As a pastor and student of God’s Word I would be very quick to claim that there are many things about the Bible that I don’t understand. I’m constantly learning and that is the way it should be. Very often I hear people say, “I can’t understand the Bible.” Yes, there is much in the Bible that is difficult to understand, but much of the Bible is clear and plain for anyone to understand. Our problem generally rests not in what we don’t understand but rather in what we understand but don’t obey. Even Philo, who was a Jew around the time of Christ, addressed this issue. May our lives be filled with the study of God’s word and the daily living out of what God reveals to us.
(93) But it is right to think that this class of things resembles the body, and the other class the soul; therefore, just as we take care of the body because it is the abode of the soul, so also must we take care of the laws that are enacted in plain terms: for while they are regarded, those other things also will be more clearly understood, of which these laws are the symbols, and in the same way one will escape blame and accusation from men in general. (94) Do you not see that Abraham also says, that both small and great blessings fell to the share of the wise man, and he calls the great things, “all that he had,” and his possessions, which it is allowed to the legitimate son alone to receive as his inheritance; but the small things he calls gifts, of which the illegitimate children and those born of concubines, are also accounted worthy. The one, therefore, resemble those laws which are natural, and the other those which derive their origin from human enactment.
Charles Duke Yonge with Philo of Alexandria, The Works of Philo: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), 262.
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