This Reading Mama

Ep 17: The Bible is SO Confusing!

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Welcome back to This Reading Mama’s podcast!

Have you ever heard someone say, “The Bible is SO confusing!”? Perhaps you’ve thought this or said this yourself.

But is the Bible confusing on purpose? Or is there perhaps something we are doing (or not doing) when we read that makes it seem confusing?

A variation of this has been said throughout church history: “The Scriptures are shallow enough for a babe to come and drink without fear of drowning and deep enough for a theologians to swim in without ever touching the bottom." (St. Augustine, St. Jerome)

While this statement isn’t Scripture, it is very much true. Many of the passages in Scriptures can be understood by a child or even a new believer, yet there are passages that require more “swimming lessons” (studying) to understand them.

If you find yourself saying or thinking that the Bible is confusing, Amy and I would like to propose three reasons why this might be the case. We’re also walking you through a visual, which can be accessed as a Podcast+ Member, that can help you think through and understand the Bible more as you read.


Resources & Links:

Got Questions? https://www.gotquestions.org/context-Bible.html

Greg Koukl https://www.str.org/w/never-read-a-bible-verse 

Episode 4: Reading the Bible This Year
https://thisreadingmama.com/ep-4-reading-the-bible-this-year/ 

Understanding the Bible Pack from This Reading Mama
https://shop.thisreadingmama.com/product/understanding-the-bible-printable-pack/ 

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Snag a copy of Becky's newest Bible study, The Sacrifice of our Savior. It's a 4-week Easter study of Jesus in the Old Testament. Get the PDF here or get the hardcopy on Amazon.

Just a quick reminder, these printable reading plans are available to download only if you are a Podcast+ Member. You can join our Podcast+ Membership or login to your membership to download the transcript, guided notes, and study tools from each episode!

Let's Connect!


SPEAKER_01

Welcome back to this Reading Mom's podcast.

SPEAKER_00

I'm Becky. This is Amy. Glad you all joined us again today. I want to remind you all that if you are part of the Podcast Plus membership, you have access to several resources, one of them being the monthly Bible reading plans. So we started in January. We now have January, February, March, and April available. And then you also have tools to help you engage with the podcast in and of itself, guided notes. There's charts and visuals that you can also use for teaching a Sunday school class. And we hope that you find these resources helpful. If you have any questions about the resources, you can email Becky at Becky at this readingmama.com.

SPEAKER_01

Today we're going to talk about how the Bible is so confusing. I don't know if you've ever said that before. I have. I've said that before. But I think the question is why? Usually it's because we don't really know how to read it. So today, Amy and I are going to share three very helpful tips to understanding the Bible. The first tip is context. So if I were to define the word context, I would say it's the surrounding whole that provides meaning to the parts. And when I say whole, I'm spelling it W H O L E, like a whole cookie, which I would love to eat right now.

SPEAKER_00

And when you say whole, I think of H-O-L-E, where we start in the hole, where we can't see everything that is around us. And so I have an example of why context would be important. And that is uh I tend to read things like I'll be reading a book, and I think that it's just it has an amazing point. And so I'll take part of it, I'll actually take a picture of a portion of what I've read and I'll send it in a group chat, and I'll go, this is awesome. I love this. And most of the time I get text messages coming back at me saying, like, why is this so good? Or what is it that made you send this to us? And I'm going, oh, they don't understand why I think this is awesome because I've read a whole chapter and I probably sent them just the summary, like that conclusion paragraph at the end that wraps up what it's trying to say. And so we have another context example.

SPEAKER_01

That would be when you're having a conversation with someone and someone else walks in the room. Just the other day, I was having a conversation with my husband. One of the kids walks in the room, and as we're talking, this child keeps going, who, who, who? She sounded like an owl, not really, but she kept asking who, and because she couldn't, she was like, I'm not understanding the context of what you're talking about. So if you haven't caught on yet, our three helpful tips for understanding the Bible better are context, context, context. Wow, that was cheesy. It's on point. It is on point. So I think one of the pitfalls when we're thinking about understanding the Bible is we start and we end with a verse, one verse. And I like how Greg Kokel says that. You know, we have we have chapter numbers in the Bible, we have verse numbers in the Bible, and yes, those can be very helpful when the pastor says, turn to Jeremiah 29, 11. You can find it really easily. But those numbers give us the illusion that those verses should stand alone. Instead, we have a visual here. I think about a ripple effect, like when you throw a rock into the pond, it has this ripple effect. So we instead of just looking at the verse, we want to see have to have a broader view of what we're trying to understand.

SPEAKER_00

And so today we're gonna use Jeremiah 29.11 as an example of how you can get the context and understand what the Bible is teaching. So I'm gonna read Jeremiah 29.11, and it says, For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. I know I've seen this verse in many places, um, maybe just Jeremiah 29.11 on license plates or posters on your t-shirts, and then even uh maybe in prayer meetings, there's declarations that are given. And I heard someone say, blab it and grab it. So they're just, you know, repeating what they've heard and they're applying it to themselves in whatever circumstance they find themselves in. I was reading about this verse and how you need to understand the context of it in gotquestions.org, which is a really good resource, and it was saying that before you can apply something, you first have to understand it in its context, which is what we're going to teach about today.

SPEAKER_01

So if you think broader than the verse, we're gonna think section. It could also be called paragraph here, but we went with section. These are the basic units of thought in the Bible. And if we look at the section, we can kind of back up to see where it starts when we see a subheading. So in Jeremiah 29, 11, if I back up 10, 9, 8 all the way back, my my subheading begins before the chapter starts. Jeremiah's letter to the exiles. That is what the subheading says. So it begins in verse 1, and it's it's a letter, it tells me that in the subheading, it's a letter from someone. Well, it's from Jeremiah, and it says that to the exiles. So it's important to not just think of the verse, but to back up to the section or even the paragraph.

SPEAKER_00

And then if you zoom out just further than that and you start at the chapter, in this specific instance, when we back up from the verse, it takes us to the beginning of the chapter. But there are other chapters that, well, there are other verses that are found in a in a subheading or another paragraph that's in the middle of the chapter. So you would understand even more if you backed up to the beginning of the chapter. But in Jeremiah 29, if we're referencing this chapter to get context and understand what this verse is saying, as Becky said, we know that this is a letter because that's how it starts. So, what do we know if we were to read all of chapter 29? We would know that Judah, which was the southern kingdom of Israel, is in Babylon. They are now in captivity because the letter was given to someone, his name was Alaska, it says it in there, because he was sent by the king of Judah at the time, named Zedekiah, to go to see the king of Babylon, which was Nebuchadnezzar. And the letter has a few points that it's trying to communicate to those from Judah that are in exile. It's to encourage them that while they are there, this is the plan and purpose for them at this time. It warns them of false prophets and it says that the Lord has basically placed them in exile for this time, and anyone who is telling them otherwise, they are going to be killed. So in episode nine, we created a tool that's a triangle, and it basically takes a teaching in the Bible, and it's pointing you to the truths of God. So, how can you take what you're reading and understand the truths of who God is and how those truths can apply to you today? But it also takes the teaching that you're in, and it tells you how not to apply it to you today, or what it's saying that doesn't apply to us today. So if we look at this verse that God is telling them, I know the plans that I have for you. Well, that speaks of God's sovereignty. God knows all things. And then it says, I have plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope in a future. So in its context, he's telling them, I have a future plan for you, and that is ultimately, as you continue to read Jeremiah, is to bring them back into Judah, into the land of Israel. That part does not apply to us today. However, he did tell them, you can choose to believe me and you will prosper and you will not be harmed, or you can choose to rebel, and that would be giving false prophecies about how they weren't meant to be in exile and that God was going to save them. But the Bible specifically says here that when 70 years have passed, that's where it starts in verse 10, for example. So we know 70 years has to go by for them to reach the promise that God has given them. That's not the same promise for us today. The promise for us today, however, is to believe in him, and there is a future that he has planned for us. It is an eternal future to be with him forever. So we can choose to believe or we can still choose to rebel today, but the future hope that he has for us is with Jesus, not the same future hope that it's referring to in this verse. So then if we back up a little bit more and we look at the book, the book of Jeremiah, we can use a tool that we provided for you all in episode four. It is the tool that helps us ask questions about the book before we read it. This will help us understand what we're going to be reading about. You would be answering the questions of the who, the what, the when, the where, and the why. So if we look at the who for the book of Jeremiah, Jeremiah wrote it. He was a priest, and then he was a prophet to Judah. He's also known as the weeping prophet. And he witnessed at the time, he witnessed King Nebi. Nebi. You like my notes there?

SPEAKER_01

I was like, who's King Nebi? Because King Nebi is much easier to spell than Nebuchadnezzar than that, but remember there's a chat in there, and how do you spell his name? So I just say King Nebi.

SPEAKER_00

So Jeremiah was prophesying before King Nebuchadnezzar came into power and during his reign.

SPEAKER_01

We we before we do our episodes, we try to like create a quick summary of what we're gonna talk about. And I wrote this one. So she has King Nebby on her notes. All right, so what? So she answered who. I'm gonna answer what. What kind of writing did they use to communicate with us? Now, and what we and when we know the genre or we know the category, it can help us understand what we're reading even better. So we know Jeremiah was a prophet, priest, and prophet. So what he wrote was prophecy, most of Jeremiah's prophecy. But then we're told in this section of scripture that what Jeremiah wrote is a letter. And again, I'll go back to we don't just want to read one sentence from the letter. If my grandmother sends me a letter in the mail, I'm not going to open it up and just read one sentence. I'm going to read the entirety of the letter.

SPEAKER_00

Right. And then we have the when. So when was this written? And if we look at the storyline of the Bible that Becky and I walked through in episode two, I believe, we are at the point where Israel is a divided kingdom. You have the north of Israel, which is referenced in the Bible as Israel or Ephraim, and then you have the southern kingdom, which is Judah. And we know that Jeremiah is a prophet to the southern kingdom of Judah, because the northern kingdom is already gone. They've been taken over by Assyria. And so where does this fall? In the covenants. So this would have taken place during the Mosaic covenant when they were under the law of Moses, which Jeremiah in his book makes reference to, and he says that God's people have broken that covenant. It also points to a future prophecy of the new covenant, not there yet, though. And so, as I said before, we know that this is happening. The book of Jeremiah begins before Nebuchadnezzar comes in power, and it walks us through the prophecies he was given while King Nebuchadnezzar is in power. Yeah. Good old King Nebi.

SPEAKER_01

And then we have where? Where was the writer when he wrote this book or wrote these verses? Where were the people that he was writing to? So we know that Jeremiah lived in, or he was in Jerusalem when he wrote this, which was in Judah, the southern kingdom. We know that the recipients were people who had already been taken into exile, into Babylon. That's specifically for Jeremiah 29, because it says in verse 1, this is the text of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining exiled elders, the priests, the prophets, and all the people Nebuchadnezzar has deported from Jerusalem to Babylon.

SPEAKER_00

And the next question is why? Why did he write this book? And why did he write this letter? And so we see through Jeremiah it is to warn about God's imminent destruction for rebellion. The letter is also written to encourage them so that they do not lose hope. God has not forgotten them.

SPEAKER_01

And then when we back up even further, we have the Bible. Every verse is in the context of the whole Bible, the Bible as a whole. So the context, the ultimate context, is the entire Bible. And as we've talked in previous episodes, the Bible is one continuous story. God is the holy creator, man rebels, man sins, God redeems, he even can discipline us to bring us back to repentance, and through that we get restoration. And when you look at the different books of the Bible, they're all in that plan somewhere. So where Jeremiah is writing this letter, God is disciplining his people because they have broken his covenant, they have been in rebellion, they have worshipped idols, and they are in exile. And then he will bring them back and restore them as he promises in verse 11 after 70 years. But it's good to remember these stories in the Bible or these chapters, these verses, they're not isolated, they're in the whole context of scripture. A few years ago, I created this resource pack called Understanding the Bible. Now, this one was specifically for you if you're teaching teens, teaching middle school, to help them understand the Bible. And in this resource, I call it the top-down approach. So we had the circles with the verse in the middle that goes out to the Bible. We can tend to read verses that way. We start with the verse, whereas we should really start with what does scripture say? What is the storyline? How does it fit? And then paring it down to the verse so that you can see the entire context first. So this pack has read alouds, it has charts, printable activities, so it can help your kids or your learners understand the I call it the top down method for studying the Bible. And I'll be sure to put the link in the description so you can find it.

SPEAKER_00

So let's be determined, like Ezra, to read, do, and tell the word of the Lord.

SPEAKER_01

Amen.

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Becky Spence

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