You know the verse I mean.
You were reading along, and then you hit it. A verse where God sounds like someone you would not want to be alone in a room with. A verse about wrath, or destruction, or children paying for what their parents did. And something inside you went quiet.
Most of us do one of two things at that moment. We skip the verse and hope nobody asks. Or we swallow it whole and let it slowly change what we believe about God — until we are praying to someone we are secretly afraid of.
I did both for years. Neither one worked.
So I want to tell you about the one rule I use now, before I read any hard passage. It is not a trick to make the Bible say nice things. It is a discipline. And it starts somewhere most people never think to start.
God Went First
In Exodus 34, something happens that happens almost nowhere else in Scripture. God does not let anyone describe Him. God describes Himself.
He passes in front of Moses and announces His own Name: "The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness."
Stop and notice when this happens. Israel has just made a golden calf. They have just broken the covenant while the ink was still wet. This is the moment where abandonment would make sense.
And this is the moment God chooses to say who He is.
That is the foundation. Not a doctrine someone built later. Not a system a theologian assembled. God's own self-announcement, given at the worst possible moment, in the middle of a relationship that should have ended.
The Rule
Here it is, as plainly as I can say it:
God's character is the constant. My interpretation is the variable.
When I read a passage and my reading of it makes God into someone other than the God who announced Himself at Sinai, I do not adjust God. I reopen my reading.
That is the whole rule.
It does not mean I get to delete verses I dislike. It means the verse stays and my confidence about what it means is the thing that goes back on the table. The text is not the problem. My conclusion about the text might be.
Because here is what I finally had to admit: I was never actually choosing between God and a hard verse. I was choosing between God and my reading of a hard verse. Those are not the same thing. One of them is holy. The other one is mine.
Why This Is Not Cherry-Picking
People push back on this, and they should. It sounds convenient. It sounds like I have found a way to keep the verses I like and lose the ones I do not.
So let me be honest about what the rule costs.
The rule does not let me skip the hard half of Exodus 34 either. The same announcement that says God is merciful also says He "will by no means clear the guilty." That is inside the foundation. If I quote the first half as a banner and leave the second half uninterpreted, I have not applied the rule — I have just built a nicer idol.
The rule cuts both ways or it is worthless.
And it cuts against my instincts constantly. It means when a passage flatters my politics, I still have to ask who the verbs belong to. It means when a passage comforts me, I still have to ask whether the text actually said that. Discipline that only inconveniences other people is not discipline.
What Changes When You Read This Way
Something happens the first time you apply this to a passage that has haunted you.
You stop reading defensively. You are no longer bracing for God to turn on you halfway down the page. You can slow down. You can ask real questions of the text — who is acting here, what does this verb actually say, what has tradition added that the grammar never did — because you are not afraid of what you might find.
Fear is a terrible Bible study method. It makes you rush. It makes you accept the first frightening reading you encounter because contradicting it feels dangerous.
Confidence in God's character does the opposite. It makes you a careful reader. It gives you permission to be slow.
Romans 8:38–39 says nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Paul writes "nor anything else in all creation." A verse is part of creation. Scripture is God's gift, not God's ambush.
If You Are Afraid of the Bible Right Now
Some of you are not reading your Bible at all. Not because you stopped believing, but because every time you open it you find something that makes your stomach drop, and you cannot carry one more reason to be afraid of God.
I want to say something gently.
You are allowed to start with Exodus 34. You are allowed to start with the God who announced Himself before you get to the passages you cannot yet explain. That is not avoidance. That is order. Identity first, then the hard texts — because you cannot interpret the acts of someone whose character you do not yet know.
God did not leave His nature to be assembled from our worst readings of Him. He said it out loud. Merciful. Gracious. Slow to anger. Abounding in steadfast love.
Hold that first.
Then go back to the verse that scared you — and ask it better questions.