Bible Mystery Invites Us Beyond Easy Answers
When my wife and I are enjoying a television series together, I’m simply trying to let myself be hypnotized by the story; it’s one of the few times in my life when I like experiencing in the concrete instead of analyzing in the abstract. But my wife is different. As soon as we start a series, she likes to start positing how she thinks the season will go. I find this personal quirk of hers irritating, and she knows it; it’s a playful banter between us.
“You know what’s going to happen?” she’ll say.
“No! Don’t you dare! Stop it right now!” I shout.
And unfortunately for me, my wife is super good at it. For some reason, she has the mind of a professional screenwriter. She can see how pieces are going to come together long before the average person does. And nearly everyone hates it when somebody ruins the mystery before it’s been solved.
When we are consuming a good for entertainment purposes, the entertainment is in the experience. When someone ruins the experience, we feel like it obliterates the value. There is an undeniable pleasure in not knowing.
We humans do love mystery, don’t we?
Bible Mystery Is Different From a Puzzle
But the storyline of a television episode tends to be a puzzle—a simple plot meant to be solved within the hour. During the commercial breaks, the marketers seek to create other puzzles, all to be solved (by them, of course!) in a mere twenty-eight seconds.
Puzzle. Solution. Puzzle. Solution. Puzzle. Solution.
But let’s contrast the concept of puzzles with that of mysteries for a moment. Puzzles are tricky situations that are meant to be solved. And yes, some mysteries are like that, such as murder mysteries, where we sort through the evidence to discover the truth at the heart of things. But, as Frederick Buechner writes in Wishful Thinking, “there are other mysteries that do not conceal a truth to think your way to, but whose truth is itself the mystery.”1 That is why mystery is a word we often associate with something of a more transcendent nature.
Not solving a puzzle is a problem; not solving a mystery is an invitation to keep searching and discovering.
Even when we think in terms of mystery in fiction, we understand this on some level. Sometimes the best writers in the mystery genre will satisfy our longing for discovery without ever actually solving the mystery. I think one of my favorite examples of this was the television series The Blacklist, with James Spader. That show built up numerous subplots that were never even remotely resolved by the time the series ended. Mysteries invite more and more intrigue and investigation.
Bible Mystery Changes How We Understand Being Human
What does all this talk about puzzles and mysteries have to do with what the Bible wants us to understand about being human? Well, when it comes to the theological implications of the human experience, our systematic and dogmatic traditions have often created puzzles for us. They present us with the questions and invite us to answer them. As soon as we consider a spiritual puzzle, our theological provider is there to let us know that, thankfully, they got there before we did and found the answer to our theological ills.
Throughout history, we’ve created systems of puzzle answers to enable us to develop and evolve in our understanding of who God is and what he’s doing in the world. This usually isn’t malicious. In fact, many of these puzzle answers weren’t quick fixes at all; they were the result of decades, sometimes centuries, of wrestling about things that deeply mattered to people and society. Sometimes these theologies were battling great forms of institutional injustice or correcting destructive religious belief or practice.
Bible Mystery Resists Quick-Fix Theology
But often we turn the depth of those journeys into a quicker and shallower puzzle. We memorize the answers and test our seminarians, incentivizing them to possess an intimate understanding of very broad and complex theologies so they can quickly and easily respond to the situations that life will throw their congregation’s way.
Having this relationship with theology, where we treat it and embody it as a sort of AI response tool, is also why we find disagreement so easy—and frustrating. Because our systems of puzzle answers are designed to work seamlessly, any solution to a puzzle that differs from our own throws a wrench into an entire category of puzzles that our tradition has solved. We can feel disoriented—or even threatened. Combine this with our own personal insecurities, a culture of polarized othering of those who disagree with us, and our sociopolitical idolatries, and we have a real fight on our hands, usually led by those who have a deep enough grasp of our puzzle-answer systems to give clever and witty answers.
The easier to make them into a meme, the better.
Bible Mystery Leads Us Into Wonder
But maybe discovering what it means to be human is discovering that the gospel is not inviting us to solve all the puzzles. Maybe it’s not about who can accomplish the most puzzle-solving before we die. Maybe being human is about being present and curious in the mystery. Maybe the shallow, quick-fix, easy-answer-and-move-on approach is often very anti-gospel in nature. The thing we thought was supposed to give us freedom seems to just be a spiritual sales gimmick. Maybe it’s our humanity that knows, on a fundamental level, that we’re invited into (and made for) something deeper, more nuanced: mysteries with the power to transform us.
And the Bible is where the people of God have turned for insight into the mysteries.
Bible Mystery Helps Us Read Scripture With Curiosity
I’d like to suggest that the Bible isn’t a book of puzzles, even though we can tend to treat it like one; it is a book written by God’s people throughout the ages as they grappled with the divine mysteries of God. This doesn’t mean that there’s no objectivity or that nothing can ever be said with finality. I wrote an entire book about how objective I believe the work of biblical interpretation should be. I don’t believe that all hermeneutics are created equal, and I do believe that there are a finite amount of inspired “authorial intentions” in a biblical text.
But I also believe that part of what it means when we say that the Bible is inspired is that it’s not just a book of information; it’s a book that is alive. Or maybe more appropriately stated, the Holy Spirt is alive and always using the Book to try to do something in us that is very much happening in real time.
And that’s why reclaiming a human posture—which I would argue means becoming more curious, learning to pay attention, and pursuing wonder—is fundamental in our quest to “human well.”
1. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (Harper & Row, 1973), 64.
Adapted from The Gospel of Being Human: How Asking Better Questions of the Bible Reveals Who We Are by Marty Solomon, releasing in April 2026.
About the Authors
Marty Solomon is a theologian, the president and director of discipleship for Impact Campus Ministries, and the creator and executive producer of The BEMA Podcast. He and his wife, Rebekah, live in Cincinnati with their two children. Marty’s previous book is titled Asking Better Questions of the Bible: A Guide for the Wounded, Wary, and Longing for More.
Reed Dent is a campus minister at Campus Christian Fellowship at Truman State University, where he has worked for seventeen years. His gifting and passion has always been the art of preaching to and discipling college students. Reed served as one of the summer teachers at Glorieta Camps from 2015 to 2018 and joined Marty as a cohost on The BEMA Podcast early in 2021. Reed graduated from Truman State University in 2007 with a bachelor’s degree in English. He and his wife, LeAnn, live in Kirksville, Missouri, with their three sons.
