How To Read the Bible When It Offends You

You are reading along, and then you hit a verse that stops you cold. Maybe it is a command that sounds barbaric. Maybe it is a law that seems to endorse something we now know is wrong. Maybe it is a passage where God seems harsher than the God you thought you were following.

Your stomach turns. You close the Bible. You wonder if you have been believing in something you cannot defend.

I want to tell you something pastoral and something honest: that feeling is not a sign you have lost your faith. It is often a sign you are starting to read seriously. The question is what you do with it next.

Do Not Sanitize What You Are Reading

The worst thing we can do with a hard passage is pretend it is not hard. You have probably heard sermons that skim past the difficult verses with a quick reassurance and a change of subject. That kind of teaching makes the Bible look fragile. It is not.

If a passage troubles you, name what is troubling you. Say it out loud. Write it down. The Bible is not afraid of your questions. It contains an entire book — Job — where a righteous man yells at God for thirty-something chapters and is not rebuked for it. The Psalms are full of people demanding answers. Habakkuk opens with a complaint.

The God of the Bible is not allergic to honest wrestling. He is allergic to dishonest piety.

So let us pick one of the hardest passages in the Old Testament and walk through it together. Let us take the conquest of Canaan.

A Test Case: The Canaanite Conquest

In Deuteronomy 7 and Joshua 6, Israel is commanded to drive out and destroy the peoples of Canaan. Cities fall. Entire populations are devoted to destruction. If you read this and feel something close to horror, you are reading correctly. The text is not asking you to feel nothing.

And when the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction.

Modern readers stare at that and ask the obvious question: how is this not genocide? How is this the God of love?

Here is how to read it well.

First, context. The conquest is not a generic command to wage holy war against unbelievers. It is a specific, bounded judgment on specific peoples at a specific moment in history. The text gives reasons. Genesis 15 tells Abraham that his descendants will not enter the land until the iniquity of the Amorites is complete — meaning God is delaying judgment for four hundred years to give those peoples time. Leviticus 18 catalogs the practices that had filled Canaanite religion, including child sacrifice. This is not a sudden tantrum. It is a long-warned judgment.

Second, the conquest is unique, not a template. Nothing in the New Testament authorizes Christians to repeat this. Jesus explicitly turns the sword the other way. When Peter draws a blade to defend him, Jesus heals the man Peter struck and tells Peter to put the sword away. The kingdom does not advance by conquest after Christ. Anyone who has used these Old Testament texts to justify modern violence has misread them at a foundational level. The conquest was a singular act of judgment in redemptive history, not an ongoing strategy.

Third, the language is shaped by ancient warfare conventions. Scholars who have studied the period note that the sweeping language of total destruction was a recognized form of military rhetoric in the ancient Near East. The same book of Joshua that describes total destruction also describes Canaanites who are still around afterward, intermarrying, living in the land. The texts are not as flat as they look at first glance. This does not erase the difficulty, but it should slow down the conclusion that the Bible is endorsing what we mean by genocide today.

Fourth, sit with what remains. Even after all of that, there is still difficulty. God does judge. God does take life. The Bible never apologizes for this, because the Bible insists that life belongs to God in the first place. The question is not whether God has the right to give and take life — He does — but whether we trust that He does so with perfect justice.

That last question is what the cross answers.

Progressive Revelation: The Arc Bends Toward Christ

One of the most important reading principles is this: God meets people inside their broken cultures and slowly, patiently, bends the arc toward Christ.

Take the laws about slavery in Exodus 21. A modern reader sees a regulation of slavery and reasonably asks, why is God allowing this at all?

But notice what is actually happening. Slavery already existed in every culture surrounding Israel — and it was brutal beyond what we can easily imagine. The Mosaic law does not invent slavery. It limits it. It puts a time cap on Hebrew servitude. It forbids kidnapping and trafficking with the death penalty in Exodus 21:16. It demands sabbath rest for servants in the Ten Commandments. It treats runaway slaves with protection in Deuteronomy 23. These laws are not God endorsing slavery. They are God regulating a horror in a world that already had it, while bending the moral arc.

Then Jesus arrives. He reads Isaiah in a synagogue and says he has come to set captives free. Paul writes that in Christ there is neither slave nor free. The seed of abolition is in the gospel itself, and history bears this out — almost every major abolition movement in the modern world was led by Christians reading their Bibles.

This is what we mean by progressive revelation. God did not drop a finished ethical system onto a Bronze Age people and demand instant compliance. He moved a real people through real history toward Christ, who is the full revelation of God's heart.

Scripture Interprets Scripture

The third principle, and maybe the most important one, is this: let the clear interpret the unclear. Let the later interpret the earlier. Let Jesus interpret Moses.

When you hit a hard passage in the Old Testament, the question is not "how do I square this with my modern feelings." The question is "how does Jesus read this." Because He did read it. He read all of it. And He kept telling people that the whole of it pointed to Him.

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

That is your reading method. Every hard passage has a question hidden inside it: where does this end up at the cross? The Canaanite conquest ends at a cross where the only person ever destroyed in the place of His enemies was God Himself. The slavery laws end at a Savior who took the form of a servant. The hell passages end at a Savior who walked into the fire on our behalf.

This is slow reading. It is not the kind of reading you do in two minutes between meetings. It is the kind of reading that takes context, cross-references, original language notes, and a willingness to sit with a passage for a week. Bible Study Pro was built for exactly this kind of work — for the believer who has decided not to skim past the hard parts anymore.

Sit With the Discomfort

A final word, because principles are not the whole answer.

Sometimes you will do all the work — context, progressive revelation, Scripture interpreting Scripture — and you will still feel uneasy. That is okay. That is honest. God does not require you to feel resolved before you trust Him. He requires you to keep coming back to the text.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

There is humility in that verse for God's people. It is not a verse that shuts down questions. It is a verse that reminds us we are reading the words of someone whose moral vision is larger than ours, not smaller. If God were exactly the size of your conscience, He would not be God. He would be a mirror.

But here is the gift: the same Bible that contains these difficult passages also contains the clearest picture of God you will ever find — Jesus, on a cross, refusing to call down judgment, asking the Father to forgive the people killing Him. That is the God you are dealing with. That is the God whose harder passages you are trying to understand.

You can read with both honesty and trust. You do not have to choose.

Stay in the text. The cross is waiting at the end of every hard chapter.