peter 3:18-20.
To say some passages are easy is not to say those passages are light on meaning.
Ruth tells a straightforward, timeless story of a woman who loses everything but has her fortunes restored when her widowed daughter-in-law falls in love with a godly man. Their descendants go on to play pivotal roles in God’s big redemptive plan. The story of Ruth is immediately accessible to new readers and yet profound, with rich layers of meaning to be uncovered over the course of a lifetime.
The book of Revelation is on the other end of the complexity spectrum. Over the years, commentators have reached radically different conclusions with some saying that it’s a prophecy about the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, while others see it as a future series of events playing out in today’s headlines, and still others argue that the images in Revelation have multiple fulfillments. First time readers will get the rough gist of Revelation on their first pass, but they’re sure to come away with a mountain of tough questions as well.
2 Reasons Parts of the Bible Are Hard
It seems to me there are two big reasons the Bible “contains some things that are hard to understand.” The first has to do with the nature of the Bible and how God chose to build it. The second has to do with the inherent complexity of an infinite God revealing himself to finite readers.
Let’s consider both those reasons more closely.
1. The Bible Is Hard Because of How It’s Built
Here are four factors born out of how the Bible is built that can make some parts hard to understand: its languages, its inspiration, its genres, and its size.
- Languages of the Bible: The Bible was written in three different languages over 1500-ish years on three different continents. Modern readers are far removed from the tongues, tribes, and traditions of Bible times. By the grace of God and the hard work of talented scholars, we have excellent, reliable English translations that welcome us into the text with language that faithfully represents the original while still being intelligible to normal people. Still, all translation has the potential to create barriers to understanding. This is more noticeable in certain parts of the Bible than in others, and modern readers might have to grapple with the original language a bit here and there to sort through some challenging passages. Differences in translations often reflect places in the original text where scholars puzzle over the meaning.
- Authors of the Bible: The biblical authors were inspired by God, not possessed by God. God intentionally employed the personalities and circumstances of the human authors to perfectly reveal himself and accomplish his purposes. Paul sounds like Paul. Peter sounds like Peter. Each human author maintains his own unique self while writing the very words of God.
- Genres of the Bible: The Bible employs several genres of literature. Some of these genres are not familiar to modern readers. Each genre requires a different interpretive touch, and comes with different opportunities and challenges in terms of application for the modern reader. Even though this aspect of how the Bible is built adds a degree of added challenge, it’s worth it, because the various genres of Scripture cover the whole gamut of the human experience and human expression in a way that echoes across the centuries.
- Size of the Bible: The Bible is a very big book. It reveals the God of everything by telling the cohesive, history-long story of his redemptive work. Considering the scope and significance of that story, the Bible is remarkably efficient, but it’s still just so much for the reader to hold in their mind at once. It takes effort and intentionality to internalize the whole, grand story and to learn to decipher the hard parts in light of the big picture (good resources make this easier).
These factors aren’t flaws, they’re features. They’re indicative of God’s brilliant strategy for revealing himself to finite people, not just at one moment in history, but across time.
2. The Bible Is Hard Because God Is Infinite — and We’re Not
The Bible invites us to think beyond time, space, and the natural world as we know it. It reveals a reality far bigger than the one we experience with our five senses, it paints a picture of where we fit in that reality forever, and it introduces us to the one all-powerful, timeless being who made and sustains it all.
These are HUGE paradigm-jarring concepts, and it makes perfect sense that our minds (which are so informed by our experience in the natural world) would need time and reflection to begin to comprehend them.
God knows this.
He says about himself in Isaiah 55:9 (NIV), “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than yours and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
A relationship between an infinite God and finite people has built-in challenges. There’s no way around that, but the central story of the scriptures is God doing all the work to bridge that divide (a divide of both sin and capacity). The Bible spells out how God bridges that seemingly unspannable chasm by his own great effort, at his own great expense, for his own great glory. In Scripture, God explains to fallen humanity that he’s redeeming us in real time as he’s doing the redeeming.
With all that in mind, it makes sense that such a book would be challenging in spots. What’s surprising is how relatively easy so much of the Bible is to understand!
An Elegant Balance
All hard books require good listeners. A hypothetical, lesser iteration of the Bible that’s stuck on easy mode wouldn’t demand such dedication, devotion, and lifelong attention. It would be laughable if there were no moments in the Bible that leave the reader in awe of the magnitude of God and deeply humbled by the limits of our own understanding. But if the whole Bible was permanently set to hard mode, barely anyone would read it because the task would be too daunting.
The Bible’s balance speaks to the character and compassion of the God behind it. If the God of the scriptures was no more complex than a very clever person, then the whole Bible would smack of man-made cultish fraud. If the God of the scriptures was an aloof celestial genius who’d positioned himself too far removed to be known or understood, then his detached indifference would have precluded making a Bible to reveal himself at all.
But neither of these are the case. Instead there’s obvious intentionality to the ratio between the accessible and the difficult. The hard parts in the Bible are a natural by-product of how it’s built and the perfection of the God who ordained it. The easy parts welcome outsiders and make clear everything that’s needed to have life in Jesus’ name. All of it reveals the character and plan of God and all of it is nourishing to the reader by his power. No book in the history of humanity has more masterfully struck the balance between welcoming accessibility and challenging depth.
Peter saw that, and he was absolutely right when he said some parts of the Bible are harder than others.
Peter wasn’t bemoaning that complexity, he was celebrating it, and so should we, even when we’re wrestling with the hard parts.
In my next article we’ll move beyond the question of why the Bible is hard and get into the practical question of how to make sense of those hard parts. If you want a resource built to make sense of both the easy and hard parts of the Bible in normal human language, you might consider picking up a copy of my new book, The Lightning-Fast Field Guide to the Bible.
Thanks for reading.
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