A Greater Joy

 I can hear someone object: “But isn’t the goal of reading the Bible to find the right answer? Why would I want my son or daughter to have more questions about what God actually says in his Word?”

If you have ever participated in an escape room, you know how satisfying it is to escape before the timer rings, especially as those final minutes wind down. But imagine an escape room in which the answers were all given to you one after the other and you escape in a fraction of the time? Why wouldn’t this be satisfying at all? It’s because the joy of escaping is bound up with the joy of solving the puzzles for yourself. Likewise, the joy of friendship comes not primarily from knowing all of the correct facts about your friend’s ice cream and music preferences. It comes from spending time enjoying ice cream and music with your friend.

In the same way, the goal of reading the Bible is not merely to “get the right answer.” It is to spend time with God, thinking about what God has said, puzzling over his commands and over how they might best apply to our lives today, and answering those questions for ourselves. Reading the Greek text, with all of its interpretive possibilities, helps us to slow down and consider the Word more carefully than we often do when we read it in our native language—precisely because it makes perfectly clear English passages a little more puzzling.