Saturday, August 17th, 2013.
The Bible contains both easy and hard to understand passages.
The easier passages are immediately clear and their understanding is natural.
Others take a little more thought, but can eventually be understood when studied carefully with the context and other similar verses.
Then there are hard passages which seem out of place, contrary to the context, or that speak of things otherwise absent from the Bible.
These verses may have multiple possible interpretations and the audience is often unclear.
A variety of explanations given by “the experts” testify to the difficulty of these passages for everyone. It’s not just you, they are hard for everybody.
There seems to be an attraction to solve these difficult passages, and to do so by sacrificing the easy verses on the altar of having an answer.
Resist this temptation. These difficult passages are the most dangerous, and must be treated with extreme caution.
Used wrongly these verses have the potential to poison someone’s entire belief system. Sometimes it’s better not to have an answer, than to have a really bad answer.
Never change the clear and simple meaning of an easy verse for the sake of better understanding a hard verse.
Always interpret the hard passages by the easy ones.
For His glory,
Justin “takin’ it easy” Johnson