The Bible: Real People With Real Stories.

Disclaimer: I am by no right a theologian or Bible scholar. This is all based on my own opinions and personal experiences.

Many of us have heard phrases like “The Bible requires great enlightenment and can only be understood by a few”. These statements I’d like to believe are very true. The Bible is not an easy book to read/understand and without proper revelation it can confuse the reader. It is a book to be studied and not just read. However I do believe that overemphasizing these statements leads to people over complicating it too. The Bible is a book that contains real people. People like me and you. Looking at the Bible as a hard book only meant to be understood by a chosen or select group of people definitely blinds us. It also changes the way we read it. We end up seeing people in the Bible as abstract beings who are far from human or maybe even subconsciously think of them as fictional.

We came up with(or somebody did and it was later adopted) the term Bible “Characters”. The word “character” is usually associated with fiction or things that are made up. These are some of the small subtle things that subconsciously change our views or affect the way we think about things. Something that needs to be unlearned. In my opinion I’m totally against using the phrase “Bible Characters”. These were people just like us. These were people who lived and breathed and encountered similar world problems like the ones we face today. Understanding that opens you up to a whole new outlook and way of thinking. In no way will you believe that God will do great things in your life if you refer to the people that God did great things for as fictional. That level of detachment ruins our spiritual growth and hinders us from properly relating to the Bible and our Father.

People’s ideas of Jesus may be shaky simply because of the fact that they fail to understand. We need to believe and understand that Jesus lived among people just like us. From that we will then grow spiritually and grow our relationship with Him because there’s now a sense of familiarity.

I hope that by the grace of God we get to a level where we relate to the Bible as containing real events with real people. That way we can all the more stand in awe of God’s goodness, divine nature and love.