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Why is the Bible So Boring?
Posted By Anonymous on/at 8:17 AM
Written by Jesse Medina
When I think of a perfect Saturday evening, I think of Italian food, a good movie, a backscratch and/or footrub and other things that have to do with myself and my wife which I’m not at liberty to discuss. I’ll give you hint, though: it starts with sex and ends with sex.
What I don’t think of is the Bible. In fact, not only do I not want to read the Bible as my entertainment for a Saturday night, I don’t want to read the Bible at all much of the time.
It would be safe to say that I would rather get a bikini wax than read the Bible on most days.
The reason is simple: the Bible is boring. There are exceptions, to be sure. Cracked.com compiled a list of the 9 Most Badass Bible Verses which highlights a few of the best while offering some hilarious commentary (Warning: the commentary is crude and refers to male genitals often).
But for the most part, the Bible isn’t very entertaining.
And yet, as Christians, we’re supposed to read it, right? After all, if the words therein are inspired by God we should probably spend some time reading what it has to say. But God didn’t exactly make it easy. I mean, its not like The Neverending Story where you enter into the story and get to ride a giant dog-thing through the sky and do epic things.
Instead, it has stories that are so disconnected from our own experience that we wonder how it is that God plans to speak to us through the Bible at all. I just can’t remember the last time I performed an animal sacrifice or was on the verge of stoning an adulteress. Not to mention the fact that it is freaking long…in order to make it the size of a normal book they print it on extremely thin paper and use negative 12 point font. It takes even the most dedicated readers a year to get through it…reading every day! This isn’t your average wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, through-it-in-a-weekend novel.
It's like the perfect storm for boredom. But why? Why did God make it this way?
Despite the fact that I obviously wished it were different, I think the Bible is so boring for a couple of reasons:
God doesn’t care about our entertainment.
Its not because he doesn’t like us or want us to have fun (there’s a blog post waiting to be written), it is because entertainment doesn’t really help us all that much. God loves us deeply and, as a result, wants us to grow and become the kind of people we were meant to be. But growth doesn’t happen through entertainment. Quite frankly it happens through pain. Not just physical pain, either. All kinds of pain: spiritual, emotional, etc. Obviously God doesn’t want us to be in perpetual pain (or does he?), but if everything is easy we have nothing to grow into. Discipline, while it may suck as we're going through it, is actually really good for us.
It wasn’t written for us.
Yep, that’s right…it wasn’t written for us. The Bible is not God’s love letter to us, or our life manual, the book that tells us how to get what we want or even the secret to world domination (speaking of which, you need to watch The Book of Eli if you haven't already). It was written for people in a different time and place, a people with different priorities and lifestyles, different struggles and governments. And because of that, it is often foreign to us. And anything foreign is boring. Which is why I don’t watch subtitled movies (I still haven’t seen Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon). But…that’s not to say that we shouldn’t still read it or that we can’t still benefit from it – we should and we can. It may not be written for us, but there is much for us to learn from it and God actually can and does still speak to people through it.
We are sinful.
Sucks to admit it, and we don’t like that it is that much of an influence, but it’s true. We find the Bible boring because there is something within us that resists the things of God and, unfortunately, that doesn’t just go away once we become Christians. Heck, some of the time, it gets a lot worse. Maybe the fact that we have a broken relationship with God means that we don't really want to spend time with him when we could be doing more exciting things.
What do you think? Are there other reasons why we find the Bible so boring? Or, perhaps you find the Bible entertaining? Why is that?
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