Essential Skills for the Journey with Jesus

Reading the Bible Well (Pt. 6)

Reading the Bible is essential for following Jesus; whether inside the church or outside in our everyday life. In this series of posts, we are practicing four skills that will help us read the Bible well. We have covered three of the four. They are:

Skill #1: Abandon ourselves to the storyline of the passage.

Skill #2: The more we know the Bible the more we will understand it.

Skill #3: Embracing the “dissonance” between the Bible and the world we live in today.

Once we have used these skills to understand the passage, we can do what comes naturally. The fourth skill is to ask our own questions of the text.

If we start with our questions, we risk distorting the text’s meaning according to our “felt needs.” So as not to miss the point, we must begin by searching out the theme of our passage and then we are in a position to ask our questions. When we do this something interesting happens.

Often, the questions that drew us to the Bible in the first place fade into the background. We find that, as we read, Scripture redirects our thinking in a more fruitful direction.

For example, readers may approach Ruth, as a book bearing a woman’s name, with burning issues around Western gender relationships. They become frustrated with the roles of men and women in the story. But this justice issue is secondary to the story itself. The book of Ruth seeks to encourage and support people when their hopes and dreams have been dashed. To practice kindness and commitment is the best way forward in such situations.

If you come to the book of Jonah to validate or invalidate the Bible according to Western historical or scientific standards you will miss the point. When Jonah complains that God is “a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity…”¹ he is quoting God’s description of himself in Exodus 34:5-6 as a challenge to the reader. As we said in the last post, the book ends without telling us if Jonah learned to participate willingly in God’s kindness. Thus we are challenged to consider whether or not we are willing to follow God in forgiving and blessing others; even our sworn enemies.

In our next posts, we will use all four of our skills in reading through a challenging and important section of the gospel of Mark, Mark 11:12-25. I encourage you to read it or to let “Hercule Poirot” walk you through the chapter before reading the next post.

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1. Jonah 4:2