Some experience Scripture as primitive, barbaric, and repressive. Some see it as outdated and irrelevant. For some, simply hearing the word “The Scripture” elicits anger and pain because someone harmed them in the name of “being faithful to what the Scripture says.” (Or more accurately, what someone thought the Scripture said based upon their interpretation or religious
tradition, and then wielded it as a weapon.) For others, they experience Scripture as boredom believing they’ve seen and heard it all,
there’s nothing considerably new to be learned. And yet still others experience it with confusion, discouragement, and helplessness. They want to understand what Scripture says, but don’t know where to go or what to do to fill in the missing pieces.
The good news is Scripture wasn’t intended to be experienced in these ways.
The bad news is there’s clearly a problem. And the problem doesn’t lie with the Scriptures.
The problem lies with us.
It’s essential to acknowledge that the Bible isn’t an easy book to understand. In fact, it’s downright difficult because it’s a sophisticated library of ancient literature, written over the course of fifteen hundred years by more than thirty different authors, on three different continents, each one
with a particular context. That’s the reality of the Bible.
The problem is that most of us have never been taught how to read and interpret the Bible as such. And this has led to the number-one mistake most everyone makes reading the Bible. And that mistake is this: we don’t read the Bible in its original context.
The Bible was written for real people in real places in real situations at real times. Yet most of us don’t take into consideration the Bible’s context. It doesn’t even cross our minds. Most of us open our Bibles and the first question we’re asking is, “What is this saying to me?” If that’s the first question we’re asking, then we’re already reading the Bible poorly and out of context. Why? Because we’re treating it like a modern text, believing its clarity of meaning should be immediately accessible to us. But the Bible isn’t a modern text. It’s an ancient one that needs to be engaged on its own terms.
Meaning, we need to read and the interpret the Bible through the lens of its original context. If we don’t, our default lens will be our twenty-first century Western context (or wherever we are in the world), replete with our own biases and personal histories with the Bible. And such a reading will be severely tainted because the Bible’s context is dramatically different than our own. When we strip the Bible of its original context, and we fail to read it as it was intended, problems ensue.
In some cases, we miss out on the power of a passage because we understand it too superficially. It’s not that we understand it wrongly. It’s that we understand it incompletely. In other cases, however, our understanding of a passage is just plain off.
And then think about how we’ll often use the Bible. We’ll quote a single verse in a conversation or teaching to prove our point (or what we think the Bible’s point is) and we’ll have no clue what the context of that verse is. For many of us, quoting a text out of context is as automatic as breathing. We don’t even realize we’re doing it. At times, our usage may be correct, but without knowing the context, how do we know? How are we certain we’re not making the Bible say whatever we want? Or what if we’re recirculating a bad interpretation? Without context, we have no guidelines or guardrails. Anyone can make the Bible say nearly anything if it’s ripped from its context. It happens all the time. It’s hard to overstate the importance of context and interpreting the Bible.
Studying the Bible is more important than obeying it, because if you don’t understand it rightly you will obey it wrongly and your obedience will be disobedience. (Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 71)
Feel free to read that again.