Interpreting the Bible

Faith, hope, and love...

That's the way we Christians are supposed to be getting through this life on our journey to heaven.

But what is faith? Faith is not based on ritual or on our own desires. It must be based on the voice of God. That voice is given to us in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, the self-authenticating divinely inspired truth. Take away that ground of written truth, and you take away the stable platform necessary for living this good life of faith. hope, and love.

I have briefly made the case that the Scriptures demonstrate themselves to be the reliable message of the eternal purpose of God centered in Jesus Christ.

Yet isn't the Bible open to such varied interpretations as to be of little practical use to us as the Voice of God?

This is where I left off yesterday. The claim that Christians who rely on the Bible as the truth are stuck in a world of complete subjectivity when it comes to interpreting the Scriptures is a frequent objection that people bring forward to put an end to spiritual conversations.

"That's just your interpretation."

This is a very common refrain to the ears of anyone who has tried to help people to love the Messiah. But is it an intellectually satisfying objection to Bible-based faith?

First, we should readily acknowledge that not everything in the Bible is equally plain. There are many difficult passages to interpret, and some of them are very important. The Bible is a complex collection of 66 books written largely in Greek and Hebrew over a period of well over 1000 years by people from very different cultural backgrounds. It would be extremely surprising if everything in this book admitted of only one interpretation.

Yet not everything in the Bible is unclear, and not every difficult text needs to be considered a hopeless jello of interpretive free-for-all. Even when an important passage is not the plainest to interpret, we have to begin to ask ourselves this honest question: If all these many passages that prepare us for Christ, the cross, and the resurrection are not actually about Christ, the cross, and the resurrection, what are they about?

I mentioned three texts yesterday, Genesis 3:15, Psalm 22, and Isaiah 53.

Let me pick the briefest of these to demonstrate this point. Genesis 3:14-15 is at the topical center of an account of the Fall of mankind, and of the grace of God to man. Look carefully for yourself at Genesis 3, and see if you are not moved to the center by the man, woman, serpent, woman, man pattern in the middle of the chapter. In the very center is an announcement by God to the serpent that he is cused, immediately followed by this sentence: "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel."

I admit that this is not an easy passage, but it is very clear that it is an important passage. That is a plain fact according to the structure of the chapter. There are some questions that the passage brings before us as matters of interpretation:

What is the warfare between the serpent and the woman?

Who is the offspring of the serpent?

Who is the offspring of the woman?

How is the offspring of the woman going to bruise the head of the serpent?

What is meant by the fact that the offspring of the woman will have his heel bruised in this battle?

Yes, the answers to these questions are matters of interpretation, but the honest seeker would never decide that all interpretations were equal, or that a matter of interpretation somehow implied that the search for the correct interpretation of the verse was inherently impossible or fruitless.

In this case the correct interpretation is not impossible to find, and it is very important to the rest of the Bible. While it would have been impossible to fully understand at the time of the Fall, we now have more Bible beyond Genesis 3, and Scripture interprets Scripture.

The offspring of the woman is Jesus. He will defeat the devil, sin, and death, but this will come at a dreadful cost. Through His death we have life. This interpretation is helped by looking at Psalm 22, Isaiah 53, and many, many other passages.

If this passage is not about a Messiah who defeats the devil at great personal cost, what is it about? I have no other credible answer. We could suggest all kinds of interpretations, but this is by far the most satisfactory one in light of the way that Scripture interprets Scripture.

Yes, the use of the Bible as the truth that we hold on to by faith does require the interpretation of the Bible. That should not be the end of our efforts, but the beginning of a true journey of word-based faith.

How does this kind of faith fit into the larger life of Faith-Hope-Love.

Tomorrow.