📖 You should take the Bible literally

I. You should take the Bible literally.

But taking the Bible literally does not mean reading every passage in the same way. It means reading Scripture according to its genre and purpose.

Poetry is not meant to be understood the same way as an explicit teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, for example.

Some passages describe real historical events, others give direct commands, and others use poetry or imagery. To read the Bible literally is to read it as it was meant to be read, asking what each text teaches us about God and how he calls us to live, rather than treating every passage as the same kind of writing.

Taking the Bible literally is not picking and choosing what passages to follow. It is understanding a passage’s proper context and applying it appropriately.

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II. A common reason people reject God is that they disagree with something in the Bible, and they conclude that because they don’t agree with it, God is either wrong and should not be worshiped, or simply doesn’t exist at all.

But if God is real and truly all-knowing, we should expect that he will say and do things we do not fully understand or even like.

Having honest questions is not the problem. Wrestling with doubts is not the problem. The problem is assuming that our limited perspective is the final judge of God.

At most we get a handful of decades on earth, with extremely narrow and limited experiences. Like a child who many times does not understand why their parent has certain rules, we will not fully grasp why an eternal God might do some of the things he does or says.

As Tim Keller once said, “If your God never disagrees with you, you might just be worshiping an idealized version of yourself.”

The Bible was written for you, but not to you.

Because we were not the original audience for any of the books of Scripture, we should approach the Bible with humility. It certainly has wisdom and application for us, but because it was not written directly to us, it cannot mean something for us that it did not first mean for its original audience.

For example, the book of Revelation has produced countless fanciful interpretations over the years. A dead giveaway that an interpretation is wrong is when it teaches something the original audience could not possibly have understood, such as John describing Apache helicopters when he mentioned locusts in Revelation 9:1–11.

The first century church would have had no category for helicopters, so that kind of reading cannot be what the text originally meant.

Sound interpretation begins by asking what the text meant to its first readers, and only then considering what it means for us today.

The New Testament never actually says Jesus was a carpenter. The Greek word used for both Jesus and Joseph is τέκτων (tekton). A tekton meant skilled craftsman or builder, someone who worked with stone, wood, and other materials to construct homes, tools, and basic structures.

In first century Galilee, ordinary buildings were made mostly from limestone, not wood. That means Jesus likely spent much of his working life shaping stone rather than building fine furniture in a woodshop.

In other words, Jesus grew up as a craftsman who could work with wood, but whose primary work was not carpentry.

The Expectation Effect by David Robson

A book about the power of our minds, and how what we think affects far more areas of our lives than we realize.

Our thoughts and expectations influence how we digest food, how good it is for us, and how much we eat. Our thoughts themselves influence how healthy we are, how much we can exercise, and how strong we are.

It impacts how well we see, think, how we age, and how often we get sick (and changing our mindset can literally change almost any area of your life).

Overall, it was quite interesting and very eye-opening. I think everyone assumes at one level that our mindset can affect things, but we vastly underestimate just how much our expectations run our lives.

I had some quibbles with the book, namely the author’s view of religion (he pretty clearly has an agnostic view that God exists at best, which is fine, but he tries to boil prayer and faith down entirely to how the brain works).

In addition, he pretty much insinuates that the only differences between men and women are societal expectations, not that there are real, physiological differences between men and women, which was pretty strange (and, not to mention, simply wrong).

Still, I learned a lot from the book, even if by the end I was ready to be done.

7/10

P.S. A very important message…