Apologetics
It's an uncomfortable question that Christians are afraid to ask and non-Christians frequently wonder. Why isn't the Bible simpler? Why is all the good advice about life spread out over more than sixty books? Why, when we want to do something as simple as telling someone how to accept Jesus, do we have to trek all over Romans or other books, linking together verses that complement each other but are hundreds of pages apart?
And why is so much of the Bible history? Why the endless tales about people, places, and events, rather than simple and clear-cut commands about what makes God happy? If we examine the number of prescriptive passages, commandments to us, versus the number of descriptive passages, which simply tell what happened, we'll find that the latter outnumber the former by a huge amount.
It's a fair question, I think, with a handful of very simple answers.
The first answer has to do with the nature of the author and the nature of the readers. God is infinite in every way, yet he was communicating through finite human authors, to an audience of finite human readers, who didn't have the benefit of modern scientific or philosophical advancement in their thinking. Most of them were uneducated peasant laborers, shepherds and farmers. There's a pretty big difference between an illiterate farmer and an infinite God, yet the Bible has to bridge that gap.
It is quite unsurprising, then, that the Bible relies so extensively on stories. If you were trying to explain the idea of an apple to a toddler, would you go into a long monologue about how an apple is a fruit that reproduces via seeds, grows on trees, has a fleshy pulpy fruit and a core with more seeds in it, etcetera? Or would you draw a picture of an apple? So when we consider that the Bible is written to explain an infinite God to everyone, we should understand perfectly why it contains so many stories, verbal pictures essentially, about who God is and what he does. Many of the words that we use to describe God are not in the Bible at all: omnipotent (although it does call him almighty), omniscient, omnipresent. We created those words ourselves to describe what we saw in the Bible. Yet the Bible itself is simple enough to be understood even by people who do not know the big seminary words. This makes the Bible accessible, and guarantees that God does not discriminate against the illiterate or the uneducated.
The Bible's reliance on stories automatically means that it will be meandering, free-flowing, and all over the place. Real life is messy. It can't be condensed into an easy-to-follow narrative with a clean beginning and end. It simply tells what is. That's exactly how the Old Testament reads. It's the chronicle of real life with all its ugliness, complication, and real-ness.
The second reason that the Bible isn't simpler has to do with the United States Constitution. My dad once pointed out that he had read the Constitution back in college, learned what it said, and then never read it again. It's so straightforward that it doesn't need to be read more than once, except by people whose careers involve interpreting it. If the Bible was like that, everyone would just read it once and then lay it on the shelf, never touching it again. For anyone who reads the Bible, you know what a tragedy that would be, because you know that the supernatural character of the Bible means that you see something different in it every time you read it. It would be a great shame if it was so superficial that a single reading could tell us everything we needed to know. Of course, since the whole Bible is about an infinite God, a single reading of anything would be insufficient to tell us about him; there simply aren't words that could describe him perfectly even if he wanted to communicate to us that way.
The third reason has to do with Hollywood. Writers for screen plays, video games, and other visual media are always instructed to "show, don't tell." In other words, if you're writing a movie, don't have the characters stand around talking about how bad the bad guy is. Show him kicking a puppy, or taking someone hostage, or twirling his mustache. Show, don't tell.
This is directly related to the things I wrote earlier about stories. It's not just that stories are a good way to explain God to uneducated people; it's that stories are the most emotionally engaging way to describe anything to anyone. I could tell you that God is loving, and that might or might not mean anything to you. On the other hand, I could tell you about the time God blessed a widow by making it so that her last handful of flour gave her enough to bake all the bread she would ever need, and that's an impressive and moving story. The story becomes more real to you than a list of facts on a page ever could.
Alternately, I could describe my girlfriend Andrea with a list of facts. She's about five-five, has dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, etcetera. What have you really learned about her? Yet if I tell you a story instead, such as our efforts in baking a cake for a bake-off our friends hosted, you would learn a lot more. Show, don't tell.
All you have to do is search yourself to see how true these things are. The first five books of the Bible are almost as simple as it can get. Most of them are very straightforward list of rules and commandments. How many times have you read, and enjoyed reading, Leviticus? There's a reason the gospels tell Jesus' life story, rather than simply a list of facts that we must believe in. It's because the story matters.
Those are the real reasons the Bible is not any simpler. The way it's written provides a powerful, engaging narrative stretching through thousands of years of recorded history. Even if we could have it simpler, it would lose that power, and it would become a drab, boring legal document. The Bible is the story of real life, and like real life, it's messy and can't be easily edited into a neat package. We shouldn't be afraid of that quality, or shrink from it as if it's something that we need to apologize for. Our own lives are just as messy, yet our testimonies of how God has moved in our lives are just as powerful. The Bible might be complicated, but this does not keep it from being the power of God unto salvation for those who believe, and it has not stopped billions of Christians since the dawn of time for hearing and believing in the God whose deeds are contained in the Bible's pages.
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