Some years ago an alarm was raised over the drastic increase in the number of people suffering from peanut allergies. Mothers panicked at the threat posed by peanuts, which led to peanuts being banned from airline flights and from many schools. What is going on here? Peanuts are a healthy and nutritious food.

In recent years, it has been suggested that over protective parents may be the problem rather than peanuts. The first clue was the news that the rate of peanut allergies is low in countries where babies are routinely fed snacks containing peanut butter, and much, much higher in counries where babies are protected from exposure to peanuts. In recent years, large scale research projects have demonstrated that babies fed peanut butter a number of times within the first year of life (the recommendation is to begin at four to six months) are unlikely to develop peanut allergies later on. This leads one to conclude that well-intentioned mothers who did their utmost to protect their babies from those nasty peanuts have done more harm than good.

I wonder if something similar hasn’t happened with Christian doctrine. Parents conclude that little boys and girls aren’t able to digest the solid food of the Word, so they feed them on Bible story books. These books reduce the Bible to a series of simple morality tales, with charming illustrations, often omitting major details, or even adjusting them for the sensibilities of little children. When the children grow up, their understanding of the Bible is still based on those charming pictures and they are unable to digest the solid food of the Word of God.

As adults they read the same stories to their own children and show them the same pictures. They choose a reference Bible that doesn’t unsettle the understanding formed in their childhood. They prefer Bible reading plans that give them bite-sized portions from hither and thither in the Bible, but never give the opportunity to stop and consider the context of what they read. Any suggestion that they are missing the solid food of the Word is apt to be met with stunned disbelief. Aren’t they reading the Bible every day? But it seems the Bible story books they read in their childhood have made them allergic to the meat of the Word.

Doctors have shown that children and adults with peanut allergies can overcome those allergies if they follow a program that begins with a very small amount of peanut powder that is gradually increased. May I suggest a similar program for Bible reading. Pick a book of the Bible and read it through, a little every day. You will find there is much more to the story than you imagined.

Don’t worry if you don’t completely understand what you read the first time, or the twentieth time. I have been reading the Bible daily for 55 years and have gone through the entire Bible many times, in both English and French. I don’t pretend to understand everything I read. There is such a depth to the Word of God that I notice something new every time I read.

One of the first things I discovered was that every verse of the Bible is linked to everything else in the rest of the Bible. There is nothing superfluous, nothing trivial. That is something that won’t be discovered in skimming over the surface of the Bible.