Lord, I don't understand!

He (Paul) writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other scriptures... 2 Peter 3:16

Are you the kind of person who likes everything cut and dried - no loose ends, no shades of grey, everything black and white?

If you are, then I have bad news for you: expect to find yourself often frustrated when you grapple with Christian teaching. 

Certainly, the essentials of the Christian faith are clear: the ultimate reality of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; the coming in flesh of God’s Son to this world; the sinless life and atoning death of Jesus; his bodily rising from the dead; the gift of the Holy Spirit; the church as the body of Jesus on this earth; the final judgment and the reality of heaven and hell.

These core teachings have been common to pretty well every branch of the church for two thousand years.

But once you start delving into more detailed things it can get decidedly tricky, and we can be left scratching our heads. The Bible often blesses and challenges us in a way that changes our lives; but other times it can leave us puzzled. Honesty compels us, for example, to recognise that there are passages which seem to contradict other passages; or passages which raise awkward questions about certain actions of God (take a look at 2 Kings 2:23-25 if you want to know the kind of thing I have in mind).

It’s when I find myself mystified like this that I am specially grateful for Peter’s words: that some of the things written by Paul (and this would apply to other parts of the Bible too) are “hard to understand”. So it isn’t all straightforward! And I find myself thinking, “Great! I’m glad it’s not just me!”

That drive for precision - getting everything nailed down - is very natural. But it’s also unrealistic. And it can in fact be dangerous.

For one thing, it can lead us to completely miss the point of the Bible. We can get the idea into our heads that what matters is having perfectly correct beliefs rather than living holy, Christlike lives.

Way back in the Middle Ages there was a movement in the church often now called “scholasticism”. This consisted of highly scholarly men who were said to debate endlessly on topics which now seem to us utterly pointless and sterile. (The joke - at least I hope it was a joke - was that they spent hours discussing questions like how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.)

And learned scholars then and later would write lengthy tomes - thousands of pages - which purported to sum up the essentials of Christian teaching. They might be either Roman Catholic or, after the Reformation, Protestant in conviction. But they had in common a desire to get everything tied own. And - let’s face it - who in this world can tie down God’s eternal truth?

In my own early days as a Christian I got in with a couple of groups in particular which felt strongly about certain issues. On the one hand were the “charismatics”, adamant that you needed to be “baptised in the Holy Spirit” and that the sign of this was speaking in tongues. On the other hand were the “Calvinists”, who believed Christian theology could be summed up under five headings beginning with the letters t,u,l,i,p - and, take it from me, the tulips weren’t the kind you could tip-toe through.

My problem was that both these groups argued strongly from the Bible, quoting left right and centre. So who had it right? Both? Neither? Who should I believe? There were times I felt my faith was quite wobbled; and only later did I wise up to the fact that it simply didn’t matter to have every i dotted and every t crossed.

Where is this leading? To this: that there are certain questions and mysteries that we have to leave dangling - and not to worry. Love, trust and obey the Lord Jesus Christ and you can’t go far wrong.

The Christian writer G K Chesterton was once asked if he wasn’t worried by those parts of the Bible he couldn’t understand. To which he replied “No! The parts that worry me are the ones I can understand!” Wise as well as witty.

And Karl Barth, who churned out theology by the yard, when asked what was the essence of the Bible’s teaching, replied: “Jesus loves me, this I know,/ For the Bible tells me so.”

If even the apostle Peter accepted that there were things that were “hard to understand”, well, all I can say is that that will do for me too. It’s not bad company to be in, is it?

Lord God, I very much want to be right in my thinking and understanding. So give me, please, by your Spirit, increasing insight into the truth of your word. But help me still more to be right and Christlike in my living. Amen.