Life Explained in 5 Easy Lessons:

If you have chosen the Back Matter & Web for the Biography Usage, you need not fill out Author Biography below but ensure that the text is included in your manuscript. **Author Biography: Matthew Williams has—in terms of secular credentials—a B.A. in Classics from the University of Michigan and an M.A. and Ph.D. (ABD) from UCLA. He has taught Greek, Latin, and Greco-Roman civilization at UCLA. He is currently a Latin teacher in Idaho. (free preview for Kindle readers on Amazon) God Actively Blocks the Spiritually ‘Unworthy’ From Understanding His Word Be aware that—in the New Testament—information is presented to you directly. You don’t have the Old Testament ‘veil’—as St. Paul calls it in 2 Corinthians 3:15—to block or inhibit your understanding. This veil is the reality that the Law in the Old Testament is encoded by God ‘upside down’. That is, you must always convert the imagery presented to you from literal to figurative in order to properly understand it (= make it right side up). If you do not do this, your understanding of things will be upside down—the exact opposite of the truth. This was the case—as we saw—with Jesus’ disciples who were shocked to hear that literal earthly wealth didn’t ensure you an easy entrance into heaven. Only spiritual wealth with God does this. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3:14 that this veil hindered the spiritual understanding of his fellow Jews when reading scripture, “But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant [= testament] is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away.” Because his fellow Jews continued to reject Jesus, Paul adds in the next verse—2 Corinthians 3:15—that their spiritual understanding was still being compromised, “Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts.” Like putting locks on doors, this coding—inserted by God into scripture—helps keep out or block the spiritually unworthy from heaven. Jesus’ speaking in parables (= spiritual codes) was another mechanism to keep the spiritually unworthy from understanding. When his disciples ask him why he does this, Jesus responds in Mark 4:11-12, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, ‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven” Yet another way for God to deceive the spiritually unworthy is to trick them with what I call ‘Biblical booby traps’. These are things that God deliberately puts into the Bible that he knows will spiritually trip up people who are hostile to God and unworthy of understanding and salvation. These include depictions of God in human form walking around the Garden of Eden or people living to almost 1000 years of age in the book of Genesis. We will deal with these in some depth later in the book. But the biggest way that God keeps the spiritually unworthy from understanding is—as we said—by making spiritual wisdom and earthly wisdom exact opposites. Spiritual wisdom is so far apart from earthly understanding that it appears—to the non-spiritual person—to be ‘foolishness’. Unless God himself comes to you to help you understand it, you will never understand it. Veils, parables, booby traps and making wisdom counterintuitive—are all devices God uses to ‘lock out’ the unworthy from heaven. And they are all necessary. If an unrepentant evil man somehow knew the right words to say and prayers to make, God would have to forgive him and grant him salvation (‘otherwise they [= the evil doers] might turn and be forgiven’). That is why God uses them. Just as spiritual wisdom is foolishness—to someone with only earthly understanding—Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3:19 that the opposite is true as well, “The wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.”