What to Do With a Passage You Cannot Make Sense Of

You are reading along, and then a verse stops you. Not because it is difficult prose — because it seems to say something you do not believe, or would rather it did not.

Most advice at this point is some version of pray about it, which is true and not very practical. Here is a more concrete order.

First: check that it is actually saying that

A surprising number of hard passages are hard because of where the reading started.

Back up to the beginning of the paragraph, then to the beginning of the chapter. Ask who is speaking — because Scripture records a great deal of speech it does not endorse. Job’s friends get chapters of confident, wrong advice, and the book ends with God saying so. If you quote Job 5:17 without noticing who said it, you are quoting a man God rebukes.

Then check what kind of writing it is. Poetry does not make the same claims as law, and a proverb is not a promise. Proverbs 22:6 — train up a child in the way he should go — is a general observation about how life usually runs, not a guarantee, and reading it as a contract has caused a great deal of unnecessary grief to parents whose children walked away anyway.

Second: compare the two translations

You have both here for exactly this. Read the verse in the King James and the English Standard side by side, and see whether the difficulty survives.

Often it does not. Philippians 4:6 in the KJV opens be careful for nothing, which in 1611 meant do not be full of care and in 2026 sounds like advice to be reckless. The ESV renders it do not be anxious about anything, and the problem disappears.

Sometimes the difficulty does survive, and that is useful information: it means you have found a real one rather than an artefact of English changing under your feet.

Third: give it a category

Not every hard passage is hard in the same way, and it helps to know which kind you have.

Unclear — you do not follow the argument. This one usually yields to a study Bible’s note or to reading the whole book.
Uncomfortable — you follow it perfectly well and do not like it. This is a different problem, and no amount of research will dissolve it.
Troubling — a command, a judgement, or a story that seems to conflict with what you have been told about God’s character.

The third kind is the one worth being honest about. Pretending a genocide narrative is fine is not faith; it is a performance. Note it, say plainly that you do not understand it, and keep reading. Scripture itself models this — Habakkuk opens by telling God his handling of the world looks wrong, and that complaint is in the canon.

Fourth: leave it open

This is the part that runs against the instinct. Some passages should stay unresolved for years.

A question you are carrying is doing something a settled answer cannot: it keeps you reading, and it keeps you honest about the limits of what you have worked out. Every serious reader of this book has a list. Having none usually means you stopped paying attention rather than that you finished.

Write yours down. Date the entries. Look at it once a year — you will find some have quietly resolved, and the ones that have not are usually the interesting ones.

When to ask someone

Two cases where the list is not the right answer.

If a passage is being used against you — to keep you somewhere unsafe, or to argue that your situation is deserved — that is not a study question. Talk to someone outside the situation: a pastor you are not dependent on, or a professional.

And if a passage has become the thing standing between you and faith altogether, it is worth sitting down with someone who has read more than you have. Not to be argued out of it. To find out whether the difficulty is the one you think it is.