Don't Skip Straight to Spiritual

It's so interesting to look at Jesus in the Gospels and how he's interacting along economic lines. Really, all the treasures of the wisdom of God were hidden in Jesus. But we miss a lot of profound truths when we skim over the details. The details matter. The names of places, for example, matter. 

It matters that Jesus was killed in Jerusalem, not Rome. It matters that Jesus ascended from Bethany, the house of the poor and not from Jerusalem. It matters that he was born in Bethlehem. Not Jerusalem. 

If we really believe in the incarnation, we believe that all of the story of Jesus is for us. And what you're going to find is every time he's in a city and every time the Bible tells us the name of the city, you can compare that to Jesus's commentary there about wealth or about anything else. Jesus knew where he was. He wasn't giving the standard stump speech. He always spoke into his context. 

You've got the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. But then you have the sermon on the plain in Luke. And they're different from one another. Some scholars may say that it's a contradiction, but it's not. The sermon on the plain is given to a Judean audience and is much harder on wealth. All of these little details matter. 

We're so used to reading the Bible spiritually, we skip right to the spiritual. But Jesus didn't come as a spirit. He came in flesh and blood. So we can't skip over all the flesh and blood stuff we see Jesus doing. We could spend hours and hours talking about how those details matter. But this is the one thing we have to acknowledge—there are no unimportant parts of the gospels. 

If something Jesus says doesn't make sense to you, or if it's weird to you as it is to so many of us, the Bible isn't weird. We're weird. And the Bible will make sense to us when we stop being weird. And so we have to adjust our way of thinking to the Bible's rather than our own. And we have to stop taking our best thinking, and sometimes it's really good thinking, and try to find a verse to hang it on rather than looking at the context of the verse and letting God give us his best thinking.

Jerry Bowyer is a Forbes contributor, contributing editor of AffluentInvestor.com, and Senior Fellow in Business Economics at The Center for Cultural Leadership. Jerry has compiled an impressive record as a leading thinker in finance and economics.