Two momentous events occurred in 1955: I became a teenager, and rock ‘n roll was born. I am thus a child of the rock ‘n roll era and still recognize the songs that were hits in that era, especially the 1960s. Those songs are still often heard as background music in the malls.

Yesterday, as I was walking through a mall in Saskatoon, the songs I heard were Undun by the Guess Who and Piece of my Heart by Janis Joplin. That led me to thinking of the tragic life of Janis Joplin, her immense popularity and then her death at the age of 27. The Guess Who seem to have largely avoided the snares that trapped her. Their song, American Woman, is an allegory of their rejection of the seduction of the US music industry. The implied message is that they were happy to be a fairly big fish in this little pond called Canada and had no desire to try swimming with the sharks south of the border.

Getting back to their song Undun, and the real inspiration for this post, there is a line in the song that says “too many churches, and not enough truth.” I don’t know what prompted them to drop those words into the song, but I think a lot of people will agree with them. I do.

That’s all I have to say about pop music, the song was just a prompt to bring me back to the existential question: If Christians agree that the Bible is truth, why don’t they agree about wat it says? The answer must be that many (most?) of them are not getting their ideas about truth from the Bible.

Many have grown up reading Bible story books rather than the Bible. The writers of those books, in their desire to impart a lesson, have taken liberties with the accounts in the Bible, to the point of sometimes drawing a lesson that is quite the opposite of what the Bible says. But the idea is solidly planted and when the child becomes adult, he is unable to understand what the Bible says in any other way than what he read in childhood.

Study Bibles are no better. They select Bible passages to guide the unwary reader into believing what the Study Bible editor wants them to believe, and ignore passages that do not agree with that line of thought. Then there are the myriad of books purporting to guide the reader into the truths of the Bible, with as many different conclusions as there are writers. Imagination is not revelation. Imagination comes from the heart of man and can appear completely satisfying to the mind. Revelation comes from the mind of God, through His Word and the Holy Spirit, and is the only thing that can fully satisfy the heart.

Is the Bible hazy, or the Bible reader lazy? Some people seek daily inspiration from the Bible by reading little bits from here and there in the Bible each day. This is just playing hopscotch over the surface of the Bible. It is only by reading the whole Bible that we can begin to see the interconnectedness of the book and discover how the Bible interprets itself.

I said “begin to see.” We are always going to be learners. The Bible is simple enough to engage the mind of a child and plain enough to lead a sinner to repentance. It is also so deep that no individual can ever claim to understand everything about the way of God in the past, present or future. Anyone who claims to have all the answers is a blind leader of the blind.