Interpreting Scripture

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Introduction to the Session and the Danger of Misinterpreting Scripture

Today you have a special episode. This is session 2 from Snatch Them from the Flames Home Edition. This is my message on interpreting scripture. This is something we do free of charge. You can go to strivingforeternity .org.

Check out the online events. And you can watch the full 7-hour session of the Snatch Them from the Flames Home Edition. But for today, you can get session number 2 on interpreting scripture by, well, me.

The host of The Rap Report, Andrew Rapaport. Coming to you right now on The Rap Report. One, two, three.

Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapaport. Where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

All right. Well, we will get started again. I'm just going to switch my presentation here so we can get started. I hope you guys are enjoying this so far. Those of you who are watching, we just got someone from India.

That's a new spot. Someone else that has popped in. So, again, just as a reminder, as you guys have questions, put them in the chat. Whether it's on YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter, you can put the questions.

If you put a Q and like a colon, it lets the person who's gathering all the questions know you got a question for the Q &A later. And, again, if we're going to be choosing people between breaks or during the Q &A for who's going to win different books, I guess I'll let Laura know now so she can grab just two names at random.

And before we take our lunch break, just grab two names at random that have asked questions already. And we'll announce that afterwards. Just text those to me and we'll announce those as the winners. I'm going to begin with our...

This is basically... This session right now is basically a part of a longer session that we have called Bible Interpretation Made Easy.

It is...

We can come into your church and do this. It is a longer session. It usually runs about... Well, it usually runs a weekend. We do this over a weekend, but we could do it just on Saturday. This is a shortened version of it, so this is the one-hour version.

And so let us begin with a warning. I'm going to talk about this seminar that we're going to do. This actually applies more than just this session. But this really is going to apply this warning to the whole day because I think a lot of this, as you may already see, that Justin has already been willing to name some names.

And so it may get some things that apply for the whole seminar. But there's a high probability that this session, at least, will make you upset if Justin hasn't already.

Wrong button.

We're going to teach you how to interpret God's Word properly, and that could expose that you have many of your favorite Bible verses that you just knew wrongly. And we're going to try... I'm going to try in this hour, I'm going to be as condensed very quickly in 50 minutes, and I'm going to try to teach you how to interpret by rules, not experience.

What do I mean by experience? Well, you already saw Justin just talked about that when it comes to sufficiency of Scripture, that people talk about having dreams to interpret Scripture or having some experience that interprets Scripture.

It's very, very common, unfortunately. And there's also another way people use experience. They will use a systematic theology. They come to Scripture, they read what it says, and they go, Well, I see this, but the problem is that I think that it can't mean this because my systematic theology teaches something else.

Well, your theology doesn't interpret Scripture. The Scripture interprets your theology. So if you're looking at the clear reading of the text of Scripture, and you kind of come up with a different idea of what the Scripture is saying, then your theology is bad.

We're going to get to some things with that because I saw some of the questions already about Hebrew roots and things like that we may get to. And so that's a case of that. So the first thing I want to do is tell you that the book that you have in your hand, this Bible here, well, you don't have this one, but the Bible that you hold in your hand is the first tool that we want to use for interpretation.

But not all Bibles are the same.

Sorry.

Bible Translations and Why Context Matters

So when it comes to interpretations, I want you to realize that there's different types of translations that occur. And so the better books that you're going to use for study, if you're going to study God's Word, you want to be accurate with God's Word.

Then what I want you to do is I want you to stick to a word-for-word translation. It's called a literal or formal equivalent. So what they do there is they take one word, translate it, the next word, translate it, next word.

And then after they translate all the words, they may have to reshuffle things because the fact that you have language that doesn't always translate well. So word orders may have to change. Sometimes you have to add some extra words to have it make sense in a different language.

But what they're trying to do is get you as close to the literal words. Because remember, the Bible wasn't written in English or Spanish or German or Latin. It was written in Hebrew, a little bit of Aramaic, and Greek.

So the closer we can get to those words, the better. So this is going to be your New American Standard Bible, your King James, New King James, English Standard Version, your New English Translation, your Holman.

Oh, wait, they don't do that anymore. But they now have it as Christian Standard Bible. It's not as good as the Holman was. And there's a new one coming out, if you don't know, called the Legacy. I forget if they're calling it Legacy Standard Version or Legacy Standard Bible.

I think Legacy Standard Bible is what it's going to be. That's from Master's Seminary. Those are going to be formal equivalents. Then you have more of what's called free or dynamic equivalents. These are where people are going to try to translate sentence by sentence.

So what you're doing here is you're taking the whole sentence as a whole, and you're trying to translate that one sentence at a time. Now, what happens? You're getting more of the interpretation and not so much of a translation now because now someone is taking the whole sentence and trying to translate that into the language that you're in.

And so you're going to get more of an interpretation. This is going to be things like your NIV is going to have this. Now, is the NIV bad? Well, it depends what you're using it for. An NIV might be fine if you're just reading the Bible.

In fact, when I preach, I will actually read every translation into English that I have to see how people translate it differently. Do I typically study out of the NIV? No. Would I encourage you to do that?

No. Why? Because you've gotten away from that word-for-word translation. So I don't recommend that, at least in the English. I can't speak about the other languages, but I can speak about the English.

The third that is is a paraphrase. And this is where they're trying to translate thought for thought. This is your message Bible. This is not to be used as a Bible. This is something that you could use as a commentary.

That's fine. Use it as a commentary. As a commentary, it's okay. It would be as if you're reading a commentary off the shelf. Just don't call it a Bible. It really isn't. It's someone's interpretation.

That's what it is. And if we recognize that, then we can deal with this a lot better. And so what I want to do is go into some models of interpretation, okay? Now, as we look at this, I want to focus in on three incorrect models of interpretation.

These are the three that you will see most often. You listen to any of the clips that you just heard Justin talk about. You listen to the full clips, and you're going to see these three used over and over and over again.

You basically watch almost anyone that's on Christian TV or on the radio, and you're going to see them do this. These are the ways not to interpret. But the way that's most often used to interpret is isolationism.

And what that is is when people interpret a passage without regard for the context. They just take one verse. Now, you have to remember something. Those verse breaks and the chapter breaks didn't occur for 700, 800 years.

So that was not in the Bible. God did not write the Bible as if it had to have verse breakdowns. So that is something that's helpful for you and I. By the way, how did they be able to identify, then, different parts of the Bible?

Well, they actually memorized a lot of it. But you think about the Psalms. This may sound helpful to you. But what you end up seeing is they would recite the very first phrase, what we'd call the first verse of a psalm to identify the whole psalm.

How's that helpful? What was it that Christ said on the cross? He sat there and quotes from Psalm 22. And what does he do? He says, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? You go look up verse 1 of Psalm 22.

You're going to see that he quoted that. That's a way of referring to the whole thing. Keep reading that psalm. What are you going to see? A description of exactly what Christ was going through. You didn't have chapter breaks and verses.

And so it was easier, since that was added, to do this isolationism. People just take a verse. Justin just talked about where people will just open a Bible. They grab their Bible, just open it up, and point.

And that's the verse of the day. This is why I'm not a big fan of Our Daily Bread. They take one verse, give you a short little snippet of devotion that usually has nothing to do with the verse at all.

Or sometimes it's out of context. This is done commonly. I'm going to show you some examples of this. Proof texting is where you string a bunch of verses together. And they often are isolated. They're often ripped out of their context.

And they're not given the meaning. And so what ends up happening is they take this. They isolate one verse, isolate another verse, slam it together because it has some word in common. And they say, See, this is talking about the same thing.

Or sometimes people will say something, and part of it's in context. But they string it along with other verses that have nothing to do with what's being said. And in stringing those along, what they're actually doing there is they're actually proof texting.

They're trying to make an argument for what they're trying to argue. And they just go through the Bible looking, Oh, this helps, this helps, this helps. Let me put these together. That's how you should not interpret the Bible.

Spiritualizing is a way not to interpret the Bible as well. That's when you try to read into the Bible something it doesn't say. Whether it's a historical or spiritual thing that you try to read into the text of Scripture.

And you already saw that in the last session as Justin is dealing with these passages. Where if you just read them in context, you realize these people are trying to read something into the text that wasn't in the text.

So let's take a look at some examples. This is the most quoted verse of our day now, at least in America. This is replaced John 3, 16. And it is Jeremiah 29, 11. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans of welfare and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.

That just sounds so good, doesn't it? Oh, I mean, isn't it so good that God declares for me plans of welfare and not for evil to give me a future and a hope? You know, if I was to read the context, just a few verses later.

Let me just go down seven and eight verses later to this. Why is this on nobody's refrigerators? And no one shares this online as a verse to their life verse. Jeremiah 29, 17, and 18. Thus says the Lord of hosts, behold, I am sending on them sword, famine, and pestilence.

And I will make them like vile figs that are so rotten they cannot be eaten. I will pursue them with sword and famine and pestilence and make them a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth, to be a curse, a terror, a hissing, and a reproach upon the nations where I have driven them.

Why is that no one's life verse? No one wants to claim that one, and yet that's within the context. I mean, wouldn't it be good if God told us who these verses are for? I mean, wouldn't it be nice if God would just let us know who was he speaking about?

Oh, oh, wait. Oh, he did. In Jeremiah 29, 10, many people didn't read just one verse before their life verse of theirs. For thus says the Lord, when 70 years are complete for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise to bring you back to this place.

Oh, so if you live through the 70-year Babylon captivity, that verse, Jeremiah 29, 11, that's for you. If you haven't, I'm sorry, it's not for you. It isn't. It wasn't meant for you. This was a promise as God was going to put Israel in a 70-year captivity, and as he mentions, under Babylon, that he would remember them.

He would bring them back. And just as he says he's going to have a time of welfare for them, there's also going to be a time there's going to be a hissing, and there's going to be a reproach. You see, is there something you and I can learn from Jeremiah 29, 10 to 18?

Yes, there is. God is faithful. You know what happened 70 years after Israel was taken into Babylon captivity? God fulfilled this promise. God brought them back. So what can we learn? We can learn that he is faithful.

Here's another example that we see. Again, I say to you, if two of you agree on anything on earth about anything, they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. People use this all the time to say that there's agreement.

If you have agreement, then we're done. We have this, and we're able to look and say, I had an example of this in college where I had a friend of mine that asked me if I'd co-sign a loan for him because his parents wouldn't even do it.

He wanted a car, and I wouldn't do that. The next day he came up to me and says, I am going to get a new car. I said, really? How? Did your parents change their mind? He said, no, I got two other Christian brothers to pray with me.

And where two of you agree on earth and ask anything, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. And he expected a brand new car to be given to him. In fact, the very next verse is also misused.

This is used in most small church prayer meetings. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them. I mean, here people say, oh, look, there's two or three of us gathered. This is great.

We're able to have a prayer meeting. God is present. Well, if you were to look at Matthew 28, 19, and 20, what are you going to see? That Jesus Christ says, and lo, I am with you always. So how many Christians are really necessary for God's presence?

Some of you are thinking one, based on Matthew 28, 19, and 20. Well, the answer is zero. God is omnipresent. He's everywhere. We don't need a single Christian for his to be present. No, the context of Matthew 18 is dealing with the issue of church discipline.

The two or three are gathering for a purpose of saying, look, we've gone to them. We have witnesses that witnessed the unrepentance. And therefore, we're going to go to the next step of church discipline.

And he's saying, hey, no one wants to do church discipline. But if you've gone through these steps, the context says, you know, assuredly where two of you or three agree. In other words, we need that assurance to know we're doing the right thing.

That's the context. Now, let me give you an example from Bill Johnson. This is from his message, staying on assignment. Now, you probably never thought in your life that you would hear Bill Johnson preach out of Matthew 7, 21, and 22.

He doesn't go on to 23. I wonder why. But if you look in your Bibles in Matthew 7, 21 to 23, what you're going to see is Jesus speaking actually about Bill Johnson. That may be hard for some to hear. But, yes, I think that's exactly who he's speaking to.

So in Matthew 7, 21 to 23, this is what Jesus actually said. He says, Bill Johnson doesn't go on to read the next verse. And then, Bill Johnson, who teaches that he could do miracles and cast out demons, and he uses that to argue that he is a child of God because of it.

And here's what he says about this verse.

I'd like to suggest that there are actually two parts to the lesson Jesus is trying to instruct this crowd in. The first is concerning the will of God. He said,.

Same.

He's saying you can't find your identity apart from obedience. Those who do the will of God, those who yield to the assignment, the commission that God has given, that's where we—identity in Christ is like two-part epoxy.

Obedience seals what was revealed in Scripture. Two parts to this. He said, You can't call me Lord. You can't call me Lord and not obey, right? So what is the will of God? Well, the broadest definition is found in what we usually call the Lord's Prayer, which is your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

So it's the reality of that world changing.

Now, do you notice how he just did proof texting there? That's an example of proof texting. He wants to explain something in one verse, jumps to another verse. And just because the word will, he ends up using that in both.

But let's hear what the rest he's going to say.

Infecting the reality of this world. Every other commission Jesus gave, every other assignment he gave, was actually an expression of that overall commission. The overall commission, heaven to earth. It became practical when he said, I'm going to send you out two by two.

You're going to a home. Heal the sick that are there. Find the peaceful people. Minister them. Make sure deliverance comes. Cast out demons. Cleanse lepers. Raise the dead. That's very specific. So what is the will of God?

If they're sick, heal them. That's the will of God. So when he says, don't call me Lord and you disobey me when I give you a commission. Pray for the sick. I'm not saying that's the only way we demonstrate the will of God.

But don't ignore it because it's part of the program. Don't say he's my Lord and yet you don't pray for the sick. You don't confront somebody who's tormented with dreams. Well, I don't know how to deal with demons.

Tell them to leave. Start there. Start there. Just pretend like you're standing in Jesus' clothing and his shoes and use his name and come against that demon. Tell him to break off that person's life.

Just this nonsense of torment stops today. The whole point was you can't call me Lord and not do the will of God, the will of my Father in Heaven. The second verse, though, verse 22, he says, Many will say to me, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name, cast out demons, and done many wonders in your name?

What group is that? Those are the people that don't have the relationship with God, but they know enough spiritual truths to demonstrate his authority and prophesy and heal the sick doing the will of God.

So the first group, they don't even try. The second group, they try, but there's no relationship. Depart from me. I never knew you. So people will say, well, here, this is evidence. We're not supposed to pray for the sick.

No, it's the opposite. Here's the deal. If people who don't have a relationship with Jesus can use his name and people can get healed, those who know Jesus have no excuse.

So there you go, folks. I mean, he came close to a proper interpretation when you look at the context. He really did. He only missed it by a light year.

Yeah.

I mean, he even recognizes that he has the complete opposite interpretation from the context. He even mentions that. Anytime someone says they recognize what the common reading is, and then they say, oh, no, but it's the opposite, be warned.

That's a problem. And so let us look at an important thing when it comes to the correct model of interpretation. The right way to do this is to use inductive Bible study, to be using exegesis, meaning pulling the text out of, pulling the meaning out of the text.

You look at the text to get the meaning out of it. You don't try to read into it as you just saw in that example. He's sitting there and saying, oh, well, this is what it is. Let me stick this in. Let me stick this in.

The reality, why has he got to do that? Because that passage condemns the very behavior that Bill Johnson does. He's one of these people who is going to stand before God, and the whole part of that passage is to sit there and say, people are going to say, look at all the great things I have done, God.

I am one of your children. And he's going to declare, no, you weren't. That is the very thing that Bill Johnson, that passage is actually condemning a man like Bill Johnson, and yet he's going to preach that and give it a whole new meaning.

Why?

Because he ignores this very important issue of context. This is the most important thing when it comes to interpreting scripture. In fact, when I was on the streets in New York City, I would go out every week and preach the gospel, and people would challenge me, and people would ask me about a verse that they find in the Bible, and all I did was I'd open up my Bible, I'd turn to that passage, I would back up several verses, and I would read it in context, and the entire crowd would realize the context, and suddenly it's like, what's the problem?

And the person, once the context was read, realized there wasn't a problem, and they had no answer. In fact, one of the guys who used to work for the ministry, Striving for Eternity, he actually met me on the street.

He would watch me do this week in and week out. He was in a Word of Faith church. He started to apply that very same technique when he would sit in church, and I tell people when I disciple them, you read something in a book and it has a verse, go read that chapter.

Don't read just a Bible verse. You read the whole chapter. Get the context. Well, this is what this guy was doing. He went to church. He's in a Word of Faith church. He reads the context, and he suddenly realized, wait, they're ripping every single verse out of context, and you know what he did?

He left that church and got into a Reformed church.

Why?

Because he realized context gives the answer. So we have to understand that. Now, I'm going to argue for what I call a literal or normal interpretation of Scripture. What do I mean by that? I mean that we're going to see things that are figures of speech as figures of speech, and we're going to see things that are literal as literal, and I'm going to give you some tools of how to identify the different types of literature in Scripture to know what kind of rules apply for that.

So the first and most important is context. You have biblical context. Where is this in biblical history? You have historical context. You have cultural context. You have grammatical context, and you have spiritual context.

So in the first, you're going to look at where the verse is before and after it. Where are we in history? What's the culture of the time? What's the grammatical setting that we have here? And where are we spiritually?

Now, let me give you some examples. Let me give you at least one example of this. This is a verse I was very puzzled the first time I heard this preached. My pastor was preaching out of Matthew 24, 36.

But concerning that day or hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. And my first pastor, he was preaching this. He spent about 20 minutes explaining this division between Jesus and his humanity versus his deity.

And in his humanity, he could not know something, but in his deity, he could. I was very puzzled by that. Now, by the way, when you cause that kind of division in the nature of Christ, it's actually a second-century heresy.

You must recognize that Christ is one being. He's truly human, and he's truly divine, but those two natures are one. There's not a separation there. So Christ knows all things. How do we then divide this?

I'll tell you why I was puzzled. I was puzzled, and I walked up to my pastor afterwards, and I said, I'm really not understanding why you spent so much time on that verse. He said, Well, I'm trying to explain how Christ could not know something.

I said, But that's an idiom. It's a Jewish idiom. It refers to a wedding. A Jewish idiom that would be what would happen in a Jewish wedding is you end up seeing that you have people who would, the father would tell the son, You're going to get married.

Get the house ready. He would start working on a house. He'd build an extension of the family house. He'd have that. When he's ready, he's waiting. All his friends would be like, Hey, when's the wedding date?

The answer, the idiom is no one knows. Not even the angels, nor the son. Only the father knows. It's the idea of living in expectancy. And if you read the context there, you're going to see him refer to Noah and the days of Noah living in expectancy.

The question being answered is the second coming. And he's saying, Live every day as if today's the day. Because when the father calls the son, he says, Go get your bride. That's when the son knows. He runs against the groomsman.

Go get the bride. The groomsman run ahead in town so that the wife will know to get ready. And then they go and the groom will go get his wife and bring her to the feast. Well, this is a cultural thing.

And if you don't understand the culture, if you don't understand the idiom of what's going on, you may miss some of that. Sometimes grammar makes a difference. Here you see in one example in John 5, 13, the grammar here is specific.

I write these things to you who believe in the name of the son of God that you may know that you have eternal life. Notice the words in red that I put in there. These are past tense. You already believe.

You already know. And you already have eternal life. That tells us that eternal life is not something we get when we die. It is something we have. So people who would say that you can lose your salvation, you have to lose that eternal life that God already gave you.

Here's another example. This is a longer one, so I won't read this whole thing. But John 21, 15 to 17, what do we end up seeing here in the grammar? Well, we see the word love. Now, I've color-coded this for you for a reason.

Because many people argue in this passage that the reason that Simon Peter was upset because Jesus asked him three times, do you love me? People argue, well, he was upset the third time because he denied him three times.

That is in the context just before it. The denial of Peter was just before this event. So, yes, that is within the context. However, when we look at the Greek, I think we have something more. So I'm going to read this, but I'm going to put the word for agape love, which you have there in red, that is the word, the self-sacrificial love.

I'm going to translate that as love. There's another word here in the Greek used for love that's translated love, and it is the word phileo, which is a brotherly love. It's not the same level as agape.

And I'm going to translate that as like. And I'm just going to kind of skip through this, but maybe you'll get a better idea of why Peter was upset. Jesus says, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?

Peter's response is, yes, Lord, you know that I like you. He said to him a second time, Simon, son of John, do you love me? And Simon Peter's response is, yes, Lord, you know that I like you. And he said to him a third time, Simon, son of John, do you like me?

Peter was grieved because he said to him a third time, do you like me? And he says, Lord, you know everything. You know that I like you. You see, here Jesus is saying, do you have agape love for me? And he says, I have phileo love for you.

Do you have agape love for me? I have phileo love for you. Do you even have phileo love for me? Now, after the three denials, it is a fair question to ask, but that's the challenge here. He was upset because the third time Jesus questioned the phileo love.

Misusing Prophecy and the Need for Exegesis

Now, let me give you another example of how not to interpret in this sense. Now, if you go to Justin Peter's website, Justin had done a video where Sid Roth at the end of the year of 2020 had 20 different predictions of prophecies.

And in that, what you ended up seeing was he had all these people that gave prophecies for 2020. It was their 2020 vision. And yet Justin went through and said, how did all these people have these prophecies?

And nobody saw COVID -19, right? Nobody saw that. And here's what you have when you have someone that takes something out of its context and ends up trying to give it a meaning. This is Sid Roth responding to Justin Peter's.

Oh, he won't mention him by name. He doesn't want any of you to go see that video. Go check out on YouTube Justin Peter's Ministries and watch it for yourself. But watch what Sid Roth does with the idea of prophecy.

We think of prophecy as Justin would explain in that video. Prophecy is something that's not going to fail. If God says this is what's going to happen, that's what's going to happen. Let's see if Sid Roth agrees with God.

Most of the prophets I know, not all. I wish it was all. And by the way, there's a big misunderstanding of prophecy. I had someone pick a bone with me on social media and do a whole post against me. Yes, he said Sid did this 2020 thing with 20 of the best prophets he knows.

And some of them talked about things would be wonderful. And some of them talked about things would be bad. Well, have you ever read the scripture that say we know in part? We prophesy in part. And why can't it be both?

Why can't one part, one prophet see the part about the bad and another prophet see the thing about the good and both are right? I mean, so few people understand the gift of prophecy or tongues or any of the supernatural tools that we have.

And the devil is having a field day with Christians as a result of that.

Yeah, well, the thing is, he just totally missed the point because Justin was talking about the fact that their prophecies missed COVID -19. That was the whole thing. So Sid Roth missed the whole point of the thing.

But the reality, Sid, it wasn't about you. He makes it about him. It wasn't about you, Sid Roth. It was about the fact that people had prophecies. But do you notice what Sid does? He's got to figure a way to explain these prophecies that didn't come to pass.

Well, you know in part and you prophesy in part. Okay, well, that has context. That actual context is actually, in my interpretation, is condemning what Sid Roth was just saying about the tongues because it says they will cease when the canon comes.

Some people don't agree it's the canon, but I do. We could discuss that in Q &A. So let's go through the first thing. When it comes to interpretation of scripture, here's what I want you to do. First thing I want you to recognize is the different genre or type of literature in the Bible because each of these are going to be interpreted differently, and I'm going to give you those rules for how to.

First, you have historical narrative. Okay, that's going to be, you know, in the Old Testament, those beginning books, Genesis, Exodus. Those are historical narratives. They're giving historical accounts, and they're narrating that.