'How to Avoid Misinterpreting the Bible'
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Let’s recap: we are exploring matters that are vital to all Christians, and easily understood by all. Even the newest Christian is engaged in the pursuit of biblical truth. We all use hermeneutics (methods of interpreting the Bible) even though most of us never use the word.
The emphasis in most Bible schools and seminaries tends to be on teaching methods of interpreting the Word that anyone can use, regardless of whether the person has any spiritual connection to God or is even pagan or atheistic. This is no criticism of theological institutions. The techniques taught are important and could be called basic or rational hermeneutics. We simply need to understand that there is more to Bible interpretation than this.
As children, we learned to read. This has proved a most valuable skill that we continually draw upon when studying Scripture. Some of us learned to read in a Christian school. Most of us learned in secular schools. It makes no difference, because an ability to read has nothing to do with one’s relationship with God. What we could call basic hermeneutics is like that. It could be taught just as effectively in a secular college as in a theological institution. It’s a valuable skill that we should be using all the time when studying the Bible.
But just as one can read the Bible well, without truly understanding it, so one can skilfully employ basic hermeneutics and not understand the spiritual truths of the Bible. The danger is that the more highly trained someone is, the more he might fool himself into thinking he understands a Scripture, when he is actually completely missing or misunderstanding much of the divine message. No matter how great his intellect, when a non-Christian encounters spiritual truths, “ . . . he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14).
That sounds spooky. We who pride ourselves on our intellect can find it so offensive that we reject the possibility of there being things the finest human minds cannot grasp without a spiritual transformation. It almost takes a divine miracle just to gain the faintest inkling as to why understanding spiritual truth is beyond the grasp of the unaided human mind.
What would it be like to experience the sensations a lizard feels when it detects a sexually desirable lizard or a delicious cockroach? No matter how much ingenious research we did, trying to figure out what it feels like to be a lizard would remain mostly guesswork and we’ll never know how off the mark our presumptions are. The only way to perceive things as a lizard does, is if, for a while at least, we had the mind of a lizard. And even if offered that opportunity, some of us would find the offer too scary to accept.
This is like the impossibility we face in trying to understand spiritual truth. It is something so foreign to human experience that no matter how great our intelligence and how deeply we ponder and analyze it, we cannot perceive things as God perceives them without undergoing a transformation of mind-boggling proportions. The sheer impossibility is reflected in Paul’s almost nonsensical prayer about God’s love:
Ephesians 3:17-19 . . . I pray that you . . . know this love that surpasses knowledge
Learning facts will never do. We cannot understand as God understands without a supernatural transference of God’s mind/nature to our mind. This life-changing experience does not come in a one-off explosive burst, wrecking every neural connection in our brain. It comes one staggering revelation a time throughout the life of everyone who is in intimate union with the divine. It is an on-going process that we can stop or hinder at any moment. This is why Peter urges Christians to grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ (2 Peter 3:18). Paul, too, speaks of “growing in the knowledge of God,” (Colossians 1:10) and tells his readers they “have put on the new self, which is being renewed [note the tense] in knowledge in the image of its Creator (Colossians 3:10). Here’s a fascinating promise:
Isaiah 54:13 All your sons will be taught by the LORD . . .
The promise is not merely that all will have access to Scripture. As important as access to the Bible is, it is like the excitement of being given a seat on a jumbo jet, only to discover that the plane has no pilot. As a telephone is dead unless someone speaks to us through it, so is Scripture, unless God speaks to us through it. Our great need is to be taught by the Lord, as the above Scripture promises. The Almighty usually does this through Scripture, but it is something he must do. If, rather than being taught by God, we are self-taught, we will inevitably miss vital spiritual truths, no matter how diligently we study the Bible. Proverbs 28:26 He who trusts in himself is a fool . . .
The same is true about looking to human teachers, rather than the Lord:
Isaiah 2:22 Stop trusting in man, who has but a breath in his nostrils. . . .
Matthew 16:17 Jesus replied, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven. . . .”
In the previous two webpage's (which should be read first – please start here) we began exploring the factors determining our receptivity to divine empowerment to discern spiritual truth. Having commenced this fascinating and critical subject, we now need to uncover still more spiritual factors affecting one’s ability to understand the Bible.
Elsewhere on this vast website I have written much in which I needed to use Scripture to discern God’s heart on various subjects. Sometimes when writing on these matters I thought it helpful to explain various principles I had had to draw upon in order to have any chance of “rightly dividing the word of truth.” So although most of this series of webpage's about Bible interpretation is new, there are occasional quotes or adaptations from portions of my other webpage's, here compiled to bring together some of the many factors that affect our ability to discern spiritual truth in the Bible. The following section is one such instance.
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