During our teaching time at Youth Group this week we came across and important but perplexing question. For Christians who grow up in the church, a question which many experience in their adult life is some version of this: “As an adult, why are the Bible passages and stories I learned about in my childhood, so different from what I remember learning?”  In our Youth Group time we discussed Jonah the prophet.  Many Christians learned about Jonah in their childhood.  The point of those lessons were often about choosing to obey God, or about God’s power to save Jonah from the storm using a great fish. But as a we learned in youth group, the four chapter book about the prophet includes those things but really teaches about God’s great love and mercy for the enemies of the prophet. In Jonah, the prophet is consistently doing what you expect from ungodly people and those who respond quickly to God are the enemies of Israel. Our adult understanding of the text seems to say, “Wait a minute, why haven’t I heard the story this way before?” That’s an important question to pause on. I’ve had different thoughts about this question over the years, but let me share briefly what I’m thinking at this point in life. If asking this question leads you to some feelings like:

• Maybe the church people lied to me about the Bible.
• Maybe all the things I learned about the Bible as a child are not true.
• Maybe I don’t really know anything about the Bible.

Let me encourage you friend. These are feelings and questions that I have had also, and I think others have. But be encouraged by a few counter thoughts when you learn more about Noah and God’s judgement or the violence, cowardice, and humor of the David and Goliath chapters.

First, the lessons you first learned when hearing edited versions of these Bible stories were directed at your childhood self. They were, hopefully, direct applications from the Bible story, but tailored to what children are learning at an age-appropriate level. So it’s likely that you were not lied to, but rather the story was shortened, simplified, or a portion of the story emphasized to bring home a valid point the scripture makes that is helpful for the life and faith of a young person.

Second, it is probable that there are more to these stories than you remember from your childhood. Some of that is our memory and some is the selectivity of our teachers. In any case, it’s probably NOT the case that what you were taught was untrue. But it is probable that much of the Bible has more truth for you as an adult than could be understood by children. The Bible is very honest of life’s hardest topics and many portions are not things that children should have to wrestle with at a young age. So what you learned may have been true even if there is much more truth in those same passages to learn as an adult.

Third, you don’t need to throw out all that you remember and start over to continue to learn as an adult from scripture. Do you have recall of the lessons from your youth? They probably help you frame many parts of the Bible with a familiarity to the history, the cultures, the peoples that are involved in ways that adults reading the Bible for the first time don’t have. This can be helpful. And as we approach familiar texts in our reading it’s a good idea to not mentally check out or skip ahead. It is quite likely that as we re-read these stories over the course of our lives, at different stages of our adulthood, we will be astonished to see what the scripture has for us. We will see new things and sometimes realize that we had missed important aspects of the story lines and characters that fill in richness to our understanding. So instead of “Wait a minute, why haven’t I heard the story this way before?” we can encourage ourselves with “Wait a minute, amazing! I’ve never heard this story quite this way before!”