Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set (104 page)

Here are six pitfalls of Interpretation to watch for as you study the Scriptures.

MISREADING THE TEXT

You’ll never gain a proper understanding of Scripture if you don’t or can’t read the text properly. Ignorance of what the text says is the unpardonable sin of Interpretation. It shows that you really haven’t done your homework. You’ve skipped the first step in Bible study method—Observation.

It’s one thing to struggle with difficulties in Interpretation; it’s another thing to distort the meaning of God’s Word. That’s serious. That’s something He will bring to judgment. So we need to be careful to learn how to interpret Scripture accurately, practically, and profitably.

Contradicting the text is even worse than textual distortion. It amounts to calling God a liar. Satan has been lying from the beginning of history, and he’s still lying today by encouraging people to contradict the biblical text. One of his favorite strategies is to use the words of God to authorize a belief or practice that goes against the character of God.

Many Christians tolerate a form of mysticism in reading their Bibles that they would allow in no other realm. They violate every tenet of reason and common sense. Their Bible study is totally subjective. They wander around the Scriptures, waiting for a “liver-quiver” to tell them when they’ve struck pay dirt. There’s nothing wrong with having an emotional reaction to the Word of God. But the meaning of the text is in the text, not in our subjective response to the text.

Some people approach Scripture assuming that the Bible changes meaning over time. They believe the text meant one thing when it was written but something else today; its meaning is relative. A passage
can have numerous practical applications. 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. Some of the worst abuses of doctrine occur when someone sets himself up as the ultimate authority on the text. Keep in mind that 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.”

TODAY’S PASSAGE:

Habakkuk 3:17–19

TIME COMMITMENT:

30 minutes

“There is a direct cause-effect relationship between content and meaning. The content of a passage is the raw material, the database, with which you will interpret the text. And because of your work in Observation, you already know quite a bit about how to determine the content of a passage” (p. 229).

A
s we move from Observation to Interpretation, we’ll start with a short passage to get some practice. For the next five days we’ll look at Habakkuk 3:17–19 and practice various ways to interpret what’s there. (Before long we will get to a couple of book studies where we plan to integrate all the elements of Bible study we’ve been learning, so we won’t get too deep at this point.)

Read Habakkuk 3:17–19. Remember to look for terms, structure, literary form, and atmosphere. Try to find things that are emphasized, repeated, related, alike, unlike, or true to life. Then answer the following questions:

Who wrote this passage? To whom was he writing? (If you notice that the author did not address his people, you will have found something that makes this book unlike most other books of prophecy.)

• What is happening? What point was the author trying to make?

• Where was the author as he wrote this passage?

• When (generally) was this written? (We’ll look more closely at the context in the next assignment.)