You CAN Understand the Bible

The recent presidential inauguration (which I only bothered to watch days later on youtube) has me thinking about bibles. The president takes the oath of office with his hand on the bible. Often these bibles are family heirlooms, inches thick with sturdy covers. The only bible my family had was a vinyl bound one that was given out by the government when my parents became Canadian citizens. This was in 1974 and I am quite sure they don’t distribute them anymore. I think the only person that ever opened that bible was me. It sat on the bookshelf in the living room but as the years went by it migrated to the spare bedroom upstairs.  

When I was about 10, I began to realize God’s presence in my life. I really had no avenue for expressing this relationship. We didn’t go to church as a family, we didn’t pray, nothing really. But in those days, there was still a sense of Christianity in the culture even if it was only because it was important to your grandma and that stores were closed on Sunday. That’s how I knew that I could read about religion in the bible.

I’d go through these bouts of wanting to be good and holy and that’s when I would read the bible. I should say I would try to read the bible. I didn’t understand it wasn’t a chapter book like my beloved Laura Ingalls and her Little House books or my Nancy Drew mysteries. I would either start at Genesis and be left ashore as Noah set sail or I would start with the Gospel of Matthew and decide that I shouldn’t practice my piety before men which meant the bible would go back on the shelf.

When I came back to the church 18 years ago, I hadn’t progressed in my bible reading at all. It was like I was still 10 years old. I was more interested in reading apologetics than the actual bible so I could understand why the faith was “right.” I was terrified of backsliding into my previous life and habits so I worked very hard to learn the “rules” so I wouldn’t make any more mistakes and I’d be happy. Also I am always looking for the shortcut! It’s a good thing God meets us where we are, but as the saying goes, he loves us too much to leave us there.

Long story, very short, I went to a 9-day retreat in 2014 and was baptized in the Holy Spirit. When I returned home, I had suddenly developed a great thirst for scripture and began to read the Mass readings every day. Sometimes it was more of a surface skimming of them but I did it. There were lots of times I didn’t understand what I was reading but what was important was that I was making that connection to the Word. Who is the Word? Jesus is the Word.

I started taking bible studies at the parish and reading a bible with commentaries. I learned how numbers are used symbolically and that was huge because all of a sudden you start seeing significant patterns that point to God's truths everywhere. I'll have to go deeper into that in another post. For the first time in my life, I began reading the Old Testament and actually enjoying it.  When I began to see how Jesus is prefigured in so many OT figures it began to make more and more sense. Brandon Vogt writes that, 

“Jesus of Nazareth…stands at the centre of the Bible’s entire story. Everything before the Gospels points to Jesus; everything after reflects him.”

The Catechism Paragraph 108 states that,

“Still, the Christian faith is not a "religion of the book." Christianity is the religion of the "Word" of God, a word which is "not a written and mute word, but the Word which is incarnate and living". If the Scriptures are not to remain a dead letter, Christ, the eternal Word of the living God, must, through the Holy Spirit, "open [our] minds to understand the Scriptures."

I’ll close with a quote from Peter Kreeft and then you can grab your bible and start reading!

"When you read the bible, beware, it will do things to you. For when you read it, it is reading you. Its Author is reading you, from within."