Though he had done so many signs before them, they still did not believe in him…. John 12:37
Imagine being there when Jesus lived to hear Him speak, watch Him interact with people and maybe even perform a miracle – right in front of you! How could you not believe?!
It’s easy to think these things. But, what would it really be like? Though Jesus performed many signs in front of people, still they didn’t believe Him. People still believed what they were disposed to believe. People saw what they expected to see.
Would we be any different?
Some people heard Him speak and saw the miracles and believed. But more people heard Him speak, saw the miracles and did not believe. In the 1st Century, they accused Him of performing black magic. Today, we might accuse Him of performing ordinary magic, planting people in the audience and doing sleight of hand.
He would most certainly rock our notions of right and wrong, proper and improper, sense and insensitivity. He would challenge our sacred ideas about ourselves and our freedoms, our causes and our individual rights.
He would be too politically incorrect for the left. He would be too progressive for the right.
Who has believed our message?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For He grew up before Him like a tender shoot,
And like a root out of parched ground;
He has no stately form or majesty
That we should look upon Him,
Nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him.
He was despised and forsaken of men,
A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
And like one from whom men hide their face
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. (Isaiah 53:1-3)
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.
Navigating by Faith 