Today, I want to do something a little bit unusual. I find my inspiration in a question posed in a Facebook group, Seekers with Questions about Christianity. You will need to become a member if you want to find the post and the response thread that follows it. This is the question:

Hi can someone please help me understand this: If God doesn’t like the idea of concubines (multiple secondary wives), then why didn’t he tell his holy prophets so? Why did He give rights and laws regarding concubines instead of tell his prophets not to have concubines? He made so many rules and instructions so that people know how to please Him and do his will – so why not also add that he doesn’t like men having concubines? And if someone wants to answer that its a matter of embracing the culture of the time, God never changes, and we are never to conform to the world around us; we are supposed to be different to the world and cultures around us.

It’s a really good question! We should be asking questions like these. The culture in some Christian circles and churches discourages people from asking tough questions. Or worse: people are actually told not to ask these kinds of questions!

I believe God expects us to ask the tough questions, and He invites us to search out the answers. I also don’t believe doubt is the opposite of faith. A lack of trust in God is more like the opposite to faith. Our doubts often drive us to seek answers and to seek God who has those answers.

In some ways, I believe our certainty can be antithetical to faith. When we think we know all the answers, we can begin to trust in our own understanding more than we trust in God. We run the risk of a shallow, intellectual faith that is wooden and stiff when we value certainty over truth.

If we reach a point where questions are no longer important, we are likely to stagnate and grow spiritually cold and distant from the world around us that has questions. If we stop asking questions, we stop growing in our knowledge of God and stop maturing in our walk with Jesus.

Thus, I think we need to encourage questions, allow ample space for questions, and take them seriously. In that vein, I want to commend Daniel Mann, who is the administrator (or one of the administrators) of the Facebook group in which the question above was posed. He is also a fellow blogger. (See Mann’s Word)

Before I get to my comments, I want to provide a sampling of the responses to the question that was asked, beginning with Daniel Mann’s response:

Another member of the group, Steve Scott, responded this way:

Laura Moore responded like this:

I think these responses here are a good start in providing an answer to the question that was posed. I do not wish to add much to the responses, specifically. My point today is about how we approach the Bible and try to get our arms around difficult passages and develop a healthy understanding of the Bible.

The Bible is nothing if it is not real and candid. It doesn’t pull any punches about the things people did – even the things done by our “heroes of the faith”. The fact that God holds up a standard against the messiness of the human condition is one of the major themes of the Bible. God’s grace and love toward humans despite that messiness is also a major theme.

People have struggled to reconcile the standard of God’s law with the the obvious fact that people do not live up to it since Moses. That struggle has led some people to become hypocrites (holding unwaveringly to the standard while failing to live up to it), and it has led some people to walk away completely from the faith (because they and everyone they know are hypocrites who don’t live up to the standard).

Both responses miss the point of the Law. Steve Scott alluded to it in his response: the Law was meant as a schoolmaster. The Law was a tutor (or guardian) “until Christ came that we might be justified by faith.” (See Galatians 3)

The Law was meant to show us our inability to fix ourselves and our need for God to fix us. Basically, the Law was meant to show us our need for God.

I said I wasn’t going to add to the responses, but to comment on them, so I have diverged (only slightly) from what I want to do. What I really want to say is that the Bible isn’t neat and clean, like we want to make it. God’s history of interacting with humans is messy, but that doesn’t mean it’s God’s “fault”.

Imagine God trying to “introduce Himself” to his creation that worships the sun, moon, stars and blocks of wood and hunks of metal made with their own hands. It’s a pretty steep learning curve, and it took generations to get to the time when God could insert Himself into the narrative, and many generations thereafter to the present day.

What I see in the arc of the biblical narrative is that God introduces rules for instruction, but He isn’t looking simply for rules followers. He is trying to establish relationship with us – like a Father with children, or a husband with his spouse. The rules were intended to point us in the right direction and help us realize our great need (and desire) for Him.

We see hints of that throughout the Old Testament, but no one really “gets it” or expresses this intention clearly until Jesus (who was God incarnate and the “exact representation of His nature”). (Heb. 1:3) Everything Jesus says is stated or hinted at in the OT, but he brings it to life. Literally.

As God incarnate, He came to us, and He demonstrated His love for us by dying for us (at OUR hands). On a very basic level, Jesus demonstrated why we can trust God. Because He really does love us.

That makes all the difference for me. Since I know I can trust Him, I can put aside my skeptical attitude and seek to understand what is going on in the OT and throughout Scripture.

I still struggle with things. Many things still don’t make complete sense, or they don’t make perfect sense, to me. But, the thing is that we are finite creatures. I am never going to reach perfection in what I know and understand, but I have come to trust God and trust the story, and it has made all the difference in my life.

I recently listened to an interview of Dr. Stefani Ruper by Jana Harmon on the Side B Stories Podcast. Her story about seeking truth is relevant to this blog post today. She tried to find meaning and truth in the secular, materialist world in which she was raised.

She got a science degree, and that didn’t do it. She got a degree in theology, and that didn’t do it. She got a doctorate degree in theology, and that didn’t do it. She wrote four (4) books on worldviews that could be fulfilling to people, and (in her own words) “they all sucked”.

She had come to realize that believing in God was a “perfectly rational thing”. Rational and intelligent people could believe in God. It wasn’t just dumb and weak, as she always thought, but she had always thought, “It wasn’t for me.”

What she found when she decided to step beyond rationalism and logic into an experiment with believing is relationship with God. If her story resonates with you, then you might want to hear her tell snippets of her story below:

If you go to her YouTube channel you can find other snippets of her story, along with some of her old vlog attempting to make sense of life through philosophy and theology without God – an interesting juxtaposition of “before and after”.