Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set (32 page)

Another problem we run into in interpreting Scripture is the variety of the terrain. If it were all mountains or desert or ocean, we could outfit ourselves appropriately and have at it. But the literary genres of the Bible are quite diverse and demand vastly different approaches. We can’t read the Song of Solomon with the same cold logic that we bring to Romans. We won’t get the point of the parables through the same exhaustive word studies that might unlock truths in Galatians.

In
chapter 29
, I’ll talk about the different types of literature in the Bible, along with suggestions for interpreting each one.

Perhaps you’ve seen the
Far Side
cartoon in which the first panel shows a man lecturing his dog, saying, “Okay, Ginger. I’ve had it. You stay out of the garbage. Understand, Ginger? Stay out of the garbage, or else!” The caption reads, “What people say.” The next panel shows the situation from the dog’s point of view, captioned, “What dogs hear.” What do dogs hear? “Blah, blah, blah, blah. . . .”

Sometimes I feel that way as a teacher. I wonder what my students are hearing. And frankly, they’re probably wondering what in the world I’m talking about.

It’s the age-old problem of communication. And even though God
Himself is speaking through Scripture, we still must contend with breakdowns in the communication process. As finite creatures, we can never know what is going on in someone else’s mind completely. As a result, we have to settle for limited objectives in our interpretation of Scripture.

So can we interpret anything? Is it possible to interpret the Bible? Of course. But you need to know that you will always encounter problems. You can never answer every question—as a seasoned old preacher wisely perceived. He was dining in a restaurant when in walked the local atheist, who thought he’d have a little sport with him. The skeptic sat down, pointed at the minister’s Bible, and asked, “Reverend, you still believe that book?”

“Absolutely,” the old gentleman replied.

“You mean you believe everything in it?”

“Every word.”

“Well,” he said, “is there anything you can’t explain?”

“Oh, there are lots of things I can’t explain,” the preacher responded. He opened his Bible and showed the fellow all the question marks in the margins.

Surprised, the man asked, “Well, what do you do with all of the things you can’t explain?”

He said, “Very simple. I do the same thing I’m doing with this fish I’m eating. I eat the meat and push all the bones to the side of the plate, and then let any fool that wants to choke over them.”

I run into people who are really blown away that I and other faculty of a theological seminary can’t explain everything in the Bible. So I usually provoke their thinking with a question: Does it really bother you that I as a finite person cannot fully understand an infinite Person? Does that really bother you? It would bother me more if I could, because then I wouldn’t need God. I’d be as smart as He is.

Don’t get tied up in knots over the problems and unanswerable questions that come up in your study of the Bible. The miracle is that you can understand all of the essential things that God wants you to understand for your eternal salvation and for your daily living.

That brings us to what is really a fifth barrier to understanding the biblical text—the problem of faulty interpretation. I want to warn you of some of the dangers in the next chapter.

O
ne Sunday morning many years ago I was home recovering from surgery, when two men showed up at my house, one older, one younger man, both nicely dressed. “We’re visiting in the neighborhood today to talk with folks about God and religion,” they told me. “Could we come in?”

Curious to see how this would turn out, I said, “Sure, come on in. I’d love to talk.”

So we got involved in a conversation. They kept talking about a particular passage, and I kept saying, “But that’s not what the Bible says.”

“Oh, yes it is,” the younger man insisted. “It’s in the Greek.” Of course, he didn’t know that I teach at a seminary.

So I asked, “What’s the Greek got to do with it?”

“Well, Mr. Hendricks, apparently you don’t know that the New Testament was written in Greek.”

“Really,” I replied. “That fascinates me. Do you study Greek?”

He said, “Yes, it’s a part of our training program.”

“Good,” I replied, and handed him my Greek New Testament. I would have given anything to have captured on video what happened next. He fumbled
with the text, trying to make sense out of it. The older man jumped in to try and bail him out. Finally I said, “Wait a minute,” and I read the passage to them, first in Greek, then in English, and said, “You see, it doesn’t say that. And it doesn’t mean that.”

The younger guy found that very interesting, but his older companion quickly hustled him out of there. (By the way, I’ve never been visited by that group since. No doubt they put the word out to stay away from Hendricks.) But that kind of thing goes on every day of the week, all over the world. The problem is not with the Word of God. It’s with misinterpretation of the text.

Let me mention six pitfalls of Interpretation. Watch out for them as you read and study the Scriptures.

You’ll never gain a proper understanding of Scripture if you don’t or can’t read the text properly. If Jesus says, “I am the way” (John 14:6), but you read it as, “I am a way,” you are misreading the text. If Paul writes, “For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10), but you read it as, “Money is the root of all evil,” you are misreading the text. If the psalmist cries, “Delight yourself in the Lord; and He will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4), but all you pay attention to is, “He will give you the desires of your heart,” you are misreading the text.

That’s why I said at the beginning of this book that if you want to study God’s Word, you’ve got to learn to read. There is no other way. 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.

The two men who visited me on that Sunday morning were guilty of distorting the text. They were making it say what they wanted, not what it actually said.

Apparently Peter ran into the same problem in the early church, because
in 2 Peter 3:16 he wrote, “There are some points in [Paul’s] letters which are difficult to understand” (Phillips). (I’ve always derived a great deal of comfort from that. If Peter couldn’t figure them out, I guess I’m not too bad off.) “And which ill-informed and unbalanced people distort (as they do the other scriptures), and bring disaster on their own heads.”

You see, 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.

This error is even worse than textual distortion. It amounts to calling God a liar. The classic illustration is Satan in the Garden of Eden:

That’s a direct contradiction of God’s express Word (Genesis 2:16–17). No wonder Jesus called Satan a liar and the father of lies (John 8:44). He has been lying from the beginning, and he is 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. Is God a killjoy who delights in human guilt and self-flagellation? Does God reward faith and good behavior with material prosperity? Is God for wild, sexual orgies and similar immoralities? Is God for the genocide of Africans, Jews, Asians, Native Americans, Muslims, the elderly, the unborn, the insane, the mentally handicapped, or the “genetically inferior”? Of course not. Yet people have used Scripture to argue for these very kinds of things.

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.