You read the passage in its context. You checked what kind of writing it is and who first received it. It still bothers you. What do you actually do next, this week and over the long haul, so that you neither pretend the trouble is gone nor let it carry you away from Christ?
The answer offered here is a repeatable practice drawn from a Jude 3 Project lecture by Esau McCaulley on difficult passages: sort your difficulty honestly, test it with real study, then learn to hold what remains while you keep obeying what is plain. Bring a Bible, paper and one passage that genuinely troubles you. You never have to say out loud which passage you chose.
A suggested sequence: In a first sitting or group session (about an hour), do the opening exercise, read the three Scripture passages and work through the sorting questions. The study test is homework, done over one to two weeks. In a second sitting, cover the sections on holding what remains, the puzzle board exercise, the discussion questions and the closing practice. Alone, you can follow the same rhythm across two or three sittings.
Start with your own passage
Write down the passage that bothers you. Under it, write two sentences. The first states what the passage says, as plainly as you can. The second states what bothers you about it. Keep them separate. Many people find they cannot write the first sentence without guessing, and that discovery is useful. You will return to this paper throughout the guide.
For groups: give people five quiet minutes. Do not go around the room asking what everyone wrote. Some passages trouble people because of their own history, and the choice to share belongs to them.
Three prayers that did not resolve
Scripture itself contains people who stayed with God while something remained unanswered. Read these slowly before turning to your own problem.
Psalm 13 opens with a complaint: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). By the end, the psalmist says, “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation” (Psalm 13:5). Something shifts in the one praying between those verses, yet the reason for God’s apparent silence is never given.
In John 6, many disciples leave after a hard teaching. Jesus asks the twelve, “Will ye also go away?” (John 6:67). Peter answers, “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Peter’s answer rests on who Jesus is and the lack of any better place to go. Whether the teaching itself made sense to him, the text leaves unsaid.
Deuteronomy 29:29 reads: “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.” The verse divides knowledge into two kinds and attaches a purpose to the second.
Observation prompts, before any interpretation:
- In each passage, what remains unexplained?
- What does the person still do, or still say, while it remains unexplained?
- Which of the three feels closest to where you are, and which feels furthest away?
A prayer, a narrative and a covenant address do different work, so none of these is a formula for handling doubt. What they share is narrower: unresolved questions and continued trust appear side by side in Scripture without embarrassment.
Sort before you settle
McCaulley refuses to treat every troubling passage as the same kind of problem. Some trouble comes from misreading: treating a proverb as a guarantee, applying a promise made to Israel directly to a modern nation, or taking a story that describes something as if it commanded it. Some comes from never having studied the passage at all. And some remains after the reading is correct.
Under your two sentences, answer these with yes, no or not sure.
- Genre: Am I reading this as the kind of writing it actually is: proverb, prayer, law, story, letter?
- Audience: Am I assuming this was written to me, when it was first addressed to someone in a specific covenant or situation?
- Description or command: Is this passage telling me what someone did, or what I should do?
If any answer is “no” or “not sure,” you may not yet have the problem you thought you had. The next step is study, not anguish.
The study test
McCaulley describes a familiar cycle. A passage bothers us, we move on, we return a year later, it bothers us again, and then something online names the same complaint and it feels confirmed. His challenge is to ask whether you have studied the passage or simply memed it. He gets specific: “Have I actually opened up a biblical commentary and read what two or three scholars have said?” He also points to two thousand years of Christian reflection on these texts.
Take that challenge seriously over the next week or two.
- Read the whole chapter your passage sits in, plus the chapter before and after. Write one sentence on what the surrounding section is about.
- Find two commentaries or study resources whose authors disagree in some way. A church, library or pastor can help. Restate each one’s reading in your own words.
- Find one voice from earlier church history who wrote on the passage or its question. Note how they handled it.
- Return to your first sentence and rewrite it if you need to.
Then ask whether the trouble shrank, changed shape or stayed the same. Any of those can happen to a careful reader. The test does not guarantee relief. It makes sure that if the trouble remains, it remains for real reasons.
For groups: when you reconvene, invite people to share a method or source they found helpful rather than the passage itself, unless they choose to.
When the reading is right and it still hurts
Suppose you have done the work, and what the passage says is exactly what bothers you. McCaulley treats this as good news, because “that means you’re doing theology.” Over time every Christian forms some picture of who God is. When a passage seems to violate that picture, you are holding the text and your understanding of God side by side and noticing the friction.
He names two passages he places here: the conquest narratives, including the slaughter of the Canaanites, and Genesis 22, where Abraham is about to sacrifice Isaac and is stopped. Before such texts he asks himself, “is this the kind of problem that God actually wants me to solve?” He doubts any explanation removes the deep unease, and he describes the outcome this way: “I may understand this text enough to be able to continue to function as a Christian, but it doesn’t mean that this question is answered to my satisfaction.”
That sentence separates two goals most readers merge: understanding a passage and feeling at peace with it. McCaulley says that “sometimes what it means to be a Christian is to live in that tension” and that the task is to “give God and yourself time to wrestle with these ideas and make sense of them.” Time is part of the practice. He even allows that a person might suspend judgment on a passage for now, or for life.
He also guards against the opposite error, which he names “Lord of the Rings theology”: one verse ruling everything, so that a single unresolved passage becomes a reason you cannot go on. Instead he asks, “is there enough evidence in my own life, in the life of the church and in the scripture themselves for me to continue to trust God?” Against his hardest passages he sets “the confidence that I have, that the tomb was empty on the third day.” The resurrection leaves the hard text unexplained. What it supplies is a reason to trust God that does not wait on every hard text being settled.
A fair objection follows. Reaching for the empty tomb whenever a passage hurts can look like a way to stop thinking. The difference lies in what you keep doing. Avoidance closes the file; trust keeps the passage open, keeps studying it and stays willing to let it correct you. McCaulley builds that willingness in. Some readers will press further and say certain passages should drive a deeper revision of doctrine than he envisions, and his own warning about rearranging the board leaves room for that possibility.
The puzzle board exercise
McCaulley compares theology to assembling a puzzle. “It’s rare that all of the puzzle pieces fit,” he says. “There’s always two or three that are kind of off to the side.” He observes that “no one’s construction of the data accounts for every single verse in a way that’s completely emotionally satisfying.” But sometimes “there are too many pieces of the puzzle that are not on the board,” and then the problem may be that “you constructed an account of God that actually doesn’t do justice to the scriptures.”
Draw a large rectangle on a sheet of paper. This is your board.
- Inside it, write what you hold about God with the most confidence, and beside each, one reason: a passage, an event, part of the church’s witness, something in your own life. Mark which reasons are strong and which are thin.
- Outside it, write your troubling passage and any others that sit awkwardly for you.
- Do several outside pieces point the same direction? If so, write a sentence describing what they seem to say together.
- Ask whether those pieces suggest something inside the board is wrong or incomplete. Write down what would have to change.
You may find a board that holds with one or two pieces to the side. Or you may find a cluster exposing a picture of God built from too little of Scripture. McCaulley holds himself to this standard: “I’m always willing to understand that I might be wrong.” The exercise only works if you let it change the board, not just confirm it.
Questions for discussion or reflection
- Look again at your two opening sentences. Which changed more, the one about what the passage says or the one about what bothers you? What do you make of that?
- McCaulley separates understanding a passage from being satisfied by it. Where in your life do you already accept understanding without satisfaction, and what makes that possible there?
- Peter stays with Jesus without claiming to understand the hard teaching. Is his reason a good one? What would make it weak?
- How would you tell one honest piece off to the side from a pile that means your picture of God needs rearranging? What signs would you look for?
- McCaulley weighs one hard passage against the empty tomb. Some find that steadying and others find it evasive. Make the strongest case for each reaction before deciding where you land.
- If a friend said a passage was the reason they were done with faith, what could you honestly say that neither dismisses the passage nor makes it the whole story?
The turn toward what is plain
McCaulley ends his lecture by moving the weight of the question: “the real struggle for being a Christian is not the things that I don’t understand about the Bible. It’s the things that I do.” He names what he considers clear: loving God, loving your neighbor, serving him and living a holy life by the Spirit’s power. When the hard passages overwhelm you, he says, “think about the things in the Bible that you understand.”
Deuteronomy 29:29 sits nearby in spirit, though its first point is narrower. There, “those things which are revealed” are the words of the covenant law given to Israel, handed over so they could be done. Applying that pattern to the whole Christian life is an extension of the verse rather than its direct meaning, but the shape carries over: what God has made plain comes with an expectation of obedience. That is a check on a quiet temptation, to keep circling the passage you cannot resolve while a command you understand perfectly goes untouched.
So the final practice is specific. On the back of your paper, write one command in Scripture you are not confused about at all. Write one concrete way to obey it in the next seven days, with a person’s name or a time attached. Then do it. Keep your troubling passage on the same sheet, and next month, read both sides again.