Have you ever been asked if the Bible is literally true? I remember the first time I was asked this question. It was in middle school. Reflecting back on that experience, it reminds me of a scene from the Return of the Jedi Starwars movie. There is this place towards the end when Admiral Ackbar says, "It's a trap." The way he said it is quite memorable. There have been different memes made about it.

That's how I felt when I was asked this question, "Is the Bible literally true or not?" I quickly realized after I said yes that that maybe wasn't the best answer, because, that's the same type of question as, "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" Not to make light of that circumstance, but if you say yes, what are you saying? "Yes, I've stopped beating my wife." That means you used to beat your wife. If you say no, you're saying, "No, I haven't stopped beating my wife."

This is one of those questions where a yes or no answer is not appropriate, because the Bible contains different types of statements. It says things like this, in Matthew 5:29, "If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away." Is that literally true? If we say yes, then pretty much every single Christian out there is living in disobedience, because we all have our right eyes. In the same passage, Jesus says, "If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off." We've all got our hands.

That passage would lean towards us saying, "Well, the Bible is not literally true." Then we have John 15:5, which says, "I am the vine, and you are the branches." I really like Jesus, and I guess, I like a woody-earthy-viney Jesus. No, that doesn't make sense, right? Is that verse literally true? Is Jesus literally a vine, the same type of thing that's growing in a garden? No. What's he describing? He is a source of life. He is something that we become grafted into, like you could do with different branches from other vines. You could graft them into a main vine.

What about John 10:9? Is that literally true when Jesus says, "He is a door?" Which side are His hinges on? These statements are funny and comical, and all of that, but what they illustrate is you can't say all of the Bible is literally true in the same way. When someone says, "Is the Bible literally true," they're probably getting to these types of statements, "So Jesus is a door really? Why do you have your right eye?" We can't say a wholehearted, "Yes, the Bible is all literally true," because there is figurative language in the Bible, metaphor, and simile, and hyperbole, and all of these things.

We've looked at three of those types of passages. At the same time, we can't say, "No, the bible is not literally true." Neither option is available to us, because there are passages like Genesis 1:1, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." There's not a figurative way for God to claim that He created everything. Maybe we disagree on the timing and things like that, but either God created everything or He didn't. That's much less equivocal than Him saying, "I'm a vine, or I'm a door."

In the say way, in Matthew 28:6, when we have the claim made in scripture, where they say, "Jesus is not here. He has risen just as He said." The wholehearted affirmation of Christianity is that that statement is not figurative. It is literally true that Jesus rose bodily from the grave. We have looked at in just a handful of statements, statements that are literal, and statements that are not literal.

How should we respond when someone asks if we take the bible literally? I can't say yes. I can't say no. What I am going to say is: like any document and collection of documents, I seek to understand it in its context. That's a mouthful, but it actually does the Bible justice. Even if the Bible were…