Blogocentric Formulations

Something I Learned Recently

"Take up Your Cross"  | Prompt ▼

Write about something you learned recently and how you can apply it to your life.

At my weekly Bible study (which is reading through the entire Bible in a year), we finally reached the New Testament and just finished the Book of Matthew. The conversation this morning brought up a couple of things I hadn't considered before, the most interesting among them - at least for me - being a conversation about the questions Jesus was asked and answered. By many accounts, the other characters in the Bible asked Jesus 183 questions. Jesus only definitively answered three of them, and asked 307 questions of others, often by answering their question with a question or two. I hadn't really thought about that before.

One of the things I've always struggled with as a Christian is my fellow Christians who treat the Bible as prescriptive

in linguistics, "prescriptive" is defined as attempting to impose rules of correct usage on others

rather than descriptive

describing accents, forms, structures, and usage without making value judgements

. So many Christians look to specific passages of the Bible to tell them how to act, or to make an argument in support of what they already believe. But looking at the stories of Jesus as told in the Bible, it's remarkable how often he didn't have an explicit and direct answer for someone's question.

What that's taught me is that the Bible isn't a how-to instruction book as much as it is a book that's meant to be studied, learned from, and applied to our own lives and contexts. In terms of my own life, it means that I need to spend less time reading the Bible looking for answers and more time reading the Bible to figure out what the right questions to ask are.