Let me start with the most honest objection.

For many thoughtful people today, especially in highly urban, educated, and secular spaces like Makati or BGC, the Bible doesn’t feel false, it just feels irrelevant.

Ancient, pre-scientific, out of touch with modern psychology, pluralism, technology, and lived experience. Something that belonged to another time: useful perhaps for history or private spirituality, but not for real life in 2026.

I get that.

I spent decades in the finance world before stepping into full-time ministry. I’ve lived in seminar halls, not seminaries. I’ve worked with data, markets, incentives, and human behavior. So when people ask, “Is the Bible still relevant today?” I don’t hear rebellion, I hear a reasonable question.

The better question might be this: What do we mean by “relevant”?

Relevance Isn’t About Being Trendy

When we say something is “relevant,” we usually mean one of two things:

1. It agrees with our current values
2. It affirms our instincts and preferences

By that definition, the Bible will often feel irrelevant, because it refuses to simply echo the dominant assumptions of any age. As Pastor and Author Tim Keller often pointed out, every culture has blind spots and sacred texts that merely reinforce a culture’s assumptions aren’t transcendent, they’re captive.

What makes the Bible unusual is that it comforts and confronts every culture at the same time. Ancient cultures found parts of it offensive, so do modern ones. This is not a flaw, it is the design.

The Bible Diagnoses Problems We Still Haven’t Solved

Modern society has made astonishing progress in technology, medicine, and access to information. Yet, we are far less confident that we’ve made progress in answering life’s deepest questions:

• Why do I feel anxious even when things are going well?
• Why does success still feel fragile?
• Why do relationships carry so much weight and still disappoint?
• Why does injustice persist despite education and awareness?
• Why do we long for meaning but distrust anything that claims to define it?

The Bible doesn’t begin by telling us how to behave, tt begins by diagnosing the human condition.

Not ignorance, not lack of education, but disordered loves. We don’t just do wrong things, we love the wrong things too much: career, freedom, romance, money, identity, nation and even morality itself.

That diagnosis feels uncomfortably modern.

The Bible Is Honest About Power—Before We Were

One of the more surprising things about the Bible is how unsentimental it is about power.

Its heroes are deeply flawed, its leaders fail publicly, its kings abuse authority, tts religious institutions are repeatedly critiqued and its prophets speak against their own people. In an age that is rightly skeptical of institutions, authority, and religious hypocrisy, this matters.

The Bible doesn’t hide human failure, it exposes it. It doesn’t pretend that religion automatically makes people good. In fact, some of its sharpest critiques are aimed at the religious and that alone should make us pause before dismissing it as naïve or authoritarian.

Meaning, Not Just Morality

Many secular readers assume the Bible is mainly a rulebook, it’s not. It’s a story: a long, complex, multi-layered narrative about creation, fracture, longing, redemption, and hope.

It doesn’t merely ask, “How should I live?”
It asks, “What kind of world am I living in?”
And, “What kind of person am I becoming?”

As theologian N. T. Wright often argues, the Bible offers a vision of reality where justice, beauty, sacrifice, forgiveness, and hope are not illusions—but signposts pointing to something real.

That question, whether meaning is real or constructed, is one modernity still wrestles with.

The Problem Isn’t That the Bible Is Outdated, The Problem Is That It’s Inconvenient

If the Bible were merely outdated, we could safely ignore it.

But what unsettles people is that it keeps addressing things we would rather manage ourselves:

• Control
• Identity
• Moral authority
• Ultimate allegiance

It doesn’t simply offer inspiration, it makes claims and claims demand response.

C. S. Lewis once argued that we don’t get to treat the Bible, or Jesus, as merely “interesting.” Either it’s wrong, or it’s disruptive, or it’s true… but it refuses to remain neutral. That’s uncomfortable in a culture that prizes personal autonomy above all else.

My 2 Cents

Maybe the Bible isn’t irrelevant, maybe it’s unwilling to be domesticated. It doesn’t bend easily to any culture, ancient or modern. It critiques religious pride and secular self-confidence with equal force. It refuses to flatter us, but it also refuses to give up on us.

And perhaps that’s why, even in the most secular cities, among the most educated audiences, the Bible keeps resurfacing, not as a relic, but as a question. Not shouting, just quietly asking:

What if reality is deeper than we think?
What if meaning is not something we invent, but something we receive?
What if relevance isn’t about fitting our age but about revealing us to ourselves?

That question, at least, still feels very much alive.