I've undertaken reading through the Bible in its entirety, which I haven't done in a few years. It's inevitably a faith-challenging experience because--to really distill it:

1. I have long since committed to fundamentalism and the view that the Bible is literal and inerrant.

2. The Old Testament is ridiculous.

So doing this kind of study, as opposed to just reading the more sort of guiding, nourishing stuff of the New Testament can get me into a mode of my religious life being more intellectual than spiritual. It led me, this morning, as I was praying before doing a reading, to ask God why He prizes faith so much. Why would He rebuke the disciple who wanted to see His wounds before believing He was truly resurrected?

Outside of one's own religion, I don't think anyone ever sees blind unquestioning faith as a virtue. And God encourages reason, calling us to "be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you."

One of the things that past readings through the Old Testament did give me though, was astonishment at how little miracles can move people. The very people that saw the Red Sea parted and walked through it with Moses in very short order questioned the very existence of God. And is that really any different from me coming into consciousness every morning, drawing breath that puts some parts of the ether into my blood and lends me the ability to see, speak, move?

But still, I tried to go beyond my own mental justifications and asked God to give me something in my reading as an answer. Knowing that my reading was something He smiled on, serving as a knock on the door that He promises to answer.

And surely enough, I was satisfied with the New Testament chapter I was given, in which the disciples--not one, but all of them, apparently--ask Jesus a question that I think was very similar, in a sense, to the one I was asking: Why speakest thou unto them in parables?

His answer, from Matthew 13:11 - 17 is worth reading (Since, you know, they're the words of Christ), but in particular I appreciated:

By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: [...] But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear.

[...]

many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.