What do you do when you get stuck on a difficult Bible passage?
God wants to be known and he wants his word to be understood, so it makes sense that most of the Bible is pretty accessible even for a first-time reader. There are layers upon layers of depth to even the simplest parts of Scripture, but the basics of most passages are pretty straightforward.
That said, there are a few parts of the Bible that are incredibly challenging even for the seasoned student of Scripture. This is certainly a feature, not a bug, because when we run into these hard parts, we’re reminded of the magnitude of God, how much we depend on Him, and how much we have to learn from His Word.
It’s great to pause and reflect on such things, but at some point we have to get down to the challenging business of wrestling through those difficult passages. This article is meant to help with that.
Here, I’m going to share five offbeat questions for getting unstuck when studying the hard parts of the Bible. This list is anything but comprehensive. There are plenty of excellent, well-known techniques for sorting out tough passages (e.g., context, language study, keywords, related verses), but these questions are great for stepping back and taking a fresh angle when you’re really stuck.
Before we get into the questions, we need to pick a hard part of the Bible to try this out on. We’re going with Romans 13:1-8, where the Apostle Paul exhorts his readers to respond rightly to governmental authorities. This passage has been a point of debate and consternation for Christians since the earliest days of the church, and should be tough enough to practice on together. Please take a moment to read the passage before moving forward.
1. What is the author trying to get his audience to think or do?
This is usually going to be the easiest question of the five, and it certainly is in this case. Clearly, Paul is urging Christians (at least Christians in Rome in the first century, but maybe all Christians for all time) to submit themselves to governing authorities and to understand that God establishes all authority. He tells them to do so out of fear of possible punishment and also out of conscience.
In verses 7 and 8, he broadens the question of how Christians relate to government to the larger question of how they treat everyone else in society. He wants Christians to generously give what is owed to others, and most of all, to love one another.
Romans 13 is still a tough passage to fully apply, but because we started by asking what the author is trying to get the audience to think or do, we now have clarity as to why Paul is writing this and what his top priority is. His first concern here is not to issue a treatise on government, but to urge Christians to live rightly. This tells us that if we’re looking to Romans 13 for the complete and final word on the relationship between Christians and the state, we’re going to be disappointed.
2. What pressure is the author responding to that caused him to write this passage?
Nothing in the Bible is just there. Every author wrote for a reason and under certain circumstances. Some because God showed up and literally told them to write down what he was saying, others to impart wisdom, and still others to persuade readers toward belief. The larger context of Romans shows Paul wrote to strengthen the Roman Christians’ understanding of the gospel and challenge them to live that out in their daily lives. Other parts of the Bible reveal that Paul wanted to visit Rome at the time of this letter, but had to go east to visit the Jerusalem church instead. Paul knew great things were happening with the gospel, but he also knew trouble was brewing in the form of persecution, and that Rome was a potential hotbed of such troubles.
Paul and the Roman Christians both knew the Emperor Claudius had recently expelled the Jews from the Eternal City, presumably because of conflict about Jesus (Acts 18:2). Nero had been emperor in Rome for about three years as Paul penned this letter, and he was already behaving dangerously and erratically. Enemies of Christianity had a habit of accusing Christians of being lawbreakers in order to weaponize the Roman government against the early Church.
Paul knows he’s writing a public letter that could easily be handed to Nero himself. With that in mind, Romans 13:1-8 reads as a forthright exhortation to Roman Christians, but also as a discreet signal to Nero and his administration that Christians are law-abiding citizens who pose no threat to the state and who should not be lumped in with the expelled Jews.
3. What can’t it mean, must it mean, and might it mean?
These three inter-related questions are incredibly potent when used together. Sometimes figuring out what can’t be the case and what might be the case can help us nail down what must be the case. Let’s try it out on this passage.
- What it can’t mean: Romans 13 can’t mean that all governments are always right. Every single king of Israel proves that. It can’t mean governments are always just in their judgments, because even in the Bible we see them miss on this (Jesus was innocent, but condemned to die by Rome). It can’t mean Christians are required to go along with government and refrain from criticizing it, because the prophets of old criticized their own governments all the time, as did John the Baptist and Jesus with Herod. We could easily brainstorm another dozen interpretations of Romans 13 that can’t be right, but let’s move on to the next part of question three.
- What it must mean: Beyond the shadow of a doubt, Romans 13 clearly teaches that all authority is from God, and even bad authority figures are somehow a result of God’s will and his grand plan for history. God uses government authorities to carry out justice. Christians should be people who live peaceably in their communities and who are known for integrity and love.
- What it might mean: Romans 13 could be understood as Paul describing ideal government. It could even be understood as Paul “inceptionizing” the idea of governing justly to Nero, on the outside chance the emperor might encounter the letter. Romans 13 might mean that Rome had been fairly just with Christians up to this point, and Paul thought it made sense at this moment in history to express that and urge Christians to take note, be grateful, and continue to live peacefully in the city. It could also be understood as Paul employing timeless truths and kingdom values to justify a shrewd response to the Christian situation in Rome at this time. In short, Romans 13 could represent a flat, universal teaching for all Christians at all times, or it could represent a shrewd application of universal kingdom values in a specific set of circumstances.
Running Romans 13 through this three-part question doesn’t solve everything, and we’re certainly still left with some points of tension, but we’ve weeded out the impossible interpretations, nailed down the certain ones, and are better positioned to consider the more nuanced ones.
4. Why is this passage hard for you, specifically?
As much as I might like to imagine that I am a stoic, emotionless scholar who approaches the Bible with pure, uncompromised reason, the truth is far from that. We bring our flaws, frailties, and fractures with us when we approach the text, and sometimes passages are difficult not because they are academically challenging, but because they challenge how we live and think. That can make us uncomfortable and skew our capacity to think clearly about what’s happening on the page.
In this biblical test case, we’re considering a passage that deals with politics and government. Those are topics most people have strong feelings about, and it’s worth pausing to ask whether our deeply held presuppositions might be obscuring our understanding of this text.
5. What would happen if this passage weren’t in the Bible?
Every bit of the Bible is there for a reason. We believe God superintended the whole thing to accomplish exactly what he wanted to accomplish. Here at the end of our list, it makes sense to ask what would happen if this passage weren’t in the Bible.
What would we lose about our understanding of early Christianity in Rome and the realities they contended with? Without this passage, might Christians have become a hair-trigger people group, quick to take up the sword in rebellion any time they even slightly disagree with the decisions of secular kings?
Few things cause more anxiety than politics and government. How important is Romans 13 in helping Christians to understand what peace that passes understanding looks like?
See These in Action and Give Them a Try
We haven’t solved Romans 13, but we have made progress. If we started out imagining ourselves “stuck” for the sake of this exercise, I think we’re now at least “unstuck” and moving forward again toward a better understanding of the passage.
I recently wrote a book called The Lightning-Fast Field Guide to the Bible. I leaned on these questions and others like them to make sense of some of the hardest books and passages in Scripture, and if you want to see these offbeat questions in action, pick up a copy for yourself. Whether you try out my book or not (and of course I hope you do!), these slightly outside-the-box questions can be a big help when you find yourself stuck on a difficult passage.
The Lightning-Fast Field Guide to the Bible offers a quick and smart breakdown of each book of Scripture to help you discover “must-know” facts — who, what, where, when, and why — along with fresh and surprising takes on questions you didn’t even know to ask.
You want to understand the Bible better, but you don’t need a huge commentary with hard-to-understand words. The Lightning-Fast Field Guide to the Bible fills that gap by using concise, playful, and relatable language to tell you everything you want to know and more about the most influential document in history.
