As last week demonstrated we are a church committed to – what is called – ‘systematic exposition’. This means that throughout the year, in our Sunday gathering or our weekly bible study fellowships, we will hear the bible taught verse by verse, chapter by chapter, and book by book. The aim of systematic exposition is to not only gain a better understanding of God’s Word, but to see how each part should be applied in its right context. When we see scripture as an integrated whole, rather than treat it as a collection of fortune cookies, we will see God revealed in all His glory and majesty. Beholding God’s glory is ultimately the foundation for driving our response to God’s Word.

Now this job of reading through scripture verse by verse, chapter by chapter and book by book has one apparent drawback, and we saw that last Sunday as we encountered the very difficult passage of 1 Timothy 2 and what it had to say about men and women. But that makes systematic exposition worthwhile, because we can encounter those passages in context and our understanding of these hard texts will be aided by understanding of the previous verses! 1 Timothy 2 remains hard, but when understood in context much of its mystery is taken care of.

Still there may be some who continue to struggle with hard texts like this, so let me suggest one thing given to me once at Bible College: treat scripture as a friend. Our relationships are much more robust than we tend to think. So when a friend says something strange or does something we do not expect our first reaction tends not to be to reject our friend and never speak to them again! Instead we ask questions, we seek to know why they did that strange thing, we try to find out – in the context of their life – how such actions and words might make sense.

In the same way we should approach scripture humbly, as a friend, when we find passages difficult to understand or strange to our ears and minds. Scripture invites us to bring our questions humbly and to search its depths. And we may find in the process that our questions are answered in ways which transform us and grow our minds and hearts to love and serve God.