Fitting the Pieces Together
Over the last few years, I have enjoyed puzzling. By this I mean working puzzles. I have strangely found it relaxing, sitting at a table and sorting pieces by shape or color, taking time to notice details and reach for that missing piece. When my kids want to watch a movie I’m not interested in, I’ll sit in the back of the room, sipping tea and puzzling. When I need a minute to myself, I’ll turn on an audiobook and get lost in the story and sorting pieces. We now have a round table in the basement affectionately called the puzzle table, although we do sometimes have to move my setup and use it for other things.
However, I have found I’m somewhat particular in my preferred puzzles. I have one puzzle that’s 2000 pieces and it almost broke me. I generally reach for 750-1000 piece options. I like beautiful pictures or something sentimental. Or cats and flowers. Anything with a cat or flowers. I have worked a few mystery puzzles, where you don’t know what the end result will be and those are fun.
As I’ve sat in my chair, turning over pieces, scanning the scene of already completed portions, I noticed many similarities between working a puzzle and studying the Bible. Of course, like all analogies, it falls apart in some places but I found it very helpful to think through this way.
Some pieces seem confusing until you view them in the whole puzzle.
Often, as I’m beginning a puzzle and sorting pieces by color or edge, it’s impossible to tell what that piece represents. Is this black piece part of the cat or the night sky? We don’t know until we put other pieces together and can see where it fits in the whole. When we study the Bible and we only focus on certain books, some of the accounts seem strange. Why did God give us page after page of cleansing rituals in Leviticus? Why does Judges record such evil and hard to read stories of wickedness? When we read chapters or verses or stories in isolation, it’s like looking at a piece of a puzzle and deciding it’s not necessary because it doesn’t look like anything else in the puzzle.
This verse could be the theme of the entire blog post but II Timothy 3:16 says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.” ALL Scripture. Every section that is included, God preserved for a purpose. The pieces might seem strange in isolation but they all point to who God is and the redemption story woven throughout the Bible. The seemingly random lists of rituals show how God wanted his people to live differently than the other nations. God is holy and perfect and he wanted his people to live in light of that reality. The stories of evil in Judges give proof to what happens when everyone does what is right in his eyes instead of living by God’s commands. They also serve as a contrast to Ruth in the next book.
Just as we don’t discard puzzle pieces we don’t think are necessary, we should never discount parts of the Bible as unimportant because we don’t understand them or they make us uncomfortable. God preserved His Word the way he chose.
All the pieces are important.
This ties in with the first point but it’s worth repeating. One of the most frustrating things in putting a puzzle together is when you are missing that final piece. It’s enough to make you feel crazy. You start crawling on the floor, looking under every possible thing, interrogating your family to make sure no one carried a piece away {yes, that’s happened to me}. Even though you can see the final picture fine without that one piece, it’s frustrating! And so it is in Bible study when we forget that all 66 books form one cohesive story. Maybe we can recognize the redemption arc through the Old Testament and how it foretells the Savior coming to save us. But there’s that one story that bothers us so we want to cut it out of the biblical narrative. It doesn’t fit our 21st century minds so clearly it’s not worth studying and it doesn’t matter because we still believe in salvation!
Don’t be trapped into this thinking! Again, God in his sovereignty preserved His Word just as he wanted us to know it. He could have given us more, he could have given us less. He could have taken out the bits that make us scratch our head. But he didn’t. Every word of the Bible is inspired — literally God breathed — and therefore deserves our attention. Even if we know what the picture looks like, we want to find and place every piece where it belongs.
Border pieces serve a purpose.
I’ve never worked a puzzle with someone who didn’t put the border up first. These edge and corner pieces are distinct because one side is flat; you know they go around the perimeter of the puzzle and all the other pieces will fit inside. In terms of Bible study, while we read various passages and dig deeper into specific parts, we need to keep in mind our border pieces or framework. We know the whole of Scripture fits together and it is ALL profitable, valuable, etc. {II Tim 3:16}. When we read something that confuses us, instead of discarding it we need to return to our border pieces. I like to think of the border as two truths: the over arching story of redemption and who God is. When we view all the interior pieces, every verse that makes up those 66 books in the Bible, we come back to these two things that are containing them {much like the border of the puzzle}.
Why are they important? Because they help us understand why certain events and people are given space in the Bible. When we read the laws for offerings and cleansings in Leviticus and the complete wickedness happening in the time of the Judges, it’s easy to say those don’t matter today and we can ignore those books. However, ALL Scripture is profitable for teaching us so we ask what the lesson is. When we consider these books in the framework of asking, "What does this tell me about God” instead of, “What am I supposed to do with this” it keeps us from throwing out portions we don’t like. Because all the Bible shows us something about God and his plan of redemption.
Leviticus teaches us God’s holiness cannot abide sin and he wanted {and still wants} his people to be set apart and different from the world. If the heathen culture was doing it, you don’t! We must keep in mind, Israel had been in Egypt for 400 years. They were surrounded by idolatry, pagan worship practices, and temple sacrifices to false gods. In Leviticus, God is telling them how he will be worshipped and how he wants them to live. And even though we don’t practice sin offerings or uncleanness until evening standards, these things should humble us to realize how serious sin is and how holy God is. Judges shows what happens when we forget God and everyone lives the way he wants. It shows people standing up against the culture for God and how God uses them. It shows how wicked people can be when they choose to wallow in sin. And it also shows God’s faithfulness. Israel abandoned him again and again for other gods, but he continued to send judges to rescue them physically from their enemies {think Samson, Gideon} and to point them toward their need of a perfect Judge {Jesus}.
Remembering these border pieces keep us grounded when we study and keep us from looking to ourselves for the reason a passage is important. It’s not about us; it’s about God.
You can’t judge the full puzzle from one piece.
If I handed you a blue puzzle piece and asked what the puzzle looked like, you might say a picture with sky or an ocean. But maybe it’s actually a city scene and the blue is a shop window. Even if the piece I handed you had a clear outline of a dog, that doesn’t mean the entire puzzle is about dogs. It might be a park with a dog walking through it. You really can’t get a feel for the whole by just looking at one piece. And so it goes in Bible study. So many people look at one thing, such as God commanding the Israelites to wipe out the Canaanite nations, and immediately shake their heads. “God is too mean, too vengeful. He isn’t loving, he can’t be trusted. God in the Old Testament is a bully.” And they come to that conclusion through misunderstanding one text and not considering the message of the Bible as a whole.
Remember we talked about border pieces? A border is more than just one piece and God is much more than one attribute. In the above example, the Canaanites had been doing their thing for hundreds of years and chose to not turn to God. They sacrificed their children to false gods and did all manner of wickedness in the name of worship. God kept judgment from them for generations and nothing changed. Sin has consequences and God will judge. But consider the mercy of God in the account of Ruth. Ruth was not an Israelite but a Moabitess. She chose to leave the idolatry that her people practiced and serve God {Ruth 1:16}. God blessed her and not only provided her and Naomi with food and provision through Boaz, but God also made her descendants future kings {David, Solomon, etc., Ruth 4:22} and the Messiah {Jesus, Matt. 1:5}.
It is a great injustice of ours to limit God to what we observe in one passage or story in the Bible. The whole Bible speaks to who God is and God doesn’t go against himself. If one passage demonstrates God is omniscient {think of when God told Abraham that Sarah would have a son in Gen. 18:10-15, 21:1-3} and another passage shows his mercy {God saved Rahab and her family from destruction in Josh. 2:12-14, 6:25}, we need to recognize that both those attributes are part of God’s character. God is multifaceted and there are parts of him we won’t fully understand this side of heaven. And it’s a good thing! If we knew everything about God or everything he knows, we wouldn’t have a very powerful God!
Just as a puzzle’s full picture and beauty isn’t revealed until you can see the entire thing, we don’t see a full view of God or his redemptive plan when we focus on only parts of His Word. The individual pieces can be confusing or misinterpreted unless we take an overhead look.
It takes time, dedication, and patience.
This last point is important to remember when you get frustrated. Unless you are working a child’s 24 piece puzzle, it will take time and patience. Usually the first time I sit down to a new puzzle, I am only sorting pieces, looking for edges and corners, and flipping all the pieces to right side up. My children have been known to wander past the table at some point and say, “You haven’t even started? What have you been doing?” It looks like it wouldn’t take long and piles of pieces sorted by color or shape and edge aren’t exciting when you want to see the completed result. However, this initial time is crucial to the success of your puzzling and it lessens your overall frustration at hunting for pieces later.
When we think about Bible study and Christian growth, there are no shortcuts. We can read other books and resources, listen to sermons and podcasts, watch interactive videos. But we won’t really “get it” or see the full beauty of the Gospel if we aren’t regularly in our Bibles for ourselves. I’ve attended church my entire life, gone to Bible studies, taken Bible classes in high school and college. But some of my biggest “a-ha!” moments have come when I’m reading the Bible on my own. It’s the daily exposure, the slowly reading and taking notes and making observations that will truly make everything click. But just as you can’t pour the puzzle pieces onto a table and have them magical build the puzzle, you can’t read isolated passages — or worse never read the Bible — and expect to understand what those passage mean and how they connect to everything else.
I have never regretted time reading my Bible. In fact, I have a whole list of people, passages, and themes that I want to dive deeper into. But as you read and study, don’t get so hung up on one piece that you quit reading and start making ignorant statements about what the Bible does or doesn’t say. Keep reading. Keep clicking the pieces together. God wants you to know him and understand His Word and he will help you. One piece at a time.
Photo by Hans-Peter Gausteron Unsplash
Bible quotations from the ESV {English Standard Version}