{"id":10878,"date":"2023-02-21T02:44:00","date_gmt":"2023-02-21T02:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=10878"},"modified":"2026-10-02T01:33:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T01:33:12","slug":"the-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=10878","title":{"rendered":"THE PROBLEM"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In his new book\u00a0<i>The Truth and Beauty, <\/i>author Andrew Klavan writes about a late-night conversation he had with his adult son, Spencer.<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Klavan was expressing his frustrations with trying to understand some of the teachings of Jesus:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;I don&#8217;t understand the Sermon on the Mount. The thing is, I have this intense feeling that it all does actually make sense somehow. It&#8217;s like a beautiful picture, but it&#8217;s blurry to me. I feel if I could just turn the lens a little bit this way or that, it would all come suddenly into focus. But I can&#8217;t seem to do it.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">At this Spencer replied, &#8220;Maybe the problem is that you are trying to understand a philosophy instead of trying to get to know a man.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This response floored Klavan. He writes, &#8220;I recognized this on the instant as the single smartest thing anyone had ever said to me.&#8221;\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Approaching Scripture in an attempt to &#8220;understand a philosophy&#8221; is quite different from reading with the goal of getting to know God Himself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In his new book\u00a0The Truth and Beauty, author Andrew Klavan writes about a late-night conversation he had with his adult son, Spencer. Klavan was expressing his frustrations with trying to understand some of the teachings of Jesus:\u00a0 &#8220;I don&#8217;t understand the Sermon on the Mount. The thing is, I have this intense feeling that it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10878"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10879,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10878\/revisions\/10879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}