Necessary Questions
I used to think questioning faith was dangerous. Now I think it’s necessary…
I think at some point in life, everyone has to question their faith, not to lose it, but to decide whether it’s actually theirs.
For me, that meant asking harder questions than just the credibility of the Bible. It meant asking “Do I believe this because it’s what I was taught to believe?” Or “do I believe it because I’m convinced God’s Word is true?”
I wanted to know whether my faith could stand on more than inheritance, whether it could hold up under honest questions, real history, and lived experience or if it would all unravel when I pulled a single thread.
One thing I never really questioned is whether Jesus was a real person. Historically, that isn’t much of a debate. Many atheists and secular historians agree that Jesus of Nazareth existed and was crucified under Roman authority in that time period.
The real question has never been if Jesus was real, it’s his divinity thats debated, not His existence. And that distinction matters to me. Because it means faith isn’t built on a fictional figure or a myth that developed later. It’s built on a real person who lived, taught, and was executed in history.
What someone does with that reality is where belief comes in.
Every time I heard someone attempt to discredit the Bible, I didn’t feel threatened by it. I just wondered if there was any truth to the claim.
What I kept running into wasn’t something that fell apart when questioned, it was something that proved itself steady the more honestly I looked.
I didn’t start out questioning the Bible itself. I started by questioning traditions. The things we do in church that everyone assumes are biblical simply because they’ve always been done that way.
I wanted to know where certain practices and Holidays came from. What was actually in Scripture, and what had been layered on over time by culture, power, or convenience.
And the more I separated tradition from text, the clearer something became, when things felt off, it wasn’t because Gods word was flawed. It was because people had handled it poorly. Sometimes intentionally. Sometimes ignorantly. Sometimes out of fear or a desire for control.
That wasn’t shocking once I noticed how honestly Scripture talks about human failure. The Bible never pretends people handle God’s Word well. It documents, over and over again, how often they don’t.
The more I read Scripture in context, the more I noticed that Jesus Himself consistently confronted religious leaders over how they used Scripture.
His strongest words weren’t aimed at people on the outside asking hard questions. They were aimed at those on the inside, leaders who knew the law, taught it confidently, and used it to maintain authority.
He corrected them for elevating tradition over truth. For turning God’s Word into a burden instead of a gift. For using Scripture to draw lines of power rather than to point people toward God.
What stood out to me was that Jesus never challenged the authority of Scripture itself. He quoted it. Appealed to it. Treated it as true. What He challenged was how people handled it. Again and again, His issue wasn’t with God’s Word, it was with human hearts.
As I kept digging, I realized that a lot of the arguments against the Bible assume it came together in a much messier way than it actually did.
Before there was a bound “Bible,” the writings that make up Scripture were already being read publicly, copied carefully, and treated as authoritative across early Christian communities. Over time, church councils didn’t sit down and invent Scripture they recognized which writings were already in use, consistent, and already trusted across a wide geographic spread.
The canon wasn’t created in a moment of control. It was confirmed through time, use, and consistency.
That same consistency shows up in how Scripture was preserved.
People often talk about the Bible like it’s a long game of telephone, rewritten again and again until the original meaning was lost. But that’s not how translation works. The Bible hasn’t been translated from one modern language to another like a game of telephone. It’s translated from the original Hebrew and Greek texts. And while translation can simplify language, it doesn’t rewrite the message.
What I did learn and don’t really understand is how we have far fewer manuscripts for many ancient poets, philosophers, and historians, people we still quote and credit without hesitation. Yet when it comes to the Bible, which has an overwhelming amount of manuscript evidence by comparison, it’s often treated as unreliable.
If anything, what sometimes gets lost isn’t truth, it’s richness. Layers of meaning, cultural references, and wordplay don’t always survive cleanly in English. But the core message doesn’t shift.
And that’s where the issue stopped being about the text itself and started being about how it was handled.
Thats why the Protestant Reformation happened. It wasn’t because the people decided the Bible couldn’t be trusted. It happened because Scripture was being mediated, controlled, and in some cases abused. Ordinary people were often kept from reading the Bible for themselves and that led to church authority and tradition carrying more weight than the text.
There were real moral failures tied up in that system. Practices that weren’t rooted in Scripture, but they were being justified with religious authority.
That wasn’t a failure of the Bible. It was a failure of people using religion for gain and control.
When Scripture was translated into common languages and placed back into the hands of ordinary believers, it didn’t unravel.
It clarified things.
Once I stopped treating the Bible like something that needed defending, I started reading it differently.
Looking into the original Hebrew and Greek text deepened scripture for me. Words carried layers of meaning that don’t always survive a clean English translation. And when I began reading Scripture through the cultural and historical lens of the people it was written to, passages that once felt flat suddenly made sense.
Translation didn’t change the message, it simplified it. The core meaning holds, even if some of the richness gets flattened along the way.
What’s impossible for me to ignore now is how unified the Scripture is. There’s a thread that runs through all of Scripture, from beginning to end. The Bible isn’t a collection of disconnected ideas it’s one unfolding story. From Genesis to Revelation, it’s pointing toward the same thing.
Redemption, restoration and Jesus.
It’s not always on the surface, always obvious. Sometimes you have to be willing to look through layers. Sometimes through imagery, patterns, foreshadowing, and themes that only become clear when you slow down and read Scripture with historical and cultural context in mind.
And the more I noticed it, the more clear it became It was never accidental. A story written over centuries, by dozens of authors, across different cultures and languages, all pointing in the same direction isn’t something that happens by chance.
It reveals a God who is deeply intentional, where nothing is coincidence and everything even small details have purpose.
But this wasn’t all just intellectual for me. The more I read and understood Scripture, the more it lined up with what I’ve experienced personally. The presence of God, conviction, comfort, and guidance in my own life. Faith stopped being something I inherited or analyzed from a distance and became something I recognized because I’ve lived it. Looking back, I can see God’s hand in my life long before I knew how to name it. In moments I didn’t understand at the time. In protection I only recognize in hindsight. In guidance that felt ordinary then, but unmistakable now. That’s when faith stopped feeling theoretical. It wasn’t just something I believed because of history, evidence or because it’s what I’ve been taught since I was little. It was something I could trace through my own life, and once I noticed it, I couldn’t unsee it.
And this is where I’ve landed.
The problem has never really been the Bible or its validity. It’s been the human heart. Our tendency to bend things toward power, comfort, control, or gain. Our habit of interpreting Scripture through selfish or political lenses instead of letting it search us.
God’s Word has been used as a weapon far more often than it’s been allowed to do what it was actually meant to do. Heal, restore, convict, teach us our need for a savior and draw people back into relationship with Him.
If you’ve ever dismissed the Bible, I’d ask you this. what would it look like if you set aside everything you think you know and ask God to reveal Himself to you through His Word? Not through tradition. Not through people. But through truth. What might happen if you read His Word not looking for flaws, but looking for Him?
Just some food for thought 💜