How to Understand Bible Paradoxes and the Apparent Contradictions in the Bible
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Classic Examples of Polarities in the Bible
Before I go any further, to ensure that you understand what I am talking about as we begin, let me give you the classic illustration of what I mean when I talk about polarities in the Bible. I will use an illustration that I believe you have had cause to consider many times before.
Think of the biblical teaching of causation as a line. At one end of that line is the absolute sovereignty of the Almighty God.
We all know that the Bible teaches us in no uncertain terms that everything that happens in the world, from the smallest thing to the greatest thing is the will of God. God does what pleases Him in heaven and on earth. All things occur according to the counsel of His will. Even the most seemingly insignificant detail of life, for example, the number of hairs you have on your head at any particular moment, are all fixed in the plan and purpose of God. Whether we are talking about our national politics or the salvation of a soul; whether we are speaking of great sorrow, or great happiness: we are told in the Bible to say that, "The Lord has done this. It is His will".
Standing on the rock of this divine sovereignty, we have learned to give glory to God in every situation, for everything and supremely for the salvation of our lives. "Soli Deo Gloria" - to God alone be the glory because He alone has done it. He has accomplished it. To see God the absolute ruler of heaven and earth is to see Him in the glory of his divine majesty.
But at the other end of that same line, we are repeatedly told in the Bible and with great emphasis, that man does what pleases him and is the cause of so much that happens in life.
As to the number of hairs on the head, a man might choose to shave them all off. As to politics, he may choose to vote in another leader or partake of a revolution. We see this happening not only everywhere in the Bible, but we see it also happening everywhere in the world, and it is also happening everywhere in our lives as well.
The Bible doesn't hesitate to tell us in every conceivable way that what a human being chooses to do, matters! If he does one thing, the result will be this. If he does another thing, the result will be that. Human thoughts and actions are real causes of things that happen in the world. Man is responsible for his life, he is accountable for what he does!
In several places in the Bible, we find God dealing with human beings according to what they have done. Consider, for example, this phrase "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved and your house". There is a condition here that has to be met. And a man or woman must meet it. We know that! But it is more than that!
Again and again, we are startled when we read the Bible by the emphatic way in which it speaks of the contingency or the conditionality of life, the "if ... then" that is written over of our lives as human beings.
I don't think anyone of us who has read the apostle Paul, is quite prepared to hear him say what he says in 1 Corinthians 9:27. Keeping in mind that Paul is the author of Romans 8 and considering that he is the champion of sovereign grace and a staunch believer in indefectibility of the grace of God and the assurance of salvation; it is hard to imagine that this Paul would say in 1 Corinthians 9:27 that "I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself might not be disqualified for the prize."
Paul is taking nothing for granted. He doesn't think that because grace and God's sovereignty is the explanation for his salvation, therefore what he does and how he follows the Lord doesn't really make that much difference. He doesn't believe that election cancels out responsibility and accountability. He doesn't even take the grace of God for granted. Remember he says to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 6:1 that, "Do not receive the grace of God in vain". We would come back and say, how can you possibly receive the sovereign grace of God in vain? And yet the Apostle Paul says, "Don't receive the grace of God in vain." He takes his salvation seriously and the responsibility he has for it seriously. It matters what he does, it matters how he lives!
If the author of Romans 9 could then write 1 Corinthians 9:27, we obviously are required to believe that human accountability and human responsibility is as real as the sovereignty of God. And we are not allowed to diminish the one because of the other. We should not allow the other to be made weak or small because to the greatness of this sovereignty of God at the other end of the continuum.
No honest reader of the Bible can deny that holy scripture places a tremendous weight on what a Man or Woman chooses to do, his or her faith, hhis or her obedience, his or her holiness.
We are of course familiar with that particular polarity, that particular tension, trying to hold on the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man at the same time. We are used to our theologians teaching us about that.
Good men have sometimes tried to reconcile and to synthesize those competing emphasises so that there is just one thing in the middle that sovereignty and responsibility hold together. But the result 100% if the time has been that one or the other of those poles is diminished. One or the other is weakened.
I don't know if you have heard of John Duncan, the famous Scottish Presbyterian of the 19th century. He was a man with an extra-ordinary perceptive theological mind! This is what he said, "That God works half, and man the other half is false! That God works all and man does all is true.".
Or listen to this from the great English baptist preacher, Charles Spurgeon, "I believe in predestination. Yea even in its very jots and thistles. I believe that the path of a single grain of dust in the March wind is ordained and settled by a decree that cannot be violated. That every word and thought of man; every flittering of the sparrows wings; every flight of a fly; that everything, in fact, is foreknown and foreordained; but I equally believe in the free agency of man: that man acts as wills especially in the moral operations choosing evil with a will that is unbiased by anything that comes from God but biased only by his depravity of heart and the perverseness of his habits, choosing the right to (with perfect freedom though secretly guided and led by the Holy Spirit); I believe man is as accountable as if there was no predestination whatsoever. Where those two truths meet, I do not know; nor do I want to know. They do not puzzle me because I have given up my mind to believe them both."
Such is the teaching of the Bible. An absolute sovereignty, and an absolute human responsibility. We are familiar with that. We have talked about that. I am sure that most of you have argued about that with one another at one time or another. But we are left where the Bible leaves us. Having to confess both, though we cannot reconcile the two. We cannot explain how both are true at one and the same time.
But what I want to observe and then think about as you read your own Bible day after day is that this polarity of truth fashion is the way the Bible teaches virtually everything it teaches us.
Whatever the subject in holy scripture is taught this way. The juxtaposition of opposites, the setting out of truth related to one another but difficult to reconcile with one another. And you haven't absorbed the Bible's teaching, not really completely, until you feel the tension between those two poles at the end of that particular teaching; wanting to fly apart, and you, having to hold them together.
That's how the great Charles Simeon, Pastor for 50 years of Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge, England and a great leader of the missionary movement of the 19th century thought about this truth. He wrote saying, "I love the simplicity of the scriptures and I wish to receive and inculcated every truth nicely and precisely in the way and to the extent that it set forth in the inspired volume. I have a great jealousy on this head [what he mean here is that 'I take this point very seriously'] never to speak more or less than I believe is the mind of the Spirit in the passage I am expounding. I would run after nothing and I would shun nothing. The truth is not in the middle. It's not in one extreme, it's in both extremes."
Charles Simeon was specifically talking here about God's sovereignty and human responsibility, but he could also rightly have spoken as well in the same manner about any subject the Bible teaches: "The truth is not in the middle, its not in one extreme, it is in both extremes." In regard to this truth, Simeon continues on to say that, "The consequences of that is that when I am reading the Bible, and preaching the Bible, if I have before me a text that lays on me the responsibility of faith and obedience, I am not to bring from someplace the sovereignty of God. I am to deal with that that lies before me in the text I am preaching.
We are certainly familiar with the Bible's doctrine of the triunity of God: one living and true God existing in three persons. Every effort that has been made to resolve the tension on that line, that continuum of the personal nature of God; every effort that has been geared towards this end has resulted in either less of the three. God is one and He is three. You don't understand that, and I don't either. Nobody understands that truth and no one can understand it! It is the fact of the divine life but we can grasp it only by confessing both facts as equally true. We cannot bring them together and explain how the one and three can be understood at one and the same time.
Think of this: the Father, is not third of God. The Son is not a third of God. And the Spirit is not a third of God. If either of the persons were a third of God, He would not then be God. The Father is God. The Son is God. The Spirit is God. There is but one God, however. How do we understand that? The answer is that we don't understand that. We have simply to confess both things to be true.
Or take another classic illustration: the unity of the two natures of our Lord Jesus Christ in His single person. In my experience, I think few Christians really get this. I don't think I get it way too much of the time. We seek to avoid the tension created by this impossible to understand the description of this one single self-consciousness in which there are two divine natures that remain exactly what they are and perfectly what the are and are never mixed together. Because of course, if you mix a divine nature with human nature, it will no longer be divine; and if you mix a human nature with a divine nature, it will no longer be human.
The ordinary evangelical in my experience, thinks of Jesus as a superman; not as a true and authentic man, not as a man like you or like me, a man with all our limitations, all of our weaknesses. But the Bible says that Jesus was just such a man: with all of the limitations and all of the weaknesses of humanity apart from sin. And at the same time, He was dwelling in unapproachable light (as the bible puts it), as the living God. How do we reconcile these two things? We don't. We simply confess them both to be true.
These are typical illustrations to show that the Bible presents its truth in terms of polarities or as "extremes" as Charles Simeon put it; and these polarities are left unresolved, unsynthesized and unmixed.
See if you can find me a text anywhere in the 66 books of the Bible that even gives a reflection on how God is one and three at the same time. Not one.
Find me a text in the Bible that even reflects on how God is sovereign and man is responsible at one and the same time.
Give me a text, any text, from anywhere in the Bible that explains how Christ's deity existed in a single person, a single self-consciousness in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is not even one.
On one hand, we are told that Christ is God. On the other hand, we are told that Christ is also an authentic genuine human being. That is all we are told. And we are left struggling to understand how this could possibly be so!
It is this fact about the Bible's way of teaching that explains so much about what you see in the church. Why are there Arminians, why are there hyper-Calvinists and why are there Pentecostals and all the rest? It is because all of us have a tendency to gravitate to one pole and to minimize or neglect or ignore, the other.
We tend to prefer one part of the Bible's teaching and to neglect the other on the same line or continuum of truth, the part that is easier for us to grasp, the part we like better. And so what we find everywhere we look and what we often find in ourselves is perhaps best described as "one-sidedness". We are one-sided Christians. We like this doctrine well, but we don't like this one so well. We emphasize this, but we tend to ignore that.
And I think the differences go deeper still. Why are there differences such as American Christians and Ugandan Christians? We are reading the same Bible. We are .. and yet in some respects, we look at things in quite different ways. Why is that? I venture to say that many of these differences stem from a failure on all sides to grab everything the Bible says and hold fast to it. We take the part of the Bible that we have been taught most carefully, or we like that best because we find easiest to understand or to believe and we tend to neglect the other parts of the Bible that fail to fit in our logical understanding of things.
Page 1 ⇦ Previous
Classic Examples of Polarities in the Bible
Before I go any further, to ensure that you understand what I am talking about as we begin, let me give you the classic illustration of what I mean when I talk about polarities in the Bible. I will use an illustration that I believe you have had cause to consider many times before.
Think of the biblical teaching of causation as a line. At one end of that line is the absolute sovereignty of the Almighty God.
We all know that the Bible teaches us in no uncertain terms that everything that happens in the world, from the smallest thing to the greatest thing is the will of God. God does what pleases Him in heaven and on earth. All things occur according to the counsel of His will. Even the most seemingly insignificant detail of life, for example, the number of hairs you have on your head at any particular moment, are all fixed in the plan and purpose of God. Whether we are talking about our national politics or the salvation of a soul; whether we are speaking of great sorrow, or great happiness: we are told in the Bible to say that, "The Lord has done this. It is His will".
Standing on the rock of this divine sovereignty, we have learned to give glory to God in every situation, for everything and supremely for the salvation of our lives. "Soli Deo Gloria" - to God alone be the glory because He alone has done it. He has accomplished it. To see God the absolute ruler of heaven and earth is to see Him in the glory of his divine majesty.
But at the other end of that same line, we are repeatedly told in the Bible and with great emphasis, that man does what pleases him and is the cause of so much that happens in life.
As to the number of hairs on the head, a man might choose to shave them all off. As to politics, he may choose to vote in another leader or partake of a revolution. We see this happening not only everywhere in the Bible, but we see it also happening everywhere in the world, and it is also happening everywhere in our lives as well.
The Bible doesn't hesitate to tell us in every conceivable way that what a human being chooses to do, matters! If he does one thing, the result will be this. If he does another thing, the result will be that. Human thoughts and actions are real causes of things that happen in the world. Man is responsible for his life, he is accountable for what he does!
In several places in the Bible, we find God dealing with human beings according to what they have done. Consider, for example, this phrase "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved and your house". There is a condition here that has to be met. And a man or woman must meet it. We know that! But it is more than that!
Again and again, we are startled when we read the Bible by the emphatic way in which it speaks of the contingency or the conditionality of life, the "if ... then" that is written over of our lives as human beings.
I don't think anyone of us who has read the apostle Paul, is quite prepared to hear him say what he says in 1 Corinthians 9:27. Keeping in mind that Paul is the author of Romans 8 and considering that he is the champion of sovereign grace and a staunch believer in indefectibility of the grace of God and the assurance of salvation; it is hard to imagine that this Paul would say in 1 Corinthians 9:27 that "I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself might not be disqualified for the prize."
Paul is taking nothing for granted. He doesn't think that because grace and God's sovereignty is the explanation for his salvation, therefore what he does and how he follows the Lord doesn't really make that much difference. He doesn't believe that election cancels out responsibility and accountability. He doesn't even take the grace of God for granted. Remember he says to the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 6:1 that, "Do not receive the grace of God in vain". We would come back and say, how can you possibly receive the sovereign grace of God in vain? And yet the Apostle Paul says, "Don't receive the grace of God in vain." He takes his salvation seriously and the responsibility he has for it seriously. It matters what he does, it matters how he lives!
If the author of Romans 9 could then write 1 Corinthians 9:27, we obviously are required to believe that human accountability and human responsibility is as real as the sovereignty of God. And we are not allowed to diminish the one because of the other. We should not allow the other to be made weak or small because to the greatness of this sovereignty of God at the other end of the continuum.
No honest reader of the Bible can deny that holy scripture places a tremendous weight on what a Man or Woman chooses to do, his or her faith, hhis or her obedience, his or her holiness.
We are of course familiar with that particular polarity, that particular tension, trying to hold on the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man at the same time. We are used to our theologians teaching us about that.
Good men have sometimes tried to reconcile and to synthesize those competing emphasises so that there is just one thing in the middle that sovereignty and responsibility hold together. But the result 100% if the time has been that one or the other of those poles is diminished. One or the other is weakened.
I don't know if you have heard of John Duncan, the famous Scottish Presbyterian of the 19th century. He was a man with an extra-ordinary perceptive theological mind! This is what he said, "That God works half, and man the other half is false! That God works all and man does all is true.".
Or listen to this from the great English baptist preacher, Charles Spurgeon, "I believe in predestination. Yea even in its very jots and thistles. I believe that the path of a single grain of dust in the March wind is ordained and settled by a decree that cannot be violated. That every word and thought of man; every flittering of the sparrows wings; every flight of a fly; that everything, in fact, is foreknown and foreordained; but I equally believe in the free agency of man: that man acts as wills especially in the moral operations choosing evil with a will that is unbiased by anything that comes from God but biased only by his depravity of heart and the perverseness of his habits, choosing the right to (with perfect freedom though secretly guided and led by the Holy Spirit); I believe man is as accountable as if there was no predestination whatsoever. Where those two truths meet, I do not know; nor do I want to know. They do not puzzle me because I have given up my mind to believe them both."
Such is the teaching of the Bible. An absolute sovereignty, and an absolute human responsibility. We are familiar with that. We have talked about that. I am sure that most of you have argued about that with one another at one time or another. But we are left where the Bible leaves us. Having to confess both, though we cannot reconcile the two. We cannot explain how both are true at one and the same time.
But what I want to observe and then think about as you read your own Bible day after day is that this polarity of truth fashion is the way the Bible teaches virtually everything it teaches us.
Whatever the subject in holy scripture is taught this way. The juxtaposition of opposites, the setting out of truth related to one another but difficult to reconcile with one another. And you haven't absorbed the Bible's teaching, not really completely, until you feel the tension between those two poles at the end of that particular teaching; wanting to fly apart, and you, having to hold them together.
That's how the great Charles Simeon, Pastor for 50 years of Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge, England and a great leader of the missionary movement of the 19th century thought about this truth. He wrote saying, "I love the simplicity of the scriptures and I wish to receive and inculcated every truth nicely and precisely in the way and to the extent that it set forth in the inspired volume. I have a great jealousy on this head [what he mean here is that 'I take this point very seriously'] never to speak more or less than I believe is the mind of the Spirit in the passage I am expounding. I would run after nothing and I would shun nothing. The truth is not in the middle. It's not in one extreme, it's in both extremes."
Charles Simeon was specifically talking here about God's sovereignty and human responsibility, but he could also rightly have spoken as well in the same manner about any subject the Bible teaches: "The truth is not in the middle, its not in one extreme, it is in both extremes." In regard to this truth, Simeon continues on to say that, "The consequences of that is that when I am reading the Bible, and preaching the Bible, if I have before me a text that lays on me the responsibility of faith and obedience, I am not to bring from someplace the sovereignty of God. I am to deal with that that lies before me in the text I am preaching.
We are certainly familiar with the Bible's doctrine of the triunity of God: one living and true God existing in three persons. Every effort that has been made to resolve the tension on that line, that continuum of the personal nature of God; every effort that has been geared towards this end has resulted in either less of the three. God is one and He is three. You don't understand that, and I don't either. Nobody understands that truth and no one can understand it! It is the fact of the divine life but we can grasp it only by confessing both facts as equally true. We cannot bring them together and explain how the one and three can be understood at one and the same time.
Think of this: the Father, is not third of God. The Son is not a third of God. And the Spirit is not a third of God. If either of the persons were a third of God, He would not then be God. The Father is God. The Son is God. The Spirit is God. There is but one God, however. How do we understand that? The answer is that we don't understand that. We have simply to confess both things to be true.
Or take another classic illustration: the unity of the two natures of our Lord Jesus Christ in His single person. In my experience, I think few Christians really get this. I don't think I get it way too much of the time. We seek to avoid the tension created by this impossible to understand the description of this one single self-consciousness in which there are two divine natures that remain exactly what they are and perfectly what the are and are never mixed together. Because of course, if you mix a divine nature with human nature, it will no longer be divine; and if you mix a human nature with a divine nature, it will no longer be human.
The ordinary evangelical in my experience, thinks of Jesus as a superman; not as a true and authentic man, not as a man like you or like me, a man with all our limitations, all of our weaknesses. But the Bible says that Jesus was just such a man: with all of the limitations and all of the weaknesses of humanity apart from sin. And at the same time, He was dwelling in unapproachable light (as the bible puts it), as the living God. How do we reconcile these two things? We don't. We simply confess them both to be true.
These are typical illustrations to show that the Bible presents its truth in terms of polarities or as "extremes" as Charles Simeon put it; and these polarities are left unresolved, unsynthesized and unmixed.
See if you can find me a text anywhere in the 66 books of the Bible that even gives a reflection on how God is one and three at the same time. Not one.
Find me a text in the Bible that even reflects on how God is sovereign and man is responsible at one and the same time.
Give me a text, any text, from anywhere in the Bible that explains how Christ's deity existed in a single person, a single self-consciousness in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is not even one.
On one hand, we are told that Christ is God. On the other hand, we are told that Christ is also an authentic genuine human being. That is all we are told. And we are left struggling to understand how this could possibly be so!
It is this fact about the Bible's way of teaching that explains so much about what you see in the church. Why are there Arminians, why are there hyper-Calvinists and why are there Pentecostals and all the rest? It is because all of us have a tendency to gravitate to one pole and to minimize or neglect or ignore, the other.
We tend to prefer one part of the Bible's teaching and to neglect the other on the same line or continuum of truth, the part that is easier for us to grasp, the part we like better. And so what we find everywhere we look and what we often find in ourselves is perhaps best described as "one-sidedness". We are one-sided Christians. We like this doctrine well, but we don't like this one so well. We emphasize this, but we tend to ignore that.
And I think the differences go deeper still. Why are there differences such as American Christians and Ugandan Christians? We are reading the same Bible. We are .. and yet in some respects, we look at things in quite different ways. Why is that? I venture to say that many of these differences stem from a failure on all sides to grab everything the Bible says and hold fast to it. We take the part of the Bible that we have been taught most carefully, or we like that best because we find easiest to understand or to believe and we tend to neglect the other parts of the Bible that fail to fit in our logical understanding of things.
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