In Christian (and I use that term loosely) churches today, most people, I’m afraid, don’t really read their bibles. I know I didn’t until more recently. But I don’t think it’s for lack of trying. In their defense, it’s really difficult to read the bible in the “I’m just going to pick up this book off of the shelf with whatever presuppositions I may have,” sort of vein.
When I would sit down to try and do it, say, 10 years ago, I would meet utter failure. That failure would come in a number of ways:
- It was too confusing from a language perspective. Yeah, I had the NIV and The Message, but that didn’t help for some reason.
- It was too confusing from a doctrinal perspective. I mean, I went to a church 10 years ago whose leaders always “heard from God” while they were reading their bibles. Mind you, they didn’t mean that the Holy Spirit quickened their mind to understand Scripture—they meant that they literally heard from God audibly or in some sort of impressionable sense in tandem with reading the Word (a game of semantics might be played here, but I can assure you that the folks I had as leaders at the time believed they were hearing audibly from God).
- It was contradictory to what I was hearing excerpted on Sunday mornings (and at all my weekly church events).
- It did not agree with me culturally, so I found it irrelevant anyway.
These are the problems that I faced. Perhaps you did or still do face these problems. I don’t entirely blame you, but I can’t shift that blame squarely onto someone else, because it’s essentially our own faults.
Guilt-tripping people into reading God’s Word? Really? No… Read on.
The church I attended was attractive to me because it spoke to me in a culturally-relevant, age-specific way, with enough irreverence to upset conservative folks whom I thought were meaningless in my life (this opinion has change, by the way). It also quoted snippets of parts of bible verses (no joke on the twice-sliced verse description) that, when mixed with an enormous amount of charisma and leadership and application seemed to be Godly ways for me to modify my behavior and get that biblical stamp-of-approval.
Sadly, this directly affected my bible reading dramatically (though I didn’t know it at the time).
You see, when I was confused from a language perspective, it was because I was taught that down-to-Earth, American English was the way God should be speaking to you (audibly), and if it was anything else (from academic to foreign), it required massive faith to understand some esoteric truth, usually reserved for the titans of my church leadership (you know, the Senior Pastors). So as I read things like:
“And the LORD answered me: ‘Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it. For still the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay.’” (Habakkuk 2:2-3 ESV)
…I was confused. This, at face value, seemed like Habakkuk was being told by God to write some sort of vision onto tablets for people to read. Simple enough? No. Because my pastors (and many today) look at this verse and see some extraordinary call to write a church vision statement and to run the church like a corporate machine, basing all of its endeavors on this vision statement.
But for some reason, I didn’t see all that. So I would stop reading.
Take my second difficulty. Doctrinally, I looked at something like:
“I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.” (1 Timothy 2:12 ESV)
…And I would be confused. Well that’s ridiculous! One of my Senior Pastors and several of my leaders are women in authority! I must be misinterpreting Paul in this verse. Add to that the fact that throughout the same book (1 Timothy) and its nearby books (2 Timothy and Titus), there are clear descriptions of elders and what their lives should look like to qualify as elders. Yet none of this matched my elders or pastors. Quite contrary to what was in the Word were the lives of my leaders, actually. Their responses? Some (again) esoteric, we-live-in-a-covenant-of-grace statement that excused all sorts of morally reprehensible failures or lifestyles while in leadership. After all, nobody’s perfect, right? (Ugh…)
What about verses that seemed to mean something so profound on Sunday but ceased to have the same, “Wow!” factor on Monday? I would read some of the verses from a sermon on, say, Developing The Riches God Really Wants You to Have, where the supporting verse for the entire 60-minute sermon was:
“Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.” (3 John 1:2 KJV)
But then I’d read that verse in my daily attempts to read the bible, and my ESV, including the rest of the greeting, says this:
“The elder to the beloved Gaius, whom I love in truth. Beloved, I pray that all may go well with you and that you may be in good health, as it goes well with your soul. For I rejoiced greatly when the brothers came and testified to your truth, as indeed you are walking in the truth. I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.” (3 John 1:1-4 ESV)
Now it doesn’t seem to talk about money and riches at all. What was I missing? Clearly, I must lack some sort of powerful faith that my leaders had in abundance.
Finally, as I would read through the bible, I would stumble on things that didn’t really connect with me at all. Take the book of Leviticus. It spends a majority of its text describing and prescribing types and methods of sacrifice. Well, we don’t sacrifice anymore. What does this have to do with me now? There was no sermon EVER in my 10 years that dealt with this book of the bible, or its subject matter. Yet a lingering thought in my brain said, “It’s there for SOME reason, right?”
So every attempt would end with the closing of the Holy Bible—the very Word of God delivered for all Christians for all time to know what God might say, was a frustrating tome of esoteric texts to me. Yet something still seemed wrong about my failure to read it, so I never gave up.
I’m glad I didn’t.
After ten years in a church whose focus was anything BUT teaching me how to read and understand my bible, I became zealous to understand what the bible really DID say.
At first, I looked to some people in my life who had always read the bible—morning after morning—and had lots to say about what they were reading. Some even had journals and margins in their bibles FULL of notes in their own hand. Because I wanted to learn how to have a similar understanding, I asked, “How did you know it meant this?” The answers would range from, “Well, God audibly told me,” to, “The Holy Spirit spoke to me and gave me this verse in my dream,” to, “I opened my bible at random and looked down after praying desperately and sincerely to God, and it was crystal clear that He wanted me to know…”
For me, these were not satisfactory answers (and, incidentally, they are NOT satisfactory answers). I began to doubt that these people even knew what they were reading—even with their copious notes. Why? Because the sources weren’t confirmed, and the private interpretations went unchecked! In any research, if you can’t show your work, the piece you write becomes practically (academically) useless if you have no sources. Similarly, in the biblical context, if these people couldn’t show me WHY Habakkuk 2 was telling them to write a family vision, I felt no obligation to believe them any more than any other worldly philosopher.
Please note: does this mean that if you have an impression as to what a text in the bible means that you cannot ever trust it? No, I don’t believe that. Without sources and double-checking your own work, there’s always a chance that you could be right. But—especially when you have just started reading and you’ve done no external research at all—why take that chance? We are charged to test every spirit (1 John 4), and remember that our heart is deceitful (Jeremiah 17:9), so trusting our own instinct to provide insight into God’s truth without any test can be very dangerous!
Shortly into my quest to understand the bible, I purchased a book called Knowing Scripture by R.C. Sproul. It’s in my recommended reading list because Dr. Sproul made something incredibly clear about reading the bible. It is simply true that no matter who we are, we will all come to the bible with some sort of doctrine or presupposition in mind. We already have some idea of Who we think God is, what we think He’s like, and how we think He should act. When we read, those presuppositions either meet confusion because they are contradicted (as in my case), or they meet validation because we warp the text to mean what we presupposed.
Very often, you’ll hear people ask this question: “What does this passage of Scripture mean to you?” Because of our culture and our upbringing, we find this to be a fair and innocent question. But according to the author, it is irrelevant what a passage means to us. Our hearts are deceitful and the only way to expose that wickedness is with an honest, un-biased reading of Scripture (cf. Jeremiah 17:9 and Hebrews 4:12-13).
Faith comes by hearing… the Word of God (Romans 10:17). Our faith does not come because we prayed some special Sinner’s Prayer or because we raised our hand or because we really want to change. It comes because we hear the Word of God. This powerful tool of God’s saves men’s souls. It does so when we open it honestly and try to understand what we are reading and hear that precious Good News and understand it.
But how can we understand it? Especially in light of my four problems above? Well, I can tell you what I did, and it seems to have gone pretty well so far…
- Language Difficulties: If you want to understand the language of the bible, get a “Study Bible”. I prefer the ESV, because it is an easy-to-read translation of the original text, and the “study” part means that the scholars who did the translating included a LOT of notes to help you understand what the text means. In the ESV Study Bible, there are massive write-ups throughout to help a person like myself become educated on why, to whom, by whom and for what purpose a book was written. (Let me point something else important out: The Message is by Eugene Peterson, and is a “paraphrase”. That means it is not an authoritative translation, but that Eugene Peterson did his own interpretation and then put it in a very loose paraphrase of his own design. It is not to be used for studying—ever. Personally, I only use it for odd references made by heretics, but if you want to read it so you can hear what Eugene thinks you should do, be my guest.)
- Doctrinal Difficulties: As Sproul points out, we ALL have some sort of doctrine—simple or complex, right or wrong, and even if we say, “I have no doctrine,” we are lying to ourselves. We all believe SOMETHING about God. Thus, if you are attempting to read with clarity, my best advice is to pull from resources from writers of the Protestant Reformation through to a hundred or so years ago. These are men whose works have been read by a LOT of scholars between then and now and evaluated by a NUMBER of opinions. Why does this help? Because you are not inundated with the latest “fad” understanding of a passage—instead, there is a time-tested commentary used by a host of denominations and churches to help to guide us in the simple-to-complex understanding of core doctrines. These can be compared when you read several at a time, and you can compare them to your first-blush understanding of the passage to see how well you fared. Man is fallible, yes, but there are men whose works have been treasured by the church for centuries that are incomparable to the works put out nowadays (especially compare to those in the “best sellers” rack at a local Christian bookstore, unfortunately).
- Contradictory from your Sunday Morning: When hearing verses out-of-context, go back and read them in context, even taking sermon notes and comparing the Pastor’s results of reading that passage to what you can plainly see in the context of that set of verses, chapter, or series of chapters. More often then not, you can garner at least a basic understanding of the verse by its context. A good example is Jeremiah 29:11, which is frequently quoted to make us feel that God has promised us some amazing destiny and prosperity. But the context around that verse is one of incredibly specific (and negative) judgment presented on a specific people at a specific time in history for a specific reason. Its relevance for us today is—at best—highly suspect.
- Cultural Difficulties: Culture is probably one of the hardest obstacles when trying to read Scripture accurately. We are influenced by our present-day culture tremendously, even though it is irrelevant to what God has to say (since His Word is timeless). Add to that the fact that the writers of the Scripture, though inspired, still wrote in terminology that was specific to the culture and time of their writing. As a result, scholars pour over these original texts and even other texts of that time to discern their meaning in present-day languages. If you have the luxury of learning ancient languages and history and cultural idioms, then you will have a very rich experience in reading the original texts. I do not have that luxury, so I rely upon others who have studies copiously to inform me. Modern scholars like R.C. Sproul, John MacArthur, Michael Horton, and lots of others, along with historic students of the bible like Spurgeon, Luther, Calvin, Edwards, Augustine, and lots more. These men, of different times and backgrounds, have given a much better picture of what Scripture’s true and specific meaning is than my pastors of 10 years. Ideally, if you attend a church where the pastor actually studies and preaches using an expository method, you will have your scholar right there!
You have probably noticed that my list of scholars are all Reformers or Reformed in thought. I have found that, by and large, the authors of commentaries and other published works who have the most reverent and high views of Scripture are the Reformed and the Reformers themselves (Luther, of course, included). Most others have contributed tremendously, but very few with the same love and respect for the Scriptures as these men.
God’s Word, at least according to a declining majority of professing, Evangelical Christians, is the one source we can (almost) all agree is God-ordained. Why, if it bares the name of our Creator and the claim that it is the source of faith, would we ever want to neglect reading it, or neglect reading from it in our churches?
I hope this helps.
In Christ,
Frank
P.S. The book of Leviticus has a special meaning to me now. Since studying a survey of the books of the bible (Dust to Glory, with Dr. R.C. Sproul), I’ve come to appreciate it as a foreshadowing for the perfect sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, and why such a sacrifice can satisfy all of the requirements of the Law. In this, the Word is truly amazing!
historical church, sola scriptura
When It’s a Struggle to Read The Bible…
In Christian (and I use that term loosely) churches today, most people, I’m afraid, don’t really read their bibles. I know I didn’t until more recently. But I don’t think it’s for lack of trying. In their defense, it’s really difficult to read the bible in the “I’m just going to pick up this book off of the shelf with whatever presuppositions I may have,” sort of vein.
When I would sit down to try and do it, say, 10 years ago, I would meet utter failure. That failure would come in a number of ways:
These are the problems that I faced. Perhaps you did or still do face these problems. I don’t entirely blame you, but I can’t shift that blame squarely onto someone else, because it’s essentially our own faults.
Guilt-tripping people into reading God’s Word? Really? No… Read on.
The church I attended was attractive to me because it spoke to me in a culturally-relevant, age-specific way, with enough irreverence to upset conservative folks whom I thought were meaningless in my life (this opinion has change, by the way). It also quoted snippets of parts of bible verses (no joke on the twice-sliced verse description) that, when mixed with an enormous amount of charisma and leadership and application seemed to be Godly ways for me to modify my behavior and get that biblical stamp-of-approval.
Sadly, this directly affected my bible reading dramatically (though I didn’t know it at the time).
You see, when I was confused from a language perspective, it was because I was taught that down-to-Earth, American English was the way God should be speaking to you (audibly), and if it was anything else (from academic to foreign), it required massive faith to understand some esoteric truth, usually reserved for the titans of my church leadership (you know, the Senior Pastors). So as I read things like:
…I was confused. This, at face value, seemed like Habakkuk was being told by God to write some sort of vision onto tablets for people to read. Simple enough? No. Because my pastors (and many today) look at this verse and see some extraordinary call to write a church vision statement and to run the church like a corporate machine, basing all of its endeavors on this vision statement.
But for some reason, I didn’t see all that. So I would stop reading.
Take my second difficulty. Doctrinally, I looked at something like:
…And I would be confused. Well that’s ridiculous! One of my Senior Pastors and several of my leaders are women in authority! I must be misinterpreting Paul in this verse. Add to that the fact that throughout the same book (1 Timothy) and its nearby books (2 Timothy and Titus), there are clear descriptions of elders and what their lives should look like to qualify as elders. Yet none of this matched my elders or pastors. Quite contrary to what was in the Word were the lives of my leaders, actually. Their responses? Some (again) esoteric, we-live-in-a-covenant-of-grace statement that excused all sorts of morally reprehensible failures or lifestyles while in leadership. After all, nobody’s perfect, right? (Ugh…)
What about verses that seemed to mean something so profound on Sunday but ceased to have the same, “Wow!” factor on Monday? I would read some of the verses from a sermon on, say, Developing The Riches God Really Wants You to Have, where the supporting verse for the entire 60-minute sermon was:
But then I’d read that verse in my daily attempts to read the bible, and my ESV, including the rest of the greeting, says this:
Now it doesn’t seem to talk about money and riches at all. What was I missing? Clearly, I must lack some sort of powerful faith that my leaders had in abundance.
Finally, as I would read through the bible, I would stumble on things that didn’t really connect with me at all. Take the book of Leviticus. It spends a majority of its text describing and prescribing types and methods of sacrifice. Well, we don’t sacrifice anymore. What does this have to do with me now? There was no sermon EVER in my 10 years that dealt with this book of the bible, or its subject matter. Yet a lingering thought in my brain said, “It’s there for SOME reason, right?”
So every attempt would end with the closing of the Holy Bible—the very Word of God delivered for all Christians for all time to know what God might say, was a frustrating tome of esoteric texts to me. Yet something still seemed wrong about my failure to read it, so I never gave up.
I’m glad I didn’t.
After ten years in a church whose focus was anything BUT teaching me how to read and understand my bible, I became zealous to understand what the bible really DID say.
At first, I looked to some people in my life who had always read the bible—morning after morning—and had lots to say about what they were reading. Some even had journals and margins in their bibles FULL of notes in their own hand. Because I wanted to learn how to have a similar understanding, I asked, “How did you know it meant this?” The answers would range from, “Well, God audibly told me,” to, “The Holy Spirit spoke to me and gave me this verse in my dream,” to, “I opened my bible at random and looked down after praying desperately and sincerely to God, and it was crystal clear that He wanted me to know…”
For me, these were not satisfactory answers (and, incidentally, they are NOT satisfactory answers). I began to doubt that these people even knew what they were reading—even with their copious notes. Why? Because the sources weren’t confirmed, and the private interpretations went unchecked! In any research, if you can’t show your work, the piece you write becomes practically (academically) useless if you have no sources. Similarly, in the biblical context, if these people couldn’t show me WHY Habakkuk 2 was telling them to write a family vision, I felt no obligation to believe them any more than any other worldly philosopher.
Please note: does this mean that if you have an impression as to what a text in the bible means that you cannot ever trust it? No, I don’t believe that. Without sources and double-checking your own work, there’s always a chance that you could be right. But—especially when you have just started reading and you’ve done no external research at all—why take that chance? We are charged to test every spirit (1 John 4), and remember that our heart is deceitful (Jeremiah 17:9), so trusting our own instinct to provide insight into God’s truth without any test can be very dangerous!
Shortly into my quest to understand the bible, I purchased a book called Knowing Scripture by R.C. Sproul. It’s in my recommended reading list because Dr. Sproul made something incredibly clear about reading the bible. It is simply true that no matter who we are, we will all come to the bible with some sort of doctrine or presupposition in mind. We already have some idea of Who we think God is, what we think He’s like, and how we think He should act. When we read, those presuppositions either meet confusion because they are contradicted (as in my case), or they meet validation because we warp the text to mean what we presupposed.
Very often, you’ll hear people ask this question: “What does this passage of Scripture mean to you?” Because of our culture and our upbringing, we find this to be a fair and innocent question. But according to the author, it is irrelevant what a passage means to us. Our hearts are deceitful and the only way to expose that wickedness is with an honest, un-biased reading of Scripture (cf. Jeremiah 17:9 and Hebrews 4:12-13).
Faith comes by hearing… the Word of God (Romans 10:17). Our faith does not come because we prayed some special Sinner’s Prayer or because we raised our hand or because we really want to change. It comes because we hear the Word of God. This powerful tool of God’s saves men’s souls. It does so when we open it honestly and try to understand what we are reading and hear that precious Good News and understand it.
But how can we understand it? Especially in light of my four problems above? Well, I can tell you what I did, and it seems to have gone pretty well so far…
You have probably noticed that my list of scholars are all Reformers or Reformed in thought. I have found that, by and large, the authors of commentaries and other published works who have the most reverent and high views of Scripture are the Reformed and the Reformers themselves (Luther, of course, included). Most others have contributed tremendously, but very few with the same love and respect for the Scriptures as these men.
God’s Word, at least according to a declining majority of professing, Evangelical Christians, is the one source we can (almost) all agree is God-ordained. Why, if it bares the name of our Creator and the claim that it is the source of faith, would we ever want to neglect reading it, or neglect reading from it in our churches?
I hope this helps.
In Christ,
Frank
P.S. The book of Leviticus has a special meaning to me now. Since studying a survey of the books of the bible (Dust to Glory, with Dr. R.C. Sproul), I’ve come to appreciate it as a foreshadowing for the perfect sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, and why such a sacrifice can satisfy all of the requirements of the Law. In this, the Word is truly amazing!
From → Commentaries