Hanging Beside a King

There is a moment that seems to come, sooner or later, in every conversation about salvation. It comes when the questions stop being about ideas and start being about names. Theology slips out of the big words and sits down beside us, wearing the face of someone we love.

“But are they really saved?”

The person in question is almost always a loved one—a close friend or family member who perhaps has made some sort of profession of faith, or been recently baptized, or at least begun attending church regularly, but who has yet to show a life marked by change.

“She gave her life to Christ, but in the months since, there’s been little visible growth. She used to pray and go to church, but now she’s just drifting from God and I’m so worried!”

All of this comes tumbling out in Bible study or a home group. Tangled up in fear, hope, and panic-stricken confusion, someone listening reaches for the story that has soothed a thousand anxious hearts:

“Well, remember the thief on the cross.”

Relief floods the room. The thief. The last-minute miracle. The proof that faith can be simple and the reassurance that God doesn’t require too much of us, especially if the end is near.

No one in the room bothers to go look up the story and read it aloud. They don’t need to. They’ve memorized a one-liner that has stood the test of time: a common criminal, ignorant of God, ignorant of Scripture, ignorant of Jesus—who, in his final moments, whispers a simple “I believe” and slips quietly into paradise.

It’s a good story; gentle, merciful, and comforting to many a worried friend by someone who sincerely wants to help.

But it is almost certainly false.

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Not a Clueless Convert

The thief on the cross comes to most Evangelicals as a man with a spiritually blank slate—a random sinner who happened to be in the right place at the right time. “Praise God he heard the gospel and believed before he died!” we say.

Historically, that’s an unlikely scenario. Rome did not crucify pickpockets. Crucifixion was typical for traitors, rebels, and insurrectionists—men who had become a problem for the empire. This sentence was a common one for Zealots, who raised much internal havoc in Israel in the days of Jesus. Whatever else this man was, he was not harmless. More importantly, he was not theologically illiterate.

Listen again to what he actually says:

“We are receiving the due reward of our deeds… but this man has done nothing wrong… Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Luke 23:41-42

Those are loaded words coming from a man who is not grasping at straws in the dark.

·       He believes Jesus is a king—and not the sort who merely reigns in hearts, but one whose rule can be entered.

·       He believes Jesus will still receive a kingdom, even though he’s dying on the stake right next to him.

·       He believes Jesus’ story does not end at death. This man has a category for understanding the impossibility of a life beyond the grave.

·       And he believes Jesus has authority to include others in this future.

This is not the content of “simple faith.” This is eschatological, messianic faith.

This man is making a Jewish, hope-soaked confession at the worst possible moment to do so. And he can do this because he is not starting from nothing. The simple-minded thief we cherish actually seems to possess a robust set of expectations about God, kingship, and the future of the world. He already has a framework for these claims.

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“Remember me” is Covenant Language

In the Scriptures, God “remembers” when he is about to act to keep his promises, rescue people, or restore order to his world. God remembers Noah. He remembers Abraham. He remembers Israel in Egypt, the prayers of Hannah. To be remembered is to be delivered; to be gathered back into the story when redemption is finally on the brink of occurring.

What this man is really saying is something like: When God vindicates you and your kingdom finally comes, let me be counted as yours.

And notice where he wants to be remembered: in your kingdom.

He does not seem primarily concerned with his own salvation or his destination in the moments following his death. He’s concerned with belonging to a very real and specific future in this world—a kingdom associated with the reign of God finally setting the world right. This is a stubborn faith that says: God is not finished yet. Not with you. Not with Israel. Not with the world. And not with me.

We have no way of knowing this man’s ethnic background for certain, but it is very possible that he was Jewish, or at the very least, someone very familiar with the Jewish hope that was electrifying Israel in those years: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

The backdrop of his crucifixion is Passover in Jerusalem. In that setting, this man…

• acknowledges Jesus’ innocence

• rebukes the other criminal

• publicly aligns himself with a condemned “messianic pretender”

• and entrusts himself to Jesus’ future reign.

That is repentance in the deepest biblical sense: a total change of allegiance.

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The Courage to Defect

As hard as it is for my worried friends to accept, this is not a story about a man who knows nothing about God or Jesus and stumbles his way to salvation at the last minute.

It is a story about a man who, at the very end of his life, chooses sides—sides he probably had at least some familiarity with long before his crucifixion.

It’s true: he does not have time to make restitution, join a crew of disciples, keep the Torah better, or fix his life.

But he does repent.

While everyone else is mocking or denying Jesus, he does something astonishing: he entrusts himself to a dying king of a not-yet-visible kingdom.

He publicly defects to Jesus’ side when Jesus looks least like a winner—and when he himself has no hope of Jesus fixing anything regarding his current circumstances.

I think, if he had lived, everything suggests that this new allegiance would have recalibrated his entire life.

Somewhere along the way, we turned this story into proof that biblical literacy and repentance don’t really matter. The thief is our evidence that simple faith is what counts most, and living righteously or having some understanding the Jesus we give our lives to doesn’t count much in the end.

“Just believe in Jesus,” we say—without asking what belief in Jesus means, what we think he’s asking of us, or what kind of kingdom we imagine he brings.

I don’t think the thief believed in a vague, generic savior ready to carry him off to heaven. It seems to me he believed in a dying Messiah, a rejected king, and an invisible kingdom that would—against all appearances—still come, in the very city where he was nailed to a stake on a hill.

His faith, it seems, was anchored in that hope.

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Stealing from the Thief

The poor thief on the cross.

We have left him there, hanging beside a king, forever enthroning a story about simple faith instead of the identity of the man who died beside him.

We’re afraid of our own shortcomings, worried for the people we love who confess without real allegiance. We’re so desperate to avoid being held accountable to worshipping a God we know, we become thieves ourselves—guilty of stealing the testimony of a repentant rebel and recycling him into a clueless criminal who “got saved” at the last second by a kind king who asks almost nothing.

It’s a retelling that exposes something about the condition of our own hearts.

Maybe we are all just thieves, hanging beside a king on crosses of our own—looking at the crucified man next to us, and deciding what we want him to be.

I usually let these conversations run their course. I save my thoughts for another time, perhaps, when people are less panicked. I’ll try, as gently and honestly as I can, to recover what’s been lost. Maybe they’ll see.

In our doubts and questions, I think we are finally standing where the story has always placed us: at the place of the skull—sifting through the rubble of what we think we know, trying to see who the man in the middle really is.

And just hoping, like the thief, that he will look down from his throne one day and remember us.

Why I Wrote a Book About Leviticus (Of All Things)

If you had asked me a few years ago—hypothetically—what book of the Bible I would one day write about, Leviticus would not have made the list.

Not even close.

Leviticus is the book most of us skim or skip entirely. It’s where Bible reading plans go to die somewhere around mid-February. It’s strange, repetitive, and heavy with details that don’t seem to connect to modern faith.

Yet there it sits at the very center of the Torah, the center of Israel’s Scriptures, and the center of the story that defines Jesus.

So why write a book about it?

The short answer is this: I came to see that Leviticus is essential to the gospel, and I couldn’t not share what I had learned.

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Jesus said he came to fulfill the Torah—and Leviticus is at the heart of it.

In Matthew 5:17, Jesus says:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Torah or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

It’s a familiar verse. One we tend to read and nod along with, and then move past.

But I began to wonder: do we actually take Jesus at his word?

Because if he did not come to abolish the Torah, then we have to wrestle with what it means that he came to fulfill it. And that question becomes especially pressing when we arrive at Leviticus—the book that sits at the center of the Torah’s main tension: how can a holy God dwell among unholy people?

Leviticus is not a side note. It is the core of the good news. It’s where we learn what it means for a holy God to draw near to unholy people—what that looks like and what it costs to make it possible.

And when you start paying attention, you begin to notice something: Jesus lives and speaks as if Leviticus still matters.

He operates within categories of clean and unclean.
He spends a huge amount of time in and around the temple.
He is deeply moved by the fate of Jerusalem—the place of God’s dwelling.

And he seems to believe that its story is not over.

That realization alone was enough to stop me in my tracks.

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“Fulfilled” does not mean “replaced”—and that changes how we read everything.

Somewhere along the way, many of us inherited an assumption: that once Jesus came, Leviticus—and much of the Torah—was effectively finished.

Not abolished, exactly. But completed (past tense) in a way that no longer holds real weight. As though Jesus arrived, died, rose again, and poof—the Torah was fulfilled and done. But the more I sat with Jesus’ words, the less that assumption held up.

He goes on to say that those who set aside even the least of these commandments—and teach others to do the same—will be called least in the kingdom. To me, that didn’t sound like a system that’s been rendered irrelevant.

And it raised uncomfortable questions:

• If Leviticus is“fulfilled” by him basically doing away with it, why insist he didn’t come to abolish it?

• If the Torah is complete and already behind us, why warn against setting its commands aside?

That tension forced me to ask deeper questions: what if I’ve been reading all of this wrong?

That shift changed everything.

Instead of reading Leviticus as a dry relic—something that once mattered but no longer does—I began to read it for what it was actually saying. I tried to see it as Jesus did: a framework that points forward. One that finds its depth and future in the work of Messiah, but is not discarded by him. I asked,

What if the categories still matter?
What if the vision still matters?
What if the priesthood, the sacrifices, the rhythms of worship all still matter?

And what if its story is still unfolding?

Suddenly, Leviticus became impossible to ignore. I began to realize that a book that was central to the life and mission of my Savior was not central to me.

That needed to change.

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I had questions no one seemed to be answering.

Once those first two realizations settled in, they opened up a flood of questions.

If Leviticus still matters, how does it matter?
If it hasn’t been replaced, how should we read it now?
What do we do with sacrifice, priesthood, ritual, the Day of Atonement?
How did Jesus understand these things? And how did his first followers hold these things alongside faith in him?

And what about the New Testament? The temple?

Paul, Galatians, Hebrews? The new covenant? “You’re free from the Law!” I went looking for answers.

I read books, articles, and journals. I listened to sermons and podcasts. I took classes. I searched for voices asking these same questions. And I found…very little.

There were excellent scholars writing about Leviticus in its ancient context. There were thoughtful theologians explaining how Jesus relates to the law. But usually, the conversation seemed to stop too soon. Leviticus was either reduced to metaphor, absorbed into church tradition, or ultimately dismissed as something Jesus came to transcend.

None of them could answer the question I was asking: what does it mean to take Jesus at his word—that he didn’t come to abolish the Torah—and take Leviticus seriously at the same time?

I couldn’t shake the sense that Jesus didn’t read Leviticus the way I did. He didn’t stand over it, deciding how he’d render it all obsolete. He stepped into it. He let it shape his mission. His identity. His understanding of what he came to do—and what God is still doing.

For him.
For the Jewish people.
And for the world.

And that left me with a decision. I could set those questions aside, or I could follow them wherever they led.

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So I wrote the book I couldn’t find.

I didn’t start with a plan to write a book.

I started with a growing, gnawing sense that I had missed something.

So I began tracing the threads, from Leviticus into the Prophets, the Gospels, and the letters. From the tent at Sinai to the heavenly tabernacle still destined, one day, to descend to the land.

I stopped trying to read Leviticus backwards—starting with conclusions about Jesus and forcing the text to fit them—and instead tried to read it the way Jesus knew it: as a living part of the story he was stepping into.

What I found was not a disconnected system of ancient rituals that Jesus replaced with himself at the cross. I found a vision of a people and a tent that are at the very center of everything God still intends to do.

And I found that without Leviticus, I completely misunderstood almost everything about Jesus and his mission.

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Why this book—and why now?

I wrote this book because I think we’ve lost something.

Not just a book of the Bible, but a critical piece of the story that most of us don’t even know.

We’ve learned to read the New Testament without its foundation.
To talk about Jesus without the categories he lived within.
To celebrate fulfillment without understanding what is being fulfilled.

And in doing so, we’ve emptied the gospel of Leviticus—and our future hope of its promises.

The Forgotten Gospel is my attempt to recover that missing piece.

Not by discovering something new, but by returning to something old.

As old as Sinai.
As old as covenant.
As old as the gospel itself.

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An Invitation to Reimagine Leviticus

If Leviticus has ever felt distant to you, you’re not alone. If you’ve wondered why it’s there, or what it has to do with Jesus, you’re asking the right questions.

And if you’ve assumed it no longer matters, because no one has ever shown you why it would—I understand.

But what if that assumption is wrong?

What if the book we forgot is the one that helps us see the gospel more clearly? What if, instead of leaving Leviticus behind, we’re meant to grow into it? What if we need to reimagine Leviticus?

That’s the question that started this journey, and it’s the one that led me to write The Forgotten Gospel.

Some stories deserve to be remembered. Leviticus is one of them.

Repentance from Dead Works

The following essay is adapted from a message I recently shared at Friends Community Church. What began as a teaching for a gathered local body has been revised here for readers beyond that setting, though the heart of the teaching remains the same.

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As I considered what to share today, I found it difficult to ignore the wider moment in which we are living. Ours is a fractured and unsettled generation—marked by division and a steady erosion of trust. It is a season that demands discernment. And in such moments, novelty is not what the church most needs. There are times when Christians do not require new ideas so much as a renewed grasp of old ones.

Wouldn’t it be something if Scripture offered a clear list of the foundational elements of our faith—those teachings so basic that they form the backbone of what it means to follow Jesus? Well, we are in luck. Hebrews 6 provides precisely such a list.

The chapter opens with an arresting claim. The author urges his readers to “leave the elementary teaching of the Christ and go on to maturity,” then proceeds to list what he considers foundational aspects of faith in Christ:

• repentance from dead works

• faith toward God

• instruction about washings

• laying on of hands

• resurrection of the dead

• and eternal judgment.

These were not considered advanced theological concepts meant for scholars. They are described as basic—assumed knowledge for first-century believers who are trying to follow Christ. That assumption should give modern readers pause.

Most Christians today can articulate personal salvation, God’s grace, and God’s love. But repentance from dead works? Washings? Escatology? These are not typically things we explicitly teach to new believers. Maybe we should.

Hebrews is not scolding ignorance for ignorance’s sake, but it is diagnosing a problem: maturity is impossible when foundations haven’t been mastered. Yet the times we live in call for maturity. As believers, we are expected to not simply know the things on this list, but to be able to teach them to others. The author of Hebrews was particularly frusterated by this, “By now you should be teachers, yet you have need of someone to feed you milk and not solid food!”

If repentance from dead works stands first in this list of elementary principles, then it deserves our careful attention today. Repentance was the primary message of Jesus and of John the Baptist. They seemed to understand that repentance was critical to the coming kingdom and to faith in the Messiah who rules that kingdom. So today, we too head back to basics. Our focus will be to ask and answer this question: what does repentance from dead works mean to this author and his audience?

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What is Repentance?

Repentance in Scripture is not primarily emotional. The Hebrew word, shuv, simply means “to turn.” It describes a reorientation of direction, allegiance, and future. Repentance is not about remorse or feeling bad; it is about changing course.

John the Baptist preached repentance as his core message, a tradition our Master adopted as well. John’s call was urgent and concrete: Repent! Turn around, quit sining, obey God, align your life with his Torah, because the kingdom is drawing near.

One of the best biblical examples of repentance comes to us from Jonah 3.

Jonah is an Israelite prophet to the nations. God sends him to Nineveh, a city famous for violence and wickedness. The city’s outcry had reach God, and he needed to confront it with judgement and justics. So God tasks Jonah with giving the Ninevite’s a stark warning: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overturned.”

Jonah goes through the city announcing this, with no promise of mercy attached to the message. Amazingly, the people of Nineveh respond:

“The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed…’Let everyone urgently call on God. Let them turn from their wicknedness and from the violence in their hands. Who knows? Maybe God will turn and have compassion and relent from his feirce anger so that we will not perish.’” Jon. 3, selected verses

They fast. They abandon violence. They turn from their evil ways. Their repentance, in this account, is public, behavioral, and communal.

Then comes the surprising turn: God repents!

Jonah 3 states plainly that when God saw what the Ninevites did—how they turned from their evil ways—he turned from the destruction he had planned. The Hebrew verb used here, nacham, is often translated “relent,” “be moved to compassion,” or even “repent.” This is not an isolated occurrence. The same language is used of God after Moses’ intercession in Exodus 32. Jeremiah 18 explicitly lays out the principle: if a nation turns from evil, God relents of judgment; if it turns toward evil, He relents of blessing. Joel describes God as gracious and merciful, “relenting from disaster.”

This is not an embarrassment in Scripture. It is a declared covenant pattern.

• God’s character does not change.

• God’s purposes do not change.

• God’s righteous standards do not change.

• But God is responsive to human behavior. We can change. He can change us.

What changes is the relational outcome when human beings alter their direction. God is responsive—not because he was wrong, but because obedience and repentance are always his preference.

Jonah understands this perfectly, which is why he is furious in the following chapter. “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful,” he protests. Jonah is not surprised by God’s mercy; he is angry because God has been faithful to his character.

Repentance, then, is directional. It asks not whether sufficient remorse has been generated, but where a given path leads. This brings us back to Hebrews and its phrase: “repentance from dead works.” If repentance means to turn, what dead works are we meant to turn from?

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What are “Dead Works?

Modern readers often assume that “dead works” refers to Jewish law, ritual, or Torah observance—a legacy of post-Reformation, supersessionist categories rather than first-century realities. When the author of Hebrews speaks of “repentance from dead works,” we should resist the assumption that he is criticizing Torah or Jewish obedience.

The audience of this letter was made up largely of Jewish believers in Jesus—people who had grown up shaped by the Scriptures of Israel. They were still praying, gathering at the temple, and living within those rhythms. They did not view God’s instruction as lifeless or obsolete. We know all this from Acts. Luke does not even try to hide this information from us. In the first-century world of faith in the Messiah, the Torah was described as the way of life. And Jesus did not contradict this.

So when Hebrews speaks of “dead works,” it’s not attacking covenant faithfulness or Jewish practices. It’s referring to actions and ways of living that lead to death—patterns shaped by sin, injustice, idolatry, or rebellion. And repentance is about turning from one road to the other.

The Scriptures themselves are unambiguous on this point. Deuteronomy 30 records God’s declaration: “I have set before you life and good, death and evil… therefore choose life.” Life and death in the Torah are not merely destinations after death. They are covenantal trajectories. Life is alignment with God’s instruction; death is the consequence of turning away from it—often experienced long before physical death occurs.

The book of Proverbs develops this framework with relentless consistency. It speaks of paths, ways, and roads. “The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn,” growing brighter with time, while “the way of the wicked is deep darkness.” There is a way that seems right, Proverbs warns, but its end is death. Death is not merely imposed later as punishment; it is embedded in certain ways of living. Actions carry trajectories. Habits form destinations.

Crucially, Proverbs describes God’s instruction itself as the way of life. “The commandment is a lamp… and the reproofs of discipline are the way of life.” Turning away from Torah is not portrayed as liberation but as corruption. Even prayer, Proverbs insists, becomes distorted when God’s instruction is rejected.

Against this backdrop, the phrase “dead works” becomes clearer. Dead works are not acts of obedience, earning one’s salvation, or even participating in Jewish worship. They are actions, habits, and allegiances that carry death within them—ways of living that align with injustice, idolatry, violence, or rebellion, even when they appear productive, respectable, or religious. Something can look righteous and still lead away from life.

This is why repentance is foundational. It is the act of leaving a road whose end is death and turning toward the path of life God has revealed.

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The Kingdom and Repentance—Why It Matters

Jesus’ own preaching confirms this orientation. “Repent, for the kingdom of God is near.” Repentance is not the result of the kingdom’s arrival, but the doorway into it. The kingdom Jesus proclaimed was not an abstract spiritual realm but a promised future marked by restoration, healing, resurrection, judgment, and blessing to the nations. Hebrews shares this vision. Its elementary principles all concern a real, tangible future world promised to those who place faith in the Messiah.

Repentance from things that lead to death prepares people to inherit what is coming.

This raises uncomfortable but necessary questions for us. We need to ask ourselves what ways of life hasour culture normalized that lead us toward death? Are there paths we are walking now that we need to repent of and change direction?

What’s on our screens and speaks? What images and voices shape our day? After scrolling, are we walking away with more love and wisdom? Or more anger, anxiety, and division? Do we put down our phones and feel like we love our enemies even more?

What about the pace of life have we accepted as “normal”? Is it producing patience and love—or exhaustion and irritability? Personally, this is an area I have to constantly evaluate in my own life. Have I weighed the costs of hustle-culture against the structure required to go deep into understanding who we are as images of God? To raising children within that structure? Things can look good and well-intentioned on my schedule, but is it robbing me of the valuable time I need to build a family-culture around these things? Do I need to repent and make changes there?

What do our financial habits suggest we believe life actually is—and have those beliefs delivered what they promised?

These questions extend even into Christian culture. Are there habits we cling to because they are perceived as “religious” or “Christian” that are not leading us into God’s ways? Are we showing up to services, studies, or events—but remaining unchanged in our behaviors? In an age of nearly endless information, wre we blindly consuming sermons, podcasts, or books at the expensive of personal study and meditation on the Bible? Psalm 1 says blessed is the one who meditates on the Torah day and night, not blessed is the one who has a pastor that meditates on the Torah day and night. Are we truly committing ourselves to becoming disciples of the Word of God? What about prayer? Are we using prayer primarily to manage our own anxieties rather than to seek and agree with God’s will and purposes? Does how we pray agree with Scripture, and how God plans to make his name great among the nations?

None of these questions are accusations, but we do ourselves no favors by ignoring the hard truths. These are diagnostic questions God invites us to ask. The biblical concern is not whether something looks faithful on the surface, but whether it leads to life.

Hebrews reminds its readers—and us—that the first step in following Jesus is repentance from anything that leads away from life and toward death. Turning from obvious sin matters. But repentnance is not a one-time thing. Maturity involves more than that.

As believers, we are offered the gift to keep turning, again and again, as we follow the Messiah and become people fit and ready for the kingdom he is bringing.

On the Hard Parts

Our small group is about to finish the final book of the Torah: Deuteronomy. Two years, five biblical books, countless Sunday afternoons gathered around coffee and Bibles spread across the living room. The hum is familiar now—pens click, pages turns, sometimes a late arrival slips in with an apology. Someone opens in prayer, and we settle into another conversation about faith, obedience, and what it means to love God with all our heart.

It’s been good. Stretching. Holy, even. That’s what the hard parts of the Bible do.

In many years of leading groups now, I’ve noticed how rare it is to actually spend long periods of time in places like this—in the thick of laws, genealogies, and strange stories that don’t resolve neatly. Most of us like to drift into the same comfortable corners of Scripture. No one says, “Let’s skip Habakkuk.” But we do.

We skim the tricky stuff; treat the prophets like awkward relatives at a reunion—best acknowledged from a distance.

And when we do, we miss something sacred.

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Why We Avoid the Hard Parts

We avoid the hard parts of Scripture for many reasons.

• Emotional Avoidance—Hard passages tend to stir up things we’d rather not face. They challenge our tidy categories of “good God, good life.” Sometimes, we’re not avoiding the text—we’re avoiding the emotions it awakens (or fails to awaken). Many of us have come to the Bible expecting it to be a self-help manual and for God to play the role of our therapist. We struggle with the passages that either don’t appear to do those things or do them too well. We like God’s mercy but struggle with his judgment. So when Scripture steps outside the lines of our expectations, it’s hard to know how to respond. “This is in the Bible?” we realize, embarrassed.

• Cultural Conditioning—We live in a world that prizes positivity, productivity, and relevance. Within evangelical culture especially, spiritual growth is often measured by how encouraged we feel after an encounter with the Bible—not by how challenged we are. When a passage doesn’t yield a quick “life application,” we move on. We expect Scripture to inspire us, not to unsettle us. We prefer a verse that fits into an Instagram square to a story that forces us to rethink our own worldview. The hard parts require endurance—slow reading and learning to sit in tension without resolution, sometimes for a very long time. Most of us have never been trained for that kind of spiritual stamina. And sometimes, we’re simply too exhausted. After a long week, we crave encouragement, not confrontation.

• Fear of Getting It Wrong—Many believers fear they’re not equipped to interpret difficult texts. We’re embarrassed by that. The Bible can feel inaccessible. It’s easy to feel intimidated by how little we think we understand. So we don’t even try. Especially in small groups, we also fear those passages might stir up disagreement or silence. So leaders often default to the verses that make everyone nod. But those fears are actually an advantage. We can bring dumb questions, admit our disbelief, and step forward into conversations with the hearts and minds we have, not the ones we’re suppose to have. Its in those moments where the light bulbs flicker on and shine brightest.

If we’re honest, we avoid the hard parts because they’re disorienting. It’s not that they’re impossible to understand—it’s that they’re unfamiliar. We avoid them for reasons that sound reasonable enough, but when we finally engage them, we find ourselves pulled into a story that isn’t centered on us. To truly understand it, we have to give more of ourselves than we often want to. Books like Leviticus, Ezekiel, or Romans confront us with truths that stretch far beyond our culture and lifetime.

But avoidance comes with a cost.

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The Cost of Avoidance

When we skip the hard parts of Scripture, we end up with a God made in our own image.

The Bible was never meant to be read in fragments—ten minutes over coffee, a verse for the day, a quote for encouragement. It wasn’t written in a vacuum or designed to fit neatly into our study guides, devotionals, or theology handbooks. Yet that’s often how we approach it. The hard parts resist those models.

And so, in avoiding them, we lose our grip on the story’s sweep. Ironically, the very truths we claim to cherish are found most clearly in the places we neglect. The key to unlocking the story of Scripture is not in the Gospels or Psalms—it’s in the unopened books, waiting to be found by those willing to linger there.

Our avoidance of these texts has bred spiritual shallowness, biblical illiteracy, and costly forgetfulness. It’s possible to attend a Bible study faithfully for years, to memorize verses and fill in workbook blanks, yet never find the thread that connects the garden to the eternal throne. Worse still, it’s possible to do all this and never realize the part God has written for you within that story.

In skipping the hard parts, I fear we’ve so often forfeited what it means to become true disciples of Jesus.

Because the hard parts are not there to confuse us. They’re there to reveal God. Every law, lament, and obscure oracle is a window into the heart of a God who refuses to abandon his plan. He invites us into his story—one that is far bigger and more demanding than the version we often settle for.

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Why We Need to Wrestle Together

But when a small group dares to tackle the hard parts of Scripture together, something beautiful happens. We learn to depend on one another—and on the Spirit—in new ways. No one person has the easy answers. We grow side by side. Everyone is discipled, and everyone is discipling.

This is how the early believers learned. They didn’t gather around curated lists of “most encouraging passages for modern life.” They opened the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings—the same Scriptures Jesus used to explain himself. Every community had its Torah-guide, its elders—those “able to teach,” who helped the rest discern the wisdom of the oldest books and apply it to their sphere.

Studying Scripture in community guards us from arrogance and isolation. It reminds us that no one “owns” the truth; we discover it together as a diverse people learning to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, into the image of the Messiah.

Our mission as small groups is to disciple one another in how to enter Scripture on its own terms. Our goal is fluency and growth—to ask how the Bible uses its own language, patterns, and designs to reveal truth, and how those truths challenge our assumptions. Learning to situate the Bible within its own worldview is difficult work, but it can be done.

And the simplest, least-used tool for it?
Repetition.
Reading and rereading entire books—again and again.

The Bible is meditation literature. It’s meant to be reread, pondered, and wrestled with together. Later passages illuminate the earlier ones; earlier stories give shape to what follows. The goal isn’t to revise original meaning but to listen more carefully to it—to enter into the divine conversation already unfolding, and stay there long enough to be changed by it.

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A Way Back into the Hard Parts

The best way to venture into deeper waters is to start small—but start. And start near the beginning. In the first Bible study I ever led, we began with Genesis 1.

1. Choose a short, “hard” passage and sit with it.

   Don’t rush to explain it. Read it aloud. Ask what others notice. Wait through the awkward silence; let it do its work. Push one another to find something—anything—that stands out. Ask what this passage says in its own story, to its original audience, before asking what it means for you.

2. Embrace confusion as an act of worship.

   You don’t have to have it all figured out. The best Bible studies are the ones where someone says, “I don’t know what I’m missing here, but I want to find out.” That first Genesis study I led didn’t use a guide or workbook. We simply showed up having read a few chapters and talked about what we saw. I didn’t have all the answers (I still don’t!)—and that made everyone else feel free to learn alongside me.

3. Use good tools, but don’t outsource.

   Commentaries and study guides are helpful. Still, read the actual Bible. Learn to use a concordance—and then teach others how to do the same. Let Scripture interpret itself. Train your eyes to look for patterns, repetitions, echoes. Ask, “Where have I heard this before?” and “What does this remind me of elsewhere in the Bible?”

4. Keep the bigger picture in view.

   Every hard passage belongs to a larger story. It’s easy to zoom in so closely on a verse that we lose sight of the arc it lives within. Try reversing that. Ask how the larger story—the structure of the book, the covenantal thread, the themes, the author—shapes the meaning of the smaller part. What bigger picture is at stake?

5. Pray Psalm 1—and then live it.

   Blessed is the one who meditates on the Torah day and night. Make that your aim: not just to gain knowledge, but to marinate in the earliest books of the Bible until they reshape how you see the world. Anyone who’s studied with me knows that I’m never not studying Genesis. The stories of the Torah are the most underestimated and least utilized tools for understanding the rest of Scripture. Every syllable of the Bible echoes back to those early books. Even when you’re knee-deep in Romans, remember Genesis. Remember Exodus. Remember Leviticus. These are the words that gave every later word its meaning.

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When Small Groups Become Holy Ground

When small groups read the hard parts, the atmosphere changes. The words come alive in new ways. The discussion begins to shift. It takes time; returning to the same grass and mowing over it in different ways. But in those moments, the living room turns into holy ground.

We begin to see Scripture not as a collection of stories to inspire or fix us, but as one breathtaking reality that includes us. We discover that God’s hardest words are his most loving, meant to purify our hearts and prepare us for an eternity in his presence. But if we want to know him, we must be willing to open the whole book.

When we study the hard parts, we learn to live the hard parts. We find courage for obedience, clarity in confusion, and hope that outlasts circumstance.

So gather your people. Open the Scriptures.
Turn the pages that intimidate you.
Ask the hard questions.

And when you do, expect the Spirit to show up. Because the same God who spoke from the mountain still speaks from the pages—and he has not changed.