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Podcast: Help Jump-Start Your Journey through Scripture (Jonathan Pennington)

April 03, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

The Journey of Understanding the Bible

In today’s episode, Jonathan Pennington details three helpful approaches to reading the Bible, explaining how they each complement each other. He also highlights the potholes that we so often run into as we engage with Scripture and how to avoid them.

Come and See

Come and See

Jonathan T. Pennington

Jonathan Pennington helps readers understand what it means to know God and provides 3 effective approaches to interpreting Scripture: informational, theological, and transformational.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:58 - Learning to Read the Bible Is like Learning to Drive a Car

Matt Tully
Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Jonathan Pennington
I am so glad to be here. Thank you.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to talk about coming to know God through the Bible—how we use God’s word to get to know him better. That’s the whole point of the Bible in many ways. When it comes to knowing God through the Bible, you like to talk about that as a journey. You use the metaphor of a journey or a road trip as a helpful tool for understanding what this is all about. Why do you think that’s a helpful way to think about reading the Bible?

Jonathan Pennington
That’s a good question. It’s actually a very common and old metaphor. It’s a metaphor in the Bible itself. There is lots of discussion of being on the way and so on. And obviously, it’s certainly not unique to me in the Christian tradition. But I think it is really important because our lives are experienced as a journey. We are developmental creatures. We could have been created in a way that was non-developmental. We’re just used to it. We don’t think about it. We could have been created as full humans—boom! I guess Adam and Eve were in some sense, but we’re not. We are born and we go through stages of narrative arc, if you will, from birth to death, and of course the beginnings and the end look a lot alike in each other’s journeys. I think the gospel and the whole message of the Bible—Old and New Testament, but I think as clearly as any place in the New Testament—I think the gospel itself is described largely in terms of a journey, in the sense that we are being conformed into the image of Christ. There are actually a lot of metaphors the Bible uses to describe what it means to be God’s people. Certainly, one that we’re very familiar with is the legal metaphor where we go from being guilty to being forgiven and free. And that’s great. It’s obviously very important, but I think probably maybe a bigger one, and one that is more comprehensive than that, is this idea that we are going from being humans made in God’s image; to being humans made in God’s image with that image being cracked and smeared and broken; to being humans that because of the incarnation and life and death and resurrection and ascension of Jesus and the sending of the Spirit, the image of God in us is being restored. And so I think that whole idea of the fundamental idea of the gospel is that we’re being remade is also a very developmental idea. And so I think it’s helpful and it’s appropriate to think about the Bible and our encounter with that as part of our development. We’re on a journey as we encounter God as we grow.

Matt Tully
One of the things that came to mind as I was thinking about speaking about reading the Bible as this journey was that it helps to set our expectations differently than we sometimes are primed to think when it comes to reading the Bible. Bible reading is so ingrained in the evangelical Christian landscape. We all feel like it’s important. We all know that it’s this fundamental thing. Many of us struggle to do it like we say we know we should. What is some of the helpful calibrating that can happen when we think about Bible reading and the study of God’s word as a journey?

Jonathan Pennington
There are a lot of ways we could go with that. What I think I would want to emphasize mostly is that knowledge, which is what we often think about what we’re getting when we study the Bible, and we are. We’re getting knowledge about God and knowledge about ourselves. But knowledge should not be thought of in terms of an acquisition—like a purchase or grabbing something. Knowledge is actually a developmental reality. It’s a coming to see in a certain way. I’m thinking here of my good friend Drew Johnson, who’s a professor in New York City, and he and I have worked together on a lot of projects where we’ve talked about this a lot, and I’ve learned a lot of this from him, too, that it’s really only in the modern period (for the last 350 years or so) in the Western civilization that we’ve come to think of knowledge again in this kind of acquisition way. There’s something we don’t know, then we get it. Therefore, we have the knowledge, as opposed to knowledge more in the wisdom category, which is where we’re coming to see things in a certain way and then we return to them and we see them maybe slightly differently and we see them in a deeper way and we experience them. Knowledge is really (and this is how the Bible talks too) is really more like teaching your kid to drive a manual transmission. I have six kids, and I always joke that I’ve (mostly) successfully had six graduates of the Jonathan Pennington School of Driving. They haven’t been without their accidents, but they’ve all done it. Take the stick shift part of it out for a minute and just consider teaching someone to drive—teaching a sixteen or seventeen year old to drive. They can read a book about it. They have to pass a test at the DMV in my state to begin that journey. They’ve spent sixteen years riding in vehicles and observing, and as they’ve gotten older they’ve observed more. But then to really learn to drive, it’s very different than having that sort of acquisition of knowledge of what’s a right of way, what does a green light mean versus a red light? You really have to get behind the wheel and start doing it and start driving. And especially at first, you need a lot of direction that you really couldn’t have gotten until you’re in a situation. You can imagine lots of situations like that if you’ve taught a kid to drive or if you remember being taught to drive. You might be in a situation where there’s a car that’s waiting to turn left, and then this person turns in, or whatever it is, you can’t describe that in a book to somebody or even orally. You have to be in the situation and then have somebody who’s an expert and more experienced next to you saying, *Okay, in this situation, you have to think about these factors and here’s what to do. Well, it turns out that’s actually how most of the knowledge that we acquire is actually acquired. It’s not mostly acquired in this mathematical gaining kind of situation. It’s actually acquired through experience, and that’s the normal way that knowledge comes to us. And that’s how the Bible talks about both knowledge and wisdom. Even the word “knowledge” is used in that way. So all that to say—man, that’s a long-winded answer—but the point is the whole idea of a journey is really beneficial to us because that’s actually what coming to know God, even at the knowledge level, involves. It’s trial and error, and it’s experience-based.

Matt Tully
I also think that metaphor—the picture of learning to drive a car—is helpful, too, because beyond just the facts of the road—knowing what to do, in theory, at a stop sign, what to do at a yellow light, and that kind of a thing. There’s also a certain intuition that comes with that experience, where you can know how to respond to situations intuitively, and it allows you to be much faster, and it’s actually probably really important for our safety, as we drive, that there’s this intuitive response to situations. How does that function, or how does that play, into our encounter with the Bible?

Jonathan Pennington
Yeah, that’s exactly right. It is curious to think about: Is that intuition? It is intuition, but it’s really a trained intuition. It’s not like it’s natural, especially when you’re talking about driving. Some things might be natural, like flinching from a fire or something. But I think with driving it’s a sensibility. You might say it’s a trained subconscious awareness of what the wisest thing to do in a particular situation is. That’s really what I think you’re describing as intuition. It’s this kind of acquired awareness to make a correct judgment. That’s actually a great way to describe what happens when you read the Bible. When we’re reading the Bible, it’s not a chemistry problem to be solved. It’s not a math problem to get the solution to. When you’re reading a text of Scripture, there’s a lot going on. There’s your attitude, your posture of heart, your previous knowledge, your training, your obedience. That affects how we read texts, actually, your willingness to obey or not. There’s your personal experiences you’ve had with people. Just think about it this way: certain theological positions, if someone’s more on the Reformed side or the Lutheran side or the Arminian side or the Wesleyan side, or whatever it is. Why do we believe what we believe and why are we inclined to read verses in a certain way? Each of those denominational traditions still read the same Bible and they will see certain verses differently. Why is it that you see those verses differently? Well, part of it has to do with good skills of exegesis. That’s true. But whether we realize it or not, a lot of it has to do with who our parents were and who the person who discipled us was. They trained us to see the Bible in a certain way, and that’s okay. It’s part of being a limited human. And this is why things like the creeds matter, or doctrinal statements (some churches just call it a doctoral statement). Those things are not the Bible, but they help shape and guide our sensibilities. They help us say these are the guardrails, these are the curbs, these are the turn lanes, if you want. So I do think that it’s a very close analogy in the sense that we’re learning sensibilities from reading Scripture, from being discipled, from hearing sermons, from reading books, from suffering, from failing. And all those things train our sensibilities over the journey of our lives so that we can become better readers of Scripture.

10:53 - Informational Reading

Matt Tully
In your new book, you break up this idea of the journey of knowing Scripture and knowing God through Scripture into three distinct stages. I think you’re careful to say these aren’t as distinct as maybe you’re making them out to be in these chapters, but nevertheless, I wanted to walk through each of them separately. Stage one is what you call “informational reading.” What do you mean by that?

Jonathan Pennington
They are distinct. This is the dilemma, isn’t it? In some ways it’s helpful to distinguish them, but in reality it’s often all happening simultaneously. So, the analogy of the journey breaks down even in that sense. But yeah, informational reading is really just concentrating on a lot of the skills, especially the ones we’ve developed over the course of human history, but maybe even especially in the last several hundred years. A lot of skills are paying really close attention to how languages work, how Greek and Hebrew work for the Bible, how texts/stories are structured. I’ve been paying attention to how arguments are made, for example, in a Pauline Epistle, or how the Psalms work as poetry. All those kinds of skills are really things that we can get better at, that we can be taught about, and that we can gain information from. Because we really do want to be hearing from God in Scripture. We don’t go to the Bible—I don’t, and I assume you don’t either—I don’t go to the Bible just thinking, What can I make it mean today? I’m going to look for the verse to justify whatever I want to do in life. Now, some people probably do do that, but I don’t think it’s the wisest way to read the Bible. So the informational stage is an initial humble, attentive submission to the text of Scripture. It’s based on a belief that we need someone—God—to reveal himself to us. We don’t just need our own foolish wisdom, so we need to hear from the other. We need to hear from the capital Other. And the first stage in doing that is learning to pay attention to what the text is saying, how the text runs, how the words run, and how the argument’s being made. And so it really is a matter of submission. It’s a matter of humility before an author other than ourselves, and especially the ultimate author of God.

Matt Tully
We kind of live in this stage when we’re evangelical Christians and we think about what it means to study the Bible. We’re looking at the genre and the word order and the word choice. And we’re looking at the background of the book and who the author was and the history behind some things. Would that be accurate, that that’s where some of these tools and methods will often live?

Jonathan Pennington
Yeah, and it’s really important. These are really good things for confessional Christians who are reading the Bible to learn from others. Because there are lots of other ways you can read the Bible. You could read the Bible just to learn something about first century views on women, or first century views on what it means to be a Roman centurion or whatever. There are lots of reasons. You could read the New Testament if you’re a scholar of the history of the Greek language. You could read the Greek New Testament with a particular set of questions of: How was the middle voice used in the first century documents of Hellenized Judaism? You can ask all kinds of questions of the Bible like that, and that’s fine and that’s fair. There’s nothing wrong with asking those kinds of questions. But for those of us who really want to base our lives on what the Bible’s saying, because we believe it’s inspired by God and it’s God’s direction to us for wisdom, it really is important that we do this work of paying close attention. However, where you’re going with your observation I think is important. We tend, in our tradition, probably to stop there, or at least to emphasize that as if that is the most important thing or the truest reading, or something like that. And that’s a big part of what I’m wanting to push back on a little bit, or at least explore and invite people onto a journey to consider that that’s not all that goes into good reading of the Bible.

Matt Tully
Before we move on to the two other stages where we unpack some of that, I wonder if we could stick with that road trip metaphor a little bit longer here. What are some of the most common potholes that we should be on the lookout for in this stage? Where might we be tempted to go off track or take things too far or be myopic when it comes to gleaning this information from the text?

Jonathan Pennington
That’s a good and important question. I think that it is very easy, when we focus on an informational reading, to, as I was kind of just saying, make that an end in itself. We feel like we’ve done our good Bible reading when we’ve come to it with a lot of rigor and study genre and historical backgrounds and whatever. And that stuff is all very interesting, and it can actually be really deceptive because it could be very exciting and you could feel like you’re really growing in knowledge. And then if you just end there and it doesn’t result in an encounter with God and personal transformation, and also the humility of reading with the communion of the saints throughout history and understanding how other people have read these texts and interpreted them, then it can really, ironically, be the opposite of edifying. It can be the opposite of what the Bible’s intent was. You could become very proud. And even if you’re not proud, you can just be very content that you’ve sort of done your duty and you’ve grown in factual knowledge about the God of the Bible. Again, those are not bad things; those are good things. But that’s not the point of the Bible. The point of the Bible is not that we just acquire a bunch of facts about him. So I think that the real pothole is just getting stuck. Again, for a lot of people it’s an exciting place to get stuck. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of preaching, I think, in our tradition (the evangelical tradition) that is really not preaching. It’s really more downloading of interesting data with this new high priest of knowledge who’s up behind the pulpit, who knows all the background information because he’s read some commentaries about something. And so he gives this zinger of Here’s what this really means! And then everybody in the congregation is sitting in awe, Oh! I wish I could read the Bible like that! That’s so amazing! I’ve never seen a text like that! That isn’t all bad in a sense, but that's not the point of preaching—to awe everybody with all your factual knowledge of the backgrounds of the Bible. And so I think there’s a real potential that that becomes an echo chamber or a self-loop where that’s all it becomes. It’s just this transfer of information about the Bible, which is, again, not the point of the Bible. The point of the Bible is to understand who God is and encounter him and grow in his likeness. So that’s probably the biggest danger.

Matt Tully
Maybe that’s going to fit into even the way that you order these stages. We’re talking about stage one, informational. Should we assume something about that? Is this, in some ways, the lowest level of engagement with the Bible? By definition, you wouldn’t want to stop there.
It’s not the end of the journey.

Jonathan Pennington
Yeah, it is lowest. I don’t know if I’d want to say lowest, but it is the first, with the qualification that we gave at the beginning, that a lot of times this stuff is happening cyclically. The metaphor breaks down. I think they’re all important. I think what I was trying to do with the journey metaphor is to recognize that you really will not get to the destination well and safely if you try to skip any part of it, because they each cover ground that we need on the journey. But yes, I would agree that, in light of what we just said, the potential of stopping at this point is great. And so in that sense, it’s foundational and not sufficient. “Necessary but not sufficient” is a great philosophical phrase that we use to refer to ideas. And I think that’s true of this.

19:32 - Theological Reading

Matt Tully
Let’s move on to stage two, which you call “theological reading.” Unpack that for us.

Jonathan Pennington
This is maybe the least familiar, in some ways, to the evangelical tradition—in one sense and in another sense not. The point of the theological reading is very much related to what I said a few minutes ago as well, that why we believe a text is saying what it’s saying—I’ll say it better this way: why we believe a certain interpretation of a text has a lot to do with things beyond those informational skills. It does have to do with our theological tradition. And that may sound a little weird to some people in our tradition because we’re kind of used to emphasizing the Bible and—I don’t ever say this—a lot of times people certainly in fundamentalism and in some forms of evangelicalism would say the Bible and the Bible alone, or no creed but Jesus, or something like that. The good of that kind of comment is what it’s supposed to be indicating well is that the Bible is unique and that it’s a unique authority and we don’t make it mean whatever we want it to mean. But the problem with that kind of view, and in practice, is that the reality is not only are all of us reading conditioned by a theological tradition—we all are. Not only is that inevitable—all of us have assumptions and prejudices and presuppositions and training and influences on why we think the Bible says what it says; that’s inevitable and it’s part of being a limited human. It’s not only inevitable, but it’s also a good thing to read the Bible in a kind of conditioned way. To go back to our driving analogy, it’s good to have an expert who has driven longer than us and has maybe, to extend the analogy, knows how wheels work and knows how engines work. It’s good to have people guiding us as we learn to do anything. And that’s what the creeds were, starting back in the early church. It's what doctrinal statements are in any church that would have a doctrinal statement. I’m a professor as well as a pastor, and as a professor I have to sign doctrinal statements. Somebody might object and say, Well, don’t you believe in the Bible? Why are you signing a doctoral statement? And if you couldn’t sign this doctoral statement, you couldn’t teach it? Well, yes, we believe in the Bible as primary and unique in its authority, but lots of people can read the Bible in lots of different ways. There are very different denominational readings, and even heretics can read the Bible—this very same Bible—and come up with a very different interpretation of a lot of verses. So it was recognized way back, already in the first century of the church, that while the Bible is unique in its revelation, we need help to read it well. It’s called the regula fidei, the rule of faith. Then the creeds are developed—the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed. The Reformers wrote all kinds of creeds and statements of faith that we do as well. And so the whole point of this second stage of the journey is just to acknowledge that, to think about that, and say that’s part of reading the Bible well. The church’s tradition helps us be good readers, both in creedal ways—what are Trinitarian doctrines, for example, that help us. What is the nature of Christ? That helps us. And also, in the sense of like, How have Christians before us read a particular text? So when I’m reading Matthew 18 or Revelation 3, it’s really helpful to say, I’m not starting from scratch here. How did people twenty years ago, 100 years ago, 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago read this text? Again, that’s a part of humility and part of recognizing my limits as a knower and as an interpreter, and that there are people that have gone before us that help us. So the whole point of this is let’s, again, have a heavy dose of humility and recognize that we need help in reading the Bible, and that in no way undermines the authority or uniqueness of the Bible. In fact, it helps us to be the best kind of readers.

Matt Tully
How would you respond to somebody who hears all of that and says, But yeah, throughout history, Christians, whether today or in the past, constantly disagree about all of these things. There are confessions that disagree with each other, and so if we are looking to those as guides, we’re kind of fundamentally looking to something that’s fallible and that’s imperfect and clearly isn’t really a reliable guide. Shouldn’t our goal be to progressively, as we spend more time in the Bible, clear away all these other external influences so that we can read the Bible purely on its own and let it dictate exactly how we interpret it? How would you respond to that kind of objection?

Jonathan Pennington
Your articulation was getting better as it went along. I was ready at the earlier part, the easier part to respond to. But yeah, I think there’s a good response to that. Again, one way to talk about it is what’s the alternative? Me as the authority? Me with my limited knowledge, or me and my local group that somehow has superior knowledge over all the people that have gone before us? That’s kind of a semi-snarky response, but I think the more constructive response could be that yeah, this is the whole point: different theological traditions disagree and different denominations and different creeds disagree. The creeds are pretty conciliar. That is, most of the creeds or things that were agreed upon by the universal church from the early days. That’s a little different, but even so, there are disagreements between denominations and statements of faith. And that’s exactly why it’s good to continually emphasize that the Bible is unique in its authority. We’re not pitting them as a couple of options that are equal. You’ve got creeds or you’ve got theological statements and the Bible; because if you do that, then you’re right. You are in a dilemma of when the theology’s very different, then who wins here? The best way to think about it, Christianly, is that the Bible is the norming norm. That is one of the ways it was described. It’s the unique authority, but again, unique authority and ultimate authority doesn’t mean we don’t also need helps. So it’s holding those things in tension, to recognize that we are constantly going back to the Bible and we’re constantly seeking to read it in humility with all the skills that we can develop. And at points we may realize we disagree with something we used to think theologically, and that’s okay. And we may decide I’m a Calvinist and not a Lutheran, or I’m a Wesleyan and not a Calvinist, or whatever it is. But again, that unique emphasis of the Bible as the uniquely authoritative doesn’t mean that we’re alone and that we should try to do it alone. What that means is that we’re just left to our own very, very limited understanding. If that’s not the height of arrogance, I don’t know what is—rejecting 2,000 years of thoughtful Christians who have known God and have pursued him. Yes, their theological writings are not inerrant, but that doesn’t mean they’re not very helpful.

Matt Tully
I think that’s the most helpful bit that you highlighted there in response to that. Maybe in an unintentional way, that kind of a perspective is a pretty arrogant one that is pretty blind to the real potential for our own blind spots, for our own assumptions about the Bible, about God, about what it means to be a follower of God. We can just think that those couldn’t ever be a factor. You say it out loud and it sounds pretty ridiculous.

Jonathan Pennington
Right. Like, I’ve got it. Our local congregation and wherever has got the correct interpretation of the Bible. Throughout this book, Come and See, I have all these little side trips, which are the most fun for me, really. And they all relate really to this issue of, How do we know things? That’s really what it comes down to. The big fancy philosophical term for it is epistemology. You don’t have to care about that term if you don’t want to, but it’s a great question. How is it that we come to know and believe what we believe? And that’s a lot more complicated than we might at first think. And that’s the point. It requires a lot of humility and it requires a recognition that, again, we are all recipients of training and recipients of traditions—sometimes good, sometimes bad. There are a lot of things we have to come to reject later and get over. That’s okay. But to be human is to be limited, and that’s fundamental. And I’m not even talking about sin. Sin also affects our ability to interpret the Bible well. But even just as human creatures, we are limited. We can’t know everything. We can’t experience everything. We only have our perspective on things that are very different from others. And so this big question of how we know things really relates to the idea that if you and I could just open the Bible and just from my limited perspective be guaranteed to get this perfect reading—it really just shows a kind of lack of self-awareness of what it really means to be human. To be human is to be very limited and broken. And again, you add in sin as well. In theology we call it the noetic effects of sin—the fact that sin not only affects our moral choices, but it actually clouds our minds often. And so you add that in, and that’s why we need help from other people. We need the community of the saints throughout history to help us read the Bible well. The last thing I’d want is to be stuck with my own limited knowledge of the Bible.

29:59 - Transformational Reading

Matt Tully
The last stage that you highlight is “transformational reading.” How would you summarize that? How does that fit into what we’ve already talked about?

Jonathan Pennington
In the traditional, modern way of talking we might call this “application.” I do talk about application of the Bible in the book, but it’s very intentionally not separated in the presentation I’m giving into this icing on the cake kind of thing. Application is the final stage of the journey; it’s the one that is necessary to get to the journey. And so using that analogy, we have to ask, What actually is the point of the Bible? It really comes down to that. What is the reason that God has inscripturated—put into writing—the revelation of himself? What’s the point? Is it so that we can know things about him? So that we can make apologetic arguments? Is it so we could really have fun reading literally across the canon? Those are all great things. The point, very clearly, is that we might know him. This is the point: God wants to be in a relationship with us. He is in the process of restoring the broken relationship, and Scripture is the main means. It’s not the only means, but it’s the main means by which we grow into our relationship with God. And as we see him, we become transformed. Again, back to what I talked about earlier, the message of the New Testament is that Christ is the perfect representation of God. He’s the image of God that Adam lost—and even beyond Adam because he enters into glory—and that to be a Christian is to be one that, by the power of the Spirit, is being conformed into that image and being transformed over the course of our lives. And when we finally see him fully, we will become fully known and become fully like him. Not in a divine way. We will always be creatures; we’re not the Creator. But the end goal of the Bible is that we might actually become different people, with the perfect image of God in us restored through the power and work of the triune God. And so once you get that and once you start thinking in terms of those ways, which is how the Bible talks, that really helps us see that the point of the Bible is very clearly applicational, or “transformational” is the word I use. That’s not an add-on. That is the whole point.

Matt Tully
What I also appreciate about what you just described is that it also broadens out application to more than just, How does this verse impact my life tomorrow? What am I going to do differently tomorrow because of this verse? I think this view of transformation is so much broader and deeper than simply creating a checklist for us to do, in terms of our walk with God the next day. Can you speak to that a little bit and how sometimes it seems like we almost shrink application down to “to dos” instead of transformation.

Jonathan Pennington
There’s an art there because we are called to become different in how we show up, and that includes habits—forming habits and forming sensibilities. But I think the best way I might respond to what you’ve said there is just to think about what I do as a preacher and a teacher at my church. I view everything as an invitation from God. This is what I try to do when I preach: invite people to have their sensibilities and their habits and their hearts and their attitudes and their relationships be transformed into a different way of seeing and being in the world and a different way of inhabiting the world. So that’s the language we use at our church a lot is that Jesus is inviting us to inhabit the world in a different way. That may involve taking a particular verse and doing what it says or not doing what it says; that’s a good thing. But it’s deeper than that. It’s training our sensibilities. And this is why the Gospels, which is my area of academic work, are so important because I think they especially shock us and help us see, by Jesus interacting with people and making statements and valuing things and devaluing other things—those really shaped our hearts and our attitudes. They’re not just saying don’t drink or chew or run with girls who do. They’re not just giving us a list like, don’t go to movies or do go to movies or whatever. It’s something more profound. It’s something at a deeper level of learning to see the world in the same way that Jesus does.

34:47 - Life Comes Through Death

Matt Tully
As a final question, Jonathan, as you were finishing your final edits to this new book, something happened to your family that really changed your family life dramatically, and still, to this day, has really changed your life. I wonder if you could share a little bit about what happened.

Jonathan Pennington
Yeah, sure. Thanks. Right during the final edits of this book, which had been a long writing project with stops and starts but it was kind of down to the end, we discovered completely out of the blue that my wife had a very large and invasive non-cancerous (we eventually found out) brain tumor that was causing her troubles that we did not realize. But then the surgery itself—the removal of the tumor—caused some significant brain damage. Nothing was done wrong; it was just that it was a very in-grown tumor. So the removal of it, which had to happen, basically left her completely paralyzed on the right side. So we went from totally normal, very busy lives with six young adult children and all that we do—we both work full-time and do lots of things—on a Wednesday to within six days she woke up in a hospital bed with no ability on her right side. So that was quite a shock. Long story short, she’s regained a lot of that, but not all of it, and we don’t know what the future holds. She’s able to have more mobility now with a lot of help, like a brace and things. But it’s obviously been a very difficult and dark season. At the same time, there has been a lot of sweetness—a lot of love from our church and people all over the world. And I was able to just be home with her basically for the first six months of that, and that was really a good time for us as well. We could just slow down and pay attention to things. And so, as we always say, I think God is doing a thousand good things in every situation. And I don’t say that tritely at all. That’s not a Romans 8:28 heartless rubber stamp on everything—It’s all good! There’s been a lot of darkness, a lot of pain, a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety; but also a lot of good. And that’s how life is. It’s really a mixture of pain and joy. And so I would say this season has only deepened my experience of what I’m suggesting here in the best way to read the Bible and seeing our lives as a journey of development. And the reality is that the only way we really grow is through suffering. It’s just the sad truth. It really taps into the deepest paradox, I believe, of the Bible’s message that joy comes through pain, restoration only comes through loss, and that ultimately life only comes through death. And that is what Jesus himself models, that there’s something greater on the other side of death that could not be apart from the death. “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it will not produce fruit,” as Jesus himself says. So I think this has been another season of our lives where there’s been a very acute and welcomed and painful embracing of that reality.

Matt Tully
Jonathan, thank you so much for taking the time today to walk us through these three stages of our journey with Scripture—stages that all of us can pursue right now in our own lives as we open our Bibles. We just appreciate you taking the time.

Jonathan Pennington
This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much.

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