Because of the church’s failure to teach the Bible. It’s no great mystery. Teaching the Bible has at least two strikes against it for the church looking to prosper. First, it is not easy. The Bible is a book of books, which books were written over the course of more than a thousand years, written by men who lived in cultures foreign to our own, written in languages few of us speak. Its subject matter touches on profoundly difficult matters, the intersection of the eternal and the temporal, the tri-une nature of the living God, the incarnation of the second person of the trinity. This is not “See Spot run. ‘Run Spot, run.’” Even Peter, who authored two of the books of the Bible, in one of them acknowledged that Paul’s writings in the Bible could be profoundly difficult to grasp. The church’s biblical illiteracy, in this instance, is not that distinct from the general illiteracy our culture suffers from. We’re watchers, not readers. And what we watch we watch for entertainment, not learning.
The second strike may be even more detrimental. Teaching the Bible works against the local church “prospering” because its message is abundantly clear- we are sinners, and under the judgment of God unless we rest in the work of Christ for us. When the church sees the unbeliever as their “market” and research shows the market is averse to your message, well then, you have to change the message. It is not, however, just the unbeliever who prefers not to be taught what the Bible teaches about our sin. None of us like it.
The trouble is, if you remove that truth from the Bible, that we are wretched sinners apart from God’s grace, you a. have removed a high percentage of the content of the Bible and b. removed the reason to know the rest of the content of the Bible. Why would someone want to learn about substitutionary atonement who has no idea he needs an atonement? Who would have an interest in imputation who doesn’t know he stands guilty before God?
In the end we have both teachers who won’t teach and disciples who won’t learn. We have ear-tickling hirelings scratching behind the ears of goats. Pastors sell what they sell because parishioners buy what they buy, and parishioners buying what they buy because pastors sell what they sell.
Romans 1 teaches that God speaks truth to all men everywhere. And all those to whom He does not give ears to hear, suppress that truth. They deny it, push it away, seek out a message more soothing. Romans 7 teaches, however, that when God is pleased to give ears to hear, when He gives life to we who denied Him, and we respond in faith and repentance, our sin patterns do not disappear. We too suppress the truth of God, now not just what He reveals through His world but what He reveals in His Word, in unrighteousness. May He give us then both ears to hear, and mouths that would hunger for every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.