Transcription
That's what I want to talk about tonight. How we, as individual Christians, as private believers, come to the text of the Bible and interpret it. Are there any guidelines that we have to lead us away from error and into a sound interpretation of the Bible?
Before I do that, let me take a moment to look at the Roman Catholic Church's response to the Lutheran principle of private interpretation. One of the most important aspects of the church's Counter-Reformation, Rome's answer to Luther, Calvin, and the reformers, was the calling of an ecumenical council that was held in Trento in Italy and is known now historically as the Council of Trent.
In the sixth session of that council, the church set forth its doctrine of justification and set forth its anathemas against the various Protestant teachings on that subject of the Gospel. But earlier than that, in the fourth session of the Council of Trent, the church addressed the issue of the source of revelation and of the canonical scriptures. In the midst of that fourth session, listen, please, to the following statements carved out by the church in council.
"Moreover," it says, "the same holy council, considering that not a little advantage will accrue to the Church of God if it be made known which of all of the Latin editions of the sacred books now in circulation is to be regarded as authentic, ordains and declares that the old Latin Vulgate edition from St. Jerome, which in use for so many hundreds of years has been approved by the church, being public lectures, disputations, sermons, and expositions, held as authentic, and that no one dare or presume under any pretext whatsoever to reject it."
So here we have the authentication and canonization of the Latin translation of the Bible. But what I'm really interested in is what comes next. Listen to this.
"Furthermore, to check unbridled spirits, it," that is, the council, "decrees that no one, relying on his own judgment, shall, in matters of faith and morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine, distorting the holy scriptures in accordance with his own conceptions, presume to interpret them contrary to that sense which Holy Mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge of their true sense and interpretation, has held and holds, or even contrary to the unanimous teaching of the fathers, even though such interpretation should never at any time be published. And those who act contrary to this shall be made known by the ordinaries and punished in accordance with the penalties prescribed by law."
Here, in the fourth session, the church comes down heavily with both feet against the Protestant doctrine of the private interpretation of scripture. But in this particular decree that I've just read to you, we see what happened frequently during Trent. That is, that when the guns of the Roman Church were aimed at the reformers, in many cases, they flat-out missed their target. That what they attacked were caricatures and straw men that were never part of the affirmations or denials of the reformers. Other times, the guns were trained accurately against Luther and Calvin, and they hit their target. But this one statement that I just read to you reflects that confusion.
Let me read it again to you and see if you pick up on it. It says, "it decrees that no one, relying on his own judgment, shall, in matters of faith and morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine, distorting the holy scriptures in accordance with his own conceptions."
Let me stop right there and ask this question: Would Martin Luther or John Calvin agree with that? Oh, yes, they would. Because Luther and Calvin understood that the right of private interpretation of the Bible does not include within it the right to distort the Bible. With the right and privilege of private interpretation always comes the sacred, holy, and awesome responsibility of correct interpretation, rightly dividing the word of truth. Private interpretation is never a license to distort the Bible. So that part of the fourth session, we agree in it.
What comes after that? That gets us into trouble. Because it says, "no one has the right to presume to interpret them contrary to that sense which Holy Mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge of their true sense and interpretation, has held or even continues to hold." See here what the law is. Not only do we not have the right to interpret the Bible by distortion, but we never have the right to interpret the Bible in a way that is different from how Holy Mother Church has interpreted. Because if the church has interpreted it, the question of the meaning of scripture has been settled once and for all. And private interpretation never gives you a license to interpret the Bible in any way that it would bring your doctrine in conflict with what the Church of Rome teaches.
It was at that point that Luther, and Calvin, and Wingley, Bucer, Bullinger, and all the rest got off the train. And they said, "No." And the reason they said no is because the church is not infallible. But the church, and councils, err. And we all are subject to error. To error. And none of us has the right to distort the scripture.
Now, let me give you some basic guidelines about this for now. That along with this principle of private interpretation was set forth by Luther and the reformers, the principle of interpreting the Bible literally. Now, I hear from people all the time about this business of interpreting the Bible literally. People ask me, "Do you interpret the Bible literally?" In fact, that's not usually how they ask the question. They usually put it in the form of a statement followed by a question. They say, "R.C., you don't interpret the Bible literally." That's the statement, followed by the question, "Do you?" I mean, like, I can't imagine that anybody in the 21st century, in their right mind, who has gone beyond the third grade, would be so ignorant and foolish as to interpret the Bible literally. So that's the way it comes. "You don't interpret the Bible literally, do you?"
Well, when people say that to me, I never say no, nor do I ever say yes. Well, what do I say? Well, when someone says, "You don't interpret the Bible literally, do you?" my answer is standard. I always give the same answer. It's this: "Of course, I interpret the Bible literally. Like, duh. What other way is there to interpret?"
Now, there's a lot of confusion about what literal interpretation means. When Luther and the reformers set forth the principle of interpreting the Bible according to the *sensus literalis*, or the literal sense, here's what they meant, and what we mean: that to interpret the Bible literally is to interpret the Bible the way it was written. Voilà. So that when you come to the text of scripture, you have to be able to discern that there are very many varieties of literary genre present in the text. We have to discern that. We see that the Bible's written sometimes in the form of letters, sometimes in the form of historical narrative, sometimes in the form of parables, sometimes in the form of proverbs, sometimes in the form of poetry. And there are different rules for interpreting poetry from interpreting historical narrative, for example. And we need to be aware of that. So to interpret the Bible literally means to interpret it according to the way it was written.
Now, let me tell you what that doesn't mean. No one ever has the right to come to a historical narrative text of scripture and turn it into some kind of moral symbolism. 19th-century liberals were the past masters of this. But I grew up in a church, and I wasn't a believer church. Church was exceedingly liberal. Our teacher, our pastor, taught us about the miracles of Jesus. And he taught us that at the wedding feast of Cana, what had happened was those great water jars had mixed with some of the sediment that had had wine in it. That they were basically water, but the people had drunk so much wine that when they brought out this mixed-up version, people thought it was the best wine of all because they were already in a stupor. Or he said they were drinking water, and the meaning of the text is this: that after all, water is the best wine.
He borrowed from the German liberals the idea of the feeding of the 5,000. He gave two different interpretations. One was very crass: that Jesus and his disciples had stored a cache of food stuffs in a cave with a hidden opening, and like a magician, Jesus stood in this long, flowing robe, and you've seen magicians on the stage pulling scarves forever out of their sleeves or sausages. So there was a like a bucket brigade of loaves and fishes that the disciples had stored in the cave, and they were passing it through this hidden opening, through this back sleeve of Jesus, and he's producing enough food to feed 5,000 people. That was one interpretation we learned in church. The other one was, well, the real story was about the little boy who stepped forward with his lunch and he was willing to share. And the real meaning that Jesus of the text is this: that some of the people came with their lunches, others failed to provide for themselves. And when the crisis came at noon time and everybody was hungry, Jesus, in his masterful style of moral education, was able to get those who had brought their lunches to share with those who didn't. So that it was a miracle of ethics. That's how I was instructed of the meaning of the miracles.
Like the death of God theology, van Bunsen, for example, taught that what really the Bible was teaching was not that they're not trying to suggest that Jesus really came out of the tomb, but rather the disciples experienced what he calls a discernment situation. That is, prior to the cross, the disciples didn't really understand what Jesus was about. And when he died on the cross, they went into this short period of disillusionment and grief and mourning. And then on Sunday, it dawned on them really what Jesus was about. And so they said, "Now we see it." And so when the scriptures say that they saw Jesus, it didn't mean that he came within the field of their vision or that there were experiences with the optic nerve. Rather, it was just simply a new insight.
Now, ladies and gentlemen, that's how not to interpret the Bible. That is what we call dishonest exegesis. Because those people knew very well that the literary form in which those texts come to us were not symbolic moralism, but that was presented to us in a genre of historical narrative. Now, you can reject it if you want, but you have no right to twist it to say that it is saying something that it never was saying.
When I was in seminary, we had a Hebrew exegesis paper as an assignment. This was a higher critical school that I attended. I wrote on the historical narrative of the narrative genre of the book of Jonah, with the exception of the prayer that is written in poetic form in the middle. My professor, who had gone to college, graduated with honors, went on to seminary, graduated there, got his Ph.D. in Hebrew studies in Old Testament, and had taught in the seminary for 40 years or so, got so excited with my paper. He not only gave me an A on the paper, but he said, "You must submit this for publication in some scholarly journal." I said, "Why should I do that?" He says, "This is remarkably innovative. He said, "I've never ever seen anybody argue that the book of Jonah was written largely in historical narrative form." And I thought, "Where have you been?" I said, "I can't do that. I said, "I'd be sued for plagiarism." All I've set forth in this paper is the classic orthodox understanding of the book of Jonah. But this man, in his entire education, had never been exposed to Orthodoxy. There is such a thing as liberal obscurantism.
But again, it is not right to treat historical narrative as poetry, or poetry as historical narrative. I've listened to a debate on television once about prophecy fulfillment. And one of the advocates of prophecy fulfillment was saying, "You have to interpret the Bible literally." And the Bible talks here about giant locusts that will come and ravage the land at the end times. That can only refer," he said, "to attack helicopters." That's where you come to if you interpret the Bible literally. I said, "No. If you want to interpret it literally in the way you're talking about literal, what you have to look for are not Apache attack helicopters, but giant locusts." I mean, but this is how we turn the Bible into a waxed nose, twisting it, shaping it, distorting it to make it say what we want it to say. And that's what the reformers were trying to guard against.
At the same time, they were trying to loose the scriptures from the chains of the of the literalisms and let that roaring lion free. They also were very careful to set forth principles of divine interpretation. The most important of one has already been mentioned by John when he talked about the *analogia scripturae*, or the *analogia fidei*, that we call the analogy of faith. The supreme principle of interpretation is: Holy scripture is its own interpreter. You interpret scripture by scripture.
Now, be careful. In this day and age, we have countless professors at evangelical seminaries who have been trained in higher critical approaches to scripture. Who, if you ask them, "Do you believe that the Bible is the word of God?" they say, "Yes." "Do you believe it's inspired?" "Yes." "Do you believe it's inerrant?" "Yes." But they have adopted a method called atomism, A-T-O-M, like atomic energy, where you look at each little bit of scripture independent from the rest of scripture. And they'll say to me, "Don't tell me what Paul says about justification in Romans or in Ephesians. All I'm dealing with is what he says in Galatians." And I said, "Wait a minute. There is not an immediate only an immediate context by which you understand scripture, but there is the total context of the whole Bible. And if we really believe that the Bible is the word of God, and that God does not speak in a forked tongue, then that means I never can take one portion of scripture and set it in opposition to another. If I do, a bell should go off in my head saying, 'Sproul, you've either misunderstood Galatians, or you've misunderstood Ephesians or Romans,' because scripture is interpreted by scripture."
Now, I think one of the great crises of our time in biblical interpretation is following the lines of which Junior spoke this morning or this afternoon about modernism or postmodernism. And in postmodernism, we have seen a widespread epidemic of people embracing relativism, where there is no objective truth. And we looked at the three ages: the classical age, where truth was defined by some kind of correspondence theory. Truth is defined by that which corresponds to reality. It's objective. Even Rudolph Bultmann, in interpreting *ala* in the KD's wordbook, grants that the meaning of the Greek word for truth includes, among other things, that which corresponds to reality or describes real objective events. So historically and classically, we had this objective view of truth.
Then came modernism, the Enlightenment, even the post-Kantian view of truth being determined not simply by what is, but the question is, you look at things a little different from how he looks at it, and our perspective tends to determine our perception of what truth is. Or truth is determined by how we perceive it. Until finally, modernism gives way to postmodernism, where truth now is a matter of preference, pure relativism, pure subjectivism.
Last week, at John's church, during the Shepherd's Conference, during the Q&A, this issue of postmodernism came up. And Al Mohler, who was there, gave a wonderful illustration that described the differences among these views by appealing to how umpires in baseball games call balls and strikes. If you're in the classical mode, the pitcher throws the pitch, the umpire watches it, the catcher says, "What was it?" "Um." And the umpire says, "Strike one." Was a strike? Objective reality. The pitch was in the strike zone. It's a strike.
Now, the modernist view is that the perspective determines the reality. And so the pitch is delivered, the umpire standing a little bit off to the side. The catcher says, "What was it?" "Um." He says, "From where I'm standing, looks like a strike." "Cut." "S." "From where I'm sitting, it looked like a ball." The umpire says, "I'm sorry, but I calls them as I sees them." That's modernism.
Postmodernism: The pitcher delivers the ball, catcher catches the ball, the umpire is silent for a moment. The catcher finally turns to the umpire and says, "What was it? A ball or a strike?" Umpire says, "It's nothing until I say what it was."
Now, that may be funny when we're playing baseball. We're not playing baseball when we come to the word of God. And that just won't work for the word of God. Because, let me tell you something, you know how many meanings are in the text of scripture? How many correct meanings? One. There may be 10,000 applications to your life of a single text in scripture. That's why you can read the same text a hundred times and learn something new every time you read it in how it applies to your life. There's only one correct meaning. But in a postmodern world, there is no meaning. It's like the art where the artist paints it, and you ask him, "What did you mean?" He said, "I don't mean anything. I paint it. You interpret it. It means whatever you say it means. It means whatever you want it to mean." You've got to run for your life from that kind of biblical interpretation.
Here's how it works out with me. When I'm teaching and I'm giving my understanding of a particular view of scripture, and some, it happens inevitably, somebody will say to me, "Well, I see that's your interpretation of scripture." I haven't done this yet, but I want to say, when somebody says, "Well, that's your interpretation," I want to say, "You have a remarkable grasp of the obvious. I'm the one who just gave the interpretation, so why are you telling me that that's my interpretation? We all know it's my interpretation. I just gave it." But when people say that to me, that's not what they're trying to do is to acknowledge that I'm the source of that interpretation. That's not the point. Now, maybe they're saying this: "That's your interpretation" as a short-handed way to completely refute what I've said. Because the unspoken premise in the syllogism is this: "Everything that R.C. Sproul interprets in the Bible, he interprets wrong. This is his interpretation, therefore it's a wrong interpretation."
I've written a book on this for the layman called *Knowing Scripture*. It's been out for 20 years or so. It's an attempt to set forth the reformed principles of interpretation in a simple way that people who haven't gone to seminary can understand, but yet can give them guidelines to keep them from falling into the traps of misinterpreting the Bible. And in one section of the book, I have a section called "10 Practical Rules for Interpreting the Bible." And what I'm going to do in the time I have left tonight is just go over those 10. So I have 10 more points. Don't ever look at me for a three-point sermon. You'll never find me. I have 10 more points. But I'm not going to bore you with a lengthy explanation of each one of these points. I'm just going to be able to list them for you and give you one or two examples quickly. If you want a further exposition of them, get the book. Uh, you don't have to read the book, just buy it.
Here's the first rule: You read the Bible like you would read any other book. So, "Surely you don't mean that the Bible's just like any other?" Well, no, it's the only one that comes to us from the inspiration of God himself. In that sense, the Bible is absolutely unique among books. But there's no such thing as Holy Ghost Greek. You know, Luther talked about the spiritualists during the Reformation, Munster, who was so convinced of his spiritual supremacy that Luther says, "The man thinks he swallowed the Holy Ghost, feathers and all." In the Bible, a verb is a verb, and a noun is a noun. The indicative is the indicative, the interrogative is the interrogative, the conjunctive is the conjunctive. There's nothing spiritual that changes the basic grammatical-historical sense in which the Bible is written. In that sense, you read it like you would read any other book. You don't open the Bible and lucky dip it. You know what lucky dip is? "God, I don't know what your will is for my life. Speak to me through the scripture. Judas went out and hung himself. I don't like that one. Go thou and do likewise." There are people who do that all the time. They think that they're getting messages from God with that utter irresponsible way of reading the Bible. It does violence to the text and insult to the Holy Ghost who inspired it. You read it soberly, like you would any other written document.
Second of all, you read it existentially. Now, I want to be careful here. I may have chosen the wrong word because I don't mean that you read it through the prism of existential philosophy. I don't mean that. I mean it more this way: like Edward Ruro, "You are there." When you're reading the history of the Bible, don't look at it as some distantly removed mythology from an ancient period, but try as much as possible to get in the sandals of Abraham when Abraham hears God call him to Mount Moriah. Try to think what Abraham was thinking, feel what Abraham was feeling. That is, you're not remaining aloof from scripture, but you enter into the reality of the scripture as it is presented. That's what I mean by reading it existentially, not simply as a detached spectator, but you become passionately involved in what it is you're reading.
Somebody just asked me a question last week out in California. I said, "We heard you say this somewhere on radio or something that when, uh, you were studying philosophy in the university, that you said that one of the things that you learned from your study of philosophy was the principle of critical analysis, where as you read things, you subject the truth claims in whatever literature you're reading to certain critical tools before you just jump, rush to judgment, and accept whatever it is you read. And there's a great value in that in the study of philosophy." I said, "And I've learned that." I said, "Yet at the same time, I find that when I come to the scriptures, the dynamic changes. And when I read the scriptures, what I discover every time I read it is that the Bible's criticizing me rather than my criticizing the Bible."
In fact, I said, "If you want to shortcut the sanctification, I've told people this before, many times. You want to get there in a hurry? Do this: Read through the whole Bible. Every time you find something in the Bible you don't like, put a big mark there. And then go back and just concentrate on those passages of scripture that you read that you don't like." Because you'll find out one of two things: either you didn't understand them the first time around, and by studying it more deeply, you'll come to an understanding and you'll be comfortable with it. Or even better, you find out that even though you looked at it more carefully this time, using all the commentaries, you find out, "Why, I did understand what that text said, and I still don't like it." Now you have a real springboard for sanctification. Because now you've isolated those places in the word of God where what you like and what God likes are two different things. And you know that here is where you have to change. But what higher criticism does is, every time they find something in the Bible they don't like, they want to change the Bible. That is the bankruptcy of higher critical scholarship. You read it existentially. You put yourself, not God, under the microscope. And you find yourself being judged by God rather than you being His judge.
Thirdly, basic principle is that you interpret the narrative by the didactic. The Bible will explain something by telling you the story. They tell you what happened, and then later on, in the didactic literature, like the epistles, for example, the apostles will set forth the teaching by explaining the significance or the meaning of the narrative. You read the gospel accounts of the cross and of all you know is what happened that day outside of Jerusalem. If you're there watching the crucifixion, it's not immediately obvious to you to the naked eye that what's taking place here is a cosmic act of atonement. You need the didactic portions of the scriptures to explain the meaning of those events for you.
Now, what happens if you interpret the didactic by the narrative? My complaint with Pentecostal theology is that it interprets Pentecost in a way that is completely opposed to the New Testament's interpretation of Pentecost. My complaint with Pentecostalism is that its view of Pentecost is way too low, because they submerge the didactic portions of scripture to inferences that they draw from the narratives. Even worse, the scourge of evangelicalism today is open theism. It's now trying to persuade you that the Lord God omniscient is not the Lord God omniscient. He does not know all things. He doesn't know what you're going to do before you do it. He doesn't know what you're going to say before you say it, because there's no way he can possibly know the future of free events done by moral agents. And the Bible proves it, because in the narratives, we see Abraham offering Isaac, and the angel coming and saying, "Now I know that you are going to obey me." And so they heap up these verses where it talks about God's relenting, God's repenting, and they say, "See, the Bible teaches that God changes his mind. He's not immutable. That God learns things. He's not omniscient." And this justifies our ghastly theology. Never mind the didactic portions of scripture that warn you that God is not a man that he should repent, and teaches you didactically that in fact, God does know what you're going to say before you say it, even though in the narrative it may be told as if from a human perspective, as if God were learning things. You correct it from coming to that conclusion by the didactic portions. That's again another application of the analogy of faith, that you interpret scripture by scripture.
The fourth one is like unto the third one: You interpret the implicit by the explicit, not the explicit by the implicit. If just this one rule of biblical interpretation were followed consistently, I'm convinced it would be the death blow to Arminianism. Because this is how it happens. I don't know how many times I've talked about the doctrine of election. How many times I've talked about these things. And the first verse I get thrown up to me is, "Well, what about John 3:16?" "So, what about John 3:16?" John 3:16 says that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever, and that whosoever is underlined five times, "whosoever believeth shall not perish but have everlasting life." I said, "And well, that means that everybody has the moral power to choose Jesus, and that anybody who chooses Jesus out of that moral power will be saved." Says, "You know, I look that in John 3:16. I can't find that in John 3:16. Where is that in that text?" I said, "Well, it's obvious." I said, "No, you're drawing an implication. You're drawing an inference from the text. All the text says explicitly is that all who do A will not receive B and will receive C. All who believe will not perish. All who in the category of believers will not be included in the categories of those who perish, but will be included in the categories of those who participate and inherit eternal life." And that's what the text teaches explicitly. It tells us about what happens to those who believe as opposed to those who don't believe. Now, what does it say to the question of who has the moral power to believe? Do I need to translate that? Nothing. What does the Bible say explicitly about natural man's ability to incline himself to Christ or to the things of God? What does our Lord say explicitly when he says, "No man, no man," universal negative, "can come to me unless it is given to him of the Father"? Now, does the Bible teach that we, in our fallen condition, have the natural ability, in our own power, to incline ourselves to Christ, to choose Jesus when we hear the gospel? No. The Lord Jesus Christ said that's an ability none of us have unless God meets the necessary condition for us to be able to respond to the gospel. That's what the Bible tells us explicitly about our moral ability. But that explicit teaching that Jesus gives in John 6 is trumped by an implication drawn from John 3, from the same author, just three chapters earlier, and sets John in contradiction to himself. Don't interpret the explicit by the implicit. You interpret the implications and test them by what's explicitly taught.
Luther said, "You interpret the obscure by the clear, not the clear by the obscure." Fifth, we're almost there. Pay close attention to the meaning of words, individual words. This is one of the reasons why we push so hard for as much as possible to get verbal agreement in English translations and away from this dynamic equivalency thing where you lose sight of the words. Because, you know, so many times in Bible debates, even debates that Jesus has with Satan or with the Pharisees, are settled on the basis of the meaning of a single word. And so we have to be word merchants. We have to be craftsmen of learning the biblical words. One of the things I love about Dr. R.C. Sproul is every time he gives an exposition of scripture, it's sprinkled not only with a bunch of scriptures, but with one Greek term after another where he's explaining for us what those particular Greek words mean. And we have to pay attention to the words. Because one of the problems we have in scripture is that words are used in many cases. The same word may have three or four or five or six nuances to it. How many times does the Bible talk about the will of God? Well, there are at least eight ways in which the Bible talks about the will of God. Which one is in view in a particular passage? How about this one: "God is not willing that any should perish." I'm bloodied and bruised from being hit with that verse. "God is not willing that any should perish." I said, "Willing in what sense? In the sovereign, efficacious will by which whatever God ordains to come to pass must necessarily come to pass? Or is this will God's will of disposition, and what pleases him? He takes no delight in the death of the wicked." What is it? But even more importantly, what's the meaning of the word "any" here? God is not willing that any should perish. Any what? Giraffes? Platypuses? Greeks? What's the what's what do people read into that text? "God is not willing that any human being will ever perish." Well, if God is not willing that any person should ever perish, and he's speaking here of God's sovereign, efficacious will, then now the text preaches way too much for the Arminian. Because now it teaches that everybody will be saved. But if we look at the text, we say, "The any, what's the antecedent of the any?" Contextually, it's the word "us." So what is Peter saying? "God is not willing that any of us should perish." Okay, now who are the "us"? It's obviously the people he's talking to. Who are they? We have to go and look and see to whom the letters of Peter are addressed. And who are they addressed to? Yes, you guessed it. The elect. And so what Peter is clearly teaching in the text is, "God is not willing that any of the elect should perish." So far from being an Arminian text, this text is as Calvinistic as you can get, if you pay attention to the meaning of the words.
What else do you have? "A woman is saved in childbearing." Right? And we know what to be saved means: to be reconciled with God, to be delivered from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. Never mind that the Bible's meaning of the term *sozo* is used to be any kind of rescue from any kind of peril or calamity. So that if you're saved from illness, you've been saved. If you're rescued from defeat in battle, you've been saved. There are all kinds of ways in which you're saved. The there must be distinguished from the ultimate sense of salvation where you're rescued from the wrath of God that is to come. So when the Apostle says that women are saved by childbearing, they're not saying that there are two ways to salvation: one is justification by faith for the men, or justification by having babies for the women. We have to be careful of our understanding of the meaning of the words of the Bible.
Next, we have to be careful to observe the presence of certain literary forms, particularly in the poetic portions of scripture, of which there are many. And one thing that we need to learn, really, or the basic, I spelled it out here, basic types of parallelisms that are found in Hebrew literature. And I'll give you one example if I can open this book where I quote from the old King James version. Isaiah 45:6-7 reads as follows: "I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light and I create darkness. I make peace and create evil. I the Lord do all these things." I don't know how many students have come to me with this and say, "Here, right here in the Bible, it teaches that God creates evil." That's what it says. That's what it said in the King James. It's a bad translation. Again, there are at least eight different kinds of evil that the Bible speaks about. And here in more modern translations, you see that what is set apart here is that God brings peace or prosperity. He also brings calamity. He brings woe. He brings woe. There's a contrast there. And if you understand that this is a parallelism, you'll see you can interpret the second half of the verse by the first verse to see the way these things are said in contrast, and you won't get fooled by that sort of thing.
Even the Lord's Prayer has parallelism: "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." Bad translation, right, John? Because it's not the neuter evil, it's *poneros*, the masculine, which is the title given in the New Testament for Satan. What Jesus is saying when you pray, there's a parallelism here: "Lead us not into temptation," that is, don't put us into the place where we're exposed and vulnerable to the assault of Satan, but instead of exposing us to the attack of Satan, you know, "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one." That's what we're asking in the Lord's Prayer. So if we learn to recognize simple forms of parallelism, it'll really help us from falling into traps of misunderstanding the Bible.
Also need to understand the difference between proverbs and law. Law has to do with moral absolutes that are given to us, unless the case laws, casuistic law, that you find in the Old Testament. But in addition to the two kinds of law, absolute law and case law, that you find in the Old Testament, you also have proverbs. And here's what happens when you turn proverbs into law, you get hopelessly lost. Let's look at Proverbs 26:4-5. Verse four of Proverbs 26 reads this: "Do not answer a fool according to his folly, lest you also be like him." Now, there's a good proverb for you. Where's Paul? "Like these proverbs: Don't answer a fool according to his folly. You'd be just like him." That's the proverb. What's the next verse? "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes." Now, some people say the Bible's filled with contradiction. And here's one from one verse to the next. First one says, "Don't answer a fool according to his folly." And next says, "Do answer a fool according to his folly." Make up your mind, Solomon, what are you talking about here? We have the same thing in English proverbs. Let me give you two classic proverbs: "He who hesitates is lost." "Look before you leap." Now, can you apply both of those proverbs totally consistently at all times? I remember when I was a teenager, I was prowling around the neighborhood at 3:00 in the morning, up to no good. Saw a light coming up the street. Oh, no, there's the police. Soon as I saw that light, I took off running. Boy, they hit the siren. Guys, two cops jumped out of the car and started chasing me through the backyards of our town in Pleasant Hills. I was running for all I was worth. They were yelling, "Stop! Stop! Stop!" You know, and I came to this great big wall of trees and bushes. I had no idea what was on the other side. Could have been Niagara Falls, as far as I know. But this thought came into my mind: "He who hesitates is lost." And I didn't have the luxury of looking before I was leaping. So I just dove through the hedges and landed in some kid's sandbox on the other side, picked myself up, and took off running into the night. And they never caught me because I applied the wisdom of not. I knew that if I hesitated, I was lost. But you see, the proverbs give us general principles of wisdom that in some circumstances show us what is the wise thing to do. And sometimes it's wise not to answer a fool according to his folly. At other times, it is the better part of wisdom to use ad hominem arguments, reduce them to absurdity by showing the fool the folly of his folly.
Right, eight, nine, and ten. Got 60 seconds. Spirit in the letter of the law. Well, this is a dangerous thing because I hear it all the time in Christendom. The Pharisees were guilty of keeping the letter of the law and ignoring the spirit of the law. And really, what God wants from his people is to keep the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law. No, what God wants from his people is to keep the spirit of the law and the letter of the law. But we excuse our violations of the law of God by saying, "Well, I'm keeping the spirit," while I'm trampling all over what God actually says. So we pay attention both to the spirit and the letter.
Number nine: Take very special care with parables, remembering that the parables, for the most part, are not to be interpreted as allegories. One is, at least, but most of them aren't. Most parables have only one central meaning. And if you try to turn each part of a parable into some kind of hidden meaning, you're going to find yourself in all kinds of trouble. So there are special rules that apply to interpreting parables. Be careful with them.
Finally, be careful with predictive prophecy. Be responsible interpreters of sacred scripture.
Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word, for its power, for its clarity, for its beauty, most of all for its truth. Amen.