One of life’s great ironies is that we all believe things that are demonstrably false, and perhaps downright silly. Otherwise intelligent people really did believe that the Mayan calendar foretold the end of the world. Some people believe that we never went to the moon. And who knows how many people now believe the earth is really flat?
The Bible is no exception to ill-founded beliefs. One of the most obviously wrong is the notion that the Bible is the fount of all knowledge—that every single truth is found within its pages. That’s nonsense. So is its correlating thought: that if something isn’t mentioned in the Bible, it isn’t true.
The truth of my assertions can be demonstrated thousands of times over. The Bible makes no mention of cars, microwave ovens, toilet paper, planets beyond Saturn, bubble gum, coffee, smart phones, electricity, and disposable diapers. And yet it’s true that all of them are real. The idea that everything true is found in the Bible is simply false. And yet I’ve heard Christians say it more than once, even from the pulpit.
One problem with such thinking (and there are many) is that those who think rejecting these ideas is a denial of inspiration tend to force the Bible to comment on things of which it has nothing to say. The result is ill-informed “Bible teaching” that is patently bizarre.
For example, some people will insist that the Bible mentions dinosaurs, countries like China, races within humanity, or flying saucers. The Bible says nothing about these things. Leviathan is not a dinosaur. It is a well-known ancient symbol for chaos and disorder outside as well as within the Bible. The Table of Nations includes only countries in the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. The subject of biological race distinction was unknown to biblical writers, who primarily separated peoples according to religion and language. People groups in the Bible are distinguished by language, geography, and the gods they worship. Ezekiel 1 does not describe a UFO—all the imagery in that passage is known from ancient art and sculpture.
Forcing the Bible to “teach” something absent from its pages means distorting its content and producing false beliefs in the name of truth. This is not only irresponsible, but it also sets up the Bible to fail as a source of truth for the things it does talk about.
The solution is simple. We need to let the Bible be what it is. Its content is deliberately selective since each author, living and writing under God’s providence, had goals for communication. Our task as Bible interpreters is to understand what Scripture says in its own context, not to add to it.