Who said it would be easy?

At the moment I'm reading a book on Difficulties in the Bible and the author makes some really good introductory points.

Basically, the guy says that we need to take a breath and chill out when it comes to biblical difficulties. There are over 31,000 verses in the bible and we aren't the fountain of knowledge that we sometimes claim to be.

If you believe the bible is the word of God, and it reveals the character of God, what His purpose are for the world and how He is working out those purposes, then it's ok if we don't have an absolute grasp of every syllable.

Why would we be so surprised that some of the bible is difficult understand? Would we be more comfortable if there was a complete revelation about God and it was no great effort to understand?

Sometimes we need to admit that we are not God. He knows the answers, even if we don't.

Second, we need to know that difficulty doesn't mean that something is wrong or that there is not an answer. Just because i found 3 Unit maths difficult didn't mean that the answers were nonexistent.

I just had to work at getting the answers or ask someone else smarter than me.

When it comes to the bible, sometimes we need to acknowledge that we don't posses the answers, but others do. That's ok. I'm humble enough to recognise that i don't know it all (no matter how confidently i may crap on!).

Actually, I'm ok with passages that give me trouble. It gives me something to think about. Something to chew over.

Otherwise this whole Christian gig could, potentially, become boring. Especially if you're planing on doing it for the rest of your life.

Then again, some famous theologian once said (something like) that it's not the passages of scripture he couldn't understand that bother him, it's the ones that he could.

Maybe he has a point.