"For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart." Hebrews 4:12 (NKJV)
Most of those of us who read and study the Bible do so with an incorrect motive; we believe in error that we should read/study the Scriptures to learn more about who God is. Not understanding(nor believing) that we aren’t capable of fully understanding God (Isaiah 55:8-9). We do a great dis-service to ourselves and make the Scriptures to be a lie by putting our efforts into comprehending God Who can’t be fully comprehended. (John 1:5, Romans 11:33)
We should be reading the Bible to learn about who we are, and more importantly, who we should be in relationship with God. The Bible is a record of God’s unfailing interaction with mankind, and a revelation of the rebellion and sinfulness of humanity toward our Creator. If we are reading/studying about “them” and their interactions with God, we have missed the point; the Bible is not just a story of how “they” messed up, it is also a story of our own failures and of how God has provided a means for our redemption from failure.
Perhaps the first step toward redemption is to abandon our conformation to the idea of self-importance that we all suffer from; there is within us all some degree of self-righteousness, and too much of the spirit of the Pharisee. To remedy this we must abandon our quest to bring God down to our own level (comprehension), and begin to study in order to improve our own character that we might be more like He always intended us to be.
This reversal of our reason for study brings with it a renewal of the mind toward God; instead of striving for the impossibility of fully understanding Him, we now study to more fully understand who we are, and how to improve our relationship with Him. Remembering that the word of God discerns and discovers all that can be known of the hearts of men; learning from this revelation as the Holy Spirit leads us into all truth, we begin to see that our greatest need is surrender to the One whose thoughts are higher than ours.
