Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set (33 page)

Now there’s nothing wrong with having an emotional reaction to the Word of God. But as I mentioned in the last chapter, the meaning of the text is in the text, not in our subjective response to the text.

In Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking Glass
(the second part of
Alice in Wonderland
), the White Queen engages Alice in an instructive dialogue:

I’m afraid that’s the condition of many people today. They assume that our faith means taking a deep breath, shutting our eyes, and believing what we know deep down inside is absolutely incredible. In fact, Christianity has often been caricatured as the nonthinking man’s religion.

But nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord with all your heart, soul, strength, and
mind
. When you become a Christian, you don’t throw your brain into neutral. You don’t put your head in a bucket of water and fire a .45 into it! You don’t commit intellectual suicide.

So let me ask, Do you love the Lord with all of your mind? As we turn to the step of Interpretation, I can assure you that if you want to interpret Scripture accurately and perceptively, you’re going to have to use your mind. As I’ve said before, the Bible does not yield its fruit to the lazy—and that includes the intellectually lazy. So get ready to exercise some mental muscle.

Some people approach Scripture assuming that the Bible changes meaning over time. The text meant one thing when it was written but something else today. Its meaning is relative.

Take the resurrection of Jesus. As Frank Morison found (
chapter 8
), there is no other credible explanation for the behavior of Jesus’ disciples after His departure than that they sincerely believed in a bodily resurrection. That’s what Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 15. But today, some teachers have changed Paul’s meaning. Yes, he’s talking about a resurrection, they say; but now it means a spiritual resurrection, a “newness of life.” It doesn’t matter to them whether Jesus actually got up and walked out of that tomb—just so long as He “lives in your heart.” That’s a relativistic interpretation of Scripture.

When we get to Application we will see that a passage can have numerous practical implications. But it can have only one proper interpretation, one meaning—ultimately, the meaning it had to the original writer. We must reconstruct his message if we want an accurate understanding.

In Bible study, as in life, pride goes before a fall. The minute you think that you’ve mastered a portion of Scripture, you are setting yourself up for a tumble. Why? Because knowledge puffs up (1 Corinthians 8:1). It can make you arrogant and unteachable. Some of the worst abuses of doctrine occur when someone sets himself up as the ultimate authority on the text.

Some of us have been studying Scripture all of our lives. Yet no human being can ever master more than one book of the Bible, even in an entire life of full-time study. So don’t expect that when you come to the Bible and spend a half-hour or forty-five minutes, you’re going to walk away with the ultimate answers.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t come to conclusions about what the text means, or that you cannot feel confident in what you believe. Just keep in mind that the process of Interpretation never ends. You can never come to the end of your study and say, “Well, I’ve got that one. I know that passage.”

In light of all these dangers, is it really possible to come up with an accurate interpretation of the biblical text? Yes, it is. In the next few chapters, I’m going to show you how.

But let me stress one final point before we launch into the process. Even though a Bible passage ultimately has only one correct interpretation, you’ll always find Christians who disagree about what that interpretation ought to be. That can be frustrating, but it’s inevitable. Two people may watch the exact same bank robbery, but in court they’ll describe it in completely different terms.

Differences in interpretation are fine as long as we keep in mind that the conflict is not in the text, but in our limited understanding of the text. God is not confused about what He has said, even if we are.

We also need to preserve the right to disagree with each other, along with the responsibility to be as faithful and accurate to the text as we know how. In 2 Timothy 2:15, Paul encourages us, “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth” (
NIV
).

This verse hangs a big sign on the Bible that says, “Handle with care!” That’s a good motto for the step of Interpretation. So let’s get started. I want to show you how to avoid pitfalls and reap the benefits of an accurate understanding of God’s Word.

NOTE

I
n
A Preface to Paradise Lost
, C.S.Lewis writes:

The same could be said for the Word of God. Before ever launching into a study of a book in the Bible, the first thing a reader needs to know is what that book’s author meant it to be. In other words, what kind of literature was he writing? What literary form did he employ?

Literary genre is crucial to interpretation. Suppose I randomly pick a text from the Scripture: “O that Thou wouldst slay the wicked, O God” (Psalm 139:19). Or,“Whatever you devise against the Lord, He will make a complete end of it” (Nahum 1:9). Or, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus” (Luke 16:24). Or, “After these things I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven” (Revelation 4:1). Unless you know what types of literature those are taken from, you are in no position to determine their meaning.

In this chapter I want to give a brief introduction to six kinds of writing that appear in the Bible, and how they influence our understanding. Please note: this is merely an introduction. We’re barely going to scratch the surface on the subject of literary form, which is utterly fascinating. Entire careers have been built on mastering the finer points of the various biblical genres, to say nothing of their subsets.

So let me put this chapter in context by giving you an analogy. Suppose this book were about learning to read music instead of reading the Bible. As a beginning music student, you would need to know the basics about notes and scales and key signatures and other rudiments of reading a sheet of music. The aim would be to get you started. With some fundamental knowledge and skills (and practice), you would be able to read all kinds of musical compositions, from “Mary Had a Little Lamb” to “Climb Every Mountain” to “Rock of Ages.”