Sometimes when I am teaching lessons when I am teaching a lesson I will use material prepared by other people. Even when I prepare my own material I am really only recompiling what others have already said and done. It doesn’t really bother me one way or another whether it is my material or that of another as long as the students are learning. However I keep running into the same problem. And the problem is that I never quite understand it. Why does the author makes this point here? How does this bible passage fit in? There are always a few things that don’t seem to fit, that I can’t quit bring together in my mind. Not necessarily about what I am teaching but about the way the lesson is put together. So I have to rearrange things, I have to add, I have to subtract. Even when it is my own lesson, every time I teach it, it gets changed even while I am teaching. I’m sure every teacher, every pastor, has run into this same problem time and time again. We are always looking at things a little different and because we never see things quite the same way there are always a few things that don’t seem to fit. If we really want to figure out why, if it’s something really very important we might take the time to try to put ourselves in the authors view, in his mind. The closer we get to thinking like he did the closer we get to understanding what he wrote.
Beyond teaching, every student of the Bible, will find the same thing true to a much greater degree here. When we are dealing with earthly things we are attempting to put ourselves in the mind set of a man. And we may to some small degree succeed. But, the Bible is written from God’s view and that is such a mindset that we can never hope to attain. Is it any wonder than that that Bible is full of things that don’t seem to add up? That it is teeming with non sequiturs. It is beyond all things the most frustrating thing you will ever attempt to understand, at least from our perspective.
Yet although we might not ever come close to being able to view all the pieces of scripture fitting together the way they are meant to. There is one thing, one assumption, from which we can start that will go a long ways to bringing it all together. The Lord is mercy. The Lord is love. Too many people I think begin to study the scripture with this question: “what does this passage teach me?” And the result is that they are almost always satisfied with a trite and rather superficial answer. “He is warning me not to commit adultery.” With such a view it is not hard to understand how they quickly become quite bored with the incessant droning nagging lists of the pastor and of scripture. It is not hard to see how with such a mindset daily reading becomes a manner of, “ohh well I’ve learned my lesson for today, now I will go out and try to do it.” Instead when you sit down to read a passage ask first, “where is God’s mercy?” In other words, ask not what you can do for God, but what God has done for you! And scripture is transformed. Not only will the pieces suddenly make far more sense, but the Bible is reborn in your mind from an annoying badgering presence to a golden shimmering love letter from your Savior. After all this is the purpose of scripture that we might come to know Him, in same way that we seek to understand and get to know a friend through their letters so we seek to know Him in his writings. They are His story written to teach us who He is.