Must it Make Sense to Me?

I was recently in a conversation with someone on a particular doctrinal topic in which we disagreed.  It wasn’t heated, but we ended it with neither of us having been persuaded by the other.  The reason we could not come to an agreement is germane to my previous posts on our understanding of the Bible, the high view of Scripture vs. the low view.  You see both of us were in agreement that what the Bible said on the topic we were discussing was difficult to understand.  Let’s face it there are a lot of things in the Bible that sound strange even absurd to us.  The same is true in science.  But our lack of understanding doesn’t mean those things are not true. 

Take Malachi 3:6 “For I am the LORD, I do not change; therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob.”  What does it mean that God doesn’t change?  He is immutable, He does not change in His fundamental nature and attributes.  Omniscient is how we define His immutability in terms of knowledge and wisdom.  He knows everything there is to know about what has been, what is, what will be and what would have been under different circumstances.  That is something we who are trapped in time and space where everything follows a path of progress either in decline or growth struggle to understand.  

But the Bible insists it is still true.  Hebrews 13:8 “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.”  Our ability to fully grasp God’s immutability does not make it less true.  And redefining a Biblical doctrine so we can make sense could be seen as a form of idolatry, because makes Him into someone other than who He is. 

Consider the incident in Numbers 21 where God established looking at a bronze replica of a snake as the cure for being bitten by a poisonous serpent.  Would you have found that difficult to believe?  There is no medical evidence to support such a claim.  It certainly would not work today. So, does that mean it never happened?  How about Jesus Christ walking on water or feeding 5,000 men and their families with 5 loaves of barley bread and 2 small salted fish?  Did those events never happen either?  I’ve read commentaries that made it clear the author’s thought so.  
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Hebrews 11:1-2 “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good testimony.” That’s not the definition of faith; it is an explanation of its function.  No human witnessed the creation but we believe, have faith, that God did create the universe and all that is in it.  We do not need to understand the physics by which He did it in order to believe He is the Creator.  In terms our personal belief structures (theology) the task is to correctly organize what the Bible says and stick with that.  If I might adapt a phrasing I got from Imad Shehadeh, President of the Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary, Biblical truth is not a problem we have to explain so much as a wonder to explore.