When God Stops Speaking

[The Midweek Encounter is a ministry of Encounter Church in Kentwood, MI. These posts are reflections on Sunday's message, which can be heard here each week: http://myencounterchurch.org/#/messages-media]

Sitting down to read the Bible can be a daunting task. In one sense, it’s so simple—open it up, pick a section, and read the words on the page. Except because it’s the Bible, we know that’s not supposed to be all there is to it. The book of Hebrews calls the word of God “alive and active,” but when I read it, sometimes it feels like it’s become lifeless and lethargic. It can feel like the way I’m reading the Bible is broken, and unless I devote every waking hour of my entire life to studying Hebrew and Greek and reading every commentary I can find, I won’t be able to really understand what God is really saying through the Bible.

It’s like God knew people would continue to despair over trying to understand the Bible, because In Deuteronomy 30, Moses delivers a word to the people of Israel, telling them, “Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach… No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it” (verses 11 and 14). The Israelites had recently left the land of Egypt where they were enslaved, and were on a journey to the land God had promised them—“a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Reading the Bible isn’t a journey in a physical sense, but it is a journey in other ways—a journey of discovery, a journey of transformation, a journey of learning about God and how he wants us to live. The task, like a trek to a new country, may seem daunting at times as we encounter passages of the Bible that seem to contradict each other, or that don’t make sense to us in today’s times, or that are worded in a way that seems fit only to confuse us. But as God worked to bring the Israelites out from their lives of bondage, he remains near to us today, actively working to bring us to him and to help us know him more. 

When we read the Bible, we’re not doing so in a vacuum, completely alone and abandoned—we read the Bible and God is with us as we do. It’s our job to read it and to use resources available to us to understand it, but the ultimate understanding and ability to apply it to our lives comes only from God. The more we spend time with the Bible, the more opportunities we’re opening up where God may speak to us. It may come in the form of a comforting passage found during personal devotions, or being convicted by a message from a pastor, or a conversation at a Bible study that brings newfound clarity. 

Of course, the opposite is true as well—if we continued to read the Bible for any length of time, there will inevitably be seasons where it truly feels like our way of reading it is broken, and that God seems to be sitting back and decidedly not helping us understand it any further. After Moses’ assurance that the Israelites were capable of carrying out the commandments he had laid out for them, the Israelites spent the next few hundred years proving him wrong. They broke, if not every single one of the commandments, most of them. Because they tried to be obedient out of their own strength instead of relying on God’s power to enable them to obey him, they were unable to fulfill what God told them to do.

Without God, we don’t have the ability to continue reading the Bible consistently and having it always speak to us in vibrant and applicable ways. Instead, we must remain faithful to the task without despairing when we stumble over difficult sections, trusting God to illuminate it for us in ways we cannot—and in ways we may not see for some time. But, because God is who he says he is and does what he says he will, we can know, even in those seasons where things aren’t making sense, that God is at work speaking into our lives and shaping us to look more like him.

[Brianna DeWitt believes in Jesus, surrounding yourself with good people, and that desserts are best when they involve chocolate and peanut butter. She writes about faith, growing up, and whatever else pops into her head on her own blog, and tweets (largely about food) at @bwitt722.]