WE DIDN’T JUST MAKE THE BIBLE HARD—WE MADE IT SMALL
I used to wonder why God made the New Testament so difficult to understand—like a complicated puzzle we have to solve about the work and worship of the church. Why the endless arguments? Why the layers of systems, rules, charts, and categories? Why can’t we all just see the Bible alike?
Now I know the answer.
God didn’t make it complicated. We did.
The New Testament is not obscure; it is unsettling. It is not confusing; it is liberating. And freedom is always harder to accept than rules.
Jesus did not come to introduce a new religious code but to announce a kingdom. He did not speak in technical manuals for church structure; He spoke in invitations—“Follow Me,” “Abide in Me,” “Come to Me.” The apostles did not plant communities bound together by intricate constitutions, but living bodies animated by the Spirit of Christ. What made the gospel dangerous in the first century was not its ambiguity, but its clarity: people were actually free.
Paul says it plainly: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Corinthians 3:17). Liberty—not chaos, but life released from fear, hierarchy, and performance. Yet liberty threatens systems built on control. So we explain it away. We turn living letters into locked rooms and living stones into fenced properties. We take the open-handed gospel and close it into tight fists.
The New Testament becomes “hard” the moment we insist it must protect our traditions. Suddenly simple phrases require footnotes; obvious freedoms demand exceptions; Spirit-led obedience must be managed lest it disrupt the order we have carefully constructed. What once read like good news begins to feel like a legal document—parsed, restricted, and defended.
Jesus warned us this would happen. He rebuked those who “bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders” (Matthew 23:4). The burden was never Scripture; the burden was what men did with it. The same gospel that set captives free became, in the wrong hands, a means of captivity.
When we read the New Testament without fear—without the need to control outcomes—it becomes astonishingly clear. Christ is enough. The Spirit leads. Love fulfills the law. Gifts are given freely. People are transformed from the inside out. The church grows not by regulation, but by resurrection life flowing through ordinary believers.
We don’t all see the Bible alike because freedom exposes us. It asks us to trust Christ more than our systems, the Spirit more than our structures, and grace more than our boundaries. And that is costly. Rules protect us from risk; freedom calls us into it.
The New Testament is not a puzzle meant to keep us guessing. It is a doorway meant to be walked through. The tragedy is not that Scripture is unclear, but that we often prefer captivity with certainty to freedom with faith.
God didn’t make His Word complicated.
He made His people free.
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Lord Jesus, forgive us for the ways we have complicated what You made alive. Teach us to trust Your Spirit, to rest in Your sufficiency, and to walk in the freedom You purchased with Your blood. Deliver us from fear disguised as faith, and lead us into the liberty of loving You and one another fully. Amen.
BDD
