I have had a couple of foot surgeries over the last few years. The first involved fusing three joints to correct some lifelong issues. The second came after a freak slip on my wet patio, when I dislocated my foot at the ankle and broke my fibula in multiple places. There are probably more impressive ways to sustain that much damage, but unfortunately, I was taken out by a patio. After surgery, when everything hurt and nothing felt normal, the pain medicine felt like a gift from God.
But the medicine could not do my physical therapy for me. Healing still meant doing the exercises and working to regain strength and movement. Unfortunately, the pain meds helping me feel better did not get me out of that part. Some of the very things I needed to do to recover were uncomfortable, and I would have preferred to be comfortably excused from them. Pain relief mattered. But feeling better for a while was not the same thing as being healed.
I think many of us are tempted to approach the Bible looking for a spiritual opiate. We want a quick verse we can wash down with a glass of water that will quiet the discomfort so we can just get on with life. And, thankfully, Scripture really does comfort wounded people. God draws near to the brokenhearted. When we are anxious or grieving, turning to him for reassurance is a good and faithful thing to do. We should never sneer at a wounded person looking for mercy.
The trouble comes when we want relief from the very conviction that could lead us toward healing.
When Comfort Becomes Avoidance
Over my years in ministry, I have had many conversations where someone wanted reassurance but not repentance. They wanted a Bible verse that said God understood and excused their situation, but they were not willing to ask whether he was calling them to apologize or change course. Much to the detriment of my pastoral ego, I recognize that instinct in myself, too. Sometimes I would prefer a soothing verse to an honest conversation about what sin I have been excusing.
In fact, far too often, we have become experts at this. We have learned some very spiritual-sounding ways to protect ourselves from uncomfortable scriptural confrontations. We’ve learned to dress our excuses in church clothes. We say things like, “God knows my heart.” Yeah, he does! And that is not always as comforting as we think it is. God knowing my heart means he can see it all, including the resentment beneath my explanation of why I am right.
“We have learned some very spiritual-sounding ways to protect ourselves from uncomfortable scriptural confrontations.”
Or someone asks an uncomfortable question about a decision we’re making, and we answer, “I just feel peace about it.” Sometimes, though, we’ve simply found a way to stop feeling convicted. That person may be interrupting our excuses rather than disturbing the peace of God.
Most of this is very human. We are tired, defensive, or afraid of what obedience might cost. But if we only want Scripture to reassure us, we will eventually resist the parts that tell us the truth. The Bible is a terrible opiate. We keep asking for another dose of reassurance, and it keeps handing us the physical therapy exercises.
Some Passages Are Clear Enough
I wrote a book giving people permission to admit that the Bible is weird and some tools for how to proceed with it anyway. When we talk about the Bible being weird, we often think of strange visions or beasts rising out of the sea that are hard to understand. But there is another kind of biblical weirdness. It’s the kind that confronts us precisely because we DO understand it.
For example, Jesus tells his followers to love their enemies and pray for their persecutors (Matthew 5:44). I can explain that passage. I can preach it. I can eloquently talk about the value of enemy-love in a small group Bible study. But then someone actually mistreats me, and suddenly I find myself looking for loopholes. I mean, surely Jesus understands what this person is like. Surely he cannot expect me to seek their good after what they did. As the resident Bible nerd at my church, I know how to study myself into an excuse. But, at that point, another commentary is not what I need most. I need to pray for the person whose name I would rather leave out of my prayers.
“There is another kind of biblical weirdness. It’s the kind that confronts us precisely because we DO understand it.”
The commands of Jesus are invitations into a way of life that often pushes against our instincts. His teaching about the heart reaches beneath respectable behavior to expose what we would rather keep hidden. So following him involves a surrender that can be uncomfortable long before it feels natural. This is part of what it means to confess Jesus as Lord. His words have authority over the places where I am most tempted to negotiate.
Unsafe for Our Illusions
If the Bible only comforts my assumptions and reinforces what I already wanted to believe, and never challenges or confronts those things, I may just be using religious language to avoid true discipleship. 
I like to tell my people that there is a difference between something being harmful and something being uncomfortably true. Scripture is unsafe for our illusions. It threatens the version of ourselves that wants God without repentance and transformation. It challenges the story that says good intentions are enough. It questions the excuses we have repeated so often that they sound reasonable. It refuses to let following Jesus become something we admire while keeping our actual lives out of reach.
This helps explain why we sometimes disengage from passages we understand quite well. We skim. We move toward something more encouraging. We assure ourselves that we already know what that section means. Meanwhile, the apology that passage calls for remains unspoken and the resentment stays comfortably in place.
The passage we are avoiding may be the very place where God is calling us toward freedom.
Exposed Before the God of Mercy
Hebrews describes the Word of God as “living and active,” able to discern “the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12, ESV). Verse 13 makes the exposure personal: “And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” Yikes! Apparently, my carefully arranged fig leaves aren’t hiding as much as I thought.
But keep reading. The passage goes on to describe Jesus as our great high priest, who understands our weaknesses and has faced temptation without sin. Through him, we are invited to approach God confidently for mercy and the grace we need (Hebrews 4:14-16).
We need both the exposure and the invitation. The God who sees through our defenses has made a way for us to draw near. We can tell the truth about our sin because our hope rests in Jesus, who gave himself for us. His grace gives us somewhere to bring what his Word exposes, just as it gives us help as we learn to obey.
“The God who sees through our defenses has made a way for us to draw near.”
So, when a passage unsettles us, we should slow down. We should ask whether we have understood it in context and invite the wisdom of others to help us see what we may be missing. But let’s make sure that when its claim becomes clear, we take a concrete step of obedience instead of searching for a less demanding reading.
The Bible offers something much greater than helping us feel better about the lives we are already living. It brings us before the God who tells the truth and leads us into life with him.
The Bible is not an opiate. The Bible is unsafe for our illusions. The good news is that we can trust the God who strips them away.
Adapted from Let the Bible Be Weird: How to Read Scripture Without Flattening Its Strangeness, by Billy Johnson.
