Thoughts on Hebrews 5

Today’s reading: Numbers 11; Hebrews 5-6

The last paragraph of Hebrews 5 is a pretty good summary for why I put together this reading plan and why I am doing this daily blog along with it:

About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.

I love the Word. If it wasn’t obvious, even just from this blog, I am fascinated by the Bible, and I can very easily geek out about the Bible and spend a lot of time reading it, and spend a lot of time reading, thinking, and listening to podcasts about it. But one thing you might not know about me is that this was not a natural thing for me. I know some people who I would say God has gifted in the Word, and from the day they come to know the Lord they are drawn to the Bible and want to learn it and grow in it, but that was definitely not me. For a long time I was very inconsistent at spending time reading the Bible, and the thought of devoting time to it just felt burdensome.

I was happy to sit in teachings at church or at bible studies and learn about the Bible, but I was very much the child that the author of Hebrews is talking about here at the end of chapter 5 that needs milk and not solid food.

At some point along the way though I felt the conviction that, if this is the revealed Word of God, then I should probably be making an effort to learn it better, so I found a bible-in-a-year reading plan and forced myself to read the four chapters a day that the plan required. I had to make a rule for myself that I wouldn’t let myself go to sleep at night unless I had done the reading for the day in order to actually keep “consistent” with it, and it wasn’t for a couple months that it started to become more of a habit and less of an after thought.

At the time I also heard people saying things like, “Reading the Bible isn’t studying it. Reading it is good, but you really need to start studying it if you want to learn it.” So I tried adding in “studying” the Bible too, looking for different bible study methods, ways to break down a passage, etc., but I honestly don’t think I got all that much out of it.

A few years into reading the Bible consistently following various reading plans, and failing, during that time, to figure out how to “study” the Bible right, I started a new plan that had me reading 10 chapters per day from 10 different places in the Bible simultaneously (I know that sounds like a lot, but if you think about how much time you spend watching tv, scrolling through social media, reading the news, etc. most of us could find the time). This was when my view of learning the Bible started to change. This was when I started to make connections between different parts of Scripture, and started recognizing, not just Old Testament quotations in the New Testament, but also themes and ideas that the New Testament authors were pulling into their writings that told me where to focus as I was reading in the Old Testament, and I started getting a deeper understanding of New Testament passages as I saw and understood their Old Testament roots.

Today, I vehemently disagree with the people who say that reading isn’t studying the Bible, or that you need to go deeper than just reading it. I think this mentality is backwards and kills the joy of the Word for so many people.

Think about it this way: What else in your life do you approach the way people approach the Bible? I think of books that people love enough that they read them over and over, and that whole online communities exist around them, like Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter. Why do people love those books? Is it because each morning they opened one of the books to a random page and spent time meditating on a sentence or two? Is it because they read a couple pages, stopped, counted/highlighted important words, considered the semantic range of a given word choice, sentence diagramed it, and maybe googled other people’s thoughts on the page before moving on to the next? Of course not! That is no way to enjoy a story, but this is exactly how so many of us approach the Bible.

I've become convinced we need to read the Bible less like a reference book and more like fiction. I don’t say read it like fiction in that it is made up, but I mean read it like fiction in that you let yourself get drawn into and caught up in the story.

Here’s the thing. In a book series, there are potentially plot holes, or things that seem out of place, or plot lines that don’t get resolved, etc., but you don’t know that on your first read through. You don’t know where the story is going or what seeming plot holes might get resolved in an unexpected way, or what was out of place specifically to draw your attention to it. But when you love the story enough to go back and read it again, each time through you notice more and more details. Not because you are studying it or reading it specifically to pick up more details, but because you know the broad strokes and so your brain starts focusing on smaller and smaller pieces, and how they fit into the larger whole. And then it is at that point that, if you don’t understand something in Lord of the Rings, you might pick up the Silmarillion and start reading the history of Middle Earth to look for an answer. Or if you think something is a plot hole in Harry Potter you go down YouTube rabbit holes of internet theory videos looking for an answer.

I’m not saying that studying a specific passage of the Bible is useless or a waste of time, but I am saying that I think a lot of Christians have it backwards. Rather than learning and enjoying the story of the Bible, and developing an understanding, simply by enjoying the story, of the inter-connectedness of Scripture, and then turning to deeper study when we run into something weird or confusing, we start from the deeper study even though we have no idea if there is even anything in a given passage that warrants us diving deeper into it.

My hope with this blog is not to help people learn to study the Word, but to help people learn to love the Word. As you read along with the reading plan, I want to help connect dots between different parts of Scripture and give you things to think about to help dive a little deeper into the story and maybe start to see it more as a story you can dive into and enjoy yourself. I have been enjoying the story of the Scriptures for years, and if I can use this blog to help be a bit of a short-cut to you making some of those same connections and developing that same kind of joy in the Word, that is what is going to ultimately take us to the place of maturity the author of Hebrews is talking about in Hebrews 5.

Learning the right bible study method(s), owning the right commentaries, learning basic Greek and Hebrew, etc. are not what the author of Hebrews is talking about here in Hebrews 5. His audience didn't have commentaries or extra resources. They didn't even have personal copies of Old Testament books, let alone the entire Old Testament, and what they did have was most likely the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament books), not even the Hebrew Scriptures. We get so caught up in "studying," thinking that that will lead us away from milk and into the meat that the author talks about, when the reality is that none of that was available to his audience, so that can't be what he is talking about. He is calling them to dive into the story of the Word, to seek to understand it, to think about and talk to one another about who God is, what He is doing, what that means, and what it should look like to live it out as followers of Jesus, and I think this is exactly what we need today too.

So my advice, if you really want to learn the Word deeply, is to put down the highlighters, put the study bible back on the shelf, and just let yourself get lost in the text. I personally love my ESV Reader's Bible that has no verse numbers, text headings, footnotes, etc, and just lets me read the Bible as though it was just a book (that's why my blog posts almost never have verse numbers when I reference a verse, because I don't have them in front of me when I'm writing these posts). Or if you read in a bible app or online, you can change the view settings to turn all those things off too, and see if it changes how you read the text.

It's time we worry less about learning to study the Bible and more about learning to love it, and letting that love be what draws us deeper into God's Word, and through the Word, deeper in our relationships with Him.