The Bible is a difficult book. It’s just plain hard to read and even more so, understand. Along with this, there’s some tuff stuff in the Bible. Lots of death, murder, violence, empires rising and falling, epic battles, stories of heroes and their victories, their failures, genocide, funeral dirges, laments, etc. One could make a strong case for the fact that the Bible has more tragedies than any other genre. After all, isn’t the Old Testament and epic tragedy?
What’s funny is that this is one of my favorite parts about the Bible; because it’s real. It matches life.
I returned to Haiti again for the eighth consecutive year just a couple of days ago. As I’m catching up with friends and co-workers, there is just tragedy all around! My secretary had a miscarriage, our good friend’s wife lost their second baby at 5 months (the first baby they lost at 7 months), a couple of retired employees passed away, and almost everyone has had chikungunya (a virus that gives you an awful fever and terrible joint pain).
Wouldn’t it just be annoying if the Bible was happy happy happy, chipper chipper chipper all the time? I simply would not be able to put my faith in a book of nice little stories and anecdotes. It would minimize the brokeness of humanity. It wouldn’t be the Bible at all, would it? The Bible doesn’t do that. Thank God.
The Bible is hard because life is hard. The Bible can be confusing because life is confusing. The Bible can be difficult to understanding because life is difficult to understand. It gives me great comfort that the Bible gets it. The people of the Bible get it. God gets it. His word to us meets us right where we are in our brokeness.
Have you ever noticed that the greatest climactic event in the Bible is a story of injustice, murder, betrayal, and violent suffering? What a climax! I love God’s irony. He takes the worst of the broken world, turns it upside-down and inside out by walking out of the grave after three days.
He redeemed it all. All the hard stuff, the tuff stuff, the ugly stuff. Jesus took it all on, was broken bread and poured-out wine, and rose again.
I know I certainly learn more during the hard times and I’m inclined to stay closer to The Lord as well. Perhaps this is why God allows tough times. He knows we tend to drift away from him when everything seems to be going fine. Just a thought.