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why are there so many interpretations of the bible?
A13
Sometimes people will dismiss the Bible or Christianity saying, hey, now, Christians can't even agree among themselves what the Bible means. So when someone is asking about that, the first thing I want to try to hone in on is if there's really an issue or if this is just a smokescreen.
It's like, ah, Christians can't agree on that. And the words of Mark Twain come to mind. Mark Twain says it's not the parts of the Bible I don't understand that bother me. It's the parts of the Bible I do understand that bother me. And so for the person who's who's saying, ah, people can't agree, I say, I want to follow up and say, well, what do you, tell me what exactly you're talking about. Tell me the issue. I wanted to try to hone in on a specific issue because in my mind, I'm wondering, is the real issue the rebellious human heart that's resisting the authority of Scripture and the reality of the God who is there that we're all accountable to?
So someone is not wanting to face the reality that, hey, I'm a center condemned by God and I am, is it a way of fleeing from him? I'll also mention that we really shouldn't be surprised if non-Christians have radically different interpretations of the Bible. If we're watching a secular TV program and there's some religious expert from a prestigious university who then very knowledgably gets up there and sounds so irredyed and says, well, we know that Jesus really wasn't born of a virgin. We shouldn't be surprised because that person often by definition does not believe in the miraculous. Their starting presupposition is that nothing miraculous can happen. Therefore anything in the Bible reported as miraculous is false. So we're not surprised that their conclusion is the same as their presupposition.
It's not a surprise that non-believers, especially those who are skeptical and antagonistic to Christianity, would arrive at different conclusions. But there are genuine questions about interpretation. So Christians, non-Christians can have genuine questions, not just be smokescreens, and we need to give genuine answers to those. And when we're thinking about that, one of the things I'd like to think about, especially for Christians, is to remind them what Jesus taught us about God our Heavenly Father. And Jesus taught us that God is a loving Father. So God is not trying to hide the meaning of the text from you. He's not trying to confuse you or mislead you. Jesus taught us that God our Heavenly Father, when we ask Him for bread, He doesn't give us a stone. And when we ask Him for a fish, He doesn't give us a snake. And so when we come to Him and ask Him, God help me with this text, I want to understand and believe rightly and follow you, we can expect Him to lovingly guide us and bring people into our lives or at least give us a sense of peace in waiting for Him to answer that.
We also acknowledge that in 2 Peter 3, 16, Peter says that some of Paul's letters, some of the things Paul writes in his letters are hard to understand. So we would be misrepresenting the Bible to just claim that, well, it's all easy to understand. Even the authors of Scripture acknowledge that there's some difficulties. Now, notice Peter doesn't say it's impossible to understand, but he says some things are hard to understand. And so that's a reminder too that as Christians, we devote so much excellence and hard work to whether it's getting the bushes and grass in our yard looking good or doing a good job at work or making a perfect roast or pie, right? We do all these things with diligence and excellence. Why do we think that we shouldn't have diligence and excellence in studying the Scriptures? This is somehow we think we're just going to glance at the page and suddenly it will make sense to us. So if someone is having questions, it's a call to study, it's a call to prayer, it's a call to discovery of things that we didn't know before. It's a journey. It's a journey that ends up in a place of deeper fellowship and deeper understanding where we are then equipped to answer questions that others may have.
We also recognize that Christians can disagree about secondary or tertiary matters and that's okay. In Romans 14, Paul talks about Christians disagreeing about certain days and their significance and he says, let each person be convinced in their own mind. There's a place for Christians to disagree about secondary or tertiary matters. And yet if you take Christians, first take Christians who submit themselves to the Word of God as finally authoritative, submit themselves to the Word of God as flawless. So the Word of God is authoritative and it's without error. What you'll find is amazing agreement on the fundamentals of the faith, amazing agreement on who God is, what salvation is, what it means to follow him, what does he desire of his people in these different areas of life, in marriage, in sexuality, in money, right? These are because there's a submission to the Word of God and there's a presence of the Holy Spirit opening the hearts and minds then to believe in a bay. So sometimes people can overstate the amount of disagreement that Christians actually have, especially about the fundamental matters of the faith.
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