How much Bible knowledge does a Christian need to fully understand the Bible?

Question

Before I did extensive Bible study, I found many things I felt were inconsistencies in it. Such as these words of Christ:

Revelation 3:11:
11 I am coming soon. Hold on to what you have, so that no one will take your crown.

It seemed to me that 2000 years wasn't quickly. But then I found this scripture:

2 Peter 3:8:
But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

Ahhh, there was the answer.

So, again, how much Bible knowledge must a Christian have to fully understand the Bible, being so many scriptures needed to be cross-referenced and taken together? Opinions?

Actually, I'm a Christian author, I've studied the Bible extensively. This question is mostly for Christians who don't care enough to do their own study, and let someone spoon-feed them what they learn.

There were so many good answers to this question, I'm going to chicken out and put it to a vote. Thank you, everyone for your answers!

Answer 1

what difference does it make?

Answer 2

Consider, these passages were written at the end of the First Century. Christians were worrying about the "delay" even then! So it's still late, two "days" late.

Literalists are forced to cherry-pick and jigsaw verses to resolve apparent conflicts and mistakes in the scriptures. Others use a more allegorical approach and take the sense rather than a scrupulous, verbatim rendering.

Still, the more you read, the more you understand (even when it's a rerun). It's a bit like chess: you get the basics quickly, mastery takes a lifetime.

Answer 3

The Holy Spirit isn't telling anybody a similar element--a strategies from it. in all probability, the Holy Spirit is the call believers unknowingly assign to the DMT excreted through their pineal gland at the same time as they have a religious journey. This "spirit molecule" is straightforward to prayer, meditation, non secular reviews, close to-demise reviews, and easily demise. it is also present day in severe quantities interior the blood of schizophrenics. N,N-dimethyltryptamine (aka DMT) is the carry close spirituality molecule and is strongly linked with non secular journey, meditation, schizophrenia, and close to-demise reviews. once someone realizes the actual realm is the purely purpose fact and that their subjective psychological reviews are entirely created through their very personal residing mind, there is now no longer a want for a superstitious faith to create a fictious reason for an misguided religious description of the nature of fact.

Answer 4

Actually the word translated "soon" can also be translated "quickly" or "suddenly". When He comes, it will be fast.
You will never have enough knowledge of the Bible. even learning the whole Bible by heart won't do it for you. God wants us to just keep learning form Him, to have teachable minds and hearts.
When you meet somebody that tells you he fully understands the Bible, pray for him, feel sorry for him, but don't expect to learn from him. Find someone who is still learning and knows he has a lot to learn.

Answer 5

There's lots more than one right answer to the questions you just proposed, and they are not all found in scripture.

Jesus returned in judgment for the Jews in 70 AD, as he had predicted. He even used the Romans as his chosen instrument, just as he did for his own crucifixion.

Any backsliding Christians who reverted back to their old Jewish roots would have perished there, while the faithful and WATCHFUL Christians left Jerusalem before the conflagration, without suffering any casualties.

Answer 6

The Word of God is delivered first not in the form of a gilded compact book. God's saving mysteries have been CONSISTENTLY entrusted only by way of oral instruction to His appointed ministers: the priests of the Levitical race - and this has been finally and explicitly decreed by the Word Himself through the mouth of the Prophet Malach, "And now, O ye priests, this commandment is to you... And you shall know that I sent you this commandment, that my covenant might be with Levi, saith the Lord of hosts... The law of truth was in his mouth... For the lips of the priests shall keep knowledge, and they [God's people] shall seek the law at his mouth: because he is the angel of the Lord of hosts" (2.1,6,7).

Understanding God's communication of saving truths then can not be an endeavor divorced from the divinely appointed keepers and expounders of the Divine words. "In Jerusalem also Josaphat appointed Levites, and priests and chiefs of the families of Israel, to judge the judgment and the cause of the Lord for the inhabitants thereof" (2 Paralipomenon 19.8). "And Moses answered him: The people come to me to seek the judgment of God... And when any controversy falleth out among them, they come to me to judge between them, and to shew the precepts of God, and his laws" (Ex 18.15, 16).

The Protestants came and by their revolt reversed upside-down the basis of divine authority and so they cried: "Sola Scriptura!" But against this is the divine decree: "For the lips of the priests shall keep knowledge, and they [God's people] shall seek the law at his mouth: because he is the angel of the Lord of hosts... And THE COVENANT OF THE PRIESTHOOD FOR EVER shall be both to him and his seed" (Malachi 2.7; Num 15.23).

Answer 7

It never really ends. Even the Bible witheld a lot information for now because men will not be able to comprehend it.

Check this thought for example. You hear people talk about going to hell or heaven when you die, yet what does the Bible say about the dead?

Gen. 3:19: “In the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.”

Eccl. 9:10: “All that your hand finds to do, do with your very power, for there is no work nor devising nor knowledge nor wisdom in Sheol [“the grave,” KJ, Kx; “the world of the dead,” TEV], the place to which you are going.”

You can't think like a living person when you're dead.

Eccl. 9:5: “The living are conscious that they will die; but as for the dead, they are conscious of nothing at all.”

Ps. 146:4: “His spirit goes out, he goes back to his ground; in that day his thoughts [“thoughts,” KJ, 145:4 in Dy; “all his thinking,” NE; “plans,” RS, NAB] do perish.”

John 11:11-14: “‘Lazarus our friend has gone to rest, but I am journeying there to awaken him from sleep.’ . . . Jesus said to them outspokenly: ‘Lazarus has died.’” (Also Psalm 13:3)

There is no soul that lives after you die, you're dead.

Ezek. 18:4: “The soul [“soul,” RS, NE, KJ, Dy, Kx; “man,” JB; “person,” TEV] that is sinning—it itself will die.”

Isa. 53:12: “He poured out his soul [“soul,” RS, KJ, Dy; “life,” TEV; “himself,” JB, Kx, NAB] to the very death.” (Compare Matthew 26:38.)

Even stories about ghosts are not real. Dead people can't touch you.

Eccl. 9:6: “Their love and their hate and their jealousy have already perished, and they have no portion anymore to time indefinite in anything that has to be done under the sun.”

Isa. 26:14: “They are dead; they will not live. Impotent in death, they will not rise up.”

Now this thought alone has tie ins to heaven and hell and you'll see how different the world viewpoint is with what the Bible teaches.

Answer 8

I dont think there is a person alive who fully understands the Bible.

Answer 9

honestly, that is why there is so many Bible studies week in and week out.
the learning of the Bible never stops until we die.
and when you have trouble understanding it, what I do is ask the Holy Spirit, who inspired the Bible, to help me to understand it.
best thing to do is to ask the one who wrote it what He meant when He wrote that down for me to read, huh??
happy learning.
keep on reading, keep on studying, and keep on learning

Answer 10

No one will EVER fully understand the Bible, nor does God expect you to. If you want understanding, you have to pray for it.

Answer 11

It will take a lifetime, but to fully understand the Bible it will take a resurrection.