Mount Pisgah Academy SDA Church

What does the Bible teach? Well, depending on your reading of it, just about anything you want it to teach. You can find passages that suggest God is loving, while other passages suggest God is full of rage. You can find passages that recommend staying away from booze, and others that seem to condone its use. You can find passages that support vengeance toward someone who has wronged you, while others support forgiveness. The list can go on and on.
Does this mean that the Bible is a book of contradictions? No more than a parent's words to a toddler compared with the same parent's words to a young adult. God seems to meet us where we are in our knowledge about life and about Him. There are words in the Bible for people coming from all different places. Only as we read the Bible in this manner will we start to see harmony in all that it says. God never changes, but, due to His gracious influence, we do.
As much as we might wish the Bible to be a codebook, listing all that we need to know about living life, it just doesn't read that way. Rather, the Bible is more like a casebook, showing how God has worked with humanity at many levels and in many circumstances. There are historical narratives, poems, songs, prose, sayings, biographies, pastoral letters of advice as well as prophetic predictions. If we read it as something other than this, as if it were some kind of utterance, word for word from God's lips, then we miss out on seeing how God has used humanity as a conduit for communicating the truth about Himself to the world.
Of course, this is the good news, the fact that God has disclosed Himself to humanity, telling how He has taken measures to help us out of our desperate plight.
As you read through the Bible, if you'd enjoy emailing someone about what you read, feel free to contact us. We won't throw a bunch of bewildering explanations back at you. You'll get just our own, humble opinions of the picture we see being painted from Genesis to Revelation.

to exchange email with someone, click here: Bible answers