Making Sense of the Bible #5

Bear with me….

Years ago, when I first moved to Texas to preach, one of the members built custom homes for a living. One day he got to telling me about one of the men in the congregation who had built his own house. At the time, he was a young husband/father who wanted to build his own house with his own hands, but he didn’t have the expertise, so he began asking the home builder question, after question, after question. About the time the young man was ready to break ground for constructing his new home the builder was also ready to break ground for a new home.

Once the construction started, my home-builder friend told me that the young man would come out to the job site every day after he got off work to see what had been done that day. The young man would make notes, ask questions and then go back to his own site and do exactly the same thing. When he couldn’t figure out how to do something, he would call the builder at home. The builder would explain how to cut this angle or that angle or to install this or that. A few months after the home builder finished building the new home, the young man finished the new house for his family. When I moved from there, that man and his family were still living in that house he had built with his own hands.

When it comes to understanding how God communicates to us through the Bible He does it just as my home builder friend did for the man who knew nothing about how to build a house. The builder would give him direct instructions on how to do something, or when the young man would go out to the site after work, he saw an example of how and what needed to be done. When he couldn’t figure something out, the homebuilder gave him enough information that he could necessarily deduce how to do a thing.

There are only three ways I ever knew how to teach my children anything. I either told them how to do it or I showed them how or I would give them enough information that they could figure out how to do it. Again, that’s just common sense. Friends, God does not communicate His will to us in the Bible through some hidden, mysterious or esoteric manner. He teaches us in the same way we teach things, namely, through direct statement/command, or approved example or necessary inference. It is no wonder that the Bible tells us that “the common people heard (Jesus) gladly,” (Mark 12:37) for He taught His will to them just as they would teach their children and others about things they knew.