One of my least favorite reading experiences was reading Beowulf in high school English. Were you subjected to this torture? Beowulf was written sometime between the 8th and 10th century and uses an early form of Old English called West Saxon.[i] Maybe if I re-read Beowulf I would love it, but at the time it felt like it was just one of those books we were reading because of its historic significance. Getting through the language was just brutal. I could barely piece together what a sentence meant, much less a paragraph, and understanding the plot felt virtually impossible. On top of that, this bizarre story of a monster in a faraway land felt profoundly irrelevant to my life.[ii]

Maybe you feel like that about the Bible. I get it. The Bible was written 2,000+ years ago. It seems borderline ridiculous that Christians pick it up and it expect it say something valuable to them about life in a completely different world.

Isn’t the Bible out of date?

The final challenge that is made against the Bible is that it is out of date. The Bible has old-fashioned morality about gender and sexuality. How can we trust a book that is so backwards.

Let me offer two very brief responses to this: first, the Bible is likely much less backward than you might think. In fact, all over the place the Bible breaks cultural expectations regarding gender, socio-economic class, and race.

Second, in those places where the Bible appears to be “on the wrong side of history,” I would ask you first to engage the central question of whether or not the Bible is God’s Word. If it isn’t, then of course the Bible is a skeleton, an artifact, when it comes to morality. But if it does happen to be God’s Word, I would ask you where your objective measure of morality derives from? And how can you be guaranteed that your own morality won’t look extremely dated in mere years? And I would add that if the Bible is indeed God’s Word, wouldn’t you expect that God would disagree with us at points? If we found in the Bible everything we already believed, would it be God’s Word or our word?

Are you willing to read the Bible not to tear it down but to enter in? Would you be willing to taste and see Jesus through the eyes of his followers? It only takes the average reader between an hour and a half to two and a half hours to read each of the four gospels. Pick up Mark or Luke or Matthew or John and encounter the man who calls himself the Son of God and see if you think it is a fable or if it rings of truth.[iii]

MIT professor and atheist Rosalind Picard thought that Bible was “full off fantastical crazy stuff.” But, for the sake of intellectual honesty she felt like she needed to actually read it. And so she did. And when she started to read the Bible, she says, “it started to change me.”[iv] She’s a follower of Jesus now.[v]

I could describe to you what a dark chocolate gelato tastes like from Frost: the rich cocoa flavor with a hint of bitterness, the cold buttery smoothness as it coats your tongue. But you know how you can really experience Frost’s dark chocolate gelato? Not by me telling you about it, but by you trying it yourself.

The Psalmist sings out about God’s Word, “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (Psalm 119:103). It’s my prayer for you that you can experience that sweetness.

Would you be willing to test the Bible?

Would you be willing to taste scripture? Would you be willing to really read it? Not just as a critic. Not as someone trying to nitpick it to death? Not just the Sunday School version you might have heard about as a child, but encounter it for yourself. If half of your friends raved about a movie wouldn’t you watch it?

Have you ever read a book earlier in your life that you didn’t like but then you read it again later and you found that you really appreciated it? The book didn’t change, you did. Maybe I ought to pick Beowulf back up.

Maybe you dove into a difficult part of the Bible before you were ready for it. Maybe you didn’t have a good guide to help you along the way. Let me encourage you to try it again. Don’t give up. Maybe you think that you have gotten everything out of the Bible there is to get. It’s impossible. You haven’t. It isn’t just a great novel, it is the Word of God. My rough estimation is that I’ve read the Bible all of the way through about twenty times. Every morning of mine begins in God’s Word. And every time I encounter a passage again it has a new freshness and power.

Where else are you going to go to encounter truth? To be transformed by something outside of yourself? If you’re like me, you realized long ago that you don’t have all the answers internally, you don’t have the capacity to pull yourselves up by your own bootstraps and get it together. You can’t answer some of the deepest and most profound questions we have in this life.

Once, when Jesus was speaking to the crowds, the crowds became shocked at what he said and they began to leave. They couldn’t swallow what he was telling them. Jesus turned to his disciples and asked if they were going to leave as well. Peter responded, “Where shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68-69). The Bible is difficult, the Bible is challenging, the Bible demands more from me than I want to give, but where else am I going to go? It has the words of eternal life.

There are many questions about the Bible and its reliability. It is hard for us to cross 2,000+ years of history and engage the writings from an entirely civilization, much less culture, and try to understand different aspects. You can find all sorts of peripheral issues that have a variety of different interpretations and ways to make sense of them, but I would ask you to zero in on the most important issue at the heart of the Bible: whether Jesus was in fact the Son of God, whether in fact he lived, died, and was resurrected again.[vi]

For instance, do we really discredit someone for saying that the sun rises or do we recognize that is a perfectly acceptable poetic description that is not making a scientific claim that the sun actually rises?

A friend could share with us, “one minute my boss is telling me to do one thing and the next minute he is telling me to do something else,” and we understand that this friend could be reporting things the boss said that were hours, days, even weeks apart.[vii]

The Bible contains 66 books written by 40 authors over 1,500 years on three continents over more than a dozen different genres. And yet they all tell the same story of the same God. The Bible is a theological book that shares true history, but even when it is telling true historic facts, it doesn’t do so like a 21st century western history text book. It does so like an ancient Middle Eastern theological story.

So, for instance, much has been made of the fact that while the events of three of the gospels line up in their chronology—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—one gospel does not appear to line up chronologically: the gospel of John.[viii] But there is a simple answer to this. John clearly tells his gospel around themes of Jesus’ life and ministry. If I come home and tell Angel about my day I can do so by walking through my day chronologically, but I can also share about different types of things I did: maybe I first share about the meetings I had, then I share about the writing I did, and then I share about what I learned. To share my day in that style isn’t to try to deceive Angel, it is sharing the same story with a different arrangement.

[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf

[ii] When Angel and I were first married, we discovered a disagreement in our marriage. I enjoyed watching older movies, but Angel had a strong aversion to them. If I put in a movie and she saw it was black and white she immediately was skeptical. What does something this old have to do with me? Angel has changed, but it appears my kids have gotten that gene. And I get it, it’s hard to believe that a movie that old would have something to say for us today.

[iii] https://jamedders.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-read-each-book-of-the-bible/

[iv] McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity, 101.

[v] See also the story of Lee Strobel, the editor of the Chicago Tribune, who set out on a two-year quest to disprove Christianity only to become a Christian himself.

[vi] In his book, The Reason for God, Tim Keller likens these peripheral issues to the shallow end of the pool, where, if you dive end, you are “likely to get scraped up” because of the variety of explanations. However, if you dive into the deep end (the central claim of the New Testament that Jesus is the Son of God), then that is less likely (p. 113).

[vii] McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity, 103.

[viii] You might ask, “What about the gnostic gospels?” The gnostic gospels were written in the second century and later. The most famous gnostic gospel is the Gospel of Thomas, which was penned in the year 175 AD at the earliest The gospels are heavily influenced by a philosophy called Gnosticism. Gnosticism believes that special, secret knowledge if required for salvation from this evil, physical world. These gospels were not accepted by the early church because they were recognized to depict a very different Jesus than the Jesus of history. Similarly, they contain a problematic worldview that is, among other things, anti-material and anti-woman.