What was God thinking when he wrote the Bible?

The Bible is the owners manual for our lives. But yet, it is one of the most difficult books to understand and figure out.

I have read a lot of owners manuals in my life. I got one just the other day for a telescope that I purchased. At the start of the manual, it said that the assembly of my telescope would take 30 minutes. I remember thinking to myself; Yeah, right !

I went through the manual and read the instructions carefully. Some steps were fairly easy to follow. For others, I had to read and re-read them, but finally got it right. Others seemed to be just plain impossible. I was about to give up, when God gave me the thought to look on YouTube. Thank God for YouTube! I found the assembly instructions for my telescope right away. I was able to watch the videos and finish assembling my telescope.

Just like those telescope instructions, most people find the Bible to be a very difficult book to figure out. That's why we have so many Preachers, and Evangelists. If you ask 20 different Pastors, Evangelists, and Christians what a certain passage in the Bible means, you are likely to get 20 different answers. (If you stick to asking people that are all a part of the same denomination, you might have a better chance of getting the same, or similar answers. Pastors that are of the same denomination probably all attended the same type of college or seminary, so they were all taught the same thing.)


To make things even worse, we have a lot of versions of the Bible. At my last count, there were about 150, and those are just the English ones. The more popular and accepted ones are the New International Version (NIV), New American Standard (NAS), the King James and a handful of others. In fact, there are many Churches that will only read a specific version of the Bible and refuse to even recognize any of the others.

Then there is the problem of denominations. There are hundreds, and perhaps even thousands, of denominations (Denoms) in Christianity. The Baptist Denom alone has about a hundred different divisions.

So is it any wonder that the average Christian is completely confused?

Lets get back to my example of the telescope and the users manual for it. Lets say that the manual for my telescope was originally written in Greek. It was then translated into English by 150 different authors . None of the 150 authors could agree on the proper interpretation of the manual, so all 150 of them came up with their own version.

Interpretation of the manual for this telescope was so controversial, and so disagreed on, that hundreds of thousands of Colleges and Universities sprung up to teach people how to properly interpret the manual. These colleges, and universities generated hundreds of thousands of professional teachers that had the sole purpose of teaching others how to properly interpret the manual. These teachers started hundreds of thousands of smaller schools where they taught others how to properly read the owners manual, and put together the telescope.

Soon, several of the smaller schools that believed the same, or similarly, began to come together to form Unions. Each of these Unions had a different idea on how the telescope should be assembled and used.

The Union of "Southern Telescopes Users" (STU for short) believed that before the telescope could be used, it had to be immersed in water.

The Union for "Thats a Really Dumb Idea" (TARDI) believed that immersing the telescope in water was stupid and just sprinkling it with water was enough to make it useful.

The Union for "That's still a really dumb idea" (TSARDI) believed that putting any water at all on the scope was just plain dumb and the TARDI and STU were morons.

The Union for "Telescope Speakers" (TS) believed that if the telescope was assembled properly, it would begin to speak in strange languages. They further believed that if the scope didn't speak in these weird languages, it was not a useful scope.

The Union of "Telescope Speakers Anonymous" (TSA) believed that the Union of TS was full of BS (Buggy Swillology, which meant "Crazy Turtle People" in Greek).

I could go on and on with this analogy, but I think I had better stop there. Besides, I think I made my point. In case I didnt, I will state it plainly.

Here are the problems I might run into when purchasing this telescope;

• Hundreds of versions of the manual.
  
• Hundreds of thousands of Colleges and Universities that were there to teach me how to build and use it
  
• Hundreds of thousands of smaller schools that had teachers that all taught different ways of building and using the telescope
  
• Thousands of Unions that all thought different ways to build and use my scope.

If you were faced with all this, you would probably throw up your hands in disgust and return the telescope. I know I would !

As Christians, this is exactly what we have to deal with.

I know its taken me a while to get here, but I have finally arrived at my original point.

What in the world was God thinking when he wrote the Bible?

Its important to understand that all this mess that I just described was not God's doing. We made this mess.
We invented Denominations.
We invented these Colleges and Universities.
We invented all these different versions of the Bible.
And we invented all these Pastors and Evangelists that have all these different ideas of how to build the proper Christian and make him or her useful.

But even the Bible itself can seem to be a pretty confusing book. Lets take a look at that a bit.

The Bible was not written in English. It was written in Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew. The entire old testament was written in Hebrew, expect for a few chapters that were done in Aramaic. The entire New Testament was written in Greek. To make things even more difficult, most authors of the New Testament used common everyday Greek, while some used a more classical form of Greek.

After the Roman Empire was Christianized, the entire Bible was translated into Latin. In the coming decades, the Bible was translated again and again as needs arose. Then around 1611 AD, the Bible was put into what we know as the King James Bible. The King James bible was written in the style and common usage of the English people that lived in.... you guessed it, England.

This was the Shakespearean era. Shakespeare used words like Thou, Wherefore, Wherto and other words of this nature. In fact, calling the Bible by the one that authorized it, King James, seems strange to me. I think the version should be renamed to the "Shakespearean Bible"?

There have been hundreds more versions since the King James. Some have stuck and some have fallen by the way side. Perhaps the versions that didnt make it were the ones that were sown in poor soil?

The Bible authors wrote the books of the Bible in languages that we dont use today. The Greek language that was used in the Bible is a dead language. So in order for the Bible to be useful to us English speaking types, it had to be re-written. Trouble is that no one can agree on the proper interpretations of the languages used in the Bible. There are many words in Greek that just dont translate well into English. Many Greek words dont have a direct translation at all.

One good example of this is the word "Love". This word is used hundreds of times throughout the Bible. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, there are 4 words that all mean different kinds of Love.

Agápe means unconditional love. In modern day Greek, it means "I love you". Éros is passionate love, with sensual desire and longing.
Philia means friendship or affectionate love in modern Greek. It is a dispassionate virtuous love, a concept developed by Aristotle. It includes loyalty to friends, family, and community, and requires virtue, equality and familiarity.
Storge means "affection" in ancient and modern Greek. It is natural affection, like that felt by parents for offspring. Rarely used in ancient works, and then almost exclusively as a descriptor of relationships within the family. It is also known to express mere acceptance or putting up with situations, as in "loving" the tyrant.

There are hundreds of thousands, depending on who you ask, of other words in the Bible that just dont translate well and in some cases not at all. So this is why no one seems to be able to agree with how to interpret them. So therefore, we have all these hundreds of versions of the Bible.

The difficulty with this is that if a word is not translated properly, it can completely change the meaning. We can get an idea of the problem if we go back to my story of the telescope with the manual that was originally written in Greek. Lets assume that when the manual was translated into English, 1 word was translated incorrectly. The word "Screw" was improperly translated as "Hammer". So when the manual meant to say "Screw the left and right parts together", the bad translation made it to say; "Hammer the left and right parts together."

This 1 word would change the entire project. Instead of a telescope, I might have wound up with a very large well beaten metal toothpick.

The story is the same with Christianity. Lets take 1 of those 4 Greek words for Love and intentionally mess it up. How about using for an example "Love your neighbor". Now the intention of God's statement was that we should have unconditional love, or feelings, for our neighbor. We should have "Agape" love for them. But what if this word was mistranslated as Eros. Now instead of having this unconditional love for our neighbor, we are to fall in love with with our neighbor, which is everyone.

When I found my telescope instructions on Youtube, I was able to skip the written ones and get my telescope assembled easily and quickly. Unfortunately, God didn't use video for the books of the Bible. It had not been invented yet, so he couldn't. But surely there were people that could draw. The Bible does not even have any good illustrations in it. Though you can find some versions today that have these in it. Oddly though, its children's versions of the bible that have these. For some reason, it is seen as a weakness if you need pictures in your Bible. Something I dont get. Personally, I would love to have an adult version of the Bible that has lots of good pictures in it.

This blog may have come across as a bit on the negative side. If it did, that was not my intention.

If we are to point blame at anyone for this mess, its rest securely on us. God is perfect. In his writing of the Bible and setting up the Church, he had to rely on the imperfect, which is us. God gave us an excellent owners manual. If we follow it, we can build a good Christian life which will work just as the master meant it to.

But just be careful who you listen to, and what you read.

If I were to give new Christians, and even old ones, suggestions, they would be this.

• Dont believe everything you hear or read.
  
• Read from more than 1 version of the Bible and compare what they have to say.
  
• Go to whatever Church that God has led you to attend.
  
• Listen to the Pastor, your elders, and those Christians that God has put over you, but your ultimate authority is God, not any man. (Even Pastors make mistakes. If you Church's Pastor says, or thinks, that he is totally right and right all the time, go someplace else.)
  
• Be careful who you let speak into your life.
  
• Test everything you hear and read against the word of God and when in doubt go to God in prayer.
  
• Pray constantly
  
• Study the Bible for yourself from multiple versions.

The bottom line to all this is that God is perfect, but we are not.

• God's Word is perfect and was perfectly inspired. But what we have are translations and as such certain words and phrases can and do vary from translation to translation.
  
• God's Church is the perfect and spotless bride of Christ. But the Church is made up of people that are not.