Foundations of the Christian Life. Chapter 6 - Understanding the Bible.

Foundations of the Christian Life.
Chapter 6. Understanding the Bible.

We are looking at the concept of the Word of God, the Bible, as being part of the foundation of our Christian life. It is something we build our lives on. We saw how the position of the Protestant Evangelical church worldwide has always been that the Word of God is the final authority for all matters of faith and practice. Everything else is to be judged by that standard.

But that brings us face to face with an important question: How do we understand the Bible?

A popular idea is that the Bible is so complex that one can make it mean anything one likes. So many people treat it like that – and invent all sorts of crazy ideas that they try to justify from the Bible. How do we protect ourselves from just “reading our own opinions into the Bible”?

There are some things we need to know to protect us.

THE HOLY SPIRIT IS OUR TEACHER.

Firstly, we need to recognise that the Holy Spirit is our Teacher. Christ returned to heaven and sent us the Holy Spirit to lead, teach and guide us. The following are the words of Jesus:

JOHN 14:26
“But the Counsellor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.”

JOHN 15:26
"When the Counsellor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me.”

JOHN 16:7-15
“But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counsellor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgement: in regard to sin, because men do not believe in me; in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; and in regard to judgement, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.
"I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you.”

* Jesus here predicts his own departure from the disciples. But it is not a bad thing – it will be to their advantage.
* When Jesus goes, God will send the Holy Spirit.
* The Holy Spirit is the “Spirit of Truth” and will guide Christians into all truth. He will reveal to us what the meaning of Jesus’ life and ministry is all about.

This was to fulfill the promise God made to his people in the Old Testament that in the New Covenant they would be taught in a new way.

Jeremiah 31:34
“No longer will a man teach his neighbour, or a man his brother, saying, `Know the LORD,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest," declares the LORD. "For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more."

It makes sense that God would give us the Holy Spirit to be our teacher – it was the Holy Spirit who inspired the writers in the first place (2 Timothy 3:16,17, 1 Peter 1:10-12) so he best knows what the Bible means.

1 Peter 1:10-12.
“Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow. It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things.”


But even more than this: the Holy Spirit lives in us, he knows us intimately so he knows what we need to know and how best to teach us that so that we can receive it. The Holy Spirit develops for each one of us an individual teaching programme. It is unique and different for each person. All he asks of us is that we read the Bible regularly and he will speak to us through it.

We should not worry that there are parts we don’t understand – when it is the right time understanding will come on them. But through what you read the Holy Spirit will make sure you come to know what you need to know.


REASONS WHY WE NEED TO HAVE A MORE DISCIPLINED APPROACH TO THE BIBLE:

1. Every subject of human knowledge has its own methodology of understanding – accounting, chemistry, philosophy and so on. The Bible is no different. If we are going to undertake the Christian walk we need to understand the Christian Bible – and the methodology we need to interpret it.
The Bible is not systematic in the sense that it is not a handbook of doctrine or teaching. To understand what it teaches on any subject we need to know how to seek out the bits and how they relate to each other. Which bits are more important than other bits? How do we decide this? We can do this is we have a system.

2. When we hear someone teaching we need to be able to check out what they are saying. Each of us needs to have a methodology to work through what we hear so we can rightly judge whether or not an idea is right or wrong. We need a system that is not just a matter of our own personal judgement and prejudices.

Acts 17:11
“Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.”

Even the Apostle Paul needed to be checked out. The Bereans were called “Noble” for doing so.

3. What we believe will govern what we do.
Doctrine (what we believe) will determine practice (what we do). Hence it is important to have a good intellectual understanding of the word of God if we want to live right before God.

4. We will all get personal revelations from God. But there is a danger in this. There are spirits and spirits. How do we know the spirit we have tapped into is the Holy Spirit and not some deceptive spirit? How do we check this out? The Bible tells us to “test the spirits”. And if we are going to test the spirits then there must be some sort of criteria we can use to test them by. The Devil comes as an angel of light. I have seen powerful men of God, strong in the word, fall into major error because they stopped checking out the revelations they got against the word. It can happen to any of us.

1 John 4:1.
“Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.”

We need to check on revelation because of the danger of getting it wrong, the danger of deception.

There are several things that can “go wrong” when we get revelation from God.

a. There can be interference in the spiritual realm from Satanic (demonic) spirits. They can create a form of “static” that confuses what we hear so we get it wrong.
b. Demons try to “imitate” the function of the Holy Spirit in teaching us. They constantly inject into our minds all sorts of ideas that sound spiritual and often they sound right – but following those ideas will lead to deception.
c. Our own spirit is where the Holy Spirit speaks to us. But if our own spirit has unconfessed sin tainting it, or we are under strain from external pressure or internal pain, or our spirit can already hold to ideas that are wrong, then our spirit may not properly “hear” the Holy Spirit.
d. All revelation comes in our spirit – but for us to be able to understand it, it needs to be transmitted to the mind. This “channel” of communication, from the spirit to the mind, can be upset by pressure, sin or pain.
e. Our minds can have preconceptions that stop us “hearing” the revelation, or that cause us to reinterpret it to suit ourselves.
f. Revelations from God only come “in part” – he never tells us everything about anything (1 Corinthians 13:8 “We Know in part”). The fact that we only know a part immediately opens us up to the possibility of getting it wrong. We can fall into the trap of adding to what God is saying to make sense of it. God’s purpose is to have a body of people who hear him – each one will get a part and we have to learn from each other. The attitude that “I know it all by myself” is a deception and will lead to greater deception.

All of these problems can lead us to “mishear” God’s Holy Spirit in this teaching process and we can get it wrong. No one has a perfect “hot-line” to heaven.

WHAT ABOUT THE MIND?

The mind has been given to us by God to use in his service – We are to “Love God with…all your mind (Matthew 22:37)”. But we need to be careful not to be too reliant on it. It is the Holy Spirit that gives life and understanding and not our intellectual efforts.

We need to understand the place and role of the mind.
God intended in creation that he would speak to mankind in their spirits. This is a process of revelation by the Holy Spirit. He still wants to do the same today.
The place of the mind is to be the checker of the revelations that we receive in our spirits. The role of the mind is not to discover spiritual truth – that can only happen by revelation. Rather the role of the mind is a judgement function – to check out what our spirits are hearing and evaluate it. To do this we need some sort of system by which we check things out.

God expects us to learn to use our minds to understand his word – it is simply faulty understanding of scripture to stand the “use of the mind” over in opposition to the use of “Spirit revelation”. The two are never separate. But we need to understand clearly the role of each because God has a valuable function for the mind in this process of revelation – and that function is the rational checking of revelation.


HOW CAN WE PROTECT OURSELVES FROM DECEPTION?

The first and obvious way is to have other people we share our ideas with who we allow to correct us. Not only will they find our wrong ideas but they will add to our right understanding so that we come to know more through the process of “peer review”.

But there is also another tried and tested way of protecting ourselves from deception, by having a way of checking revelation with our minds. To do this we need certain objective rules to guide us – other wise we will simply direct our minds with our feelings and still end up in deception.

The Evangelical church has a set of objective rules which are simple and easy to follow that anyone can use to check revelations to see in they are right or not. The are Bible Principles of Interpretation.

Principles of interpretation give intellectual knowledge and are useful for checking revelations we get – but they cannot give us revelation knowledge – this comes by intuition in our spirit. I.e. the principles are for proving what we get by revelation but they do not lead to revelation.

PRINCIPLES OF INTERPRETATION.

1. The Bible is God’s revelation to man.
It is a revelation, not a mystery. The Bible is not a complex book, so long as you follow the rules. God has not gone out of his way to obscure his message! It is a revelation not a mystery. It only becomes a complex book if you try to do it your own way. It was written for the average man, not for scholars.

2. The Translators have done a good job.
It doesn’t really matter what language you are reading it in, nor what translation version you are using. The translators around the world have done a very good job of rendering the Bible into the vernacular languages of each country.
You do not have to know Greek or Hebrew. A good knowledge of the grammar of the particular language you are reading helps as following the rules of grammar helps prevent many errors of understanding.

3. The Bible is our ultimate source of doctrine and practice in the church.
This is not to say that we don’t accept information from elsewhere but whatever we accept has to conform to the Bible somehow. But our starting point for understanding is the Bible. If you come with preconceptions – your mind already made up – then you will find it very difficult to understand what the Bible means.

4. Recognise the sort of literature you are reading.
The Bible is not a book - it is a library of books. Hence we refer to the "Books of the Bible". The invention of the printing press allows us to contain it in something less than a cubic metre, and between two covers.
As with any library, there are different types of literature in the Bible, and each type of literature has its own "rules" for interpretation. Just as we wouldn’t, in an English library, treat a novel the same as a text book, or a poetry book the same as a recipe book, so too in reading the Bible we need to be aware that there are different types of literature there.
E.g.
Genesis to Nehemiah, Matthew to Acts are history.
Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy contain law codes.
Job and Psalms are poetry.
Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are Wisdom literature.
Romans to Jude are letters.
And so on.
Clearly a different approach is needed when reading Romans as compared with Psalms, just as we would read a letter from a friend differently to a book of Poems by a noted poet.

5. The Principle of Literalness.
In general, having decided what type of literature we are reading, and taking that into account, the Bible means what it says, if it is not clearly intended to be symbolic.
The plain, literal sense of the words, in most cases, will give you the proper meaning.

If the meaning of the Bible is not the plain, literal meaning of the words then we would be left with an impossible situation - the words would be crytic. And, because there has not been given to us a key to understand the cryptic nature of the words we would be left to our own imaginations. We could make the Bible mean whatever we like. This is untenable. Either the Bible means what it says literally, or it means nothing at all. But the words must mean something so the second option is not viable. The Bible must mean what it says - literally.

This does not mean that there is no symbolism.
* Both Hebrew and Greek are very rich languages full of figures of speech.
* The Bible, particularly the OT, has large amounts of poetry which are just as rich in imagery as the best of poetry from any other country in the world. But allowing for all of that the Bible literally means what it says.
* There are pictorial/symbolic meanings for many passages.
* There are some parts of the Bible which are clearly intended to be symbolical (E.g. Daniel and Revelation). Other parts are capable of being interpreted in a symbolic way – and it is permissible to do so.
* There is a whole branch of Bible interpretation that specialises in symbolic interpretations called Typology.

Interpreting Symbols:
* We can never interpret a symbol in such a way as to contradict the plain meaning of the scripture – either the immediate context or elsewhere.
* A symbolic interpretation of the Bible always fills out the literal meaning but never contradicts it. So generally we can say the literal meaning of any scripture text is the correct one – only we may be missing some of the depths God wants us to see in it if we cannot enter into the pictorial/symbolic sense as well.
By these two caveats we are protected from deriving fanciful interpretations when giving a symbolic interpretation.

6. The Principle of Context.

This has two applications:
(i) We should first try to understand the meaning in the context it was originally written – the culture and times of the Bible.

“The Word became flesh” in Jesus, i.e. he came as a person in a particular cultural context so that he could communicate with people in that context. The “Word” was packaged in a 1st Century Jewish culture. But we are not expected to become 1st Century Jews to “follow Christ”. In the same way the Bible was written in the context of cultures that are now history – Hebrew, Greek and Roman. In other words the revelation of God to us in the Bible is packaged in historical cultures that we do not have to try to imitate to be true to the Bible.
For instance, there are, in the Bible, detailed instructions on dress, hair style, diet, hygene and many other issues relevant to those who lived at the time of writing. However to try to apply those things today would, in most cases, be inappropriate. However there are often principles behind the detailed instructions which are halpful or practical.

So we need to understand a little about their culture so that we can separate the message of God from the culture it is packaged in. If we understand what it meant to them we are less likely to come up with a fanciful interpretation today.
This is important because what they said was written with a cultural bias - it made sense to them, and we have a different cultural bias so it often doesn't make a lot of sense to us, unless it is explained.

There is a limitation on this. 1 Peter 1:10-12 tells us that the Old Testament writers really didn’t understand what they were writing about. The true meaning was hidden from them because the truth of what they were writing about was to be revealed in Christ. This means that trying to get back to understanding what the OT writers thought they were writing about is, in some sense, a waste of time. The interpretative principle, the key to understanding the OT is Christ, just as he is for the NT.

However allowing for that there is a usefulness in understanding the historical, geographical and cultural background to what is written in the Bible.

What we need to be able to do is separate the message God has for us found in the Bible from the historical and cultural context in which it was given to find the eternal principles. Then we need to apply the principles to our culture and context – make it relevant. But to do this we need to be able to identify what is just the culture it was written in and what is the revelation itself.
To help us, then, we need background information, and this has to be supplied by scholars who make it their job to try and find out how the Bible people lived. This is where a Bible dictionary or encyclopaedia becomes very helpful.

(ii) Each verse should be interpreted in the literary context it is found in. The meaning given must conform to the overall flow of the passage. Many false ideas come because people reading the Bible take a few words or phrases out of context and give it a meaning that cannot be sustained if it is read in context.

7. The Principle of Comparison.
Every Bible teaching (doctrine) is taught in more than one place in the Bible. We should never build a doctrine on just one passage of the Bible. Rather we need to find all of the references to an idea and by comparing one with another we arrive at a fuller understanding and avoid coming to wrong understandings.

In trying to establish the meaning of any doctrine or belief from scripture one needs to find all of the relevant data on the subject that the Bible has. This takes some digging but is worth the effort. If one doesn’t do this step thoroughly then the verse one misses will be the key verse and one ends up with a wrong idea. Computer software is a great speeder up in this task. Learn how to use a concordance to find the relevant texts.

* To arrive at truth we need to compare scripture with scripture.
* Use a concordance to find all the relevant references.
* Then decide which ones are the plainest, clearest, statements. Build your basic understanding on them.
* Obscure statements must be made to fit into the meaning of the clear statements and not the other way round. We need to interpret obscure passages by using clear passages.

We need initially to learn how to prioritise. Not every scripture is of equal weight when it comes to a particular issue. Start with those passages that make sense easily – plain clear statements. Grapple with what they mean then move from them to the more difficult passages.

8. The Principle of Orthodoxy.

What the church has taught before must be a guide, but not a binding rule.

However we need to recognise that:
* In the Church is much traditional doctrine that is not correct but is a misunderstanding of God's ways.
* Orthodoxy and Tradition usually works to protect the status quo, so is not always right.

A problem arises when Church tradition gives us two or more possible ways of interpreting something. Who is to say that our stream of Christianity is right and the others are wrong? The only way we can be sure is by going back to the Bible and honestly re-evaluating the question looking at it from all sides.

This does not mean that God will never speak again however. We must realise that God is still speaking.
Martin Luther said: “There is yet more light and truth to spring forth from God’s word.”
Martin Luther recognised that the Church had abandoned truth in the Dark Ages and that he was but the start of a process of God restoring understanding of truth to the Church. This process is still carrying on. Multitudes of scholars are today uncovering truth that we have ignored, misunderstood and so on.
What this principle means is that God's new revelations will be based on and will not contradict anything that has been previously revealed – except if the Church has fallen into error.
But there is a warning here. If Luther had accepted his tradition there would never have been the Protestant Reformation and all the blessings that flowed out of that. Sometimes the new does contradict the old.

It is acknowledged that there are many things in the Bible that are debated between different groups of Christians. In my observation most disputes about doctrine arise because of the following reasons:
* One or other of the parties are breaking one or more of these principles of interpretation.
* Often the debate is simply caused because we don’t really know enough to be sure. Even the experts don’t know it all!
* People are bringing their cultural preconceptions into the Bible and introducing ideas that are not really there.

For this reason the Church, in history, has arrived at a “short list” of doctrines that are considered to be essentials for believing Christians. These are considered to be fundamental beliefs if one wants to be considered “Christian”. Yet, even on these, there is debate as to the exact meaning of each. Though we agree on the main idea there are often differences of opinion on the minor details.

The list of “main ideas” has been summarised by the Church at several points in history and make up what are known as the Historic Creeds of the Church – the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed. These two summarise the main ideas that have been deemed to be the minimum belief we need to adhere to if we want to be considered “Christians”. In interpreting the Bible we need to be sure what we are saying agrees with these Creeds.

THE APOSTLE’S CREED.

I believe in God the Father Almighty;
Maker of Heaven and Earth;
and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord;
who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary;
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried;
he descended into hell;
the third day he rose from the dead;
he ascended into heaven;
and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost,
the holy catholic Church;
the communion of the saints;
the forgiveness of sins;
the resurrection of the body;
and the life everlasting. Amen.


THE NICENE CREED.

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God,
begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures;
He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
Who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.

These 9 principles of interpretation are a good basic guideline to understanding the Bible. There are a few more complex rules that you will find out as you grow in Christ but these basic ones will see you through most difficulties or questions.

THE BIBLE HAS LEVELS/DEPTHS OF MEANING.

The Bible is like a diamond. When you hold it up to the light – depending on the angle you look at it you see different things. If you choose a portion of scripture, say the Sermon on the Mount, and then go looking for different books on the subject you will find a wide variety. Depending on the gifting and ministry and background of the author they will give quite a different way of understanding it.
But all of these are only giving a different application of the basic truths in the text – God allows them through their particular gifts and experience to show some of his manifold wisdom and greatness that He has hidden in the text. But essentially they are not in conflict.
The Bible is like a gold mine. There are a few nuggets on the surface for anyone to find – but if you are prepared to dig you will find the real seam of gold. But, following this illustration, it is still gold – again there is no conflict in the essential views. The nuggets on the surface and the gold in the veins agree – there is no secret hidden wisdom in Christianity that is reserved for the few – but there are depths of understanding of the truth we have.

Beware of anyone who claims to have received a special revelation, a secret hidden wisdom, that no one has ever had before. It will almost certainly be a deception.

CAN WE USE THE OLD TESTAMENT FOR DOCTRINE?

Yes. Three Reasons:

1. The New Testament says we can – several times.

Romans 15:4
“For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.”

1 Corinthians 10:11
“These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come.”

2 Timothy 3:16,17
“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

“To teach us”, “were written down as warnings for us”, “All scripture…is useful”
The “us” referred to here is New Testament Chrisitans, i.e. us. The writings referred to are the Old Testament.

2 The NT writers did so. And thus showed us by example that it was OK to do so, and also they showed us how to do it.

3 In actual fact every Christian teacher uses the OT for doctrine so the question is a non-issue.

But we need to be careful:
* Some of the OT is fulfilled in the NT and this fulfillment sets the meaning for us.
* The NT sometimes rejects or changes some OT teaching.
* The OT writers didn’t always understand what they were writing about (as we saw from Peter) so the meaning wasn’t clear to them.

General Rule: Where the NT does not change an OT teaching, then that teaching still stands and “is profitable for us”. Where the NT changes the OT teaching we are to follow the NT understanding.

A good way of understanding the relationship between the OT and the NT is summarised in the following couplet:
"In the Old the New is Concealed,
In the New the Old is Revealed."

I.e. the OT is not a clear revelation in itself. Much is hidden in symbol and type. Prophecies are not clearly given, particularly relating to Christ. The NT therefore reinterprets the Old to show its true meaning.

Jesus said, "Moses wrote of me". But the fact is Moses did not, unless he did it in symbols.
This fact means that we can recognise that often OT scriptures will have a meaning for deeper than the literal meaning. But any symbolic meaning always coincides with the literal meaning of the same scripture and never contradicts any other scripture.

HOMEWORK:

1. Read the study 2-3 times during the week.
2. Do the transformer verses and prayer every day.
3. Learn the Apostle’s or the Nicene Creed off by heart.
4. This week would be a good time to read through (in one sitting if at all possible) all of the studies again. Chapters 2-6 are a continuous whole and reading them together will open up understanding in your mind and spirit at a deeper level.

TRANSFORMER VERSES:

JOHN 14:26
“But the Counsellor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.”

JOHN 15:26
"When the Counsellor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me.”

JOHN 16:7,12-15
“But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counsellor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you...
"I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you.”


PRAYER:

Father God, I thank you that you have sent the Holy Spirit to us to be our teacher.
I pray that he would teach me, that he would guide me into all truth. Teach me to know his voice and his ways of teaching me, I pray.
I especially pray that he would reveal Jesus and the things of Jesus to me. Jesus promised this and it is my deepest heart’s desire to know him more. Show me Jesus I pray, so that in beholding him I will be changed into his likeness.
In Jesus name I ask this, Amen.