The Bible Said That???

Having established the importance of personally studying the word, it is critical to state ‘how’ to study the word. First, we get maximum edification from The Bible only when we ask through prayers for The  Spirit of God to breathe on the pages, afetr all, who. This is not a personal theory; it is right here in 2Cor. 3:6 where we are told that the letters kill, but The Spirit gives life. Elsewhere, it states that up till today, when people read Moses (the law), a veil comes upon their faces but when we turn to the Lord (the Holy Spirit), the veil is taken off for where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty.

I see men as trees Mark 8:24

What prompted this line of thought was the realisation that many times, we will take from God’s word what we want to take from it. Until last week, I had never met people who actually found a way of interpreting The Bible to mean that God the Father and even Jesus during His earthly ministry approved of homosexuality. You would think that Leviticus 18:22, and Roman 1:26-27 were clear enough but to this people, that isn’t so. once they transalted it to the Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and other languages, their evidence verse meant something entirely new.

Although I believe that practising homosexuality is a sin before God, that is not what this post is about. This is rather a call for us to avoid handling the Word of God deceitfully. There is how to study The Bible such that we can understand the author’s thoughts and there are ways of studying it craftily for us to justify what we think is right. There is no profit in this. It would be better to not read than to consciously misinterpret it and spread that misinterpretation to others (who may be less informed). To start with, spreading misinterpretations is probably what created the factions and discord among Christians. If we say we want to know The Truth so that we do not enslave ourselves to flimsy (sometimes baseless) doctrines, how dare we start the process that created those doctrines all over again?

As we take the decision to know The Truth of God’s word, let us approach it with sincerity and humility, seeking what it says-not what we would have it say. I will close with this excerpt I found at Pyromaniacs (I do not agree with many things I read there but I believe that this note from them is true.

“The way you read the Bible dictates the kind of truth you can get from it…
You know: Hemingway never wrote anything but fiction, more or less. Even his autobiographical stuff was fictionalized -- so if you want to take truth away from Papa, you can't take factual truth away from him, because there's no way to read what he wrote and distinguish the "rote historical data" from the "whimsical authorial license." None. If you take truth away from Hemingway, you have to take allegorical truth away from him…

And some people will read the Bible that way -- and they come to the conclusion that things like the resurrection or the virgin birth are themselves analogical truth and not something which happened on calendar days to people with (so to speak) birth certificates and dirty sandals. And their conclusion is honest insofar as their approach is honest.

Which is to say, what exactly do you expect to get from the Bible if your major premise is that it is not a story by witnesses about something that happened on the streets of Jerusalem and in the Roman courts and on a filthy wooden cross?

See: the problem with the idea that there are "quite a few" ways to read the Bible is that it makes the intention of the writers of the Bible a non-determining factor… We can read John like fantasy literature or a poem and extract the truth; we can read Psalms like they are newspaper reports and look at Adam and interpret him as a cool-ective metaphor rather than a person that both Jesus and Paul said was a real guy.

So sure: go ahead and brush up on the many, many ways people have, in the past, read the Bible, and the ways some people today are trying to "read" the Bible. But then ask yourself this straight-up question: isn't the first person we should ask about what this text means the author of the text? If yes, how does he tell us this?”

Enough said.

Blessings,

Ms. August.