Never Give Up
Back to How to Avoid Misinterpreting the Bible
Jesus deliberately made it hard for people to understand his teaching. We see this in his parables. Although powerfully helpful to the few who got close enough to him to be given the key to their meaning, to everyone else most of his parables were little more than frustrating puzzles (Matthew 13:10-13). But Jesus even went beyond using parables in making things difficult for his listeners. He kept coming up with weird, even offensive, sayings such as, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53).
This saying was enough for many of his disciples to leave him. He could have explained. He could have worded it differently. He could have avoided the subject. Instead, he used it to test them. The twelve, though as bewildered and as offended as the others, clung to Jesus. It was perhaps years later – after the resurrection – when it eventually made sense to them, but no matter how ridiculous Jesus’ teaching seemed, they stubbornly clung to the belief that Jesus had the answers they needed and that if they kept with him for long enough, he would eventually reveal what they needed to know.
God has not changed tactics. He still uses silences and Bible difficulties and offensive situations as challenges for us to rise to the occasion and prove that we believe that no matter what, the answer is found in Jesus and in him alone, and that if we cling to him for long enough, all that we need will be revealed.
We again see this in Jesus’ interaction with the Canaanite (Syrophenician) woman. She needed him. He gave her the silent treatment. Instead of giving up, she hounded him all the more. When she finally wrung a response from him it was worse than nothing. He insulted her and said he wouldn’t give her a thing. Still she hounded him and ended up receiving not only her request but Jesus’ high praise (Matthew 15:21-28). It turned out that despite not revealing a hint of it until it was all over, her persistence thrilled him. And when you receive the silent treatment, your determination to keep badgering him because you believe he cares and will not remain silent forever, will likewise thrill him, gain you high praise and you’ll hear from him as well.
It seemed to Lazarus’s sisters that Jesus had let them down by not responding immediately to their urgent plea for him to come and heal their brother. But they were wrong. (John 11:1-45). Jesus is always faithful and always cares and always has more ways of bringing good out of disaster than our powers of imagination could cope with. To our great loss, it is usually suppressed from official biographies, but many – perhaps all – great men and women of God have reeled in agonized bewilderment at having been certain they had heard from God; only for circumstances to later prove they had been mistaken. Why God allowed it, I do not know, but what proved these people’s greatness is that after that sickening blow they staggered to their feet and kept pressing forward for God.
We sometimes feel sure God will answer a prayer a particular way and for some mysterious reason it doesn’t happen. It can be bitterly disappointing and defy all understanding, but we continue to believe in prayer. Likewise when it turns out that we had misheard from God, we need to continue to believe in God’s guidance and his integrity.
Cling to him. Whenever God communicates, whether it be through the Bible, through circumstances, or whatever, he usually whispers. The further we let ourselves drift from him, the more likely it is that we won’t catch everything he is saying and we will unknowingly fill in the gaps with what we suppose he is saying, thus exposing ourselves to danger.