Why the Bible Keeps Giving Us the “Wrong” Answers
And why that might be exactly the point
A Sunday reflection
Some books invite answers. Others invite patience.
This reflection is about the kind of book the Bible is, and what happens when we stop forcing it to behave like something it was never meant to be.
I have been publishing regularly online for just over a year now, and I’ve loved collecting my thoughts and sharing them on various platforms. Some of the most rewarding moments have been articles that have taken on a life of their own, sparking comments, debate, and thoughtful questions. Quite a few of those conversations have ended up becoming new articles in their own right.
Over time, I’ve noticed a pattern forming. Many of the most interesting comments circle around questions of literalism, often framed like this:
Is the devil an actual being or a symbol?
Did Jonah really end up inside a fish?
Was there an actual garden, with an actual tree, and an actual talking snake?
Can the Bible be trusted if parts of it sound a bit crazy?
I completely understand these questions. They are thoughtful, sincere attempts to take the text seriously. In many cases, they come from people who want to believe but are unsure what to do with ancient Scripture in a world shaped by science, evidence, and explanation.
Very often, I find myself mulling these questions over. I’ll take the dogs for a walk around the field outside my house and, more often than not, come to the same conclusion:
These are not the kinds of questions the Bible is set up to answer.
To explain what I mean, we need to take a step back.
The Truth We All Live By (Without Noticing)
Long before people worried about accuracy, they were trying to make sense of experience.
Longing. Rivalry. Fear. Love. Shame. Hope. The ache that follows success. The strange mixture of joy and terror that arrives with new life. The sense that the world is not quite as it should be, and neither are we.
From the very beginning, human beings have reached for stories, images, metaphors, and symbols to speak about these things. Not because they lacked intelligence, but because some realities refuse to be reduced to facts alone.
When someone says, “She’s carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders,” nobody reaches for a set of scales. We understand immediately what is being said. The phrase is not literally true, but it is deeply accurate. In fact, it tells the truth more effectively than a technical description ever could.
The same thing happens in moments of joy. When family and friends asked me about the birth of my daughter, they wanted details I found oddly beside the point: her weight, the time she was born, her name. They grew frustrated because all I kept saying was how amazing it was.
It felt like life was starting over.
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t. Yet anyone who has lived through that moment knows exactly what I meant. The language stretches because the experience demands it.
When Precision Took Centre Stage
At some point in human history, something remarkable happened. We learned to describe the world with extraordinary precision. Numbers, measurements, formulas, systems, logic. This way of knowing transformed civilisation.
We owe medicine, engineering, transport, technology, and much of modern comfort to it. It is a genuine achievement and a gift we all benefit from. We rightly admire it, and we continue to boast about our progress, dazzled by innovations that reshape daily life.
But it has limits.
In our striving for achievement and knowledge, it is easy to lose sight of the humanity involved.
Precision can tell you how much a baby weighs, but not what it means to hold them for the first time. It can analyse brain chemistry, but not explain love. It can chart grief, but not account for the hollow silence it leaves behind.
Over time, this way of knowing has become the dominant way our culture decides what counts as “real”. What can be measured, tested, proven, and repeated is trusted.
Everything else is treated with suspicion.
Which creates a problem when we open the Bible.
What We Did to the Bible (With the Best Intentions)
Rather than asking what kind of book the Bible actually is, we often demand that it behave like a modern textbook.
We try to defend it using the wrong criteria. We insist it must function as scientific explanation, forensic history, or modern biography. When it doesn’t, people either work themselves into knots trying to protect it, or quietly walk away convinced it has failed.
On the other side, critics dismiss it for not meeting standards it was never written to satisfy.
Both sides end up arguing within the same framework, just from different perspectives, and the result is predictable: the Bible becomes confusing, combative, bizarre, or simply dull.
Something essential is lost.
The Bible’s Actual Ambition
This does not mean the Bible is uninterested in history or reality. It is not all poetry and song. It is rooted in real communities, real places, and real events. Books like 1 & 2 Kings make that abundantly clear.
But its primary concern lies elsewhere.
The Bible is a library of writings shaped to explore meaning. It wrestles with suffering and injustice, faith and doubt, desire and fear, joy and loss. It is concerned with what it means to be human in a world that is both beautiful and brutal, and yet still unresolved.
That is why it speaks so often in story. Why it leans into poetry. Why it uses symbol, exaggeration, repetition, and paradox. Even when it describes historical events, it weaves them together creatively and theologically, because it is trying to convey meaning rather than mere chronology.
These are not decorative choices. They are necessary ones.
Which is why asking, “Did this happen exactly like this?” can feel like a mismatch. Not because the question is foolish, but because it is too small for what the text is trying to do.
Why Big Questions Need the Right Framework
Take the question of the devil.
Is the Bible describing a literal being?
A fallen angel?
A symbol of evil?
The voice of accusation?
The pull towards destruction that runs through human history?
The Bible is far less interested in pinning this down than we are. Instead, it shows how temptation works, how blame operates, how fear distorts, how power corrodes, and how evil is both external and disturbingly close to home. It exposes the fragile, often frighteningly thin line between good and evil.
Those are not lesser truths than literal description. They are larger ones.
The same is true of Jonah, Job, Adam and Eve (complete with talking snake), the flood, and even the resurrection stories, where recognition fails and time seems to behave strangely. These accounts are not puzzles waiting to be solved. They are invitations to be entered.
When we get trapped in the mechanics, we often miss the meaning.
A Different Kind of Honesty
Sometimes we need to recognise that reading the Bible this way is not a retreat from truth. It is a deeper honesty about how truth actually works.
Some truths are measured. Others are lived.
Some are stated. Others are sung.
The Bible belongs primarily to that second category, and it asks to be approached on those terms. Which means we don’t need to defend it by forcing it to be something it never claimed to be. We can simply say: this book plays by different rules.
In doing so, we may recover something we badly need. Because the questions that first brought people to the Bible were never really about data. They were about meaning. About suffering. About hope. About whether this fragile, bewildering life is held by anything deeper than chance.
Those are still our questions, and they deserve answers big enough to meet them.
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be exploring some of the big questions people keep asking about the Bible, not to shrink or answer them, but to give them room to breathe.
Sacred & Secular publishes daily reflections exploring faith, doubt, and meaning in ordinary life. Sunday articles are always free
Thank you for reading todays reflection.
Paul
Yes, exactly right. Also, literalism is a double evil. First (as you mentioned), it is behind a lot of the confusion many Christians feel when they try to reconcile passages they see in their Bible with their life experiences. This confusion is paralleled in a clever way when the gospels portray the disciples as obtuse and slow to “get” what Jesus was talking about. But second, it is behind a lot of the conflict with atheists when they tease Christians about supposedly believing in talking snakes and sky gods. The truth is found in meaning, not in literalism.