What To Do With The Hard Sayings Of The Bible

Every Christian has a Bible inside their Bible.

What I mean is there’s the Bible you own and there’s the Bible you actually read. There are the passages that get underlined, memorized, put on coffee mugs and hospital cards. And then there’s the other parts. The verses nobody reads at a wedding. The ones your small group somehow never picks.

We don’t reject those. That’s the interesting part. Almost nobody walks away from Jesus over a verse anymore. We do something far more respectable.

We handle it.

You hit the verse, maybe you pause or flinch, and then, without deciding to, you reach for an explanation. There’s probably some cultural context here. He can’t mean that literally. Let me see what the footnote says. And usually the footnote helps. The tightness lets go. You’ve done your homework. You move on, and you’ve been a good student of the Bible, and nothing about your week is any different than it was before you opened it.

Something goes wrong in that move. Most of us have been making it our entire lives without noticing.

The rest is for paid subscribers. Once a week paid subscribers get a second post that dives deeper in what Scripture means for your life.

$6 a month through July 31. On August 1 the price increases.