How Hard Can it Be, It’s Written in English, Right?
Wrestling for Blessings
It’s easier than ever to wind up behind bars in America. People imagine prisons filled with vicious gunmen and notorious gangsters but I met more doctors than bank robbers. There are 300,000 federal laws on the books in the United States and that equates to over a quarter million ways to get yourself in federal handcuffs. Over 22 million words of hard-to-read statutes are bound up and organized in what’s called the United States Code (USC). Most of you have never taken a dive into the pages of the USC and I wouldn’t recommend it. It is truly torturous reading!
My first time in the law library I remember thinking, “How hard can it be, it’s written in English, right?” The easy sentences went like this:
I am herewith returning the stipulation to dismiss in the above entitled matter; the same being duly executed by me.
The hard ones sounded like so much jibberish.
The only people who spend large parts of time sludging through the USC are lawyers and inmates. Every federal prisoner has access to an online USC and you wouldn’t believe how crowded the law library could get. Regardless of education, IQ, or reading level, eventually everybody found themselves in the law library scratching their heads staring dumbfoundingly at a computer screen. It was all about motivation, everyone was motivated to understand the intricacies of their case. So they put in the time or found someone to help them. Inmates would spend hours scrolling through legalese hoping to find something to explain or help their predicament. All at the bargain basement price of five cents a minute. Typically, what you found wasn’t what you wanted to hear.
Maybe that's why people shy away from reading the Bible, they might find things they don’t want to hear. Plus, like the USC, it can also be hard reading.
But unlike the USC, God didn’t go out of His way to make it difficult, except to the proud and unrepentant.
Take these verses:
Don’t be afraid!
Those who accept and obey my commandments are the ones who love me.
Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and he will give you everything you need.
A person is a fool to store up earthly wealth but not have a rich relationship with God.
Anyone who isn’t with me opposes me, and anyone who isn’t working with me is actually working against me.
If anyone is ashamed of me and my message, I will be ashamed of that person when I return in my glory and in the glory of the Father and the holy angels.
If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross daily, and follow me.
You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: Love your neighbor as yourself.
I’m always with you, even to the end of this world.
The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.
I’m coming back for you.
What does it matter what anyone else does, you follow me.
Do those seem difficult to understand?
I know, I know…..I’m picking the easy verses and certainly not in danger of putting any theologians out of work. But really, why do so many Christians struggle with reading the Bible? And come to so many different conclusions? Sometimes it seems that people take a verse here and a verse there, and then try to piece something together that validates what they want to believe. But picking and choosing only leads to delusions and disappointments. The entire Bible is a chronological telling of God’s dealings with humans since the fall, but it’s pretty clear the New Testament is the final word. Everything in the Old Testament led up and pointed to Jesus’s work and sacrifice.
The Bible provides us with so much information on one hand but is maddeningly vague in the other. It’s why so many people disparage the veracity of Bible history. But this, like everything seems to, comes down to faith. We choose to believe the Bible because we be crazy to follow a God who couldn’t get His own story straight.
But is it possible that God made the Bible difficult……….deliberately?
Like Jacob beside the river Jabbok, wrestling for a blessing. For me, the more I struggle with a Bible passage, the more time I spend studying it. And it seems we humans grow best during times of struggle. It’s where we learn to persevere (not my favorite thing). Also, in my experience, the more we contemplate God’s word, the more He reveals to us. God could have made the Bible really simple but we wouldn’t have read and re-read the passages waiting on the Holy Spirit to reveal its truths. And honestly, none of us do well with big rewards for little efforts.
Sometimes, like the above verses, we understand it, but have trouble living it. I stumble quite regularly over loving my enemies and most of the time my prayers seem anything but powerful or effective. And Lord knows when the future stretches out like chain links of drudgery, it's hard not to be afraid.
But don’t they go hand in hand…….studying it and living it. I don’t think you can do the latter if you don’t do the former. We have so many distractions and an enemy who wields them like a sword. Anything to keep us from being reminded and strengthened by the blessing derived from wrestling with scripture.
It’s hard to live it and many times my life doesn’t match what I read, but I keep stumbling on and every day, after every struggle, things get a tiny bit clearer.
