The Bible's Amazing Hidden 2%

By William L. Wagner

My background is that I am a licensed civil engineer, a pastor, a professor of theology, a university president, and a missionary. As a young theology student reading the Bible, I found many verses of Scripture that I could not fully understand. In going to commentaries and speaking with professors, I did not receive the answers that I was looking for. This book is an attempt to look at many of the problem areas of the Scriptures and to find the reasons why they appear in the Bible. I found that only about 2 percent of the Bible begins to open the door to the real meanings of heaven, hell, eternity, angels, demons, etc. This 2 percent is important for us to correctly realize that God does not expect us to understand more than what He has given in His Word.Our Heavenly Father has revealed to us what we need to know while here on earth. The Bible begins with creation and ends with the final judgment. Above us is heaven and below us is hell. This book gives a diagram which shows us the area of interest in his revealed Word. What exists outside of this area of revelation is unknown to us because God decided not to reveal all to us.Much of my ministry has been working with university students in many countries. They often look at these problem scriptures and need good answers but seldom get them, such as the whole concept of creation. Realizing that the Bible is not a book of science but a book that shows us how to live, I feel that there is a good explanation that students can and will accept.I am convinced that it will never be possible for us to fully understand all of God's Word, but in looking at these problem verses and understanding why they have been given, we come to the conclusion that much of the Bible will never be truly understood while we live here on earth. However, many of these verses open the door to even a greater understanding, and that is for us to know how truly great our God is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098058326

Book preview

Chapter 1

Understanding Our Worldview

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation: the old has gone, the new has come.

—2 Corinthians 5:17

Introduction

As a young student in the University of New Mexico, I gave my life to Jesus Christ and became a Christian. Even though I had been attending Sunday school most of my life, this new experience gave me a great hunger to read and understand the Bible. I made the common mistake and began my reading of the Bible in Genesis but got bogged down in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and gave up trying to read the Old Testament. I found the New Testament much more to my liking and thus read it several times. It seemed that every time I would read the Bible there would be new insights in the character of God, life in the church, and the way a Christian should live for his Savior. I was excited.

There are several phases that have been used to describe the Bible. Some say it is a compass for life, while others say it is a roadmap to victory. There is no doubt that the Bible gives the Christian help in finding their way through the complications of life. My experience was that as a student in a rather secular university I needed help to navigate through the pessimism and doubt that surrounded me at school.

The first semester after my conversion, I took a course at the Baptist Student Union entitled How to Interpret the Bible. The professor Dr. Bill Jenkins helped in showing the correct way to understand many verses and books in the Bible. However, often I would come across a section of the Bible that seemed not to have any relationship with where I was coming from. Often when I presented Dr. Jenkins with these verses the reply would be something like Don’t worry about that area of Scripture because there are good explanations, but we do not have time to go into that now. At that time, the replies seemed to be rational enough particularly since I was dealing with just simple existence issues as a Christian in the university. During my ministry I kept coming up to these various verses and would do as I had been told and went to accepted Bible commentaries to find good explanations. Often, I was stuck that there would be great differences in interpretation by well-known theologians. How to understand some of these problem areas of Scripture was kept in the back of my mind, and as I continue to study, I tried to form a personal theology that could include these controversial texts. Only recently have I come up with a solution that has given me some satisfaction. However, I must admit the more I try to understand the greatness of our God, the more I realize that we are but a very minute part of His great creation. One person has tried to help in the understanding of God’s relationship to man as being like that between an ant and human. The ant can no more understand who we are and our life than we can understand God and His total creation. This helped me in understanding the Bible, but still there must be a reason for all that God has revealed to man. How can we understand the greatness of God together with his revelation to man?

The Purpose of the Bible

In my early Christian life, one of the major points of discussion was Can we prove the Bible by science? Or are the two too far apart? In the period after the Second World War, most in school would believe in creationism, but the theory of evolution seemed to be gaining ground. Today I know of one science teacher in a high school who was fired because he held to the view of creation as given in the Bible. Some say it must be either the Bible or science. I contend that his is false.

First, we must understand both what the Bible is and what it is not. First, what is it not.

It is not:

a book of science;

a general volume to solve all problems;

a guide to be used by all people.

But what it is:

The infallible Word of God

A book designed to give the follows of God the way to live for Him.

A book of principles that will help Christians navigate life.

A book designed to help us begin to understand the workings of God.

Because most young people in school in the Western world are given strong teaching based on secularism, it is no wonder they try to understand the Bible from a scientific point of view. When they do this, they will certainly fail. Some, when forced to decide between the two poles, will decide to give up their faith. This happens repeatedly in the world’s universities. This is not to say that the Bible goes counter to science, but just that the purpose of the Bible was never intended to give a scientific proof of God and his works. The more one studies the Bible, the more they are impressed on how the Bible compresses the facts about the great creator God and teaches us the basics that we need to know while on this earth.

While I was a professor at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Leuven, Belgium, my position was as the chairman of the doctor of philosophy program. One of our professors was both a capable theologian and a world-class biologist. He had a student who already had earned a doctor’s degree in biology but now wanted one in theology. His desire was to write on creationism and to bring science and the Bible close together. I was given a copy of his finished dissertation, which was over five hundred pages long. It was an impressive work, but I did not understand even a tenth of what he wrote. He was going into minute details on the theory of biological life and how it was supported by biblical proof texts. I was impressed to think that someone that smart could bring the two disciplines together and give such a good conclusion, but I really do not think that this is the task of most of the followers of Christ. We must take the Bible as it is and allow it to help us in our daily lives, and not use it as a scientific textbook.

Once while playing racquetball, the discussion on the court turned to the accuracy of the Bible. One of my friends, a Jewish university professor, stated that there were many errors in the Bible. I politely asked him to show me the errors. The next day he brought me two typed pages of supposed errors. We began to go through them one by one until he gave up. When the Bible is used as the Book of Life for the followers of the Savior then the problems fade away. But one of the reasons for this book is to say how we confront problems or passages that seem to be so spiritual that they run against the secular view of life. I feel all the problems can be addressed.

Those Troublesome Texts

Here are just a few of the texts that I found to be a problem for me when I tied to approach the Bible as an honest student of God’s Word:

Genesis 1—The whole twenty-four-hour creation story

Genesis 1:27—The creation of man in God’s image

Genesis 3—The origin of sin in the world

Genesis 6:1–4—The sons of God marrying the daughters of men

Job 1—The angels and Satan presenting themselves before God

Isaiah 14—The description of Lucifer

Jeremiah 10—Description of God’s creative powers

Jeremiah 4:23–26—Description of God’s destructive powers

Ezekiel 28—Description of the King of Tyre

Daniel 9—Michael hearing Daniels prayer but being hindered

Corinthians 12—Paul being caught up to the third heaven

Ephesians 6—Our struggle against spiritual forces

Hebrews—The place of angels in the universe

2 Peter 2:4—The existence of fallen angels

Jude—Michael disputing with the devil over the body of Moses

1 Peter 4:6—Jesus going to preach in hell after his death

Revelation 12:7–9—War in heaven with a third of the angels falling to earth

Revelation 21–22—The whole issue of eternity

Most of the above texts seemed to be out of the mainstream of understanding what we perceive to be important to our lives, and thus spiritual forces that are not related to our problems here on earth are beyond our reasoning abilities. My big question was why they even appeared in the Bible. The problem became even greater for me as I tried to adapt my knowledge of natural sciences into my theology. Many were saying:

The earth is fifty billion years old.

Man has evolved from a fish.

The only reality is what we can see.

Miracles are only myths.

God does not go against nature.

The Bible does not speak to reality.

All peoples will ultimately be saved.

Science is supreme.

As I pondered these points it occurred to me that most of the Bible was given to man to act as the proverbial roadmap for life. Its intent was to help man to know and serve God, but it was not trying to explain all of creation but limited itself to the information that we needed while here on earth. But if this is the truth, then why do we have short unexplained glimpses into some areas that cannot be easily explained? I consider these glimpses to be the 2 percent whose meaning is sometimes