Question:   Can the Bible be understood by the average person today?   Yes, the Bible can be understood by the average person today.  Most of the Bible is easy to understand. Some of it is harder, and will take more study to fully understand, and probably no one understands all the Bible perfectly.  God keeps the challenge to all of us, even to the most intelligent, to keep on studying His Word, not only to fully understand all the truth it reveals, but also to keep us from forgetting that which we have already learned from it. We do not graduate from the need of Bible study.   

        Paul wrote, "But I fear, lest somehow, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, so your minds may be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ" (2 Cor. 11:3).  It was a simple command, "Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die"  (Gen. 2:17). Eve understood the command  (Gen. 2:9; 3:2,3). She did not need some special revelation to tell her the meaning of what God had said. God gave to her and Adam the ability to understand Him. But the serpent corrupted God's word, put his own spin on God's command and said, "You will not surely die." (v.4), and Adam and Eve disobeyed God's Word. Misunderstanding  God's Word today is still partly caused by man's desire to do what he wants to do, rather than to believe and obey God. "Therefore do not be unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is." (Eph. 5:17).  Surely, God, who created man, and knows him well, did not command man to understand something he could not understand. The Holy Spirit  revealed to the apostles and prophets of the New Testament the way for man's salvation, and Paul referred to this in Ephesians 3:3,4: "how that by revelation He made known to me the mystery (as I wrote before in a few words, by which, when you read, you may understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ". It was a mystery to the Old Testament prophets how God was going to save man, but it was revealed in the New Testament, and man can now understand it.

        Jesus taught in one of His parables (Matt.13:23), that "he who received seed on the good ground is he who hears the word of God and understands it...", and in so doing he bears much fruit. He had a "noble and good heart" (Luke 8:15, nkj).  Developing a good, honest heart to obey God has something to do with a person's understanding of God's Word. (See John 7:17). Satan is in the business of hardening people's heart by the "deceitfulness of sin" (Heb. 3:13; See also Matt. 13:21,22). Let's study and restudy God's Word so we will not misunderstand it. Come worship with us any time!