2
Timothy 2:15 “Do your best to
present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be
ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.”
I
read that during the medieval times, when some church leadership did not
believe that individual Christian did not have a right to read and interpret
the Bible for themselves, Reformers of the time believed in the doctrine of
justification by faith alone and that a closed book available only to scholarly
elite and the clergy violated that right because the Word of God as the
possession of all Christians. The doctrine of “sola Scriptura does not mean
that Christians are to pay attention only to personal understanding of the
Bible or that we can make the Scriptures mean whatever we want them to mean;
the Word of God must be rightly handled. The meaning of Scripture is not so
uncertain that we can all come up with our own views and never know the truth.
That would be a skeptical view of divine truth that says it is wholly subjective
and objectively unknowable. The Holy Spirit is no skeptic.
Ecclesiastes
8:1b “Who knows the
interpretation of a thing?”
With
the right of private interpretation comes the obligation to interpret Scripture
correctly. We must work diligently with the text in order to rightly handle “the
word of truth.” Scripture is the only
infallible authority and the Bible is the best guide for interpreting the Bible,
but we also have the teaching of godly councils, individual theologians,
ordained clergy and teachers as lesser authorities to help us understand God’s
Word and provide a measuring stick against which we can check our personal
interpretations of Scripture.
1
Corinthians 14:33 "For God is not a God of disorder but of peace."
We
are not to treat Scripture like a secret code book; rather, we read the Bible
as we would read any other work of literature, because our goal is to read the
Scriptures according to the intent of its authors and the literary conventions
of the particular style that is being used, whether poetry, narrative, proverb,
epistle, sermon, et cetera. In reading the Bible literally, our goal is to get
at the plain sense of the text. Scripture is divinely inspired and the content
we need to know for salvation. God did not use specialized or obscure forms
when He revealed Himself because He wanted us to readily understand it. God accommodated
Himself to the genres that we know when He gave us His Word. God is not “a God
of confusion”. The purpose of literal interpretation of Scripture is simply to
read the Word of God with an eye for understanding it according to its various
forms and genres (for example, we should read poetry as non-literal symbolic
language), thereby rightly handling the Word of God.
In
Christ, Brian
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