Interpreting Scripture
I Cor.2:13 - which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words. (NAS)
God has given His precious Word to mankind with the express purpose of more accurately revealing Himself and unfolding an understanding of His glorious redemption through His Risen Son. But let us be honest, men have taken God’s Word and twisted it into tortured theologies while still claiming they were teaching what God’s Word was saying. Some are abject heresies while others are different but still teach the authentic core of the gospel truth. But there must be some guidelines, some structure that keeps our interpretations well within the parameters of Biblical truth without removing the sacred and spiritual essence. I contend that most wrong theology that claims the Bible as its source is a matter of flawed methodology in interpreting Scripture itself. It is not enough to say “You are wrong!”, we must show why a teaching is in error.
The basic and imperative rule of Scriptural interpretation is that Scripture must interpret itself. All Scripture is inspired of God, and if God inspired His written revelation then He surely was able to preserve it as well. So we must embrace all 66 books as having divine meaning and direction for sinners and that these are the building blocks that are used by the Holy Spirit to illuminate God’s truth as well as God Himself. Anything less than that view is like a loose thread that when pulled begins to unravel the other securely woven threads and ultimately ruin the entire garment. Many so called theologians are doing just that today with the perfect garment of Scripture. Brother Roloff used to say with Solomon, “If it’s new it ain’t true!”. If some teaching is not a further revelation of some established truth and it seems out of line with what we’ve already learned and in fact undermines what we thought we knew, then run from it.
It is getting easier and easier to find new and exciting revelations today that are leading millions astray, taught and presented by careless men who dissect the Scriptures as if they were some human stories that could have many different meanings. Their basis for these new and spurious teachings are quotes from some rabbi from a few millennia ago, and many now have been energized by pressing God’s Word in the vice of rabbinical understandings. Do no be deceived, God’s Word cannot be compressed by any religious structure and indeed many of the rabbinical understandings were human constructions and not meant as prisms through which all Scripture must be viewed. In fact, the church operates now in the “times of the Gentiles” and for the most part the bride of Christ is a Gentile ethnically. These new “rabbinical” teachings seem so deep and intellectual but they are misguided attempts to interpret the New Testament through the understandings of men who for the most part had not the Holy Spirit.
Is it not somewhat curious that the theologians of old, men of deep spiritual lives like Wesley, Whitefield, Spurgeon, and thousands of others, used no tortured ethnic guideposts in their unfolding of Scripture? I would not say that these new and improved theologians were operating out of bad intentions and motives, I will, however, claim they have been mislead and are in turn misleading others. The cultural surroundings in New Testament times can be edifying to the Scriptural understandings, but they would be further illuminating rather than a wholesale change. To have a knowledge of the place that bread held in Jewish lives helps deepen our understanding of Christ’s words, “I am the Bread of Life.”. But that additional knowledge must build upon and enhance the clear meaning that Jesus was the Life Giver and was using bread as an object lesson and looking glass into who He was and is.
Let us now step further into the methodology concerning Scriptural interpretation. The basic premise is that Scripture is its own interpretive instrument and that there is no private understandings such as Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, Charles Taze Russell, or any other so called “prophet” who come with new revelations. We must have the heart of Luther who said, “Unless you can convince me from Scripture…” because in the end it does not matter what some theologian said in the first century and in fact many in the embryonic church are quoted as Roman Catholic authorities. Many Protestants who convert to Roman Catholicism do so based upon some notion of apostolic succession and the writings of the early fathers. The early church fathers are no more or less authoritative than your Sunday School teacher and holding them up as divine conduits is idolatry and even reflects the structure that the Roman Church itself embraces.
The same is true for Wesley and Luther and Calvin, all just men with feet of clay who have no more of the Holy Spirit than do we ourselves. Please do not base your theology on the teachings of men, use those teachings as divine prods to search the Scriptures to see whether these things are true. The majority of professing believers never experience the absolute glory of discovering the treasure held in God’s Word, like baby wolves they are content to ingest the regurgitations of other men. If you or I agree in totality with Wesley or Calvin or Spurgeon or any one man we probably have been lulled into receiving another man’s labors without reaping the rewards of our own spiritual study.
So if Scripture must interpret Scripture which Scriptures are the starting point, the foundations of understandings? If someone says “Leviticus” he is mistaken and all his teaching will reflect that initial error. The same will be for anyone who constructs his interpretations on faulty foundations, he will run the risk of tainting all of his teachings and instructing others to do likewise. That doesn’t mean his teachings won’t be exciting and mind tingling and inspiring, they may well be all that and more, but they are still wrong. Wrong teachings many times make us feel good and even inspire us to make outward changes in our lives that seem to substantiate those teachings, however, many Americans have converted to Buddhism and been freed from drug addiction and many interpret that as substantiating the “truth” of Buddhism. So just because someone gets excited about the Scriptures does not translate into substantiating his view of truth as proven.
Of course the Holy Spirit is the Teacher, but if a student doesn’t follow instructions he may well be lost quickly if he and the teacher are not on the same page. So the beginning point, the complete revelation, is the New Testament. If someone was marooned on an island for the rest of their lives and just before being shipwrecked you could throw either the Old Testament or the New Testament to him, which would you throw out to him as you left him? Come on, no ifs, ands, or buts it is clear that we would want the New Testament in his hands because without the New Testament the Old Testament is worthless for those living this side of the cross. Even those who minister to Jews use the OT which they espouse and lead them to see that the New Testament is the interpretation of, for example, Isaiah chapter 53, otherwise that religious Jew still believes that the man of sorrows is Israel and never understands that God is foreshadowing the Messiah. You see, the New Testament is that which is foundationally indispensable to Scriptural interpretation.
Of course the early apostles relied heavily upon the Old Testament accompanied by their new revelations as how those Scriptures speak of Christ, about which they had been ignorant until now, but they certainly were in a transitional phase of Scriptural interpretation. God surely did not just “download” everything they would need to know concerning this New Covenant, and Peter and James especially made some serious mistakes early on. But does a new believer come immediately equipped with deep Scriptural understandings or must he grow in the knowledge and grace of Christ and His Word? So it is with the church, she was birthed at Pentecost with a zeal about Jesus but had to grow and mature in God’s grace and truth. God chose Paul to teach more extensively concerning all the connected gospel truths and subsequently Paul wrote most of the New Testament and was used as the teaching lynchpin of ecclesiastical truth.
So, the New Testament revelations that incorporated the Old Testament shadows are the solid foundations for interpreting all Scripture. Think on that for moment, if there is no foundation, no point at which to reference, then anyone can interpret anything as they see fit. Someone can claim God still desires stoning if he rejects New Testament guidance. Take a seed in your hand and tell me what kind of seed it is. Then take a flower in its bloom beside the seed and suddenly the flower explains and reveals the seed, does it not? The Old Testament had the seed and wrote what God said but having not seen the Incarnation bloom as of yet, they remained ignorant of the eternal implications of the seed they were trusting faithfully. And on Pentecost the Holy Spirit through Peter watered that seed and the flower of the Lord Jesus bloomed in their hearts and it all suddenly made sense.
The 11th chapter of Hebrews recounts all the great men and women of faith. Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Rahab, and many others are listed as examples of great faithfulness. Wow, what a list! The Scripture says they were stoned, afflicted, tormented, went homeless, imprisoned, and suffered greatly while still remaining faithful. What a testimony to God’s grace and their faithfulness! But look how God closes that chapter:
Heb.11:39-40 - And these all having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise. God having provided some better thing for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.
Can you not see it my dear friends? We as New Testament believers confirm and complete the Old Testament saints. The New Testament Scriptures are actually the interpretation of the Old, never the reverse. That is why when men use the Old Testament as their home base they can alliterate anything they desire especially when they isolate it from the New Testament. If the New Testament doesn’t teach, reveal, complete, or fulfill some truth taught or hinted at in the Old Testament then we have the wrong interpretation. Go ahead, read the Old Testament and the only reason they mean anything to you is because you are subliminally and overtly drawing from the reservoir of New Testament knowledge already active in your spirit. In reality, the Old Testament is a confusing story of Israel and certain men and women who have no relevance to me and my life when untethered from the New Testament and absent the Spirit’s teaching chiefly through those 27 books of illumination.
We must rightly divide the Word or we end up with all kinds of confusion and an amalgam of doctrinal teachings that combine the Old Testament and the New Testament in a subjective and unguided way. That is why, for instance, men teach with conviction that babies that die go to heaven primarily based upon David’s words about the death of his child with Bathsheba. But the New Testament does not teach anything about it so these assumptions may or may not be true, but without teaching on the subject we can only guess from an Old Testament narrative quote. But that is exactly what some do with the Scriptures, they reach into the Old Testament, cull out some quote or narrative, and make that doctrinally authoritative. And behold, we have every wind of doctrine.
Now let us distill it a little finer as it pertains to Scriptural interpretation. The actual manual for church teaching are the epistles. It is somewhat fashionable today to rely heavily on the gospels as church teachings and place Paul in a subservient role, but all Scripture has its authority and its place in the framework of that authority. Jesus washed the disciple’s feet and said that they should do what He had done, so why doesn’t your church wash feet every month? It is because the teaching epistles do not teach feet washing as a literal and demonstrative doctrine along the lines of, for instance, the Lord’s Supper, so we can glean from them that Jesus was teaching the principle of humility which is taught in the epistles.
That is why it so wrong to teach something from the Old Testament and apply to it something that is not found in the New Testament. Just recently a preacher taught that the Song of Solomon was in essence a sex manual for married couples. It is interesting that God could place that manual within dogs but humans have to learn it? This form of “teaching” is not only disgusting, it is wrong hermeneutically on every level. If the New Testament does not teach about sex except for the chronological morality as it pertains to marriage, then what people say about the Song of Solomon is wrong. There are many such pieces of erotic literature in the secular world so there must be a spiritual reason why this was included in Holy Writ. Well, how do we know what God is saying to His people through the Song of Solomon?
The answer is still the same, the Old Testament must be interpreted through the lens of the New. So since the Song of Solomon deals with love there are only a few types of love dealt with in the New Testament. The Lord loves His church, the Lord loves His follower, the believer loves his Lord, the Father loves His Son, the Son loves His Father, and of course marital love. To suggest that the Song of Solomon was a course in eroticism for the western church is as viable as believing the Earth is flat and is a startling and sad revelation of how Scripturally ignorant we have become. In reality these kinds of “tours” are meant to pad both the fame and the fortune of the preachers who hold them, and in fact they do both very well. But that is not how we must interpret Scripture.
Perhaps something I have shared either made sense or at least made you think about questions you have had about the swirling teachings today that, let’s face it, cannot all be right. If so, I challenge you to dig deep in the Word and see some of the principles I’ve laid out. And take some of those weird teachings and see if they are consistent with these principles of Biblical interpretations. I may write about this again, but for now I pray you will not only not be led astray but you will undergird your walk with Christ with a diligent seeking of God’s truth and at the end, He who IS Truth.
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