Following is the introduction to a message I preached on 1 Corinthians 9:1-18 at Redemption Hill Church on March 22, 2026 as part of the preaching series on 1 Corinthians. (That sermon is HERE.) In the introduction I raise the question of why everything in the Bible isn’t easy to understand.
When God got a hold of my 14-year-old heart while thinking about how the brevity of life and the length of eternity, one of the fruits of my spiritual awakening was that I started reading the Bible a lot. Most of what I read I understood. And, of course, I could understand the main things—since God wrote his word to reveal his character, plans, and purposes to us. But on almost every page I came across questions I couldn’t understand.
This was hard for me to accept. There was a part of me that thought that the Bible should be easy to understand. I mean, if it’s really from God and if God wrote it to teach us his character and ways, including the way of salvation, you would think that it would be easy to understand, wouldn’t you?
The answer to that question is that understanding the main teachings of the Bible is easy to understand. The primary truths of the Bible are emphasized and repeated so many times that to miss these truths would be like not being able to recognize a barn door while standing twenty feet away from it.
If you spend any time in the Bible, you cannot possibly miss:
- that God is a holy God—and that he is also a God of love
- that human sin is a huge problem
- that Jesus is himself God in the flesh
- that Jesus came into the world to save sinners from eternal separation from God
- that the way he did it was dying on the cross
- that he proved he had the power and authority to forgive our sins by rising from the dead
- that Jesus is coming back again as judge
- that there is a glorious future when God will make everything right
Seriously, you couldn’t miss these clearly-taught truths—and many other truths like these—unless you simply refuse to accept them.
But I took the observation that the primary things in the Bible are easy to understand and extrapolated from that truth the false notion that everything in the Bible ought to be easy to understand. And when I ran into really hard questions, they became almost existential problems for me early in my Christian life. But the only reason they were such a problem for me was because of my assumption that everything in the Bible ought to be easy to understand.
Where did this assumption come from? I’ve thought about this question for years and now believe that the main reason was because in my mind I had separated the world of experiment and observation (science and the social sciences) from the world of aesthetics (beauty, music, feelings). I grew up in an engineering family where we analyzed and tested everything. But my family was also very musical; we focused on beauty, especially the music you listen to or create—not so much the visual arts. But I struggled to figure out how to integrate these two sides of my brain.
You see, there is a direct sort of way that music impacts you—whether you like it or not. But you do not receive direct impact from an idea that you do not understand. In other words, I was superimposing my ideas of beauty onto a Bible which, although it is beautiful, also makes truth claims—some, and only some, of which are difficult to understand.
I was assuming that God should be easy to comprehend—that everything about God should be immediately accessible. But unless God himself chose to create a world in which everything is simple to understand—and tells us that it is so—I was simply forcing my assumption upon God that his communication should be easily and quickly understood, at least by me.
One moment of reflection, though, will demonstrate that understanding everything about God and his word cannot always be easy. God is infinite in wisdom and knowledge, and my brain is the size of a potato—which means that it has all sorts of limitations. We only have access to knowledge of God to the extent that God chooses to reveal that knowledge to us.
But because God is infinite—which is something the Bible clearly teaches—then it cannot be the case that we will understand everything. Otherwise, that comprehensive understanding would be evidence of a human-constructed religion rather than something that came from an infinitely wise God.
For more on the clarity (perspicuity) of Scripture, see chapter 2 in my book Bible Revival: Recommitting Ourselves to One Book. The sermon that this introduction was taken from is HERE.
Kindle Afresh 