We live inside an unfinished story.
—Rachel Held Evans
Like most people in a new relationship, I became nervous when I was dating my husband, JD, and he told me he wanted to introduce me to his parents. But they made me feel right at home! Dinner had barely started when they began to tell me stories about JD—stories that they told all evening. Most of them were ridiculous and hilarious, and I shouldn’t have been surprised. My husband still has a way of winding up in strange circumstances that turn into great stories. I heard about the time he fell off his bike, ended up with his head stuck in a chain-link fence, and had to be rescued with the Jaws of Life! And the missionary Sunday he had been selected to carry the flag from a country where one of the missionaries served. He had been warned that the flag must never touch the ground, so when he realized he forgot to wear a belt that day, he had no choice but to let his pants fall to the ground in front of the whole church.
At the time, I wasn’t sure if they were trying to scare me off or warn me, but either way, I was loving every minute of it. I was falling hard for this guy, and the chance to hear about the thirty-two years of his life before he met me was so fun and intriguing. Of course, as our relationship has grown, I have also heard some of the hard stories from his life, the things that broke his heart or were difficult for his family. But all of these stories are precious to me because I love him and he is precious to me. The more I get to know him, the more these stories make sense and help me understand him even more deeply.
This is why God’s story is given to us through Scripture—a library of books that we have bound together and call the Bible. When you love someone and are in a relationship with them, you want to know their story. You want to know all the stories of their life in order to make deeper meaning from your relationship with them. This is exactly how I now experience the Bible and my relationship with God. The more I experience God in my life, the more interesting the Bible is to me. The more I read and learn about the Bible, the deeper I experience God. But it wasn’t always this way for me. It has taken me a long time to be confident that the Bible helps me deepen my faith rather than causes it to unravel.
Even now, though I approach the Bible with far less trepidation than I once did, I still find myself wrestling with Scripture and what it means for us today. I think I will wrestle with the Bible for the rest of my life. Thus, I join a long line of people trying to understand these ancient words and finding that it’s not a simple task.
If you walked into any Jewish Synagogue today, you would find a Torah scroll containing the Jewish Scriptures written in ancient Hebrew. The Torah is the first five books of what Christians refer to as the Old Testament. Every Torah scroll is made with the utmost care and precision, following the law of Moses (which is itself a part of the Torah).
Every scroll is made out of parchment (a paper made from animal skin) and each page is sewn together with threads made from the sinew (fibrous tissue that connects muscle to the bone) of a kosher animal thigh.[1] This is done intentionally to remind the Jewish people of the story of one of their forefathers, Jacob, who wrestled with an angel. The story is usually seen as representing wrestling with God. The angel touches Jacob’s hip and throws it out of its socket. Before the exchange is over, Jacob is given a new name, Israel, which means “one who wrestles with God.” The Jewish people are later called the people of Israel or the Israelites. Living up to their name, they continue to sew thigh sinew into their scrolls because they expect to wrestle with Scripture every time they read it.[2]
One of the first things to notice about the Bible is that it’s not a chapter book but rather a library of books. Each of these books falls into a different genre, or even multiple genres, and genre is one important way to determine the meaning of a piece of writing. The genres include narrative, law, poetry, prophecy, and apocalyptic books. You’ll notice that “handbook for life” or “science textbook” or “magic answer book” are not included on that list, even though so many people act and talk like these are the only genres in the Bible!
The Bible is not a handbook that you can apply to twenty-first-century life. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t relevant to twenty-first-century life. It just means that you shouldn’t try to make it into something it isn’t. Try this exercise: look to see whether you have a handbook lying around at home (the instruction manual that came with your new Instant Pot, the owner’s manual to your car, etc.). I have the handbook to my Mazda sitting next to my Bible right now so I can make a comparison. As I page through each thick book, I see that they could not be more different. I can read my Mazda handbook transactionally. By reading a sentence or paragraph plainly, I can easily find the answers to my questions. If the check-engine light is on in my car’s dashboard, I simply turn to page 27 and read some bullet points that help me get to the bottom of the problem. The Bible just doesn’t work this way—it’s not transactional. If you have warning lights going off in your life, the Bible can be extremely helpful. But it won’t be as simple as reading some bullet points on page 27. Sure, it might be nice if it was designed that way. But it wasn’t.
Some people point to the Bible’s lack of straightforward answers as evidence that the Bible isn’t reliable. To that, all I can say is that the Bible is not reliable for doing things it was never intended for.
Is the Bible reliable as a magic answer book? No. Sorry.
Is it a science or history textbook designed for readers to scrutinize with the precision of modern scientific or historical methods? I don’t think so.
However, is it a reliable collection of various books and genres that give us a deep and complex look at the story of God? Yes. This is exactly what it is intended for!
Is it a reliable tool for shaping our understanding of how humans have responded to God throughout the history of humanity? I think so!
Is Scripture reliable as a greater narrative that we can see our own stories within? Absolutely.
Is the Bible reliable as a library we can use to shape our lives that can be transformational (rather than transactional)? Yes!
The Bible is reliable, but only to do what it was intended to do. We will have to wrestle and struggle through the complexity of an ancient book that wasn’t written to us but is absolutely relevant for us.
If you’re reading this book, you might have grown up in a home that valued the Bible and heard it talked about like it was a handbook to life. So the perspective I’m offering can sometimes feel disorienting. It can feel like a thread was pulled, and your understanding of the Bible is unraveling before your eyes!
For thousands of years, various cultures around the world—from the Greeks to the Japanese—have used tapestries to tell stories. Historically, weaving a tapestry was nearly always a community effort. Many were so large that it would take multiple people multiple years to complete. Intricate images woven with the loom would represent multiple genres and concepts from narrative to ancient poetry, all in a single tapestry. It could easily take days or weeks to fully grasp all that was depicted. Yet, one single tapestry could never represent fully the stories it was trying to depict.
We can think about the Bible like a tapestry. A community of people led by God came together to interweave stories, poems, genealogies, and other genres to try to represent a huge story. The story is so grand and epic that it would never fit into a single book, or even a sixty-six-book library. If you carefully study each thread, over time you will get a pretty good idea of the story. But there is so much woven into this story that it would take more than a lifetime to grasp it fully. The good news is we have our whole lives to give it a shot. Scripture is a “living word,”[3] as the writers of Hebrews call it, so none of us can expect to master it. In fact, Scripture has infinitely deeper meanings as a person, or a community, continues to engage with it.
Here is the thing about a tapestry: even if you realize that some of it is beginning to unravel, it is not in danger of unraveling to the point of destruction. It would take a lot more than pulling a thread or two to dismantle the warp (the vertical thread that provides structure) from the horizontally woven threads that tell the story. I like to think of proper exegesis (study of what the text meant in its original context) and intentional hermeneutics (study of the meaning and relevance of the text to today) as the warp of the tapestry of Scripture. The warp keeps the horizontal thread in place and helps the depiction of the story to be visible and clear.
I live in the urban center of Minneapolis, and while there are many wonderful things to say about my city, our community also struggles with destructive things like gang violence. Many young lives have been lost, and it has devastated communities again and again. A quaint house on the corner of a rough street has been set aside as a retreat for those who need a space of refuge and healing. A group of Catholic nuns oversee this home, named the St. Jane House. In the house is a beautiful Japanese loom that those who retreat there are able to use to make a tapestry. A spiritual guide helps the sojourner weave a tapestry of healing.
A woman named Mary Johnson lost her son to gang violence in that neighborhood, but she later befriended Oshea, the man who shot her son. Today, Oshea and Mary call each other “spiritual mother and son.” This beautiful story of healing has birthed a movement called From Death to Life, led by Mary. She brings mothers who have lost their sons and daughters to violence and drugs to the St. Jane House to weave their own healing tapestry. These mothers bring with them strips of cloth from their child’s clothing or fabric that represents their child’s favorite color or sports team. They gather with other women telling stories of the children they have lost while weaving the thread onto the warp. These children’s lives may have ended, but they are still a part of their mothers’ stories, and healing is needed in order to move into the future after such a tragedy. The mothers’ lives continue, as they are still in the messy middle of their own stories.
The Bible as a story is not complete. We have the beginning (creation), a crisis (fall), some of the messy middle (redemption), and then a vision of how the story will end (restoration). God created a world that was good, brokenness entered the world, and from that moment on, God began a work of redemption—God’s mission to redeem the world that God loves. The end of the story is termed restoration because it looks forward to a day when the world is fully redeemed, and all that has gone wrong is made right. One of the things I cling to the most in life is that even though John’s vision written down in Revelation is cryptic and confusing, it shows us that brokenness is not the end of the story!
If you’re following me so far, you might realize that most of the entire tapestry of Scripture is the redemption portion of the story (from Genesis 8 to Jude). Sometimes, when you plop down in the middle of 2 Kings, it doesn’t seem like you are in the messy middle of redemption. But if you zoom back out, you’ll see that you were reading right in the middle of the mess being redeemed!
Here we are in the twenty-first century, still living in the messy middle of the story. The tapestry of God’s story isn’t complete; it’s in process. We see the beginning, the crisis, and a portion of the messy middle, but we are still living right smack in the messy middle ourselves. I don’t know about you, but I have experiences nearly every day that remind me we’re still in the messy middle. We are all a mess! But God has been on the redemptive trajectory for many pages—or threads if you will. Your story matters inside this greater story and so does mine. The fabric of our lives can be woven into the story as part of the larger tapestry.
If you were to take some time to observe your own story as part of the tapestry, my guess is that you will find that it brings healing—just like it does for those mothers at the St. Jane House. When you see the big story as God’s, with our lives woven in as supporting characters, it pries our hearts from egocentrism, helps us see the bigger picture of God’s movement around us, and invites us to be a part of this messy middle of redemption! We get to play a part in the story, making wrong things right, joining in with God as we were designed to do.
In the last few hours of Jesus’s life, he shared his heart with the women and men who had spent nearly every waking moment of the last three years with him. In my Bible, the words of Jesus are in red letters, and nearly all of John 14–17 is in red. I suppose most of us would be pouring out our hearts if we knew we only had a few hours left with our loved ones. Near the end of Jesus’s words to his friends, he says, “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes he will guide you into all the truth.”[4] Jesus has already said so much, but yet has so much more to say. His words remind me that there is only so much any of us can take in at one time, especially during trying times. This was certainly one of those times for these disciples.
Most of us would love to have a full understanding of the Bible and not have to wrestle like Jacob with the angel. We’d prefer not to have our hip knocked out of its socket, thank you very much! But that opportunity is not given to us. And beware of anyone who suggests that it is. Phrases like “the Bible clearly says” are dangerous. Each of us comes to the Bible with only our own cultural, generational, and socioeconomic perspective on a text written thousands of years ago. Too often, we arrogantly believe that our perspective is the only right one. The Bible can lead you to some to clarity, but to do so takes a lot of intentionality, effort, exegesis, hermeneutics, and, as Jesus said, guidance by the Holy Spirit.
I hope that you choose to stay curious about the Bible, recognizing that none of us will ever fully master one of the most complex and interesting texts that exist. Don’t run from the questions that bubble up in you about the Bible; dig into them! Be sure to vet the external sources that you pursue to help inform you, but let your intrigue and questions guide you. You just may find that Jesus was right, and the Holy Spirit meets you within them. God will lead you to answers at a rate that you can bear. You will come to new conclusions, but no doubt you will be led to deeper questions as well. So it’s best to get used to them!
There are three practices I want to offer you that give you the opportunity to approach the Bible in very different ways. These are great experiments to help you discover and wonder how your relationship with the Bible might shift, grow, change, or even begin!
Here are some experiments that offer a different approach to the Bible.
The idea behind this experiment is to imagine yourself in the midst of some of the most compelling stories about Jesus. This experiment is best done with a different passage every day for a week. For example, you might try these: Matthew 9:18–26, Matthew 14:22–33, Mark 2:1–12, Luke 7:1–10, Luke 7:36–50, John 4:7–26, and John 8:1–11.
Find a conversation partner and talk through what you discovered in this experiment.
There is a website, TheBibleProject.com, where some scholars have made artistic videos that explain the major themes of the Bible. The videos and other resources are free to use. There are multiple themes told through five-minute videos.
Find a conversation partner and talk through what you discovered in this experiment.
The overarching story we see through the Bible is referred to as the metanarrative. For this experiment, compare and contrast the following two-sentence descriptions of the metanarrative.
Narrative 1: The Bible is about human sin management and hell avoidance.
Narrative 2: The Bible is about God restoring all things and inviting humans to join in.
On a sheet of paper, draw a line vertically down the middle. On the left side, name everything you can think of that leads to narrative 1. On the right side, name everything you can think of that leads to narrative 2. (For example: life experiences, specific Bible stories, cultural realities.)
On an additional sheet of paper, create two columns again, but this time write on the left side what is produced from narrative 1 in people’s lives and in the world. On the right side, do the same for narrative 2. (For example: ideologies, perspectives on the world, actions people take, religious practices, etc.)
Compare and contrast your lists. What do you notice? Are there significant differences between the two lists? Which of the two narratives has been most pervasive in your life? Is there a third or fourth narrative you would submit? Were certain columns on either sheet easier or harder for you to fill out? Why might that be?
Find a conversation partner and talk through what you discovered in this experiment.