Jesus said, “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have been guilty of sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. Whoever hates me hates my father also. If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin, but now they have seen and hated both me and my father.” (John 15:22-24)
These words convey a stark reality that is not pleasant to consider. We might assume that Jesus was speaking of the Jews when He spoke these words, but we would be wrong. Jesus was speaking of the “world”. Just before Jesus spoke the words quoted above, He said:
“If the world[1] hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” (John 15:18-19)
These are curious things coming from Jesus. The import of what Jesus says here is that the world is ordered in opposition to Jesus and God the Father. And even when people reject Jesus, God’s purpose is fulfilled.
In other places, we see Jesus saying very different things. For instance, Jesus said elsewhere, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:17) So, we might be confused when we see Jesus implying that he came to hold people accountable for their sins.
How many people have experienced reading the Bible, or trying to read the Bible, before “becoming a Christian”? I did.
I took a World Religion class as a freshman in college. In that class I read the Bible for the first time, and I have distinct memories of of some of my initial impressions.
I am not unintelligent. I was second in my law school class. I say that not to boast, but to make a point. Human intelligence is limited, and in particular, it is limited by our perspective. What I mean by that is that the human perspective is that of a finite being who lives a very, very short amount of time and, then, dies.
What can we really know of an infinite God?
On our own, given our limited perspective, on a very small planet, in a small solar system, in a vast universe, what can we understand of the Maker of it all?
In our 80 some years of life, if we are fortunate to live that long, what we can we really know and understand of the 13.7 billion years of the existence of the universe? Over the combined lifetimes of all the human beings that have lived on this planet, we have learned a great deal, but compared to what?
We have only to compare to ourselves – other people with limited perspectives in common!
If there be a God of this incredibly vast universe, this God would have to be greater still. He would have to be “other” than the universe to have created it. Things don’t create themselves. This material universe filled with matter and space and existing in time would have to have been created by a timeless, space-less, matter-less (immaterial) God who exists on a “plane” or realm or dimension other, outside of, and beyond the material world we live in.
The words and thoughts we have to define what that other existence might be like are wholly inadequate to describe it because it is completely unfamiliar to us. We can only describe it in terms of our experience that is bounded by time, space and matter.
Still, we have some sense of transcendent reality, something beyond us. Like prisoner who spent his whole life in a small cell, who sees the sunlight streaming in through the bars of the window above him, but has never seen the sun, we “know” that something lies “out there” beyond us.
So what does this have to do with reading the Bible?
I realized as I read the Bible for the first time in that World Religion class in college that, if God did exist, He would have to reveal Himself to us. We could not reason or research or experiment our way to knowledge of God. That would be like trying to find a painter in the canvass of a painting.
God would have to reveal Himself to us.
And, if God made us, He would know how to communicate Himself to us in a way that we could understand. I sensed this “possibility” as I read the Bible for the first time.
My backstory is that I tried to find the truth in everything I read. I tried to find God or what reality there might be in everything. From the Bhagavad-Gita to the Bible, I looked for evidence of truth and evidence for God – whatever “God” or truth might look like.
I am not going to recount my impressions of the various holy books of the major world religions that we studied in that class in this article. That isn’t the point of it. I have done a little bit of that elsewhere. Really the point of this article is my before and after experience with the Bible.
The disciples didn’t even understand what Jesus was saying even after spending so much time, one on one, with God in the flesh. How can earthen vessels contain spiritual things?
After Jesus exposed who was going to betray him (Judas),[1] and that Peter, who boldly announced his allegiance, would deny him,[2] he urged the disciples, “Let not your hearts be troubled[3].”[4]
Interestingly, we find that Jesus was troubled[5], himself, just a short while before as he spoke of Judas, who would betray him. A short time later, as he was still addressing his disciples, Jesus tells them not to be troubled!
The difference is that Jesus knew what was coming for him! The disciples had no clue. Jesus knew that he would handed over to the Roman authorities, tried, mocked, spit on, beaten, scourged, made a public spectacle, nailed to a cross and die there – in just a matter of hours.
The disciples still didn’t understand what Jesus was getting at – what he had been getting at for a long time. Jesus had said similar things many times before. He not only predicted his death, but his resurrection as well.[6] But, his disciples never did realize what he was talking about (until after the fact).
Think about that: the disciples, who lived with Jesus for three years and spoke intimately with him often, didn’t get what he had been talking about throughout that whole time they were with him. They didn’t understand. They needed something more than what Jesus, who was God in the flesh, could give them!
“Saved” is one of those “church words” I normally avoid. But Jesus said, and our own eyes tell us, that there are people who are on paths of self-destruction, whose choices are toxic to others, as well as themselves. Not just violent or abusive types, but “decent” people who, if you strip away the veneer […]
Navigating by Faith 