Beginner’s Online Bible Study 09: Reading the Bible is like putting together a very large puzzle

The next 3 post will compare reading the Bible to putting together a puzzle.  It could have been one long post.  I’ll put them out quickly so you read together if that is your preference.

Have you ever put together a 1,000 piece puzzle?  Were you able to scan all the pieces and instantly see where each piece went?  Were you even able to scan every piece at once?  Of course not.  But did you eventually get the puzzle together?  How did you do it? If you were like most people, you first looked for the “edge pieces” because they had a distinct shape you could recognize.  In other words, you could recognize something about them.  Did you find them all the first time you looked through the puzzle pieces?  Did you know where on the edge they all went right away?  No, but you scanned through the pieces over and over and did eventually get the outer frame of the puzzle mostly put together.

This is just like reading the Bible.  As you read verses over and over (scanning the puzzle’s many pieces) you find a piece here or there that you can relate to.  You keep reading even though you don’t know where most of what you are reading fits into your life, but now and then you find an “edge verse”.  You can tell it is the type of verse, phrase or story that you can use, even though you may not know exactly where it fits into your life.  As you find more and more of these verses you do eventually start to put a few pieces together to form the “frame”.  At first you think you are “framing” the Bible, but later you will discover that it was framing you.

God doesn’t make everything clear to us right away – like a puzzle.  Why do you think He might do that?
Beginner’s Online Bible Study *obbs*