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Bible Studies Understanding Scripture
Difficult Bible Passages
Violence, silence, apparent contradiction, and the passages people quietly stop reading. How to sit with them honestly.
Every honest reader hits passages that trouble them. This study is about how to stay in the room with those texts rather than quietly closing the book.
What you’ll explore
- 01 Admitting the difficulty instead of explaining it away
- 02 Violence in the Old Testament
- 03 Passages about slavery and about women
- 04 Apparent contradictions between accounts
- 05 Texts that seem to contradict the character of Christ
- 06 What the church has said, and where it has disagreed
- 07 Living with a question you cannot close
Admitting the difficulty instead of explaining it away
Read 2 Peter 3:15-16
Peter says there are things in Paul’s letters that are hard to understand — in the New Testament itself. Starting from that concession is more honest and more durable than a defence that has to be airtight. A faith that requires no hard passages exist is brittle.
Violence in the Old Testament
Read Deuteronomy 20:16-18; Joshua 6:20-21
The conquest commands are the sharpest case, and Christians have answered along several lines: judgment on specific societies after long warning, God’s accommodation to a brutal ancient world, or conquest accounts written in the exaggerated idiom of ancient war reporting. Each has serious defenders and serious objections. None has become the church’s settled answer.
Passages about slavery and about women
Read Ephesians 6:5-9; 1 Timothy 2:11-12; Galatians 3:28
The New Testament regulates slavery rather than abolishing it, and Christians led both sides of the abolition argument using these texts. Paul’s instructions about women in worship are read by some as universal order and by others as addressed to a specific situation, and Galatians 3:28 is read in tension with them. These are live disagreements between people who take the text seriously.
Apparent contradictions between accounts
Read Matthew 28:1-8; Mark 16:1-8; Luke 24:1-12
The resurrection accounts differ on who arrived, what they saw, and what they did next. Ancient historical writing did not expect the kind of harmonisation modern readers assume, and independent witnesses who agree in every detail are usually suspected of collusion. The church preserved all four rather than editing them into agreement.
Texts that seem to contradict the character of Christ
Read Psalm 137:8-9; Luke 6:27-28
The psalm blesses whoever dashes infants against rocks; Jesus says love your enemies. Holding both requires admitting that Scripture contains the raw prayers of the wounded as well as the commands of the Lord, and that including a prayer is not endorsing it. That distinction does real work in the Psalms.
What the church has said, and where it has disagreed
Read Acts 15:6-11
The first recorded church council was convened because Christians disagreed sharply about what Scripture required of Gentiles. Disagreement over hard texts is not a modern failure; it is as old as the church. Knowing that the argument has a history is itself a help.
Living with a question you cannot close
Read Job 38:1-4; Deuteronomy 29:29
God answers Job out of the whirlwind with seventy questions and no explanation, and Job is satisfied without being informed. Deuteronomy says the secret things belong to the Lord. Christians have generally held that a small number of genuinely open questions is the normal condition of faith, not a crisis in it.
Questions to sit with
- Which passage have you been avoiding?
- Have you ever been given a tidy answer that did not hold up? What happened?
- What would it take for you to hold a question open without it unsettling everything?
Every passage in this study
Go deeper
Where this connects
This study sits inside a larger story. Read the passages above in their own books, and follow the thread back through Scripture as a whole.