How the Bible Actually Works

wisdom is what forms us to be more like Jesus, who, as the apostle Paul put it, became for us wisdom from God (1 Cor. 1:30).

Reading the situation—not simply the Bible—is what wisdom is all about.

The lesson here is that wealth can be positive or negative, depending on our attitude. A razor-thin line exists between genuine thankfulness to God for the protection wealth can provide and arrogance about one’s wealth. The book of Proverbs challenges us to get used to patrolling that line, so we can learn when we cross it.

Does this mean God changes? I don’t think so (though some do). It means, rather, as I see it, that different times and different circumstances call for people of faith to perceive God and God’s ways differently. God doesn’t change, but God—being God—is never fully captured by our perceptions. As people continue to live and breathe and experience life, how they see God changes too.

And so the writer of Jonah told a story of God’s expansive mercy for non-Israelites; in other words, maybe God cares for other people too. And the author used as his illustration a clearly fictionalized account of their long-gone ancient foe to express his newfound belief, or at least hope, that God is more inclusive than they were giving God credit for.

The more important point to raise is that the very presence of both Nahum and Jonah in our Bible forces us all to ponder what God is like in our here and now just as these authors did. I may be wrong in how I process what God is like, of course, but I am not wrong because I process what God is like.

The books of 1 Samuel through 2 Kings tell the five-hundred-year story of Israel’s monarchy from the first king, Saul (sometime before 1000 BCE), until the Babylonian exile. In my experience most people who try to read all four books one after the other usually scoop their eyes out with a spoon somewhere in the middle of 1 Kings. To actually finish 2 Kings requires a miracle. Continuing on with 1 and 2 Chronicles is superhuman. And I’m pretty sure Jesus would agree. It doesn’t help that these latter two books come right after 2 Kings. That’s just bad product placement, though that’s only the case in Christian Bibles. In the Jewish Bible, these books are found at the very end. Why? Because that’s where they belong. But why? Because Chronicles is not a repeat of 1 Samuel through 2 Kings. It is a retelling of those books from a much later point in Jewish history. In fact, it is nothing less than an act of reimaging God.

I don’t mean the biblical writers made up God out of thin air. I believe these ancient people experienced the Divine. But how they experienced God and therefore how they thought and wrote about God were filtered through their experience, when and where they existed.

What made the Israelites different from their neighbors, religiously speaking, was their belief that only Yahweh, and not any of the other gods (heavenly bodies included), was worthy of their worship. To use the technical language, the Israelites were not monotheists in the strict sense of the word, but monolatrists: they worshiped one God, but believed in the existence of many gods.

How we see things is exactly what we need to get over if we want to understand stories like this one. The Israelites did believe Yahweh conquered the Egyptian gods—and if we bury that lede, we miss the point of this ancient story.

But having no other gods before Yahweh (meaning “in preference to” Yahweh) is a command that only has force if real live divine options are available.

We respect these sacred texts best not by taking them as the final word on what God is like, but by accepting them as recording for us genuine experiences of God for the Israelites and trying to understand why they would describe God as they do. God met the ancient Israelites on their terms, in their time and place, stepping into their world.

To put it another way, the problem of divine violence becomes far less of a problem when we remember why some biblical writers portray God violently. They are making sense of God with the ancient vocabulary available to them in their world. And like most things in the Bible, God is presented in diverse ways along with the changing experiences of the ancient Israelites and then the first followers of Jesus.

One big clue that the Bible came along later is how little the stories of the kings and the prophets look back to the time of Moses or quote the Law of Moses, even when the topic calls for it. Though Moses and his story were likely known, in some form, there was no officially sanctioned book to appeal to. There were laws, but there was no Pentateuch, no Torah (Hebrew, meaning “teaching”), that served as a recognized compendium of ancient commands by which kings were judged.

Christian theology, in other words, is an exercise in wisdom—perhaps far more so than is normally thought. We are not simply maintaining the past; we are transforming it, again and again.

If your aim is to get people to comprehend black-and-white information, try a lecture or a press release. If you want to move people to own the moment and take responsibility to work it out for themselves, you tell them a story to stimulate their imagination.

Jesus interprets the ancient Law for a new day, which we’ve also seen already: Deuteronomy interprets the slave law of Exodus more justly; Ezekiel marginalizes the older notion that one’s actions have intergenerational consequences; the Passover morphs from a family meal at home to a national feast in Jerusalem. All of which is to say that Jesus debates the meaning of biblical laws not to dismiss them, but to see beyond them to the deeper will of God not captured by the script.

the gospel forced Paul to go back and reconsider Israel’s story from a point of view that the story itself wasn’t set up to handle. And not just any old part of the story, but the heart of it, the Law of Moses.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the backdrop of the entire Old Testament drama is about how keeping or losing the land is dependent on Israel’s religious obedience.

Paul essentially responds to Israel’s main storyline by saying, “All that was just prelude to what God is really up to—reversing the curse of death for everyone.” No one would arrive at a conclusion like that simply from reading the Old Testament. Rather, you have to start with seeing Jesus as the “solution,” read the Bible backwards, so to speak, and reimagine God to account for this surprising turn of events.

Not to escalate this too quickly, but does this include Hitler or other genocidal rulers? Do we just goose-step through life and give our “governing authorities” a free pass because their authority is “instituted by God”? How about some wiggle room? And does this include King George III, because if so, the entire United States of America has been operating outside of God’s will for two and a half centuries. Were we wrong? (I’m asking for a friend.)

A command for that time does not make it a command for all time. That can be a hard lesson to accept, especially of Paul, but it is true.

Having said that, if you asked your average Joe and Jane on the street what Christians think about slavery, they’d probably say that Christians denounce slavery as immoral. Generally speaking, in other words, the church is known for having accepted Paul’s boundary-pushing trajectory and pushing it farther. Freedom and equality eventually won out as the norm over passages like, Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling (Eph. 6:5), a compliant go-to passage of nineteenth-century Southern slave owners.

the side of the sexuality debate that can more easily draw on the Bible for support is the “homosexuality is a sin” side—it’s relatively easy to find passages that are negative, but not a single passage that affirms what we call same-sex relationships. But the very fact that polar opposite opinions exist among actual Christians shows us that there is more going on here than what first meets the eye.

In my opinion, digging into Paul’s words introduces us to some context-dependent complexities that might not be apparent at first blush. It’s not enough to cite, for example, Romans 1:24–27 as clear proof that God hates queers without struggling with how human sexuality was understood in Paul’s day.

But some argue that the idea of “sexual orientation” was not on anyone’s radar back then and so same-sex intercourse was seen not as doing what comes naturally for those born that way, but evidence of being so depraved and sexually out of control that “natural” outlets aren’t enough and you spill over to what is “unnatural.” Also, one of the men in same-sex intercourse would have to assume the submissive female role (as would one woman the dominant male role), thus exchanging the natural for the unnatural (see Romans 1:26–27).

As with any other issue, we have to consider that Paul’s words might not be an eternally binding command, but a comment that assumes a culture of sexuality different from our own.

My point is that even though Paul’s words can’t be made to mean anything we like, once we dig in to the cultural context a bit, we see that Paul might mean something other than what we expected.

Whatever else we do, and especially with issues that generate so much conflict, wisdom must be pursued by all and invited to take a prominent place in these discussions—if only so that they may remain discussions and not an exercise in lobbing back and forth “clear” Bible verses as grenades. Using Bible verses to end discussions on difficult and complex issues serves no one and fundamentally misses the dimension of wisdom that is at work anytime we open the Bible anywhere and read it.