What’s Wrong With That?
Have you ever read a Bible verse and thought it meant one thing, only to turn around later to find out it meant the opposite? I have. Usually, I found out that there was some information that I was missing and when I added the new information to the passage, I saw the meaning from a whole new perspective.
Have you ever heard someone speak about the Bible, and in your heart, you knew they were wrong, but you just could not quite figure out what the problem was? That has happened to me, too. I remember a situation that occurred during a Bible study that I regularly attended at a university. One day, we were talking about a Bible passage when the topic of Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Jesus came up. The preacher explained his understanding about why Jesus chose Judas as a disciple and how Judas came to betray Jesus. As he was talking, I knew in all my being that he was totally wrong, but I could not quite figure out just where he was wrong. I did not say anything to him, partly because it was not the right situation to have a public disagreement, but also because I was not sure what my disagreement was exactly. Since then, I have figured out how I knew the preacher was wrong, and I have gained a few basic principles for knowing how to tell if an interpretation is correct or not, regardless of whether it is someone else or myself who is misunderstanding the Bible.
I want to share a few basic principles of interpreting the Bible that can help you straighten out your own understanding and that can help you explain to someone else why the Bible needs to be understood in a certain way. I have tried to use examples that most of us could agree on because I do not want you to focus on why your interpretation of a controversial verse is the right one and mine is the wrong one. I want you to focus on the principles of interpretation, not on one controversial verse. However, despite the care that I thought that I took, you still might not agree with my examples, but please overlook your disagreement and focus on the principles of interpretation.
Here are the basic questions you should ask yourself whenever you are dealing with a hard-to-understand verse, a controversial verse, or someone else’s misunderstandings.
- What picture of God does the idea presuppose? Does it portray God as revealed in the life and death of Jesus, especially God’s love for us at the cross?
- Is the idea consistent with the rest of the Bible?
- What is the context?
- Is the Bible translation you are using accurate for this situation?
- Is the message local or timeless?
- Are you looking at the idea from your own culture, or from the culture of the Bible?
The first criteria for judging an idea is also the most important one. You need to ask yourself what picture of God this idea is based on. Does it portray God as He is revealed in the life and death of Jesus, especially God’s love for us at the cross? Jesus Himself gives us this principle in John 14:9, which says “Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?” If an interpretation shows a God who is not loving, then you need to look at it from a different angle to see what you are missing in the situation. Let’s look at an example. “And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;” (Genesis 3:17). For many years, I had the idea that this verse said that God cursed the earth to punish Adam’s sin, but if I had followed the first principle, I would have known that there was something wrong with my idea. After all, it would be unjust for God to hurt the plants and animals to punish Adam for sinning. The idea of arbitrarily cursing the earth as punishment just does not match the character of Jesus on the cross. Whenever you run into a situation where God seems to be cruel or unjust, it is time to re-evaluate your interpretation to see what information you have misunderstood or if you are missing some information. In this passage, the misunderstood part is “cursed is the ground because of you.” I assumed that God Himself had cursed the ground to punish Adam, but the verse does not say that. In reality, the verse says that Adam’s choice to sin had caused the ground to become cursed. In other words, the cursing was a natural outcome of rejecting God and choosing Satan as the ruler of the earth.
The next step is to ask yourself if the interpretation is consistent with the rest of the Bible. If most of the other Bible verses on the subject point in one direction, and there are just one or two verses that could be interpreted in a different way, it is a warning that you are probably not understanding the one or two verses correctly. For example, Jesus tells His followers in Matthew “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). This seems to be a direct and clear statement where Jesus is saying that Christians should hate their family, yet this cannot be the meaning because from beginning to end, the Bible consistently expresses the principle of loving parents, spouses, and children. The ten commandments say to honor your father and mother. In Colossians chapter three, Paul tells children to obey their parents and husbands to love their wives. Jesus Himself speaks of the need to honor father and mother in Mark chapter seven. He affirms the sanctity of marriage when He says “And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery” (Mat 19:9). There are many other examples that show that Jesus consistently taught respect and love for family members (as well as enemies). When we investigate what Jesus meant about hating father and mother and wife and children, we have to look for a meaning that is consistent with the rest of the Bible.
Another rule is to always look at the context. What has happened before this? What happens after this? What is the big idea being discussed here? For example, John says “No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him” (1 John 3:6). Some people might interpret this verse to mean that since all of us so-called Christians sin again and again that we do not know Jesus and are not saved, but if you look at the context, you would read that John had previously written “My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). Therefore, we must understand these two verses within the framework of John’s message, which is that we will want to obey Jesus because we love Him, but we will still need to be forgiven for our sins. We need to look at John’s whole message to understand what these verses mean rather than picking out one verse and having a warped idea of what John is trying to tell us.
The next question to ask is: Is the Bible translation you are using accurate in this situation? We must always remember that no one in the world today is reading the original text that came from the prophets’ hands. If we are reading in Spanish or English or any other current language, we are reading translations of the original Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic. Also, we are not reading words translated from modern languages. These are ancient languages that are not spoken today. For these reasons, translation can be complicated. For example, in Exodus 34:6 it says in my English Bible: “The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” That phrase “slow to anger” is an idiom in the original Hebrew. What it actually says in the original language is that God has a really long nose! Translators have the challenge of trying to match the original language with all of its idioms to the modern language, which also has idioms and words with multiple meanings. There may not be a word in the modern language that exactly matches the original. For example, in the verse we just read, “steadfast love” is translated as kindness in the King James Version. The reason for the different translations is that the ancient Hebrew word Hesed is much more than the English word love. It does mean love, but it also means mercy, kindness, and goodness, as well as other aspects of God’s character, so translators must find different ways to translate it in various contexts. All these complicated translation issues mean that the translator of your Bible may have chosen a word that has several meanings in your language, and you, in turn, might understand that word to mean something different than what the original word meant in the verse. Before you base an interpretation on the meaning of one word in a passage, compare it to other versions of the Bible to see if you are getting the correct meaning. Read for the meaning of the whole and do not base your understanding on one word. This is especially important for paraphrase Bibles, such as The Message.
Another question to consider is: Is the message local or timeless? The authors of the books of the Bible were not writing their messages for you today. They were focused on the people of their time and place. It is good to apply the truths that they were communicating to ourselves today, but we have to be careful not to overgeneralize a local message to our own circumstances. For example, Paul wrote to Timothy telling him that women should not braid their hair. “likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire,” (1 Timothy 2:9). Some people might want to apply this to all women in any era, but Paul was not trying to give advice about hairstyles to all women in every time. This passage is a description of the way the pagan priestesses of the area dressed. Paul was concerned that other people might confuse Christian women with the temple prostitutes. He was not making an arbitrary rule that said that women should never braid their hair.
The final question that you should consider when trying to understand difficult passages is whether your background is interfering with your understanding. Are you looking at the verse from your own culture, or from the culture of the Bible? An example of this principle is slavery. Many modern Americans read Paul’s message about slaves obeying their masters, and they are outraged. In Ephesians, Paul writes “Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ” (Ephesians 6:5). In the original Greek, the word for bondservants is slaves. Some Americans demand to know why Paul did not advocate against slavery, but instead seemed to support it. They are judging Paul’s actions by their present-day culture. In the process, they miss the timeless truths that can be learned from the verse, such as that regardless of your situation, you are to live according to the principles that Jesus taught (like the “golden rule”). We need to take off our society’s blinders and look outside of our own culture and biases to understand what was happening and what message God would want us to receive.
Satan is always trying to find ways to blind us to the messages God has given us in the Bible, but if you follow the principles that I have laid out, you can avoid a lot of the pitfalls that he has laid for you. Remember as you study the Bible, ask yourself:
- What picture of God do I see here? Am I seeing God as Jesus revealed Him, especially God’s love for us at the cross?
- Is my interpretation of a particular verse consistent with the rest of the Bible?
- What is the context?
- Is the Bible translation I am using accurate in this verse? Am I giving the wrong meaning to a word that was not in the original language?
- Is the message local or timeless?
- Am I being blinded by my culture so that I see a distorted picture, or am I viewing the message from the culture of the Bible?
By the way, I figured out the reason that I knew right away that the preacher at my Bible study was totally wrong. It was because I personally know the God of the Bible, and the picture of God that the preacher was giving was not the God that I know. In other words, even if you do not follow the steps that I have outlined here, you can still know when something is wrong if you personally know Jesus. I will leave you with one final verse that makes this promise. “. . . But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me” (2 Timothy 1:12). If you know who you believe in, if you know Jesus well, you will be fine.