Why Does the Bible Seem Unclear? The Clarity of Scripture Part 3

Ironically, the main reason why we talk about the clarity of Scripture is that it often seems so unclear.

Even though Scripture says that it’s intelligible in part and whole, and even though we know theologically that God’s goodness grounds the clarity of his communication, we still bang our heads against the unforgiving concrete of hard texts. Zophar’s diatribes, Moses’ “bridegroom of blood,” and John’s Apocalypse can feel unsurmountable. John Calvin didn’t preach Revelation, and likewise, Martyn Lloyd-Jones never finished Romans. And the apostle Peter himself says, “There are some things in [Paul’s letters] that are hard to understand…” (2 Pet 3:16).

If the Bible is so clear, then why is it so unclear?

One way to begin answering this question is to make a distinction between the intrinsic clarity of Scripture and the extrinsic clarity of Scripture. God has spoken clearly, but that doesn’t mean that we will always listen clearly. We can intentionally and unintentionally misinterpret Scripture, or cultural and historical factors outside our control can make interpretation difficult. None of those communicative barriers prevent God from inspiring a clear biblical text, but they do make the text seem unclear to us. Scripture is intrinsically clear but can be extrinsically unclear.

A few illustrations may help. If I tell my kids to “clean up your toys,” and they choose to interpret that as “don’t clean up your toys,” the obscurity does not lie in the speech but willfully in the hearer. Or, if you send a clearly worded email to a client who earnestly tries but fails to understand it, then the fault could unintentionally be on the hearer’s end as well. Or, an English speaker may turn on the radio and hear a song being sung clearly and beautifully in Spanish; he hears the clear words, but because of his cultural distance doesn’t know what they mean. While there may be intrinsic clarity all the way through, there can simultaneously exist extrinsic difficulty in interpreting those clear words.

While such categories about obscurity may be philosophically useful, we need to find out if they are biblically grounded. If it’s true that God’s clear Word can be mangled by our misinterpretation willingly and unwillingly, do we see that borne out in Scripture? And if so, where did obscurity in communication begin?

To see the genesis of our unclear interpretations, we need to head back to the garden.

Did God Actually Say?

Moses writes, “Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?’” (Gen 3:1).

According to Scripture, this serpentine deceiver is the source of our obscurity. And he delivers his poisonous confusion in two attempts aimed at Eve, Adam’s wife.

The serpent (identified as Satan in Revelation 20:2) begins his attack with a plain falsification of God’s command to Adam. No, God did not say they couldn’t eat from any tree. He said almost exactly the opposite (Gen 2:15-17)! Satan is hoping, it seems, to suggest that God is hardnosed and miserly, unwilling to share his good creation with his image-bearers. But, in fact, God is immensely generous, liberal, and kind-hearted with his newly-minted world, and Eve remembers that, albeit with some modifications of her own (3:2-3).

Satan’s first attack is bound up in the word “really,” which translates two little letters in Hebrew. Implied by that word is something like, “Would God really do such a thing to you? How horrible! I’m shocked! Why would he be so tight-fisted with such a wonderful servant as yourself? I almost can’t believe that he would be so stingy. Did he really say that? How un-Godlike of him.” Though this first jab doesn’t seem to work on Eve entirely, it sets Satan up for the fatal thrust that comes in his second attempt.

Can Envy Dwell in Heavenly Breasts?

Satan’s killing blow sounds like this: “But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’” (3:4-5). Two arguments are bound up in this statement, and both of them confirm that the extrinsic obscurity of Scripture arises from our own hearts.

First, notice that in the midst of his half-truth lies, Satan assumes that Adam and Eve are not enough like God. His argument for why they should eat from the tree is: If you eat, then “you will be like God.” That assumes that they are not now like God in the way they ought to be. They are made in his image, of course, but Satan wants them to forget all that. He wants them to gaze at the omniscience they don’t possess and to covet it as the tempter himself does. They are finite, limited creatures. They don’t know everything. They might be wrong. If they want the wisdom and certainty they seek, then they need to become just like God – they need his omniscience.

Park there for a second. How simply satanic is the postmodern, deconstructionist worldview? It says, “If you can’t have absolute philosophical certainty (i.e., omniscience), then you can’t know anything. That kind of logic, as Spurgeon probably said, is hogwash. God never intended for us to know everything, but in his goodness, he did intend to communicate adequately with us about some things. Like, that there was one tree that Adam and Eve were barred from harvesting, and that death would follow from disobedience to that command. They didn’t need to be omniscient to know what God said, they just needed to be submissive. The relativism and “truthiness” of our day is as old as the Fall itself.

Second, notice Satan’s argument for why they cannot trust God’s command to them: “For God knows…” Oh, the deadly venom dripping from those words! What is Satan saying? With cunning, he implies, “God is scared. He’s hiding something from you because he doesn’t want the competition. He’s jealous of what you can become. Up there, all high and mighty on his throne – he is just looking out for himself, protecting his interests. He doesn’t want you to have all the good things he does. God isnot good, so you cannot trust what he says.”

Here’s how John Milton imagined Satan’s sinister logic in his poem, Paradise Lost:

“The offense, that man should attain to know?

What can your knowledge hurt him, or is this tree

Impart against his will, if all be his?

Or is it envy? And can envy dwell in heavenly breasts?”

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX

If God is not good, then his Word can’t be trusted.

When Satan convinces Eve to take her eyes off of the goodness of God and onto the tree, he manages to convince her that God is in fact not as good as she once thought. “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.” (3:6). Before this moment, God had been the only one declaring what was good. Now, Eve takes it upon herself to decide that this forbidden tree is good for food. When the tree looked good, God did not.

No Right to Accuse the Sun

In falling for Satan’s deception, Adam and Eve introduced obscurity to their relationship with God. If God isn’t good, then who knows what his words really mean? The elevation of creature over Creator makes us unable to hear God as clearly as he speaks. In other words, our idolatry births obscurity.

As mankind is expelled from paradise to the desert east of Eden, their distance from God grows and his Word begins to seem more and more unclear. Sin is the first reason why we failed to understand our Maker, and it only multiplies the obscurity of our finitude and cultural distance. Babel further compounds our problem with a new barrier to clear understanding, and the inevitable march of history puts us further and further from the truth.

What I’m saying is that the Bible can seem so unclear to us because we have rejected the ground of clarity in the goodness of God. Of course, that struggle is even more painful because of our own natural finitude and the cultural distance between us and the authors, but the start of it all was a human refusal to cling to the goodness of God. We have a \*moral\* problem obscuring the clear light of Scripture. We need to see God’s glorious goodness in the pages of his book to rightly understand it, but our hearts have been blinded by our love of idols. So Calvin writes,

“Let blind and weak-sighted men therefore accuse themselves, when they cannot endure this brightness of the word; but, whatever may be the darkness by which they shall endeavour to clothe it, let us adhere firmly and steadfastly to this heavenly light… for blind or weak-sighted men have no right to accuse the sun, because they cannot look at him.”

John Calvin, \*Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Isaiah\*, vol. 3, 420-21.

How, then, will God unblind our eyes to clearly read his Word? For that answer, we will look to a prophet on the plains of Moab in our next post.