the beginning and the end

My studies over the last few weeks and months have had me turning over the idea of “the beginning and the end” in a variety of ways. This is a familiar phrase from a few different Biblical passages, perhaps most famously the Book of Revelation, when Jesus claims this title for Himself:

“Behold, I am coming soon, and My reward is with Me, to give to each one according to what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.”

Revelation 22:12-13

Interestingly, the last couple chapters of Revelation act as a mirrored bookend with Genesis 1-2—the beginning and the end of the story. They match, and they tell us so much about what comes in between. Genesis begins a conversation about who God is and how He intended Creation to work; Revelation then offers the final say on who God is and how He intends the New Creation to work. The middle is … messy, full of questions and contradictions and moments of uncertainty, where we watch humanity fail to carry out God’s intentions again and again.

It has me thinking about how we view the Bible generally: As the beginning of the conversation, or the end?

Most of the time, I’ve noticed, we use it as the end. To doubters, we hand verses. To questioners, we respond with verses. To people who would ask us to see something in shades of gray rather than black-and-white, we give verses.

We effortlessly throw verses at anyone who disagrees with us, makes us uncomfortable, or asks us to think about a different possibility—and not because we want to open the floor for discussion or better understanding, but to silence debate, stay in our comfort zones, and have the last word. The Bible becomes a clumsy battering club in our denominational disputes and culture wars, leaving little space for it to act as the precise, soul-piercing blade of the Spirit it claims to be.

And the more time I spend with the Bible, the less convinced I am that we are “accurately handling the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15) when we use it in this way.

One of the things I love and hate about being a lifelong believer who grew up in church is that I “know” all the answers—the church answers, that is. This is helpful when it comes to constructing and corroborating doctrine, or avoiding blatant heresies, but it’s much less so when all those clean and pat church answers cloud my ability to recognize the complex and uncomfortable questions God is actually asking.

In other words—I’m well-trained in using the Bible as an end. But what about learning to let it be the beginning?

What happens when we let the Bible speak on its own terms, unfettered by our pre-determined bounds of doctrine? What happens when we let God tell us who He is, uncontained by our neat boxes of divine attributes? What would we learn about who He is, what He is doing, and how He wants us to reflect Him if we stopped trying to tell Him—and everyone else—who He is allowed to be and what He is allowed to ask of us?

Of course, I know there is a vitally important place for right doctrine. It matters that we relate to Yahweh rightly, and we know a lot about how to do that (and how not to do it) from the Scriptures. But an honest reading of the Bible won’t let us hold our “right answers” very tightly. It will challenge them and question them and throw them into turmoil at nearly every turn. It will demand of us to think and feel and undo and rebuild. It will constantly force our conversation-ending verse-wielding back into a place of humility and uncertainty, where there is room for an incomprehensible God and His creative work.

The Bible is an end: It has the authority to define God and tell us His story. It has the true answers we are looking for. But if that’s all it is—if the conversation has no beginning—then we will miss the messy riches of the middle, the parts where we have to wrestle with God and leave marked by the encounter to receive the blessing. We miss the questions it would ask of us. We miss the lifelong journey of discovery and delight it promises, because we were too mired down in making sure we “knew it all.”

I’m noticing that the more I learn, the less I know. As God increases in my perception, I decrease. Every new discovery or epiphany simply expands the universe of what I don’t understand. With every answer comes a thousand more questions.

This, I think, is as it should be.