This will conclude my series on how to read and understand the Bible before beginning my next series on the 10 major systematic theology categories. Last week, I wrote about how Jesus is the ultimate central message of the Bible. Every passage of Scripture is meant to point to Jesus and reveal Him and also show what He is not. But I also left last week pointing out that if we truly are to follow Jesus, we must take all that comes with Him. That is what this post is about. While every passage is about Jesus, it is also about living a life with Jesus at the center.
The American Church as a whole has overemphasized “just believe Jesus” so you can get to heaven and the rest is details. The problem is that Jesus never taught that Himself, and neither did Paul or any other Biblical author. Luke 14:25-35 is one of the most neglected teachings of Jesus today, telling us to “count the cost.” Few people are being taught today that to be a Christian is not a freebie. While it is a “free gift” in that we do not do anything to earn it, there most certainly is a cost to it, and that cost is steep. It cost Jesus His life; it also costs us ours. We are to die daily to self, take up our own cross, and follow Jesus. Jesus did not say, “Proclaim my name, say good things about me, but you can live your life as you want otherwise.” Yet that is how many “Christians” live today. Many will adamantly deny they do this, but it won’t take lot of pressing for them to show that is exactly what they believe. So, what are other major themes throughout the Bible that revolve around following Christ?
First, you are not God. God is God. God is not like you nor molds to your desires. I will take any person to task who challenges me in my claim here that the bulk of “modern Christianity” in America today does not worship God but worships self. Listen to them. Listen to how they preach and pray. It’s all about how God can help them and service them. They treat God as their “Divine Butler.” They see Jesus as the “Humble Servant” and instead make him “THEIR servant.” God is Holy. Not just holy but holy, holy, holy. He is not like us. He is separate from everything in this universe not just in substance but especially in thinking. And in man’s hubris, we have created an image of God that does what we want, is against what we are against, likes what we like, hates what we hate, and is frankly a mirror image of us or what we would be like if we were God. One of the central messages of the Bible is that God is not like us. He is above us, far above and beyond us, where sinful man cannot grasp Him. Yet He has let us know Him in ways our finite minds can comprehend.
With that is a call for separation. This is nearly completely absent from modern Christianity today. We are to be in this world but not of it. And it’s not the Word of Faith only that does this. Listen to the Old Earth Creation scholars. They are totally engulfed in this world. They cannot understand how you can proclaim the name of Jesus and actually agree with what Jesus said about origins. Some of these scholars of various types go as far as saying that we cannot understand the Scriptures without understand the Ancient Near East cultures that surrounded them. That is absurd. Israel was told repeatedly to not be like the other nations. Yes, they were a nation that was in the Ancient Near East, but their culture was extremely different and God disciplined them every time they tried to mix with the other cultures. We in the United States are no different. We are called to be different from the culture and yet the primary philosophy of many churches today is to be like the world. We are not to think like the world, act like the world, embrace the world or any of its ideas, from millions of years (which is out of secular humanistic naturalistic thinking), to the sexual perversions we are seeing today, to the lust for material wealth, health, and prosperity, to the consumer mentality, to critical race theory and other Marxist ideologies, or even to the political issues. We are not to think like the culture, no matter what culture it is.
We were saved not only for enjoying paradise either. We were saved for the purpose of serving and glorifying God. This is often missed in the studying of Exodus. My pastor has pointed that out as he has been going through his teaching series on Exodus the last almost 2 years (and we aren’t halfway through yet). God did not save Israel because He was sad about their fate as slaves. He saved them so that they would be His people, serve Him, represent Him, and be a people that would raise up the Savior and proclaim the Savior to the world. That is our job, too. We are not saved just to get out of Hell. We are saved so that we can be separate from the world and to serve, worship, and glorify God. Our primary dream about going to heaven should not be for paradise, but our primary dream should be about being with Christ. Our dream should be about being finally free from all that which goes against Christ (which is sin). We were created to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever; the paradise is just the cherry on top. But if Christ is our focus, then Christ should BE our focus.
Finally, a key message throughout Scripture is summarized in Proverbs 3:5. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. A central message to the Bible and a central message to Christianity and following Christ is to not rely on self, especially self’s understanding of things. I do not think it is unfair to state that you are not following Christ if you are relying on your own understanding of things; you are following you in that moment, not Christ. So when you hear, “That’s your interpretation” or “That’s not how I see it” or any other variation of that, you are listening to self’s opinions, not what God has said. And while we can only proclaim what we know, we must take the pulpit or the pen very seriously. I can tell when what I write and what I speak is coming from God and when it is coming from self. And the latter is nearly always convoluted and confusing and often gibberish. But God speaks clearly and poignantly so that we have no excuse on what He meant. We are to trust God, not ourselves. When we read and study the Bible and we are saved, the Holy Spirit is with us. He is a far better teacher than any preacher or scholar (and that is no knock on those who have done these great studies). If you submit to the Holy Spirit and read the Bible for yourself with the mindset of believing and obeying it, you will find that the Holy Spirit is an even better teacher of Scripture than I ever could be.
Next week is 2023, and I will open up the year with a 10-post series on Systematic Theology. Enjoy.
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In our day and age of intellectualism and our desire to pick apart and dissect every detail of anything academically, it is very easy to get sidetracked and chase rabbits while forgetting where we are and where we are going. While the ability to properly read, understand, and unpack a verse gives the reader life, let us not forget that all these verses and all these passages have a point and purpose together. For the next two posts, I am going to describe several of the central key messages of the Bible holistically to help us keep our thinking and our studies in line. This will set up my next series on the ten fields of systematic theology that theologians use to describe the ten major subjects and themes of the Bible.
As we celebrate Christmas this weekend, we should have a heightened awareness of Christ and His coming. The overall central message of the Bible is Jesus. As Eric Ludy teaches, the Bible is the Word of God in text form. Jesus is the Word of God in living flesh. One of his sermons that I often go back and listen to again is called “Christophany,” which is about making Jesus the center of all our theology and Bible and living discussions and studies. In the sermon, Ludy shares a hypothetical dialogue between a new preacher and his old mentor. The new preacher did an excellent job at dissecting the text with great analogies and good application, but the old preacher said it was a poor sermon. Why? Because even though the text did not explicitly have Christ in it, the preacher did not make a connect to Christ. Every text has such a road to Christ and the preacher’s job, or the reader’s job, is to find that road and go to Him.
I emphasize on origins a lot, but it really is not about whether the earth is 6000 years old. The age is merely a label that encompasses everything that comes with it. There are some old earth creation apologists who publicly state that Jesus is more important than origins. While that sounds good on paper, and while no one would disagree with such statement on the surface, this is actually a false teaching in how it is used. It is correct in that studying origins is pointless unless it points to Christ, but it is dead wrong to suggest that you can believe whatever you want regarding origins “as long as you believe in Christ.” Why? Because if you get origins wrong, you get Jesus wrong. If the earth is billions of years old, that means within all those rock layers are millions of dead things, including humans, that well precede any notion of Adam. That puts human death before sin, and that right there completely eliminates the Gospel. The atheists know this. Yet our theologians cannot see it. And we wonder why our churches are so impotent today: our leading men don’t believe our own text. Why are we letting those men lead us? Why are we putting men who openly question the clarity and meaning of the opening chapters of the Bible in the spotlight as our representatives?
If Jesus is the center and the most important topic, then anything He says on the matter goes, right? Except that Jesus didn’t come into existence only about 2000 years ago. Jesus is the very Creator Himself. Don’t you think He’d know what He did? “Well, well, this is Jesus’ humanity speaking. He didn’t have His God-knowledge.” Is that your final answer? Because Jesus said He knew Abraham and that He was the I AM who met Moses at the burning bush. But let’s say Jesus’ “God-knowledge” was held back. How would Jesus answer any question about origins? “Have you not read in the Law of Moses that in six days, God created the heavens and the earth and the seas and all within them?” We have a very famous apologist who said if he could go back in time and talk to Jesus about origins, he not only would have to teach Jesus about Evolution, but that Jesus would be perfectly fine with it. My reaction to that was, “Blasphemy!” Not because he is wrong about origins, but because he is wrong about Jesus. He has the wrong image of Jesus as a result of his wrong image of origins.
There are other fields of theology in which Christ must be center. No. matter what we study, the center must be Christ. The end goal must be Christ and the One proclaimed in the end must be Christ.
Proclaiming Christ means proclaiming the Gospel. Now the Gospel is not merely the plan of salvation. It’s a big part of it, but the Gospel is so much more than that. The Gospel is not just how we sinned and rebelled and how Jesus came to save us. It is also about how we live our lives as saved people. So, the Gospel is for the believer, not just for the unbeliever. And the Gospel should be all about sharing Christ and who Jesus is.
One of my pet peeves today is the modern testimony. It is so self-centered and all about “me” and how Jesus makes my life better. While there are often mentions of “I once was a sinner and now am saved” and while there are mentions of how “Jesus saved me,” I have to ask: would anyone leaving that conversation know anything about Jesus? The answer is often no. Why? Because all they gave was self-centered message in which Jesus is a means of making life better. Jesus was presented as a means to an end, not the end of the means. We need to learn how to share our testimony so people walking away will be thinking about Jesus, not us. When Rebekah came to become Isaac’s bride, she was thinking about Isaac, not the servant who told her about him. The same should be true about us. We point to Christ and then get out of the way.
In our intellectual day and age, we are so focused on doctrine that we frequently miss Christ. I easily fall into this trap as well. I often fail to get to the Gospel when doing apologetics because I am so set on seeing the truth being proclaimed in that one area that I never get past it to where it all points too. This is one thing I so greatly appreciate about my church is that while we love and support the intellectual studies, we seek to do so out of humility and not pride. I have learned a lot, but I have a lot more to learn in putting it into practice.
Though He is the primary message, Jesus is not the only message in the Bible. There are others that go along with Him. You cannot have Jesus without having these other central messages as well. It is not enough to “just have Jesus,” because Jesus drew a rather thick line to what it means to be His disciple or not. You have to take all that comes with Him. That’s for next week.
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The past few weeks, I have been emphasizing that the Bible is overall simple and easy to understand. It is easy to get the central message of it. Otherwise, the believer would not be able to cherish its truth, and the unbeliever would not feel its conviction. But the Bible is much more than a simple book. It is a book that no matter how many times you read it you will never exhaust its depth. There a very few books you can read and keep getting new content out of it. Some books are thick enough and meaty enough that it takes multiple readings just to get it (just try studying physics when you are not used to it and see if you get it the first time through). But once you get those books, there is little point in re-reading them other than just to refresh your mind on it because you already exhausted its content. The Bible is not like that.
Anyone can unpack Scripture and continue to dig and mine its depths to see each verse come alive over and over again no matter how many times you have read it. Proverbs 3:5 is one of those verses for me. It’s a verse I memorized as a child, but in recent years, it’s truly come alive where no matter what I see and hear, this verse keeps coming back. In this post, I want to give you tips in how I unpack Scripture.
First off, there is no such thing as a “deeper meaning” of Scripture that is different from the plain, surface-level meaning. In a debate between Kent Hovind and Hugh Ross on age of the earth, during a Q&A session one guy proposed that “day” as a normal day is the plain reading, but “day” as a long period of time is the deeper meaning. I don’t remember Hovind’s response to that, but I remember I didn’t like it. He should have said that such a proposal was absurd because “deeper” cannot be “different.” You cannot go over basic addition and subtraction and then teach calculus that denies addition and subtraction. Deeper has to build upon the plain meaning and make the plain meaning richer. But you cannot change the meaning, otherwise you have a different meaning, and it will be nonsense. The simple meaning of “day” cannot be a normal day when the deeper meaning is “long periods of time.” That doesn’t work.
Sometimes digging into the original culture gives additional details that we don’t see through our lenses. An example is the Parable of the Prodigal Son when the father runs to greet his son. It was actually culturally inappropriate for an older man to run in that time period. Does this change the meaning or our understanding the passage? No; it just makes it even richer because we see the father abandoning cultural norms to show his love for his son. Yet, I have had someone use this as justification to support “Old Earth Creation” models and there was no relation whatsoever to the two. You can use these “parochial” sources to help expand the picture, but never to change the picture.
So how do you unpack Scripture? The first part of that is to believe and obey what you already know; this is vital. God has no obligation to show you deeper truths if you do not believe nor obey the truths you already have. The unpacking of Scripture is not meant to be an intellectual game that is for the scholars only. My dad is an anti-scholarly as you can get; he simply is not wired academically. Yet when he was reading through Acts and came across Paul preaching to King Felix, he caught something. Felix was nearly persuaded to be a Christian and chose to send Paul back to his prison cell to be brought back at a time that was more convenient. He shared this with me, and he had a whole sermon about the dangers of listening to and obeying Scripture at our convenience. He could not understand how someone like me could unpack Scripture so deeply, and yet there he was doing the same thing. I told him how proud I was of him in seeing that. He COULD do it. And it is because of having child-like faith. The Bible says it; he believes it. That is the first secret.
Once you come to the position of believing the text, the next part is asking God what He wants to show us. This may happen subconsciously on a spirit-to-spirit level. This happens with me all the time. I may not articulate it as such, but I’ve already taken a position of “This is God’s Word; God, what are you saying here?” As you pray and meditate on the passage, write down what is coming to mind. There are places for consulting commentaries and other versions, and I do not knock those, but be careful about letting them do your studying for you. People can tell when a preacher or writer (like me) has actually spent time in Scripture on a topic or spent time in “the books.” You will see things differently and find different things than I do. You will emphasize one thing more than I would but as long as the truth of the overall message is not changed, then you are on the right track.
When you let God speak, there is no limitations to what you can get out of a text. But beware of just pulling something out of a hat and talking out of your rear. Our job is to preach the Word, not make something up and decorate it in Christianese. But the applications, the angles, the pictures, that one living, breathing text that the Holy Spirit makes alive are too numerous to count and all out of one interpretation. There are not many interpretations – just one. God said one thing, not 20, not 2000 – just one. (See Eric Ludy’s sermon "Betrayed with a Kiss" for more on that issue.) Just preach that one thing, but the depth you can go in that one statement, that one truth, is limitless.
To unpack Scripture and dig into its depths is a skill that will not come immediately, and no blog post or book will properly equip you. It’s just like prayer. While you can read books about what prayer is and what it should look like and what it does, you will not experience the power of prayer until you actually pray. Likewise, you will not mine the depths of Scripture until you start digging and practicing and believing the truth that you know. Next week, I’ll wrap up this series by examining the central messages and key “systems” of the Bible.
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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about how to read the Bible, and now I am going to show you the opposite: how to misread the Bible, so you can identify it when you head some of these silly ridiculous arguments made by both unbelievers and believers. And don’t think I am bashing everyone out there because all of us are guilty of doing this. We have all read the Bible wrongly. So, this is not just for watching for bad arguments from “out there,” but also for watching for it in ourselves.
We first must recognize that the born-again believer is still not fully redeemed. He still has his mind and body acting on sinful old habits that are in defiance and rebellion against God. That is why we must be in continual process of putting self to death and being renewed with the transforming of the mind into alignment to Christ’s. While we are alive here on earth, we will not escape this reality, but we can be in the process of becoming more and more freed from sin and more and more like Christ. In the meantime, we have the Bible, which is our guide and school master for doctrine, reproof, correction, and righteous instruction. But we have to read the Bible correctly and not let our sinful desires that reject, corrupt, and twist it get in the way.
Perhaps the most common error that I see among professing believers is the practice called “eisegesis.” It is the idea of taking an already established idea or model and using that to interpret the text. One example of this is “Old Earth Creation” models. Because there is no text anywhere that remotely supports these models, the way it is argued is that “modern science” is true, and then they search for an interpretation, a dictionary definition, that COULD be used to support it, despite the context completely saying something different. One example of this is when an OEC cited Proverbs 6:6 to show that we could use science to interpret the Bible. Proverbs 6:6 is telling us to “look to the ant” as an example to ward against laziness and slothfulness. It does not hint whatsoever that science is a valid interpretive tool to understand Scripture. Steve Risner has a couple of blog posts, such as this one, that address this issue in more detail.
Another example of eisegesis has been a lot more subtle, but it ties back to my previous series about how the Christian home needs to ditch the “American mindset” and return to the Biblical concept. Today, we read of the Proverbs 31 woman in context of the American dream. That’s not how it should be read at all. Instead, we need to look at what it says regardless of our culture. But we do this all the time. We bring in our own understanding and our current definitions of terms instead of actually looking at what the text actually says. We must keep our guard up against this.
Another common error is that of pragmatism. I’ve always known what pragmatism was, but it really wasn’t until I was at the Shepherd’s Conference in March 2022 that I really started to get a grip of how pervasive pragmatism is in the church. Pragmatism is the “practical solution” by man’s understanding rather than doing things God’s way. The Shepherd’s Conference dealt with Critical Race Theory as the main false teaching it targeted, but one I will address is the “church growth movement.” It’s all pragmatism with the goal of “getting people in the church.” They change the message, remove the pews, give concerts instead of worship services, and give motivational speeches instead of preaching. And it works. It gets people in the church buildings. But it has gotten few saved. It is the complete antithesis of being Biblical. We must be watchful for the “practical solution” at the expense of prayer and seeking God.
Allegorization or spiritualization of the text is another big one. Here, the theme is “look for the spiritual meaning and don’t worry about the plain meaning.” Again, Genesis is a common place this is used. “It doesn’t matter that God actually created the physical universe. What is the spiritual message we can learn?” My response: you can’t learn the spiritual meanings until you get the plain ones first. But even more common than this is the inserting of yourself into the text. A classic example is David vs Goliath. You are David and Goliath is that big obstacle in front of you: finances, a job, a boss, whatever. You have to take your stone of faith and slay your giant. Sorry, that’s NOT what it is about, and you are NOT the hero. Jesus is the hero. We can learn from David for sure, but you are not David. We are not Gideon. We are not Nehemiah. Those people are all pictures of Jesus overcoming sin, not our tiny little problems.
Another one that I am surprised is still being used often is bad application. It goes like this: Jesus said He was the door, and He is not literally a physical door, therefore not every text in the Bible is to be taken literally, therefore the days of creation in Genesis 1 must be taken allegorically. And I’m like “What? How did you come up with that?” That is not flying at all. Not only is that a strawman argument, but it’s not even coherent. You can’t just say, “This worked here, therefore it must work there,” unless you can demonstrate the same conditions and setting. These arguments do not do this. We all recognize Jesus gave a metaphor, but it is quite obvious what a door is and what it does, and it is obvious what Jesus is saying with the metaphor. But those who say “day” must a metaphor never tell us what the metaphor is. What is the picture? What is the image it is supposed to portray? And is that image clear from the text? It’s not. And it’s not just Scripture where this argument is used. It’s used to defend mainstream geology. In The Grand Canyon: Monument to an Ancient Earth, 11 geologists argued that rocks can fold without breaking by applying the right pressure in all directions in the same way that in a lab you can deform an ice cube by putting the right pressures in the right directions. What these geologists did not do is demonstrate that those pressure conditions were present without also literally transforming the rock metamorphically. And they accuse us of telling “half-told stories” in the same breath.
A final way to misread the Bible is, “that’s your interpretation.” I get this one quite frequently, and there is a lot of baggage with this claim. They generally mean that the Bible cannot be read or understood as God’s message to us, but one that we have to “interpret” to academically figure out. These people do not believe that God actually intended to say anything to us, because the message is “not clear,” so we have to “figure it out.” God only intended one interpretation and He used precise language (known as the doctrine of perspicuity) to make it so no one has excuse for not knowing what it says. When someone throws the “that’s your interpretation” argument at you, they are trying to put you on defense and make you second guess yourself that you have heard from God correctly. All the while THEY are the one who is “interpreting” it wrongly so they can justify their false beliefs, while professing to be Christians. Don’t fall for it. There is a way that seems right to a man, and the end is death. None of us are “qualified” to “interpret” the Bible. We are all untrustworthy. This is why Proverbs 3:5 tells us explicitly to not lean on our own understanding but to the trust the Lord. Do not try to “interpret” the Bible. Instead submit to it.
Next week, I’ll look at how to unpack Scripture and how to dig into it for richer and purer ore.
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Samuel Clemens stated, “Most people are disturbed by the parts of the Bible they don’t understand. I find the most disturbing thing are the parts I do understand.”
The Bible is not some cryptic text that takes decades of scholarship to understand. It was written in simple, plain language so that an “uneducated” audience could hear it and understand its message. A child can understand the basic message in Scripture, despite the depth of Scripture being inexhaustible. But a common trend I am seeing today are scholars, some of whom proclaim to be Christian, actively trying to make the Bible not understandable because the plain reading directly contradicts all the scholarship of their age and culture. And I will call this intentional. Why? Because the passage in discussion is directly in conflict to the world’s teachings.
I have had people actually try to cite 2 Peter 3:16, in which Peter does admit that some of Paul’s teachings are hard to understand as justification to claim that “some parts of the Bible are hard to understand, therefore Genesis is hard to understand.” Really? That passage actually doesn’t do what he thinks it does. The context of that passage not only puts Paul’s writing in the Scripture category, but the “difficulty to understand” part is specifically connected with those who seek to distort the teachings. The Bible is hard for the natural mind to understand, because they are spiritually discerned.
So while I am not trying to make a blanket statement here, if people think that “day” is not clear in Genesis 1, when it is even clearer in Exodus 20:11, is that because the text is not clear or because the reader simply doesn’t want to believe the text? The word “day” is never debated in any other passage, only Genesis 1. Why is that? The answer is very simple: Because we have an academic world that teaches the earth is millions of years old and this notion is held as tightly as Jezebel held the teaching of Baal. I truly consider “millions of years” to be one of the big idols of our nation. And because it is given precedence over the directly revealed, divine revelation of Scripture, that certainly puts it in the idolatrous position.
Martin Luther said that if we proclaim the truth of Scripture EXCEPT in the area where the battle is taking place, then we are merely professors of Christ, not confessors of Christ. Professors of Christ in this context are in extreme danger of being in the Matthew 7:21-23 category, professing the faith but never having known Christ. Only confessors of Christ – those who stand for Christ no matter what the world says – are getting in. It’s not enough to just say, “I believe in Jesus.” That is not going to cut it. You can state all the doctrines and proclaim the Gospel all you want, but if you cave on the very topics that the world is attacking, then all those proclamations have no weight and no power. For the last 200 years, origins has been on the front lines on the attack on Scripture. The Christian duty is to defend Scripture against such attacks, not to surrender Scripture to accommodate such teachings. We must be vigilant at all times and be alert for the cheap counterfeits of faith being offered that lets you get along with the world and still proclaim a faith that actually doesn’t match the one the Bible teaches.
To cover this, the unbelieving yet professing believer doesn’t admit that he simply doesn’t believe the text. He makes the argument that the Bible wasn’t clear. That the text was for ancient, primitive people, that we modernists have moved on from. This argumentation unintentionally does several things. The person who makes these claims is actually proclaiming illiteracy. If they do not understand what “day” means and they really mean that, why on earth should we believe they actually understand anything else like “science” or “salvation”? If you have a hard time understanding addition and subtraction, how are you going to convince someone you understand calculus?
With this charge is an accusation that God does not know how to communicate with his own people what he meant to say. Einstein is attributed to saying that if we can’t explain something simply, we don’t know the material well enough. If God did indeed create over millions of years, He had the ability to communicate that to an unscientifically minded audience. Take notice that all these supporters of Deep Time cannot do it either. They cannot explain it themselves. It’s too nuanced, too technical to explain it simply. The fact remains that Deep Time CANNOT be understood until it is accepted first. That’s why elementary books and science shows all get the indoctrination done first so it is already accepted before going into the details. But this whole charge is that man is smarter and more advanced than God. Such hubris. So why are CHRISTIANS supporting this? I get the world doing this. I get sinful people doing this. This is why Eve ate of the tree: to be better than God. But the Christian?
My recommendation to the Christian struggling with “understanding the Bible” is to empty your library. EMPTY it. Get rid of all the books. Forget all the theologians. Get rid of your education. Start all over. That’s part of what being “born again” actually entails. Even Yoda echoed this truth: “You must unlearn what you have learned.” Start over. Start with the Bible. Understand it as the Word of God speaking directly. If you need it hear aloud, read it aloud. Pray that God reveal what he means to you. After all, the Author is still around. Only upon accepting the Bible as the Word of God are you to start looking at any other book. There are things you may not understand, and that will happen. We are finite beings. But when you come to an area of not understanding, take the mindset of the father of the demon-possessed boy: “I believe, help my unbelief.”
Make this your prayer: “Father, I know this is your word. I do not understand it, but I accept it as your word and I will believe it, even though I don’t understand it.” NEVER let this be your attitude: “Our modern science and academics must be true, therefore the Bible needs to be adjusted to meet it.” The Bible is the first, final, and ultimate authority of the believer. We go to it first, we check our studies with it, and we let it trump any and every other voice out there. Beware, only those who believe and obey are getting in. And how can you believe and obey what God says when you change the message to make it more comforting to you? Here is a good, general test to see if your “interpretation” is correct or not: Does the world teach the same idea or the opposite? If the world is teaching it, you can be certain that God is not part of it. Believe the Bible; believe God. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and please do everything in your power to stop leaning on your own understanding.
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We live in times with the information superhighway, and most access to commentaries and study guides and sermons of all time, and yet we have to actually teach people how to read again. It is no exaggeration when I say that while we have the most access to information of all time, we are also the most illiterate of all time. Not only do so few people actually read books anymore (they read blog posts or hear commentaries on social media, but few actually read), it’s left a generation that is truly the dumbest of all time. Don’t believe me? Watch Jeopardy! Why have we had several excessively strong winners all in a row? Look at the questions. They are getting easier. The reason we have three of the top winners all in the last few years is because they have little competition. I’m not taking away anything from them academically. They did their job. But so few can rival them because we have an illiterate generation.
There is a saying: as goes the family, so goes the Church. As goes the Church, so goes society. Yes, I will put a big chunk of this problem on the Church from the past 50-some years. When Barna released their latest polls last year, 6% of professing Christians have a Biblical worldview and 34% of pastors (and I think that’s being generous). Where are you going to find a pastor actually preaching from the Bible? Hardly anywhere on TV today. Where are you going to find a pastor who strives to teach his congregation how to read the Bible? I’m glad I am part of a church that wants to do that. My previous church touched on it, but overall, there is an assumption that those in the congregation are reading the Bible regularly and know how. We know that is not true because of how many false teachings pastors are letting through their doors and proclaiming themselves. And we have to ask as well: how many pastors are actually reading the Bible besides to find something for a sermon? What is going on here?
The only solution for any of this is to get back to reading the Bible and actually believing it. For this post, I am going to give you tools and tips on how to read the Bible, and these are not magical formulas by any means. It is simply putting to words what should be practiced in normal reading. This is about what the Bible says; what the Bible means is a separate topic that I will address next week.
The first tip is to identify the genre. We do this naturally and subconsciously with nearly anything else we read. We know what a historical document is, what a poem is, what a metaphor is, what a myth is, what legal document is, what fiction is, etc. After all, I do assume we passed basic English or literature classes here. The Bible is written in multiple genres and the only ones it does not have are myth and fiction. Even if you don’t agree with it, at least be honest about what genre it is. Genesis (for example) is a historical document. Despite many scholars trying to say otherwise, there is no legitimacy to any such argument. Each argument boils down to, “I know what the text says, I don’t believe it, but I want to show I believe the Bible, so it must not actually mean what it says.” And these are people we have deemed to be good preachers saying this, not just your average academic. The language, the grammar, the syntax, and the verb conjugations all speak of plain, simple, historical narrative, just as much of the rest of the Bible is. But many try to make Genesis anything other than this so they can be justified in holding positions that are directly contrary to what it actually says.
The next thing to learn is called exegesis. Don’t panic over this theological term; it simply means to let the text speak for itself. We do this with every other document. Yet why is it so hard with the Bible? When the Bible says “the first day,” it MEANS “the first day.” When the Bible says, “The waters parted and Israel crossed on dry land,” it means that waters parted and Israel crossed on dry land. When the Bible says Jesus rose on the 3rd day, it means He rose on the third day. When the Bible says that Jesus is the ONLY way into heaven, it means Jesus is the ONLY way. That is what it says. That is what the words say. “But how do we account for modern science?” We don’t try to account for modern science. Not at this stage. The first stage is: “What does the Bible say?” Once we get that straightened out, THEN we can go try to figure out how it all works.
My friend Bobby Maddox is a business lawyer and to help address this topic, he came up with a list of ten principles that we all normally do anyway. If we keep these principles in mind, we’ll avoid the traps and errors that so many have fallen into. In this video, he explains his structure, so take the time to listen for more details. Here are just a few of the ten principles.
• The plain meaning is to be the intended meaning unless the context demands something different. The adage goes: “Adding more sense to the plain sense leaves you with nonsense.”
• Stay within the four corners of the document. In other words, get as much out of the document as you can from within the document itself. The phrase preachers use is “Scripture interprets Scripture.” Follow this and most confusions will clear up.
• Use of other sources should be limited and only used for help to clarify what the document is saying, never for interpreting and making it say something it didn’t. These outside sources are only to be used after all other internal sources have pretty well been exhausted.
• Keep it simple. Don’t try to overthink it. The mental gymnastics people do in order to try to keep track of their misinterpretations is simply mind-boggling. God did not write a book that takes a super genius and 80 years of scholarship to figure out. He made it simple so even a child and the uneducated can get at least the basic message.
One final tool is the acronym OIA, which stands for Observation, Interpretation, Application.
Observation: What does the text say? Get all the data you can before you start putting the facts together. Don’t read a single verse and lift it out of context. Keep it in context.
Interpretation: I’ll emphasis this more next week, but only put together your interpretation after you gather all the facts. Don’t be like those CSI teams that quickly jump to a conclusion too early and then a new piece of evidence reveals the actual truth. Get all the facts as much as you can. And please, test your interpretation against the whole message of Scripture.
Application: The purpose of the Bible is first to be believed then obeyed. It is not meant to be academically scrutinized (though there is great truth to be found in unpacking Scripture, which I will address in a couple weeks). You cannot obey the truth that you don’t know. And if you misinterpret it because you left out some of the facts, how can you obey the truth?
Read the Bible – all of it. It pretty well clears itself up. There will be some things that are harder to understand than others; I get that. But the whole message is pretty clear. It is clear enough that Jesus’ audience understood perfectly what He was saying, and they hated Him for it. Please do not confuse unbelief with “it’s hard to understand.” That’s just a cop-out to cover for unbelief. Next week, I’ll address how to understand the Bible, rather than “interpreting” it according to our own understanding.
This forum is meant to foster discussion and allow for differing viewpoints to be explored with equal and respectful consideration. All comments are moderated and any foul language or threatening/abusive comments will not be approved. Users who engage in threatening or abusive comments which are physically harmful in nature will be reported to the authorities.
To be dead honest, I think to have to write a post about “how to read the Bible” shows just how far we have fallen both academically and intellectually. I will save the details for next week because I need to use this post to explain why such a post needs to be written. The way people try to read the Bible to get it to say something other than what it says really demonstrates both the pride of humanity and the determination to look religious while disbelieving the very text these people proclaim to believe. Intellectualism has truly become the prime idol of our nation today. It is in the universities and the churches. The liberals in secular schools of thought profess all this science and knowledge that is direct rebellion against God. And in the intellectual reformed circles, there is a level of pride that has not been seen in years. I am wired intellectually, yet what I am seeing around us today in the name of education is truly insulting to an actual education.
Mixed with all the hubris and pride of education, theories, ideas, etc. is a New Age mystic approach where everything is about feelings, emotions, and personal opinions. The deception we have going on today is actually a mix of these. But keep in mind, it’s not new. It’s the same recycled theories of Epicureans, Stoics, and other philosophies of ancient Greece/Rome. Different flavors and different colorings, but same core meal.
Along with this is an ever-present teaching that, “You cannot understand anything unless you have been properly educated.” In today’s world, you cannot understand “Evolution” unless you have been thoroughly trained in Evolution by universities and embrace it. Go online and present an argument against Evolution and someone, PhD or not, will give you the standard reply of, “You don’t understand Evolution.” I hear that so often I seriously have to wonder how many of them understand Evolution. I suspect the answer is few because they can only parrot what they were taught.
This is a problem with the Bible today, too. Some believe that no one can be a pastor unless he’s been to seminary and learned all the theories and man’s ideas about the Bible. No one can actually understand the Bible unless you speak fluent ancient Greek and Hebrew. No one can actually understand the Bible because it wasn’t written to a 21st century audience, but to a dumb, uneducated Ancient Near East audience, so in order to understand the Bible, you have to understand all the pagan cultures around Israel. While knowing your Greek and Hebrew and knowing the context in which the books were original written is very useful, can you not hear the pride in such arguments? I can.
In his book The Lost World of Genesis One, John Walton tries to paint a picture that Genesis 1 is a “temple inauguration text,” not a description of the creation of the natural world. When asked why no one else had seen that before, he defends his position by saying that the rest of church history didn’t have access to all the Ancient Near East documents we have today. There is such pride in thinking, “No one else understood this, but because of my education, I do.” I am immediately turned off by such thinking, and I hope you are too.
So let me make this simple: you don’t need ANY of that to be able to read the Bible, to understand the Bible, or to believe the Bible. God wrote the Bible to be timeless and simple enough that the uneducated layman can understand its primary messages. Yes, there are passages that are hard to understand. They do exist. But most of it is not difficult. Jesus does not require an “educated” faith; He calls for a child-like faith. The simplest and best approach to any passage we do not understand should be: “Father, this is your word. I don’t get it, but because it is your word, I receive and believe it. Help me in my unbelief.” Instead, what many do is come up with their intellectual theories and systems to try to explain both God and the passage to audiences to make them look smart. We have to get rid of such ideas.
The Bible is a very complex book because no scholar is ever going to exhaust the depths of it. But it is also a very simple book. A child can read it and get the main message. “But a child doesn’t have all the knowledge that we have,” says the skeptic. Yes, but a child also doesn’t have his brain washed with man’s ideologies either and is able to believe it with simple child-like faith. While I am an intellectual type, and while many people praise my ability to write and my ability to explain things, really what I have is that child-like faith. The Bible says it; I believe it. There’s nothing more to it. All I seek to do is showcase what is there for all to see. I don’t need anyone looking at me as some guru. I’m not a guru or an expert; I’m simply a proclaimer. I have no special knowledge that is not accessible to anyone else who simply believes God at His word.
But that said, the Bible is also a living document in the sense that its Author is still alive and still around. The Bible’s openness is towards believers with that childlike faith. To the intellectually proud and to the unbeliever, God is going to shut off understanding of His word and to them the Bible is just dead text. The real power and the life of Scripture comes from those who believe it and submit to it. Leonard Ravenhill said this:
One of these days some simple soul will pick up the Book of God, read it, and believe it. Then the rest of us will be embarrassed...
The fact beats ceaselessly into my brain these days that there is a world of difference between knowing the Word of God and knowing the God of the Word. Is it not true that with the coming round of Bible conferences we hear only old things repeated, and most likely come away without any increase of faith? Perhaps God never had such a set of unbelieving believers as this present crop of Christians. How humiliating!
~Leonard Ravenhill, Why Revival Tarries, page 71
While God can use the intellectual, He does not require them. Only one of the Apostles was an intellectual – Paul, and he was the last one chosen. Paul also knew where academia belonged – to be subservient to simply preaching the Word, if not discarded. Paul never came with eloquence of speech but through the foolish method of preaching. Today, we have apologists who are very eloquent, and some have declared that their mission is to “remove any intellectual barriers between an unbeliever and the Gospel.” There is a valuable place for that, but what it has become is a pure intellectual game that ultimately has no power. I love apologetics and I love being able to defend and proclaim the faith in a rational way, but something is drastically missing and a lot of it is a total lack of belief in the power of God to actually do the work through His word and instead relying on man’s wisdom and man’s intellect. Do we really believe the Bible or not? And how can we believe it if we have forgotten how to read? Next week, I’ll go into how to read the Bible. It will be simple, straightforward, and easy to understand.
This forum is meant to foster discussion and allow for differing viewpoints to be explored with equal and respectful consideration. All comments are moderated and any foul language or threatening/abusive comments will not be approved. Users who engage in threatening or abusive comments which are physically harmful in nature will be reported to the authorities.
I have written about the topic of the Bible’s authority in multiple posts over the years, and one can never emphasize this point enough. The Bible has authority, and everyone knows it, believer or not. Whether people recognize it or not, nearly every decision must go through the Bible and God’s revealed moral statutes. Those who believe and follow the Bible will make their decision based on a particular command or principle established in Scripture. Those who reject the Bible may not think about it actively as they make their decision, but they categorically rejected the Bible a while back. To this day, I have never met a person who can truly demonstrate that he rejects the Bible for intellectual reasons. He hides behind such reasons, but that is not why they reject it. It is because of the moral standards and the ever-present condemnation that it brings to men who are not of Christ.
The Bible has authority. One thing I find fascinating is that everyone who holds to some teaching that goes against what the Bible said, even if they proclaim to be Christians, are constantly arguing and debating against people who do believe what the Bible says. Why would they? The answer is very simple: they need approval from those who know God to justify their own unbelief. They are very clever in their approach, but they are constantly looking for acceptance and approval from the genuine believer. They would not do this unless they knew the Bible actually has the authority on the matter and they knew that the believer was at the watch tower to let them in or not. If they really believed the Bible didn’t have such authority, they would not even bother with us and they would not seek to get us involved in their choices. But they can’t escape it. God won’t let them live in rebellion against Him that easily. So they come to us for the purpose of seeking to suppress the truth and justify their unbelief and sin.
The Bible has authority. If you pay attention to any of the creeds or confessions of the faith of church history, the Bible is always what they start with, because the Bible is the source of all their information and their statements. It is imperative that we give the Bible the position that God gave it. There are three positions of authority I am going to address in this post.
1) The Bible is our first authority. Many people tend to forget this one and leave the Bible as the last resort. However, the Bible should actually be our first authority. It should be the first authority that we turn to. The Bible should be our first filter to determine what we should do. Any time we are confronted with a decision our first question should be “What does the Bible say?” (Katie Erickson’s book is a good primer on this issue.) The Bible may not explicitly state what we should do in every situation. It does not tell us whether we should go to that football game or not, or whether we can watch that show or not, or which school we should go to. But it does give us the framework we should use in making said decisions. One question we should use in such cases is: “How will doing this thing or going to this place help me give glory to God?”
The Bible teaches us that our primary purpose is to glorify God and to worship and enjoy Him. When God rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt, He didn’t want to just get them out of slavery; He wanted them to be a people unto Him, to serve Him and to glorify Him. The same is true when Jesus delivers us from the slavery of sin. Our saved life is about glorifying and serving Christ. So, when we decide what job to take or what school to go to or whatever, our first authority should be to see what God says about such things.
2) The Bible is our final authority. Now, don’t get the wrong idea here; I am not talking about the Bible being our last authority after we have exhausted all others. There are severe dangers in that because we’ll start getting ideas from the bad sources and intentionally or not, we’ll start comparing the Bible to what we heard from the world or start mixing and matching what the world says with what the Bible says.
What I mean by the Bible should be our final authority is that we should start with the Bible, do our study and analysis, and then check our conclusion with the Bible. We build our framework for our question with the Bible, and then we confirm that our answer, our models, and our conclusions still agree with the Bible in case we got off track. Many people will build their models and ideas and they’ll use pieces of Scripture to build them, but they never check to see if their models actually agree with what the Bible says. That is why we must check our ideas out with the Bible as our final authority.
3) The Bible is our ultimate authority. This is not popular today because this means that the Bible is above every other authority out there; yes, that includes all academics and modern “science” which has become its own religion. It does not matter how many physicists, geologists, astronomers, paleontologists, biologists, chemists, theologians, or whatnot support whatever model; if it does not agree with the framework of the Bible, namely the historical context of events it describes (6000 years of history, a global flood, and people dispersion from Babel), then it is not an accurate study. The skeptics hate the “statement of faith” that groups like Answers in Genesis or the Institute for Creation Research have in which any scientific statement that disagrees with the Bible must be wrong. At least AiG and ICR are up front about it. The same skeptics automatically dismiss any science that might agree with the Bible, so they are guilty of the same thing. But what many Christians have done, including some who are very good preachers otherwise, is surrendered the Bible in light of “modern science.” All the “old earth creation” models actively reject the authority of Scripture on this topic, whether anyone recognizes it or not, because in order to get “millions of years” into the picture, you have to reject Genesis’ account, even if you support pieces of it. It’s all or nothing.
A common argument I get is that “The Bible is silent on this issue; therefore, we are free to look to other sources.” Actually, no you are not. And you will find that the people who say the Bible is silent on the “age of the earth” have the exact same argument structure and style as those who say the Bible is silent on “loving, committed, homosexual relationships.” In fact, the Bible is quite clear on both of those topics. If old earthers had not brought such arguments into the Church, the Church would not be listening to it from the sexual immoral people trying to justify their lusts. Yet they are, because they no longer believe in the Bible as the ultimate authority, the supreme authority, and the superior authority. They didn’t go to it first. They went to their own models and own ideas. They did pull from some Scripture, attempting to justify their models by twisting Scriptures totally out of context. And they never went back to verify their models to compare them with what Scripture says.
If we are to actually believe the Bible as the inspired Word of God, as actually coming from God, we cannot allow any other authority to have a say. If we do allow them say, then they must be completely subservient to Scripture. Rank them. If the Bible is at authority #1, then science should actually be about #10 if not lower. In between with a full visible gap between the Bible and the next ranked authorities, pastors and commentaries should be next around authority #5 or 6. There should be no #2-4 in this case to just to showcase how far above and beyond the Bible is over any man and his sayings or writing. Even the man who fully believes the Bible should be put far below Scripture itself. Please, friends, don’t ever think that what I am writing here is actually remotely on par with Scripture itself. All I can do is point to it.
When we have the Bible in its rightful place with authority over all matters in which it speaks (hint: it speaks on every type of topic so there is no thing you can address in which the Bible does not have some say on the matter in concept, overview, or specifically), then we can make the wise and correct decision in any matter or situation. Over the next few weeks, we’ll look at how people are reading the Bible wrongly today and how it should be read instead.
This forum is meant to foster discussion and allow for differing viewpoints to be explored with equal and respectful consideration. All comments are moderated and any foul language or threatening/abusive comments will not be approved. Users who engage in threatening or abusive comments which are physically harmful in nature will be reported to the authorities.
One of the greatest unfortunate side-effects of modern academia is that because it is based on man’s ideas and man’s interpretations, even the most elite scholars have actually forgotten the most fundamental thing behind academics: reading. Now, I am not saying that these people do not read at all, but that they do not know how to read. They know how to make ideas fit with their ideals, but do not know how to actually let a text say what it actually says. This is especially true when it comes to the Bible and Christianity. And I am not merely talking about the world “out there” either. I am talking about professing Christians and defenders of the faith in our apologetic communities. When I hear some of these people talk about the Bible, I seriously have to ask, “Do you even know how to read anymore?” Because what they say the Bible says is nothing like what the Bible says. People want to boast about the salvation and sanctification of Christianity, but for the life of them they cannot figure out what the word “day” means in Genesis.
This has compelled me to write a series about how to read and understand the Bible. God’s timing is perfect, because I just completed a series about returning our homes to a Biblical structure and format, to be a place that God directs and owns and where it is a place of production and value, rather than a place of consumption and about self. How can we return to the old paths, how can we go back in order to go forward, unless we know what God is actually saying through Scripture? We need to get back to the basics, return to the foundations. There is nothing wrong with studying things academically, but there is something dreadfully wrong with how academia is done today.
This post will start a series about the fundamentals of how to read and understand the Bible. While I will at times throw in some “academic” terms, those are merely fancy words for things we normally do anyway. The Bible is a simple book in that even a child can read and understand; but it is also a deep book that the most learned scholar will have only scratched the depths of its richness. And one thing I will make clear: if the “deep” meaning contradicts in any way the “simple” meaning, it is not a “deep” meaning at all but a perversion. I will not be as some of the academics that talk down to the non-scholars and say “you have to know the original Greek and Hebrew” to understand the Bible (which is useful, but not necessary), but I want to re-open the Bible to people. It is a book that is to be cherished, loved, and respected, but it is primarily meant to be understood, believed, and obeyed. If people want to reject the Bible, that’s their call, but they had better accurately represent it when they do so if they want to be known as an academic.
So, what is the Bible? What is this book? First off, it is not one book. It is a collection of 66 books written by 40 authors from all sorts of walks of life, in all different political and religious contexts, different locations, different languages, different primary audiences, different genres, all over a 1600-year span, and yet it all says the same message. It is not an anthology either, but it actually reads as though it is a single book with a single mind. There is no other book that is like it. No anthology compares. No academic text compares. No historical document compares. No religious text compares either. It is unique among all other books. You can get more details about this in my book Ten Reasons to Believe the Bible.
The Bible is not just a book of Jewish writings about the Jewish people, but rather a book by Jewish authors through whom God is sending a message to the whole world. The primary audience of the Bible is not Jews, but rather the Church throughout the ages. While many academics often look at the Bible from the lens of the Ancient Near Eastern culture, that is not an appropriate way to interpret it. Even though Israel was geographically in the Ancient Near East, culturally they were vastly different. God set up their culture to be different from the rest. This was to be a physical demonstration for the church age to come.
The Bible’s historical writings have a two-fold purpose. First, to give an accurate history. That history was primarily as a test to prove who the Messiah would be. Jesus had to come from Adam, Noah, Shem, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah, and then David. The historical records are not only the most accurate accounts of history ever written, but their accuracy is part of what enables us to know that Jesus is indeed the Messiah. Second, to give all its readers examples of every type of situation we could face. These are not myths nor fables but records of actual events. They actually happened as described. They were not mythicized. There are countless examples where I have seen the exact same tactics and moves used by the people recorded in the Bible today.
The Bible has laws, teachings, wisdom writings, songs, prophecies, parables, group and personal letters, apocalyptic literature, and even metaphors and allegories. The primary genre is history or historical narratives – giving an account of what happened. Unless the text demonstrates to be otherwise, this should be the default. I’ll deal with this more as the series progresses.
The Bible is unique from every other book in that it is inspired by God. While God did indeed use human authors to physically pen the text, each were moved and carried along by the Holy Spirit. In some cases, it was direct dictation such as the prophecy books. In other cases, the Holy Spirit utilized the author’s personality and writing style and yet still carried on the divine spirit in the text. Not just any book or author could claim this, though many tried. Moses and the Apostles in particular were validated as divine authors because they were given power to perform miracles that showed they were from God. The prophets were authors were tested by the tests of a prophet which included a death sentence for prophesying wrongly. So not only were these books written under the direct influence of the Holy Spirit, but they were publicly recognized as such at the time they were written. It is this inspiration that gives the Bible its position as the first, final, and ultimate authority over every matter it speaks on.
This forum is meant to foster discussion and allow for differing viewpoints to be explored with equal and respectful consideration. All comments are moderated and any foul language or threatening/abusive comments will not be approved. Users who engage in threatening or abusive comments which are physically harmful in nature will be reported to the authorities.
