CAN THE BIBLE BE FIGURED OUT? How is it that so many people disagree about what Scripture says?

Scripture must be used the way Christ used Scripture. We have to use it the way John the Baptist used it. We have to use it the way Paul and Peter used it – and Stephen, and James, and John and Matthew and Mark and Luke.

You know, the hermeneutic of the men who delivered the word of God to people as prophets and apostles is not actually a very complicated hermeneutic. The position these men all put Scripture in was one that is above human reasoning in such a way as to overcome human reasoning.

Christians today prefer a more complicated hermeneutic. They have things they like just the way they are, and sometimes want to find a way to justify that. They do extraordinary linguistic studies to find out whether God saved anyone eternally in the Old Testament in order to justify truncating the New Testament expression of salvation. They do the same thing to make a sin out of wine drinking, and out of married love, and to tone down the problem of excessive riches because we live in an excessively rich society. They use Scripture to buttress their beliefs in the church to make it more than it ought to be, and often less than it ought to be.

What we ought to do with Scripture is come to it in complete poverty and desperation, knowing that it is the wisdom of God that makes the wisdom of men nothing more than foolishness. Our hermeneutic ought to be one in which we frame ourselves not as peers to the writer but as abject beggars before the writer. Our hermeneutic ought to be the sinner who will die without God’s intervention.

The word God has commanded is there for us to remember who God is when we think we have enough that we can live without Him. The word of God ought to be taking us down a notch from satisfied to grateful, from safe to seeking refuge, from comfortable to poor in spirit. You can know your conclusion about the word of God is sound when what you have brought out of the text something you could have never put in there. When you realize the text is there to reveal God to you, to show you His love for His creation and to announce His plan for its redemption. It is drawn there by God’s wisdom in the face of your own foolishness. That’s how you get it right.

The preceding was adapted from an article by Frank Turk.