Making Wise the Simple

The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy making wise the simple.
Psalm 19:7

There has been many a tendency over the years to make the Bible harder than it is.  It has been portrayed as a code to crack and we need translators and schooled educators to explain the meaning of the Bible.  Yet, the Bible really is amazingly simple.  An uneducated, unschooled person can understand it quite readily.  We think of the Pharisees response to Peter and the disciples recognizing they were “unschooled, ordinary men”.  This verse goes even further and says that those that read the Bible are actually made wise.  It is not that they are wise – they are made wise.  They are given illumination.

Debsue and I have this thing where if we have to put something together, it has to be a tag team effort.  I simply cannot look at the directions and envision the end result.  I am spatially challenged and simply have a brain blockage that prevents me from understanding the result.  So I get the master translator, Debsue to tell me what to do and I do it.  So it is with the written word which instructs and interprets through the power of the Holy Spirit.  Before I was a Christian, I read the Bible but it did not make complete sense to me.  After I was saved, the pieces fit together.  I was given the understanding.

This passage goes further and states that we can trust what we see.  Sometimes there are hard things that we may not completely see and we think they are hard.  But they are given for our own growth and maturity.  For example, Jesus says you cannot serve God and money.  Everything in my humanness tells me I don’t like that verse, yet God has clearly taught me the truth and the trustworthiness of such a statement and I have lived it out.  God says do not have sex before marriage.  Marriage provides the enjoyment of sex but it is accompanied by intimacy which is how it was ordained.  We think God is a cosmic killjoy, but there is no doubt that if we disobey the command, there are consequences.  On the other hand, if we obey, there is incredible joy.  The author of the word is perfectly trustworthy.