The Verses Churches Pretend Do Not Exist

If you have been in church for any length of time, you know there are verses that get used a lot. John 3:16. Romans 8:28. Psalm 23. The armor of God. Love is patient, love is kind.

But there are other verses. Hard verses. Verses that make you uncomfortable, that raise questions you do not want to answer, that seem to contradict what you were taught about who God is.

And for the most part, churches do not talk about them. We skip over them in our reading. We do not build sermons around them. We hope nobody notices they are there.

But they are there. And avoiding them is not honest.

The Elephant in the Room

Here are some verses nobody talks about:

Genesis 19 and the destruction of Sodom. What exactly happened there, and what does it mean that God destroyed an entire city? Are we supposed to read that as history, metaphor, or something else?

Deuteronomy 20 and the commands to completely destroy the Canaanites. Men, women, children, animals. All of them. What do we do with that?

1 Samuel 15 and Saul being rejected because he did not completely destroy the Amalekites. God told him to kill everything, and he kept the animals, and that was his undoing. What does that say about God?

And then there are the harder ones: the things Jesus said about hell, about cutting off body parts, about hating your family. The things Paul said about women being silent, about slaves being obedient. The things that do not fit the God we want to believe in.

We can explain them away. We can say they are cultural, historical, not for today. And sometimes that is valid. But we cannot just pretend they are not there.

Why We Avoid Them

Let me be honest: I understand why churches avoid these verses.

They are hard. They raise questions that do not have easy answers. They make people uncomfortable. They can be used to justify terrible things. And most pastors would rather preach on something that builds people up than something that tears them apart.

But here is the problem: when we avoid the hard parts, we create a faith that cannot withstand scrutiny. We teach people a version of Christianity that falls apart the moment someone actually reads their Bible. And when they encounter these verses, they either abandon faith or abandon honesty. Neither is good.

We owe people a faith that can handle the whole Bible, not just the comfortable parts.

What to Do With Them

Here is my suggestion: do not ignore them. Do not explain them away before you have sat with them. Do not let someone else tell you what they mean before you have asked God what He thinks.

Some of these verses are historical, describing things that happened in a different time and context. Some of them are snapshots of a moment, not the eternal heart of God. Some of them are misread, taken out of context, made to say things they do not actually say.

But some of them are uncomfortable because they reveal something true about God that we do not want to face. And that is where the growth happens: in the uncomfortable place, asking the questions nobody wants to ask.

The Bible is supposed to cut us, not just comfort us. And the verses we avoid are often the ones that have the most to teach us, if we are brave enough to look at them.

The Twist

Here is what nobody expects: the hard verses might be the most important ones.

Because the easy verses make us feel good. They confirm what we already believe. They build us up in the way we want to be built up. But the hard verses force us to grow. They challenge our assumptions. They make us reckon with a God who is bigger than our comfort.

And if we can learn to sit with the hard verses, to ask the hard questions, to not pretend we have all the answers, we end up with a faith that is resilient. A faith that can survive scrutiny. A faith that is honest about what it does and does not know.

That is a faith worth having. And it starts by reading the whole Bible, not just the parts that make us feel good.

The whole Bible is God speaking. Even the parts that make you uncomfortable. Especially those parts. And if you can learn to sit with them, you will know God better than if you only read the parts that make you feel safe.