Are You Reading Your Bible Wrong? | ask Theocast

So you wake up every morning and you read your Bible for 30 minutes, and at the end of it, you ask this question, how does this apply to me?

You're probably reading your Bible wrong. Stay tuned. Hi, I'm Jon Moffitt.

I'm the pastor of Grace Reformed Church and host of Theocast. This is Ask Theocast, where we answer your questions from a

Reformed and pastoral perspective. And today we're talking about Bible reading, and the frustration that most people have is they read something like the book of Leviticus and they're stuck in the blood laws and you're reading through all of the disgusting laws and requirements and puss and bring it to the priest and it's disgusting.

And how in the world do you read that and think to yourself, well, I've got to go to work in 30 minutes. How does this apply to me?

And then we bring all kinds of application. A lot of times people just end up skipping it and they're thinking to themselves, I can't wait to get out of Leviticus, and this is also why a lot of times people will partner their readings with Psalms in the

New Testament. I understand why. But a lot of this has to do with our understanding of the Bible in general. We're trying to read the

Bible as if it's an instruction manual from God. Here's how to live as a Christian or how to be a sufficient

Christian in the eyes of God, we'll read it as a guidebook, right? Here's a guidebook to kind of navigate the problems of life as if all of the

Bible is a proverb. And so here are the wisdom sections, and then we look for them.

The way I would describe it is we're trying to find ourselves in the text. It's the where's Waldo method, right?

We start in Genesis, we work our way through it, and we're trying to figure out how each section of this applies to our daily life as if the

Bible was written for us to obey as it relates to every verse of the

Bible. Well, I think that's going to frustrate anybody who tries to read any kind of book that way, if you're reading some fantasy book and you're trying to find out how it applies to you, instead of allowing the genre of the book to determine what you are doing, you're going to be frustrated by it.

So let's just stop for a moment and back out and ask ourselves one question. What is the Bible?

Well, it is a book, but it's not a book that has necessarily one writer.

There are multiple writers, or does it have one writer? That's where the question needs to really begin.

Who's the author of the Bible? So what happens is when you read the

Bible as an instruction manual, you're not paying attention to the authors. You're asking this one question, what does it say?

How do I obey it? Or what does it say? How do I apply it? And that's kind of hard to do. And a lot of applications are being made that have nothing to do with the actual purpose of the text.

You read the section about the children of Israel walking through dry ground. And so you're asking yourself, well,

I'm just going to trust that the Lord's going to provide a miracle because I'm up against the Dead Sea or the

Red Sea. And I need God to perform a miracle in my job or in my work or whatever. And so you put all your hope in the fact that today

God's going to part the waters for me to walk on. And then it doesn't happen because that's not why it was written.

It wasn't written so that you could crumble walls or you could walk on water or you could see the sun stop.

See, we don't know what to do with the Old Testament. So because of that, we create all kinds of applications that the author,

God, never intended us to have. Now, how do I know this? How can I make such bold statements about the

Bible? Well, I think the Bible is very clear in its intentions when you read it as it is intended to be read, or I should say, when you engage

God's word in the way in which it was intended to be engaged. Okay. Just not reading, but majority of the word of God has always been a corporate engagement, whether it's the teaching and preaching of his word.

So if God is the author, we need to ask this one question, what's the purpose?

We know there's multiple genres in there, right? There's history, there's proverb, there's all kinds of epistles, which are letters and instructions.

There's poetry, there's apocalyptic language in there, there's revelation, which means we're talking about the future.

How does all this meld together? Well, there's a system that's been handed to us, and really it's called looking at the

Old Testament through the lens of the New Testament. You see, we aren't wondering what's going to happen.

We already know what happens. Jesus came. Not only did Jesus come or came and died on the cross, he interpreted the

Old Testament for us, and so did the New Testament writers. So we should ask ourselves, how did they use the

Bible? How did they read the Old Testament? And what you'll find is you do not see the

New Testament writers looking at the Old Testament and making weird, obscure applications that have nothing to do with, one, the history or the purpose of the text.

So we're going to start by looking at the New Testament, use those lenses and applications to give us the explanation of the

Old, and then we can actually know exactly what it is that God wants us to know about his word.

I mean, what use is the Bible if you don't really understand what it's saying? It's like having an instruction manual to build something, and if you don't understand the instructions, you're probably not going to rightly build whatever it is that you're trying to build.

Well, if you don't know why it is that God wrote what he wrote, then you're not going to understand what he's trying to communicate.

So I want you to take the whole idea that the Bible is an instruction manual or a guidebook for life, and I want you to throw it out the window, okay?

That's not what it's designed for. We're going to get to the instruction part, the part you're supposed to obey, later.

But if we're going to start in Genesis, we have to ask ourselves, why is it written? Well, Paul writes something very important from the beginning.

It's in Ephesians 1, verse 4. Let me read it to you because it helps you kind of put a canopy over the entire

Bible saying, this is what the Bible is about. He says this, even as he chose us and him before the foundations of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.

So the first thing he's saying, before creation, there is something happening.

So it's almost like Marvel movies. There's this moment where you have this montage before to kind of give you the setting, here's everything that happened, you know, up in this planet and these gods, and then all of a sudden, now here's the scene that we have set for the movie, that's what he just did.

He's giving you the montage. Before the world began, God made a decision.

And what was the decision according to Paul? That he was going to save sinners. Look at verse 5, he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.

So before the world began, God had determined according to his nature, his will, that he is going to save sinners.

For what reason? To the praise of the glorious grace with which he has blessed us in the name of the

Lord, my beloved. So according to Paul, before the world began, the purpose of creation and the purpose of God's word is to reveal to us how

God is going to redeem sinners. The easiest way for me to put this is the

Bible is a book, it's a story, and the story has a specific theme, according to what we're hearing from Paul, it's redemption.

Even Jesus on the Emmaus Road, you probably know this famous story where you have the disciples who are walking with Jesus and they don't really know who he is at the moment, he's just been raised from the grave.

And it says, from the law and the prophets, Jesus pointed to the passages that were about him.

Well, why is it so important that Jesus would do that? Because he's trying to explain to them the whole Old Testament is the story of how the

Messiah, Jesus, got to the cross. There are even prophecies about Jesus and how he's going to die on a cross, that he's going to be pierced in his side, that his bones would not be broken, and that he would live this perfect life and that he would raise again.

All of this was not only prophesied, but promised. Let me put it this way, the Old Testament is a promise given to us in Genesis chapter three, and it is further explained and proven to be true when

Jesus shows up as Messiah in the New Testament. The Old Testament should be read this way in essence.

It should be read as God promising sinners to save them and proving he keeps his promises.

God is faithful. The whole Bible, I would argue, is a book written to prove that humans are not faithful.

Adam and Eve failed in the garden. The children of Israel failed in the Old Testament. David failed as a king. Solomon failed as a king.

How many illustrations do we need as failure, failure, failure, right? And then yet, who is the ones who succeeds and is faithful?

It's God. He is faithful. So, but what do we do? We look past God and we look for ourselves.

Well, be like David or be like Daniel or be like Joseph. These men are sinners. They needed

God's promise just like we do. There was no one in the Old Testament that was ever saved by the law or by obedience or by morality.

So, instead of looking at the Old Testament to receive confidence and a God who was powerful and a

God who keeps his promises, what do we do? We look for promises that if we do something, we internalize the

Bible. If we do something, then God will do this for us. Well, God made it very clear in the

Old Testament that he promised to save sinners, even though the sinners did not deserve it.

And that is the entire story of the Old Testament. Then we finally get to the New Testament. Jesus Christ dies, he rises again.

And what do we learn? That those who put their faith in Christ, just like they did in the Old Testament, but those who put their in the coming of the

Messiah, those who put their faith in the risen Messiah who died will have eternal life.

And now there is stuff for us to do. There are instructions. But if you're going to look at a percentage as far as narrative of how

God saves and now that you're saved, what you're supposed to do, you're looking at 3 % of your Bible, because even the sections that have, here's what to do.

Those are very small. And yet, how do we read the Bible? Here's what to do in every section.

And yet 3 % of your Bible, that's what it's dedicated toward. If you read your Bible word for word from the beginning to the end, if that's how you decide to read it, 95 plus percent of your time, you're going to be engaging in the failure of man and the faithfulness of God.

Which actually is the priority of God. He wants you to always be looking to his promises, his faithfulness, not yours.

And in light, once you see those and you trust those, love your neighbor, love God. Those are the two greatest commands that he gives us.

If you look at all of the Old, the New Testament commands, they all related into either you're loving

God or you're loving your neighbor. They all are wrapped up into this. And this is exactly what Jesus says is himself.

So in conclusion, if you're going to read your Bible, you're going to engage with God's word. My encouragement to you is read it as a story of redemption.

What I described to you right now is the difference between a dispensational perspective, reading the

Bible as disconnected, and really the Old Testament is really for the old saints of Israel and the

New Testament is for the church versus a covenantal perspective, which is what I just presented to you, is that we understand that all of the

Bible is about this covenant of redemption. God promising to save sinners. And how does he perform that?

He does it through the covenant of works and the covenant of grace. If you want to learn more about what I just said, covenant theology,

I would encourage you to listen to a podcast. We'll put it down below. We have a couple there on reading your

Bible from a covenantal perspective. I promise you the Bible will come alive. You won't be as interested in where you are at in the text because you're going to be excited to see where is

Jesus and how is he going to fulfill this promise and his fulfilled promise is what gives us hope.

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