Dig Deeper: Tools To Unearth The Bible's Treasure

Introduction

‘It’s all a matter of interpretation’

Most conversations I’ve had with non-Christians about the Bible end up there sooner or later. It’s all a matter of interpretation. Sure, you say it means that Jesus is God and that sex outside marriage is wrong and that heaven is only for Christians, but maybe for me it means that Jesus was just a good teacher and sex with anyone is OK as long as you both want it and heaven is for everybody. It’s all just a matter of interpretation.

Actually, we’ve all been conditioned to think like that. It’s part of the whole philosophical movement called ‘post modernism’, and over the last few decades it has infiltrated the TV shows that we watch and the classrooms that we sit in. Postmodernism teaches that when I come to a piece of literature such as the Bible, what matters is not what it means, but what it means for me. And that might be different from what it meansfor you. And that’s OK.

I wonder if you’ve ever been in a Bible study like this:

That’s postmodernism in action. The text means one thing for one person and the complete opposite for another, but both interpretations are to be respected and treated as equally valid.

But the apostle Paul doesn’t see it like that. He thinks that there is a right and a wrong way to understand the Bible. He writes to a young church leader:

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.

(2 Timothy 2:15)

Here are some of the joys of understanding the Bible correctly:

You hear the voice of your heavenly Father speaking to you.

You learn what he is really like from his own lips (and often God’s true character turns out to be a surprise because we’re so used to second-hand caricatures).

You discover the wonderful truth of salvation, and how to be sure of heaven.

You find out the things that are on God’s heart, what really matters to him about this world and his will for your life.

The truth actually changes you – get this, it doesn’t just inform you of things, it does things in you.

On the flip side, the consequences of misunderstanding the Bible can be devastating:

He [Paul] writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.

(2 Peter 3:16)

I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them. So be on your guard! Remember that for three years I never stopped warning each of you night and day with tears.

(Acts 20:29–31)

Many of the world’s leading cults – Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science – claim to place the Bible at the centre of their religion. They just interpret it ‘differently’. But even mainstream Christians can end up in a real mess because they think that the Bible is saying or promising something that it isn’t. I (Andrew) think of a Christian I knew at university who was young but dying of cancer. Some well-meaning Christians told her mum that she would be healed if only they had ‘enough faith’. It was a desperately cruel error; they added the agonizing guilt of ‘maybe I haven’t believed enough’ to the grief of losing a daughter. But they had verses in the Bible – tragically misunderstood verses – to back it up.

The truth is that without some care in your interpretation, you can make the Bible say almost anything. It may shock you, for example, to discover that the Bible says twice that ‘there is no God’. Check it out – Psalms 14:1 and 53:1. Seriously, have a look. Or if you’re a single bloke and wondering whether you should get married, then the Old Testament has clear guidance for you: ‘you shall go out with joy’ (Isaiah 55:12,

NKJV

). If you know a girl by that name, you’re on to a winner.

In our work with university students in London, we’ve seen people get the Bible right and watched their eyes light up with excitement at new truths and seen their lives changed by the word of God. It’s been a privilege to witness that. But we’ve also seen people get the Bible wrong and end up in trouble or even losing their faith altogether. And that breaks our hearts. That’s why we’ve written this book.

This is a book to help you to understand the Bible correctly. We don’t claim that we will always get it perfectly right. But nearly right is more valuable than half right and much better than wholly wrong.

We want to help you to dig deeper to find hidden riches in the Bible. We hope that parts of the Bible that previously have seemed like gobbledegook will begin to make sense, and that bits that were clear already will become even more vivid and gripping.

Most of all, we want to help you to do all thisfor yourself. You may go to a church where the pastor is a gifted teacher of the Bible, and each week he brings it alive for you. Certainly there are many useful commentaries written by scholars who understand the Bible very well, and explain it verse by verse (see pp. 179–180 for some recommendations). Pastors and scholars are a gift from God, and we should be grateful for their help. But we shouldn’t be content to leave it entirely to the experts. The Bereans in the book of Acts are an example to us, because even though they were taught by the great apostle Paul himself, they nonetheless ‘examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true’ (Acts 17:11).

The book is based on the idea of a toolkit. Sorry if that conjures up painful memories of failed DIY projects, or hours waiting for a mechanic on the hard shoulder of the motorway. There aren’t any spanners or screwdrivers here, but a set of practical tools to help you get to the bottom of any Bible passage. We’ll look at things like context, repetition, linking words, different translations and more.

A science and an art

Reading the Bible is both a science and an art. By calling it a science, we mean that as a discipline it is rigorous and structured: there are certain principles to follow in order to understand the Bible correctly. Those are what we hope to teach in the following pages.

However, we don’t want you to get the idea that under standing the Bible is an automatic and mechanical process – as though you just apply the tools and out pops the answer. It’s not like that.

Understanding the Bible is also an art. It is something you learn by doing, something you ‘catch’ as well as get taught, something intuitive as much as logical. That is why we have called the following chapters ‘tools’ rather than ‘rules’ – like a master craftsman, you will need to exercise judgment and skill in the way that you use them.

Bear the following points in mind:

You won’t need every tool for every passage you read.

Some tools will be crucial for some passages, others secondary.

Sometimes the tools will work only when used together, one tool enabling you to use another.

Rather like learning to ride a bike, after a while you will forget the tools because the principles behind them have become second nature.

The format of this book

Each chapter introduces you to a separate tool and explains how it works. Although there are illustrations from the Bible throughout, we’ll sometimes spend a bit longer on a ‘Worked example’ to show you how that particular tool really can help us discover something exciting and relevant that the Bible is saying. Finally, the ‘Dig deeper!’ exercises give you a chance to practise using the tools for yourself.

At the end we’ve included a brief appendix with a suggestion of how you might use the ‘toolkit’ concept in your small group.

A note on authorship. This book was very much a joint effort – we planned it together, wrote about half of it each, and then revised and edited each other’s chapters. Most of the time we write as ‘we’, but we had to use ‘I’ for anecdotes that only happened to one of us, or (in the case of Nigel) when referring to ‘my wife Elisa’.

1. What the Bible Is and How We Should Approach It

Before we jump in with our first tool, we’re going to pause to examine the nature of the Bible – what kind of book it is, and how it came about. That will lead us to the right way to approach it.

Imagine that a friend who isn’t a Christian asks you, ‘Why do you bother reading the Bible? Isn’t it out of date?’ How would you respond?

We hope you would disagree. The Bible isn’t like an old railway timetable that has outlived its usefulness because things have changed. It is something that the eternal, almighty God has said, and therefore it is relevant and important for all times and cultures: ‘The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands for ever’ (Isaiah 40:8).

You can see where your friend is coming from, though. We would have to admit that parts of the Bible seem a bit ‘dated’. After all, it was written between 2,000 and 3,500 years ago; it describes the history and events of people we’ve never heard of and who often don’t seem anything like us; it talks about what food you should and shouldn’t eat, how you should sacrifice animals, and the type of material you should make your clothes from, none of which applies to us today. It isn’t hard to see why someone might say it’s out of date.

Our dilemma is caused by the dual nature of the Bible. It is adivine book, spoken by God, and therefore it is always true and relevant. And yet at the same time it is ahuman book, written by people a long time ago, and therefore it is in some senses ‘dated’. Let’s think about each of these two natures of the Bible and how they should influence the way that we approach it.

A divine book

By calling it a ‘divine book’, we mean simply that the Bible comes directly from God. Behind the various human authors, he is the ultimate author.

That’s a huge claim to make, and lots of people would dispute it. But for Christians the issue is settled very easily: this is what Jesus himself believed about the Bible.

When asked by the Pharisees about divorce, Jesus said this: ‘Haven’t you read...that at the beginning the Creator made them male and female, and said, For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh?’ (Matthew 19:4–5).

Jesus quotes from Genesis 2:24, which, he says, was spoken by ‘the Creator’. But when we turn to Genesis 2:24, we find that it is not a direct pronouncement from God (compare 2:18), but simply part of the narrative written by the human author of Genesis, probably Moses. However, Jesus sees this human sentence as something spoken by the Creator, God himself. We could multiply the examples showing that this is typical of Jesus’ attitude to the Old