Understanding the Bible with the heart

The truth that God reveals to us in the Bible, contrary to human sciences, it is not acquired with natural intelligence, at least at the beginning of our Bible study path, nor with an effort of reflection. In Matteo 13:15 we find an unusual expression: understand "with the heart". And just with the heart, seat of conscience and affections, that man can understand divine thoughts, and not with intelligence. Because? Because the central message of the Bible is the revelation of justice and God's love for all men. Reading it, we learn that God sent his only Son into the world; and in the world, despite the wickedness he encountered, He went from place to place doing good, teaching people goodness, the love, the grace, God's mercy and responding to the needs of everyone he met.

Jesus told them: “O foolish and slow of heart to believe…”

And they said to each other: "Perhaps we did not feel our hearts burning as he spoke to us along the way and explained the Scriptures?”

God shows his love for us in this: that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).

This is what his infinite love has reached. If our hearts are too hard to be affected by this message, if we are prejudiced and proud and do not rely on God, then the Bible remains a closed book for us, incomprehensible. But if we are suddenly enlightened, we will also receive the faculty to understand all its content because God will give us his Holy Spirit who will "guide us into all truth" (Giovanni 16:13) and will allow us to understand his thoughts. But it all has to go through the heart first. And it is to our heart that God gives faith. Without the gift of faith from God, without his intervention, we cannot understand.

The Bible cannot be understood with the intellect alone, being the Word of God and not a book like any other. Even with the intellect, but this will come later. The Bible must be read without prejudice and with an open heart, it will be the Holy Spirit to guide us in the reading and to open our eyes to make us understand things that before then seemed silly, incomprehensible and illogical, with only our materialistic mind. Those who want to read the Bible with skepticism and then find inconsistencies in it and attack it are wrong, that's not how it's done, and this is not how God manifests himself to us. We must read it with humility and prayer, and God will do all the rest. Once you understand the Bible, and it can take years of study, our faith will be steadfast, but not because this comes from our will, it was God himself who gave it to us and we will never be able to lose it. Maybe you can go back when you have discovered a truth and pretend you don't know anything? No, of course not. God will never abandon us.

+1

0