Starting Anew

I've decided to start this blog purely as a place to post my thoughts on the exegesis of Scripture.  In case you're wondering, what this means is that I plan on posting my understanding and interpretation of what Scripture teaches.  I'm not planning on trying to debate the accuracy of the bible or whether there were multiple editors, or how the Scripture came to be.  All of that is important, and it all has its place, but this blog isn't being started with that goal.  The only goal for this blog is to explore what Scripture teaches, regardless of whether we like what we find or not.

Far too often it seems that we read our own understanding into the text of Scripture.  Sometimes we aren't even aware we're doing this.  Unfortunately, the longer I read and study Scripture, the more I realize we will always be guilty of this.  And it isn't all bad.  Sometimes, reading our own understanding and our own prejudices into the text helps us to understand how to apply the text to our lives today.  But sometimes what happens is we end up reading the text in a way that the original authors didn't intend.

One of the primary ways we are guilty of reading our biases into the text seems to be in reading our moral qualms and opinions into what we find in Scripture.  We call things "sin" that God does not necessarily call sin.  We want a world that is black and white, but the reality is that Scripture presents us a world that runs the gamut of colors, sometimes even ending up being black and white.  More often though, there are shades of gray in the midst of Scripture.

That's the goal of this blog, to explore the difficult passages of Scripture; to examine the beauty of the myriad colors of life.  Hopefully those who read this will, like myself, be challenged with our view of God.  I want us all to grow in our understanding of the righteousness of God, the wisdom of God, and the power of God.  I hope that we will find that our God makes us uncomfortable, because he doesn't fit into the box of our understanding.  I want us to read Scripture and marvel at God, so that we can say truly his foolishness is greater than our wisdom, and that his ways are beyond our understanding.

C. S. Lewis once said, "Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."  Thus is my goal, not to be original, but to tell the truth, no matter how original it sounds to our ears.  I fear we have too often had an easy explanation of Scripture, we have watered down the hard parts of Scripture, so that we can have a God who fits within our understanding of righteousness.  We need to have our view of righteousness and holiness challenged.  We need to understand how the same God who is called a "man of war" can be said to hate those who love violence.  We need to understand how the God who rebuked Israel for abandoning their wives could command Abraham to send his concubine and his son into the wilderness.

This is my goal, and hopefully those who read this will grow in wisdom with me as we explore the depths of Scripture together.