Abstruse
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9
One popular New Year’s resolution among Christians is to commit to reading the Bible through, cover to cover, in the coming year. That’s a good plan because it makes you a regular Bible reader and exposes you to the entire word of God in context. But as any regular Bible reader will tell you, there are some parts of scripture that are abstruse, or difficult to understand.
You may ask, “Why would God allow his word to be abstruse?” The short answer, at least in part, is found in our focal passage above. God and His ways are beyond our ability to fully comprehend or understand. We must remember that God is eternal; we are mortal. God is timeless and infinite; we are finite. God is the creator; we are created.
Parts of the Bible are abstruse because God’s plan for His creation is both simple and complex. For example, God’s basic plan of redemption is easy to understand, and it’s summed up in the Bible’s most well-known verse: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16).
But then we are confronted by the existence of evil and the reality of its consequences. The Bible’s apocalyptic and prophetic writings are filled with imagery and symbolism which collectively describe the perfect harmony between God’s justice and mercy, but that often leave us bewildered as to their precise meaning or interpretation.
Put simply, how God works in and with this broken world is abstruse. So, what are we to do? The best response is to keep reading and keep studying. As we do that, we’ll see our understanding and knowledge grow—God’s word will be less abstruse and its meaning clearer as we better understand the mind and the ways of God.
Are you reading your Bible, even the abstruse parts?
Having begun as a guest speaker in 2005, Dan was appointed Interim Pastor in 2008 and has been serving Maple Root Baptist ever since. As a small group leader and Chaplin for the Connecticut Tigers, Dan has a heart for the lost and the God that saves them.