2 Timothy 3:16-17 says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that ethe man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” Proverbs 3:5 says, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.” So what should we take from the Bible when we read it?
There are two ways of teaching...you can teach by rote, or to instill others to think for themselves. God to a certain extent allows us to think, but the thinking we do as far as He is concerned is toward accepting what He tells us, even if it goes beyond our understanding of things.
The Bible contains things that have come to pass, and that will come to pass, and somewhere in the middle it contains symbolism and substance, things and ideas. It can serve as the pit of our fears and call on the summit of our imagination. At some point in our journeys it has joined us to show us the rest of the way.
There seem to be inconsistencies, to be sure, but God does not expect us to address the inconsistencies, he expects us to accept them as a given. Many of us are reasoning human beings by nature, but in terms of God if we give our reasoning for our own purposes the first priority instead of working to accept what God has told us in the Bible first and then thinking of how to apply what He has said, we will never understand what He wants from us.
Some have perceived anachronisms in the Bible, which are inconsistencies of time. How is it, for example, some ask, that the Bible has David speaking in terms of walls that haven’t been built yet, or an alter that hasn’t been set up? But what is the point? As far as the Scriptures are concerned, it doesn’t matter that alters and walls are mentioned in the Psalms, or if they were to be mentioned in the first few sentences of the Book of Genesis. In the Bible, all verses matter regardless of where they show up, and they are there to teach, train, correct and train us toward righteousness.
From perhaps another angle, consider the Book of Revelation. None of what is mentioned in there has come to pass, at least in a tangible sense, but John speaks of those things as if they are happening as he tells us.
In short, in the Bible, things like time, place and people are irrelevant...it is what God says that matters, regardless of who, what, when or where.