To make it really clear and simple, let’s call this movement across history we see in passages like the ones we just looked at from Exodus and Deuter… - Rob Bell

In those moments when the two of you see things differently, you can hold on to your view, defending it and protecting it and arguing for its superiority, or you can allow your perspective to be broadened, enriched, expanded, and deepened.

Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two — love and controlling power over the other person — are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.

When people charge in with great insistence that this is God’s word all the while neglecting the very real humanity of these books, they can inadvertently rob these writings of their sacred power. All because of starting in the wrong place. You start with the human. You ask those questions, you enter there, you direct your energies to understanding why these people wrote these books. Because whatever divine you find in it, you find the divine through and in the human, not around it.