42: What’s the Worst Question to Ask
When You’re Reading the Bible?
Any question that begins “Why did God …?’
Try reading without ideas about the nature of God entering into your thoughts. Somebody wrote the passage reflecting how THEY understood the passage. If they attribute something to God, it their understanding of God in their time and culture, not necessarily the truth about God. <This is a tough one for me.>
“You have to let it be what it is.
There are lots of passages that are quite mysterious, words in the original language we don’t have adequate modern equivalents for, and stories that involve practices and rituals we don’t have any context for.
But if you keep your marbles in the bucket, and you read and listen carefully, you start to see the story behind the story, the story about people waking up to bigger and more expansive understandings of who they understand God to be and what they believe God is up to in the world.
Your questions, then, start to take on a new character, because you begin to realize that the more you enter into the humanity of their story, the more you discover that there’s something at work, something insistent, something enduring, something that won’t let these people go.
And then you realize that that same force, presence, pull, and call are at work today within you. And in those around you.
And whatever it is that won’t let those people go, won’t let you go.”
Excerpt From: Rob Bell. “What Is the Bible?.” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/what-is-the-bible/id1146440401?mt=11