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Josh and I had gotten together at the gym for a workout on the wrestling mat. We were just starting to circle for a takedown when I told him I wasn't reading my Bible anymore. I figured he'd tell me he understood and he'd be praying for me, the type of thing you'd expect from a compassionate friend. Instead, he just stared at me with a look that said, "You stupid dork."

He kept giving me that look as we circled one another for what seemed like the length of two geometry periods. I finally stopped and blurted out, "What's your problem?"

"You're a stupid dork," he said.

"What?"

"You heard me. You're acting like a little kid."

"What do you mean?"

"Let me guess why you stopped reading the Bible: It just doesn't seem relevant anymore."

I hated Josh at times like this. He knew me too well. We'd been friends since I'd been a freshman and he a sophomore on our high school's wrestling team. I was always the better wrestler—even though I was smaller than him. But he was always the better Christian—even though I had gone to church longer than he had. Now, he was in college and I was a high school senior, and we were catching up after a few months apart. I wanted to see if he'd gotten any better at wrestling; he had been asking me about my spiritual life.

"I pick it up and try to read it, but it's so strange," I explained. "There's all that stuff about the Canaanites and the Jebusites and so on—who cares? And in the New Testament, they toss around monster words like justification and sanctification—who talks like that today?"

I was surprised at how angry I was getting. "Even Jesus makes no sense sometimes: 'The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.' 'The kingdom of God is like a treasure hidden in a field.' What's that supposed to mean? And then there are books like Ezekiel and Revelation—well, don't even get me started!" I was fuming now.

"So, you're ticked off because the Bible is hard to understand," Josh replied.

"Yeah," I said, realizing I'd stopped moving during my rant. "I get all this pressure from my family and the church—and now you—to read a book that doesn't make a whole lot of sense a lot of the time. I'm tired of it." And though I hated to admit it, I concluded in disgust, "So, yeah, it's irrelevant."

Josh was silent for a long time. I started circling him again, wanting to end the conversation so we could keep wrestling. I wanted to see if I could still take down his 6-foot-2, 200-pound frame. Then he asked me, "Did it ever occur to you that maybe it's not the Bible that's irrelevant, but that you're irrelevant?"

"What are you talking about?" I was still mad, but intrigued. I stood still again, realizing the conversation was not over.

"I don't mean just you. I mean all of us. Human beings—we're the ones who are irrelevant, out of touch with reality. And it's the Bible that's relevant and real." He paused. He could see I was having trouble understanding. Then he asked, "Have you ever seen someone who's drunk?"

"Yeah. I just don't get what they like about drinking. Drunks can't see straight. They can't walk straight. They slur their words. It seems stupid to me."

"Well, in a spiritual sense, we're like drunks," he explained. "If you try to steady a drunk when he's about to fall, he'll say 'Hold still!' when he's the one losing his balance. Reality hasn't changed, but he sure has. It's like that with us spiritually. So when we read the Bible, sometimes it doesn't make a lot of sense and seems off balance. But we're the ones who are confused."

"Like how?" I asked. We were both sitting on the mat by now.

"For one thing, our instinct is to try to earn God's favor, to prove to him we're worthy of his love," he said. "So we come across something like the Ten Commandments, and we think this is what we have to do to please God. We try to live that way and fail time and again, and then we say the Bible is irrelevant because its advice is impossible.

"All along, though, the Bible is trying to say something different—that we don't need to earn God's love, that his love is a gift, and that parts like the Ten Commandments are not ways to prove our worth but ways to say thanks to God for loving us already. It's just the opposite of what we, in our spiritually drunken state, have come to believe about God and what he expects from us."

I could see what he was saying—it seemed he had learned a lot in his first semester, at least about the Bible. But I wasn't ready to admit defeat just yet.

"You have to admit, the way the Bible is written—all sorts of books and styles jumbled together—well, it's pretty hard to read. I wish God would have laid it out a little more simply: 'Q: Who created the world? A: God. Q: What is the purpose of the Ten Commandments? A: To thank God for his love.' It would be so much easier."

"But God isn't interested in making your life easy," Josh countered. "He's interested in making your life an adventure. And that's why the Bible is very much like the adventure that life is. Life is not a series of questions and answers, but a journey. And a journey only slowly unfolds. It has many twists and turns and unexpected surprises. How interesting would The Lord of the Rings be if Frodo had been able to complete his mission by answering one question or simply walking across the Shire? It is not just the destination, but the journey itself, with its hazards, setbacks, victories and discoveries, that makes Tolkien's story so great. And it's what makes our lives so great."

"So the Bible is like a novel?" I asked, suddenly realizing the Bible might actually be more than a set of hard-to-understand rules and guidelines.

"You're getting it! Like a novel, it tells one big story through a series of smaller stories—kind of like chapters in a long novel. But the Bible also tells its story through poems (the Psalms), wisdom sayings (Proverbs), legal documents (Leviticus, Deuteronomy), history (Judges, Joshua), letters (like Ephesians, Philippians), symbolic literature (Ezekiel, Revelation), and so on."

"And the Bible's big story is. … ?"

"It's about how God created us in his image and how we defaced that image—sinned—and how that left us lost and hopeless and doomed to destruction. It's about how God tried to call us back from our self-centered ways through Moses and the prophets, and finally paid the penalty for our sin through Jesus' death, so we can enjoy life with him. It's about Christ coming again to bring history to its dramatic and amazing conclusion."

"All about Christ. … "

"That's right!" he nearly shouted, not even sensing he'd interrupted me. "The whole story is all about Jesus making the world right—making people right. It's all about God coming to Earth and bringing people back to himself."

I was puzzled, even skeptical. "How can all these books—with different types of literature and different authors writing in different centuries—possibly tell the same story?"

Josh nodded, pausing for a moment to tie his shoe. "Because all these authors, and the people they talk about in their writings, were all part of the story. See, they weren't just making up a story, like a novelist does. They weren't just writing any old story they wanted to write. They were writing the story, and they weren't only writing. They were very much involved in what they were putting on each page. They were participants—real characters—in the story."

"But those guys in the Old Testament didn't even know who Jesus was."

"They didn't participate in all of the story at the time they wrote, because the story was still unfolding. They didn't fully understand how they fit in with the big picture. But as we look back, we can see they are very much a part of the same story God has been guiding, from the Creation to the Fall, to Jesus and his disciples, and to the future Second Coming of Christ."

"God has been guiding," I said softly to myself.

"Yes!" he said, obviously excited that I'd picked up on that. "God was kind of like an English teacher who gives a specific assignment and leads her students through it. God oversaw the whole process of the writing. We talk about the Bible being 'inspired.' God worked through different people with different personalities, backgrounds, cultures and times in history to communicate the story."

"And this is the same story we're living today?"

"You got it! We're in the part of the story that comes between Jesus' first and second coming. We read the Bible to help us understand where we've come from and where we're going on this strange and wonderful journey. This journey has unique heroes—Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Paul—and obviously uses special vocabulary—justification, sanctification. And it just, well, looks at the world differently from the way we're used to seeing it. That's why there are times when the Bible seems so irrelevant. But as I said, it's not the Bible that's irrelevant and out of touch. It's us. And we're the ones who have to make the effort to get real."

"And we do that by reading the Bible. OK, I get it." I was tired of talking and wanted to get on with wrestling. But he had made me think, as usual. I stood up, motioned for him to stand, and started circling him again.

"Good," Josh replied. "Maybe you're not such a stupid. … "

Before he could finish his sentence, I had him down on the mat, with a half nelson on him. College hadn't helped him in this department at all.

Read more from 'Faith & Values'

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