Have you ever noticed all the questions that emerge when you read the Bible closely ... or even, when you just read not all that closely?

Most of the time, the stuff that makes you pause aren’t questions of great theological significance. It's more generally, things like consistency in storytelling.

Here's an example from the Joseph story …

Let's be honest, the Old Testament includes more than its fair share of awful/terrible/scary/kinda insane stories … like the one where God tells Abraham to kill his kid (Genesis 22).

For many modern readers, this classic story is difficult to stomach (or if you need that conclusion softened a bit — difficult to understand).

But this reaction hasn’t been uniform throughout the story’s history of interpretation…

In her typical, witty prose, Flannery O’Connor claimed,

“People have a habit of saying, ‘What is the theme of your story?’ and they expect you to give them a statement: ‘The theme of my story is the economic pressure of the machine on the middle class’ – or some such absurdity. And when they’ve got a statement like that, they go off happy and feel it is no longer necessary to read the story.”

O'Connor's words, while primarily targeted at literary critics in the mid-twentieth century, also adequately summarize many Bible readers today (and perhaps standing at the root of this tendency) many sermons as well. We want to know the point, the moral, the application, and as pastors, we feel that we need to expose these things if our sermons are going to be any good…