We would be angry if someone abused our bodies, poking or touching without our permission. Why are we not angry when someone abuses our minds with misleading or untruthful information? Perhaps we would be angry about that, and yet a great many of us let the Bible be misinterpreted to us or used out of context in ways that harm our minds.
The inspiration of the Holy Scriptures is in its objective content and not in our subjective reception. A given passage has a given objective meaning whether the passage is history, letter, parable, or some other story. We do have the obligation to apply that given objective meaning to our personal situations, but we do not have the right to read absolutely anything into the passage for our own use.
This idea that the meanings of Scriptures are entirely objective and can be determined apart from our own subjective interpretations may be new to you. A large percentage of Christians have been taught to use the Bible as a collection of stories in which only the occasional verse will have personal meaning to them. However, all of God’s Word is profitable and useful and is food for spiritual growth. Here are the steps to follow in understanding what you read in the Bible.
1) Be careful about what you think you already know about the passage.
If you have a preconceived interpretation of what the passage is saying, it can color your reading and lead you away from what it is actually saying. Try to approach God’s Word as an unbiased reader, perhaps as if it were the first time you every laid eyes on the passage before you.
2) What does the passage say, literally?
Without trying to interpret or apply anything, determine exactly what the passage says. Whether it is history or parable or narrative or poetry, look up any English words you are not sure about and make certain you know precisely what is said. Sometimes it helps to compare other translations. If there are figures of speech, hyperbolic exaggerations, metaphors, similes, or symbolic language, be sure you know what they are saying without trying to interpret them or apply them in this first step.
3) What did it mean to the original recipients?
Learn as much as you can about the history of the peoples mentioned in the Old Testament, Israel especially, their culture, their neighbors and enemies. Learn as much as you can about the Greco-Roman world of the first century, especially the conditions in Palestine and the cultural background of the Roman world. Familiarize yourself with the maps in a Bible atlas and the actual history of the peoples involved. A good Bible dictionary can be helpful. Often what a passage seems to mean to us in the twenty-first century may not be at all what it was intended to mean when written. Try to put yourself among the people who first received the Bible book or gospel or letter. What was its meaning to them?
4) What grammatical keys are in the passage?
Watch carefully for the tense of verbs. Are they present tense, past, or future? Try to determine (perhaps with a concordance that lists Greek words) whether the word “you” in the New Testament is singular or plural. Mark any transitional words such as “therefore” or “because” or “so.” And look closely at the prepositions (in, onto, into, etc.). Identify the antecedent if a passage uses pronouns like “this” or “it.”
At this point it might be helpful, depending on the passage, to write out your own paraphrase of what it says, still without trying to interpret or apply any of it.
5) What does the rest of the Bible say about this?
Now that you have a good grasp on what the passage is actually about, use cross-references or other Bible helps to locate additional passages in the Bible that talk about the same thing. Scriptura scripturam interpretatur, Scripture interprets Scripture. This means that more difficult passages of the Bible are to be interpreted by those that are more clear.
I have often heard speakers refer to discrepancies and contradictions in the Bible. In closely examining such claims during more than fifty years of Bible study I have yet to find any such errors. Often someone will hear a statement about some discrepancy and take it to heart as the more “educated” position. Such claims are passed along through the years usually without any real investigation of the claims. When I say I have investigated these claims, and there are many of them, let me say that my university training was in Chemistry and I am very familiar with examining actual data and evidence. Compare the Bible with itself to find the correct meaning if something seems unclear.
In the mid-1700s, Hermann Reimarus did something much more detrimental to the understanding of the Bible than to claim there are discrepancies. He was not a Christian, since he believed that there was, somewhere, a deity, but did not feel the need to be any more specific and he rejected Christianity outright.
Reimarus (1694-1768) decided to write the “real” life of Jesus by following the rationalist assumption that God could not and would not intervene in any non-natural way. Removing all the miracles and any reference to the supernatural, he focused on the history of the early first century to portray Jesus as a Jewish revolutionary who suffered an ignoble death at the hands of the occupying Romans. This “Quest for the Historical Jesus” continues in the twenty-first century in book after book that tries to separate the supernatural features of the Gospels from the historical features.
This approach was soon applied to the rest of the Bible. Books of the Bible were seen as later editorial amalgamations instead of works written by the purported authors. Everything had to be written long after the fact so that prophecies could be explained as nothing more than retrospective history. And the books of the New Testament were seen as similarly written by much later groups and falsely attributed to one of the apostles. In other words, the Bible was viewed as a compilation of highly edited forgeries, full of inconsistencies, contradictions, and discrepancies.
Instead, take the books of the Bible for what they claim to be, and see if they do not coalesce into a remarkably consistent and meaningful story.
6) And finally, what does this mean to me?
Now is the time to apply the passage to your own heart prayerfully. Knowing what the words meant to the original hearers, how would you apply those to your own situation in this century? But don’t leave it there. One additional step is needed: What are you going to do about it?