#light chase

I grew up hearing all of the stories in the Bible and they were new and exciting for a long time - until they suddenly weren’t anymore. Then I discovered theology and how to actually study the Bible. I started to become more and more sure of what I believed - until I wasn’t sure of much anymore. Life has a funny way of taking the things we are sure about and flipping them on their head. Sometimes this comes from an internal, existential crisis; sometimes someone we love and trust deeply hurts us; sometimes we lose our job and don’t know how we are going to pay rent; or sometimes we just wake up one morning and for no reason, everything feels different. Regardless of what causes it, people are always changing - our consciences are always expanding and we are always learning to think and feel differently as we experience more and more of life. Sometimes this change comes quickly and sometimes this change comes slowly but it is always happening. When I was the most sure of my faith and of what I believed, this change started to happen for me.

I had just graduated from Bible college and I was equipped with all of the biblical and theological knowledge I would need to successfully go into full-time, vocational ministry. So I tried and tried and tried. For almost two years I tried and I had no success in securing a full-time job in ministry. This was the first time the Bible stopped working for me. I would read it and the stories that I used to go to for encouragement did nothing for me. The passages I would read to challenge myself felt empty - they were just words on a page. But I decided to take the “fake it til I make it” approach. I kept trying and no matter what I did I just couldn’t make it work. Around this time, I got a job at a church and I was still trying to fake it. When things didn’t work out at the job, I couldn’t fake it anymore. I was left without a job and I didn’t know what my purpose was without the Bible that I had so desperately tried to make work for me. This is when I decided that something needed to change in my life.

I took a recommendation from a friend of mine and read the book Humility by Andrew Murray and for the first time in a long time, I felt something. Through reading Humility, I slowly came to the realization that my knowledge of the Bible was a source of pride in my life. I prided myself in knowing the text and being able to argue and defend my interpretation of it. I finally came to the realization that true humility comes when you are able to loosen your grip on what you know and to stop forcing the Bible to fit perfectly with your own, personal worldview. This thought was solidified when I started to read Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell.

Bell says: “The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God. We are dealing with somebody we made up. And if we made him up, then we are in control.”

This is what I was doing the whole time. I wasn’t trying to know God - I was trying to figure him out. I was trying to define him. And I was doing all of this so that I could be in control. I started reading The Bible Tells Me So by Peter Enns shortly after I had these thoughts.

Enns says: “The Bible is not a Christian owner’s manual but a story—a diverse story of God and how his people have connected with him over the centuries, in changing circumstances and situations … The Bible, from front to back, is the story of God told from the limited viewpoint of real people living at a certain place and time.”

This blew my mind. I had never thought of the Bible this way before. Sure, I knew that real people wrote the Bible at different points throughout history and of course I knew it was the story of God, but up until that point, the Bible was always a book that told me exactly how to live. I was reading it so that I could confidently know what was right and what was wrong and so that I could clearly understand and define God and all of his ways. Basically, up until that point in my life, the Bible had been written for me!

Here’s the thing. When the authors of Genesis wrote it, they weren’t writing it to a guy living in 2016 - they were writing it to a nomadic tribe of sheepherders. When Paul wrote Ephesians, he wasn’t writing it to a specific denomination of American Christians - he was writing it to an ethnically diverse group of people in Ephesus that were desperately trying to understand the new faith that Jesus had taught them through his life and his death. And not only that, but how God was understood in Genesis was completely different than how he was understood in Ephesians. How God acted in the Old Testament compared to how Jesus acted in the New Testament appeared contradictory to me. How could the same God that preached peace in Jesus be the same God who ordered the Israelites to slaughter entire tribes of people in the Old Testament? I couldn’t reconcile this in my head. But then I started reading Rob Bell’s blog series on the Bible and I came across this quote which helped me straighten it all out a bit.

Bell says: “What you find in the Bible is stories accurately reflecting the dominant consciousness of the day and yet right in amongst and sometimes even within those very same stories you find radically new ideas about freedom, equality, justice, compassion, and love … In other words, when you read through the Bible you can slowly see how people’s consciences grew and they slowly understood more about God … If you read the Bible as a static record about the God who orders people to kill other people, it will never make any sense. But if you read it as an unfolding story, reflecting growing consciousness about who God is and who we are and what it means to pursue justice and love mercy and walk humbly (as the prophet Micah said), you’ll begin to see something at work, just below the surface, planting seeds, gradually moving and calling and pulling and tugging and inspiring and transforming…”

I no longer read the Bible as a handbook but as a story of how people encountered God. Being correct is not the goal for me anymore. Instead, the goal is to grow in my understanding of God and to be open to what He is teaching me.

Always changing. Always evolving. Always growing.

I no longer feel the need to defend the Bible but I choose to accept it how it is. Instead of trying to convince others that what I think about the Bible is true, I try to come alongside them and try to understand how they view the Bible and how they see God from their perspective. All of this with the purpose to try to grow and evolve in my understanding and in my faith. To me, the Bible is no longer about the destination but about the journey.