The Purpose of Shocking Imagery

Now, for a moment, let’s go back to baking bread over poop. If you look at just this one verse, or if you take lots of other verses totally out of context, you can easily be misled, confused, or disgusted honestly. But if you look at what’s actually happening, who this is written to, you’ll see that this wasn’t God giving a recipe. It was God giving the nation of Israel an illustrated sermon using dramatic props through the prophet Ezekiel. Now, I’m a props guy. I’ve never once used poop. But I love to use different things in my messages. I’ve used apples and lemons and lemonade and strawberry freckled lemonade, cereal all crushed up all over the place, potato chips, a gym bag, a rock, all sorts of stuff. Maybe you remember one of the things that I would have used. But I use those to communicate a message, right? I use those sometimes to get your attention.

The message with the poop verse, if you actually keep reading, if you understand, if you look into it a little deeper than one verse out of context and properly understand what’s happening, you’ll see that God is actually saying to the nation of Israel that this is how desperate you’re going to become, how desperate and defiled your life will become if you continue rejecting me. Yeah, it’s so disgusting because it’s disgusting to God. See, the Bible isn’t weird because God is somehow weird. No, sometimes the Bible gets weird because God’s using shocking imagery to wake a spiritually sleepy people up.

Turns out some of us are still spiritually sleepy. But God has always been and continues to be a communicator, not a complicator. He was speaking clearly here to the nation of Israel in a manner that they couldn’t miss, even if we do. Who he was writing to, who he was speaking to couldn’t miss it. And now he still has some pretty clear ways to get our attention today. Yet if you think about modern day, if you think about our current culture and over-sexualized culture who confuses sexual identity, sexual orientation, and really just our urges and desires, sometimes those get confused with just our need for connection, our need for friendship. And then there’s the old lie that love is love. I mean, it sounds warm and fuzzy, but it’s not true. I love my wife differently than I love my son, and I love my son differently than I love ketchup. Yeah, there are different kinds of love, certainly.

See, we’re not shocked by much. In fact, we swallow up this stuff from our culture all the time. It’s playing in the background all the time and sometimes the messages of our culture are so much louder than the messages of scripture. We’re not shocked by much we see on TV or on the internet. So much is thrown in our faces. Yet even in our culture, it’s still shocking to read in church directly from our Bibles that there she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys, and whose emission was like that of a horse. Some of you are gonna be interested in the Bible for the very first time. And some of you can’t believe you’ve never seen that before. Because often as believers, longtime believers, we believe what the Bible says, but we don’t always stop to think about what the Bible says, and that’s in the Bible. It’s not what most people expect, certainly not what I expected to read 30 years ago when I started to get serious about understanding the Bible. But if you keep reading, you would see that this verse is not about sex or about sex parts. It’s about spiritual adultery. But again, you take one verse and build a meme around it, and man, it seems like you people are crazy to believe this, but if you dig a little deeper, you’ll see that God intentionally uses offensive imagery because this sin, this spiritual adultery is so incredibly offensive to him. He’s just trying to communicate, just trying to get through to us.

Defending the Faith in the Age of Soundbites

See, not every verse you read in the Bible was meant to be read literally, or quoted as if it was. See, if someone was to hand you, out of the blue, one of these single verses seemingly about poop or donkeys—so many others they could hand us as well—and they told you that all that comes from that old good old Bible, the holy ancient book that you say you believe, well, they’d have some questions for you. And many of us, if we stop to think about what this book says, we might have some questions too, rightfully so. Would you know how to respond? Would you know how to respond? See, most Christians wouldn’t. And that’s exactly why we’re doing this series.

Welcome to When the Bible Gets Weird, a three-part series designed to help you understand, explain, and hopefully apply the message of the Bible properly as more and more people turn to this ancient holy book. And they are in unprecedented numbers. They’re searching for meaning. People are searching for purpose in a culture that has left them disconnected, empty, struggling with anxiety. They’re turning to that ancient holy book. And increasingly, as scriptures are quoted, they’re oftentimes being misunderstood, maybe misused, certainly even abused at times. Some of the very verses that I’ve already shared or that I’m going to share are not only disturbing and offensive, some seemingly make no sense. Or maybe they seem to contradict other parts of the Bible of the same book. And any of these verses, honestly, they can be used to tear your faith apart, or build it up. If you actually look into things a little bit deeper, if you learn to read, understand, and experience all that God has in this book, man, those same very verses can build you, can build your faith.

But many of the people who post memes or who quote verses, they do so with the intention of discrediting the Bible. I’ll come back to the unicorns later. But the Facebook posts that make fun of the out-of-context verses, even the former Christians who are innocently deconstructing their faith, so often they get so much wrong with what they’re reading, mostly because they don’t know about the five things that we’ll unpack over these three weeks. But if you understand these five things, you won’t have to worry about these kind of verses tearing apart your faith. You’ll see that the Bible actually makes more sense and that the pages of scripture really our faith building, and that the word of God is eternal and powerful beyond our understanding. And you’ll be able to help others and answer some of these questions.

Principle 1: It Isn’t a Book, It’s a Library

So we better get started with the five things we need to understand before reading, quoting, or posting verses from the Bible. First up, in your notes: It isn’t a book. It’s a library. You’ll often find on the front of what we call a book, Holy Bible, or on the spine. But that’s just the name that someone gave this collection of books. See, the book that we’ve come to know as the Holy Bible didn’t even become the Holy Bible until the Middle Ages. And more so with the beginning of the printing press and the printed Bible, especially with the King James translation of the Bible. Calling it the Holy Bible makes good sense, as the word holy means set apart. And we do believe that the writings in the Bible are distinct, they’re set apart or sacred—another word similar to holy, right? But in the Bible itself, you’ll see that the Bible refers to itself as holy scriptures being from God. Again and again we see this.

The word Bible comes from the Greek word meaning, catch this, books. Yeah. We often say a book, here it is, and we miss the s—it’s books. Even though many of us have already heard that there’s 66 books, 39 in the Old Testament or the First Testament, 27 in the New Testament or the Second Testament, but hear this. This is so important. If you really want to understand the Bible, we need to stop thinking of it like a book and start thinking of it like a library. And when you come across something offensive, something that you think, whoa, that can’t be—when you come across those kind of things, the best thing to do when a single verse doesn’t make sense or is offensive, keep reading. Don’t stop with the one verse and think, whoa, where’s that from? Go ahead and dive in.

See, inside this library you’ll find not just 66 books, you’ll find 66 very different books originally written in three different languages, none of which were English or even Old English. “I beseech thee, therefore, brethren, to take note.” No, you might have heard the preachers say that, but that’s not the original language. These books were written in Aramaic, in Hebrew, in Greek. And they were written over the course of 1500 years by a whole bunch of people from a whole bunch of cultures. So some of the books in this library were written a thousand years before other books in the library, and yet all of them are somehow connected at a time when they couldn’t compare notes.

Illustrations/Stories: Walking Through the Library Shelves

I want you to come on a little journey with me. We still got a few minutes. Would you think, use your imagination and imagine that we’re gonna go step into a modern library, or maybe even a bookstore if you could find one, or go online to a place where you can buy books. When you’re there, will you go find some poetry? Let’s walk through this modern library and go to the poetry section. Or online, in person, whatever you need to do. But poetry uses rhyme and rhythm, right, in a way to stir our emotions. It tries to use all sorts of the most colorful words, sometimes exaggerated to tell stories. Psalms—Psalms are often written in poetry to tell a story or to share ideas. So in the poetry section, where we’re all standing at this point, in the poetry section of a library, we read those books differently than we’d read something a few shelves over in the history section. And we would read certainly the history section differently than you would read the legal documents that you need to sign.

Keep walking through this modern library and you’d find books written in Europe in the medieval age around the year 900. And those writings would be from people at that time, and the words they choose to use, and the stories that are important to them to tell—very, very different. The struggles that they face, man, very different than what you read on Facebook. And you gotta read them differently, different than the sports scores that were just printed or posted, and you would never expect to read those very different kinds of literature the same way as one another. Those different styles of writing, we would never look at them the same way or think that they should mean exactly the same thing.

A few more shelves away and you can find that legal section. You’d see a bunch of lawyers gathered around probably tapping into those pages to find out about different laws and precedents that have been set over different periods in history. And a lawyer would pay attention to when this law was written, where it was written, all those kind of things, because laws change over time, right? And they are applicable to different people in different geographic areas. A law written in New Brunswick in the early 2000s, it’s going to look very different than a law written in France in the 1700s, or in Germany in the 1500s, or in Rome in 500. Like more than one of these laws that we could look at, so many of them, we would think that doesn’t make any sense. Why on earth would they have that? But just because they’re there, and just because we don’t understand them doesn’t mean they’re wrong or that they’re pretend, made up. Rather, each of these laws needs to be read differently, taking into consideration when, where, and even why it was written. Not in light of our culture today, not in light of our experiences, but in light of what was written—that culture and what was going on then. Who was this written to? What was it written for? Can we learn something from that?

Any construction workers around here? Just imagine construction workers. Today they are required at certain times, it’s the law, they need to wear hard hats in certain situations. But you’re not—I don’t see a single hard hat. No, nobody’s wearing one today. Does that mean that’s a bad law, or that it’s pretend, just made up? Of course not. That law is for a particular people at a particular time. That makes perfect sense to us, but the same is true for much of the legal section of the law books in this library called the Bible.

So this trip through a modern library, it ought to help us see our Bible differently. It’s not a book. It’s a library with a legal section, a historical section, a beautiful poetry section, a collection of letters that were written to specific churches, a group of biographies about the life and times of Jesus, a wisdom section that we can turn to. But each and every one of the books in this library are to be looked at, studied, understood, and applied differently than the other.

Will you take your next step guide for a moment? I want to show you a chart that we built here on the front. That first column is the different genres of reading material in the library. Then you’ll see some examples of which books of the Bible fit into those genres, and then how do I read that genre? How do I do that? See, because you can’t read and apply the whole collection of books in your Bible the exact same way, any more than you would walk into a modern library and read something written thirty-five hundred years ago the same way as you would read yesterday’s news.

And yet, the late night comedians, the creators of memes that get posted all over the internet, even, again, the people that are deconstructing their faith, they’re often not trying to fool us, but that’s what they’re doing. They’re reading the different sections, the different books of the Bible in the same way. They take one line of one book and they read it like they read yesterday’s news. Not for evil or diabolical reasons, I don’t think, but because they don’t know what they don’t know and they don’t understand what they don’t understand. But for some, maybe for some, it’s in the race for building a bigger audience or being more entertaining. For some, it might be about being heard or getting likes. I think for others, it’s doing their own virtue signaling. They’re trying to save you from people like me that are pushing this book. But what they really do is they end up revealing that they haven’t done their homework. They reveal that they’re reading it wrong. See, this library—not a book—it’s this library that we need to know what section we’re standing in before we start to try to understand what it is we’re reading, much less communicate it to others or post it when it doesn’t make sense. Keep reading. Don’t give up. Keep reading.

Clearing Up Misconceptions: Unicorns and Slavery

I’ve often heard people, too many people say, “If you’re gonna claim to believe in God and this holy book, you better also be ready to believe in unicorns, because that’s in the Bible. I’ve read it. I saw it in the King James Version. It’s there.” But listen, that’s not a Bible problem. That’s an old English translation problem. In 1611, “unicorn” referred to a one-horned wild beast, not the magical horse from children’s stories today. Modern translators render it “wild ox” because that’s what the Hebrew text was actually referring to. Know your Bible. Truly, know your Bible, they say sarcastically. I say, yeah, let’s go. Let’s know what it is that God has for us.

Yeah, you know what? The Bible also talks about bigotry and slavery. “Believe this book,” they say, “and you better be ready to sell your daughter into slavery.” See, too often we’ve heard people misinterpret a God of love, acceptance, and forgiveness, and make him out to be a God who hates, murders, and condones slavery all because they didn’t keep reading, or they were reading it all wrong. Just because it’s in the library, just because it’s in the Bible, just because the Bible records something doesn’t mean God ever recommended it, that he ever suggested it, that that’s his best for us. It doesn’t mean God condones it. It doesn’t mean we should look at it from our current point of view, from our perspective, through our set of experiences.

Because the second thing we need to know before we can really understand the Bible is none of this, none of this was written to us. But all of it—every chapter, every verse, every line—was written for us. There’s a huge difference in comprehension when you understand that we are to learn from this book that was never written to us. And I’m excited to unpack that next week with you because I think it’s going to be very, very helpful.

Closing Challenge

Listen, in this age of TikTok, YouTube videos, Facebook, Instagram, we are set up for confusion. We are set up for misunderstandings and soundbites that cannot tell the whole story. But when you read the Bible, if you are reading about a violent, anti-woman, anti-science, pro-slavery, moral monster of a god, let me tell you, you’re reading it wrong. If you’ve heard people say that, they’re reading it wrong. I mean, if the Bible had that kind of message in it, if God was that kind of a God, I can’t imagine what people must think of me—giving my life to that kind of a message, raising my family to that kind of a message. You’d either think I am desperately evil or terribly stupid. And I am neither. I have done the research. I have built my life on this book. It has proven true time and time again.

If you don’t know what’s in here, you can get confused for sure, but I have done the research and here is what I have found. The grass may wither, the flowers may fall, but I have found, as you will find, and as God proclaimed, the word of our God endures forever.

Here’s my challenge for you this week. You got homework. I want to challenge you to do something. Would you get into your Bible? I want you to read just three little parts. Find a psalm, maybe Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Just read it. Look at Proverbs, maybe Proverbs 10—there’s some wisdom there. We got the poetry, we got the wisdom, and then go to a biographical section, the life and times of Jesus in Mark, just chapter one, sometime this week. And then would you do this: would you look and compare the different writing styles, understanding that these are very different things? And hey, if you haven’t already signed up for my morning devotional, the Daily Renew, would you write “Renew” and give me your email address? I’d love to help you get into God’s word and understand it even better. And if you’ve already signed up and you’re not opening it, I know—I can get the data from that. Please open it. Don’t just sign up for it; make it a habit. See, God’s word is powerful and eternal—it’ll change your life. And so this summer, let’s read a little deeper, let’s read a little better, let’s read a little more. Very good. Let me pray with you and for you.