Just be normal, meaning the words we use have normal meanings to them, and we use the literal meanings, but also the figurative meanings, and you figure out which it is by the context. We do not default to the figurative language if the literal meaning of the word makes the most sense, and that is what today’s lesson is all about. This is lesson 13 in our 20-part series on Bible study. If you are new here, my name is Ryan Rench, pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California, and I recorded this video over a year ago for an extension ministry of a Bible college. So I hope that it is a help to you, and I just hope it helps you grow in knowing Jesus better. After this lesson, be sure to get into God’s Word. With that, enjoy this week’s video.
The Normal, Literal Method of Interpretation
Well, this is lesson number 13 of our Bible study series, and we have spent four of the past lessons on observation, the big-picture look at things. We are going to start to narrow it down a little bit tighter now as we get into the study of the Scriptures and finding the interpretation. We have been doing what is called the inductive Bible study method: observation, interpretation, and application, bringing the Bible home, letting it affect our everyday lives. So we looked at things in their context, and we looked at a lot of the cross-references, but when we are actually getting into the Scriptures, there are a few more principles that we want to put into play as well. The next principle I want to talk about today is using the literal method of interpretation. We might call this the normal, literal method of interpretation. Some would be hyper-literal, and people who would accuse us of misinterpreting the Scripture would say, “Oh, you are just being hyper-literal.” They would accuse us of making everything mean exactly what it says: “Oh, are you saying that if Jesus is the door, He is an actual door?” And we say, no, of course not. We are using the normal, literal interpretation method, which is just the regular course of the language that we use. When we are speaking a language, we understand what is being communicated because of the normal use of these words. Sometimes there are metaphors, and we understand the obvious times when there are metaphors, and other times we have to see the words in their context and see how those things go. But the normal, literal method of interpretation is the way we are going to interpret the Scripture. Here are a few quotes on that. David Cooper said, “When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense, but take every word at its primary, literal meaning unless the facts of the immediate context clearly indicate otherwise.” Here is John Phillips also: “God says what He means and means what He says. We are to read the Bible just as we read any other piece of writing, not trying to force some allegorical, mystical, or figurative meaning into its plain statements.” And I like that. Charles Feinberg said, “Unless there is some reason intrinsic within the text itself which requires a symbolic interpretation, or unless there are other Scriptures which interpret a parallel prophecy in a symbolic sense, we are required to employ a natural, literal interpretation.” So we are not going to turn words into object lessons, or words themselves into symbols or symbolic language, unless Christ does in the Scriptures, or unless other Scriptures make it obvious that this is allegorical, that this means something other than just the word it is talking about here.
Against Spiritualizing the Text
So what we are talking about, the literal method, is in contrast, in opposition, to the spiritualizing or the allegorical method of interpretation. Many people will read, for instance, Revelation 20, and it will say a thousand years for the millennial reign, and I have many quotes of people who are saying, “Well, it probably does not mean an actual thousand years. It probably just means a long span of time.” We would say, well, wait a minute, it does not say a long span of time, so why would we not just believe that it means a thousand years? So I would encourage you just to understand the Scriptures for exactly what they say they mean. If we just allow our understanding or our mind to interpret the Scriptures and allegorize the Scriptures and bring in different meanings or these word pictures, well, then who is to stop anybody from turning the Bible into whatever they want it to say? If they want to spiritualize the Scriptures, in the sense that it is just up to their own imagination what the symbols of the stories mean, or what the parables mean, well, who is to stop them? If Christians are doing the same thing, why cannot non-Christians do the same thing with the Bible? New Ager Levi Dowling has a book, The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, and he says that in Luke chapter 22 the man bearing the pitcher of water is a symbol for the Age of Aquarius. We laugh at that. We say, well, of course it is not talking about this mythological thing. It is not about that at all, obviously. But then some will make those same kinds of connections to spiritualized things without any basis in the Scripture, and so if you tell him not to do that, well, we cannot do that either. We are going to interpret the Scriptures according to their normal, literal understanding.
Why We Read It Literally
So why do we do that? Why do we understand the Scriptures literally? Well, practical necessity demands it. We would have no certain foundation for what we believe if we did not just take the words for what they mean. So we just read the Bible, we understand what it means in our language, and we just believe it. We are not trying to spiritualize it. We are not trying to change the meaning. We just understand the meaning that is here. A second reason we like the literal interpretation is that that is how past prophecies have been fulfilled. Especially if we are talking about prophecies, well, that is how the prophecies were fulfilled, and we see that all throughout the Scripture: when there were prophecies that were made, they were fulfilled literally. Look at Psalm 22. Psalm 22 has Jesus’ words on the cross, in verse 1: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?” Well, those were fulfilled literally by Jesus Christ. Those actual words were the words He said on the cross. Verse 6: “But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people. All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying, He trusted on the LORD that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him.” And the people scorned Jesus, just like was predicted here. Verse 11: “Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help.” And all of Jesus’ disciples had forsaken Him and gone away from Him. Verse 14: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death.” It does not say that His bones were broken. It is just that His body was broken, His bones were out of joint, and that was a fulfillment of prophecy, literally. And we understand that while He was crucified, He was dying of thirst too. The end of verse 16: “they pierced my hands and my feet.” Verse 17: “I may tell all my bones: they look and stare upon me. They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.” And those prophecies were fulfilled literally. Those things actually happened to Jesus on the cross. The apostles fulfilled the Scriptures literally. They understood them to be literal steps to obey. They took the words of Christ literally and believed Him literally. In Luke chapter 24, verse 25, Jesus rebuked the disciples for not believing literally: “Then he said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” So He said, “You need to believe these things in the Scriptures. You need to believe them literally, that they would take place, that they would literally happen.” That is what Christ encouraged, and so we understand the Scriptures literally because of that. We are going to read the Bible literally, because that is how prophecy is going to make any sense. Again, the past prophecies that were fulfilled were precise. I mean, Cyrus’s name is given. There are dates that are given. There are days that you could count, and you could make predictions based on the days that were predicted, and those were very literal. Those were laid out. There were places that were predicted would be wiped away, and Jesus predicted Jerusalem would be overturned, and all of that. I mean, there is prophecy after prophecy that was fulfilled literally. Deuteronomy 28 talks about what would happen to Israel if they turned their back on God, and it was so detailed and so specific. As soon as Israel turned their back on God, well, it is like you could read Deuteronomy 28, then read the history of Israel, and it was exactly the same. That is just the way it happened. So what was prophesied came true literally, and so we want to study the Scriptures literally. We want to believe the words that are said. When it says things that may seem to be obscure or symbolic, in those times where it is specifically figurative language, I think the Scriptures make those times very clear. But where they are not clear, or where they are not interpreted otherwise by other sections of Scripture, then we are just going to believe exactly as it says it.
One Interpretation, Many Applications
So that is where we are getting into the meaning of Scripture, or the interpretation of Scripture. The word interpretation just means the meaning, the way we are using it when we are talking about observation, interpretation, and application. We are just trying to find the meaning of the text. We are not scared off by the big word interpretation. We are just saying, okay, when I read the Bible, what does it mean? What is the interpretation? What are the words of God to me? Some people will say, “Well, man wrote the Bible, and so man brought errors into it, and you might say one thing, and this guy might say another, so who is right?” Well, the Scriptures address that in 2 Peter 1: “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.” What is private interpretation here talking about? Well, it is talking about verse 21: “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” So there was the interpretation that comes from God. It is the words of God that we are trusting in, and it is His thoughts that we want to unpack. So there is going to be one interpretation of a text, but then there are going to be many applications, and that is where people bring the Bible home to their own lives. While there is going to be one meaning, there may be many ways you can apply that meaning, but still, there is just going to be a certain meaning to the text. Now, sometimes that meaning might get unpacked a little further later on in the revelation of Scripture. In the Old Testament there was a meaning, but then in the New Testament Jesus Christ unpacks that, and He expounded unto them all things concerning Himself, showing that the Prophets and the Psalms were actually about Jesus. So there are unpacked meanings there as well. But what I am saying is, with there being one meaning of a text, if two people are looking at the same text and they come to conclusions that are different from each other, that are in opposition to each other, well, one of them is wrong. I mean, they both cannot be right. They might have different perspectives on it, but they both cannot be right if they are in opposition to each other. They might both be wrong, but they both cannot be right. Each text is going to have just a certain meaning. So the idea there is that God has not changed. It is the way He deals with people that has changed. The way He has revealed Himself through time has changed. But the truth itself is what we are trying to get to the bedrock of. We are trying to get to the meaning of the text. First Corinthians chapter 8 says, “Now as touching things offered unto idols, we know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth. And if any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know. But if any man love God, the same is known of him.” So there is a text about how there is a whole bunch of knowledge out there, but charity edifieth. So if we said, okay, what is the truth of that passage, if we boiled it down to a nugget, then I would say something like: knowledge is not the basis of Christian behavior; love is. So it is not how much you know, but how much you love. That is the idea there. That is the truth that is there, for example. Now, you can take that truth and apply it lots of different ways, but the truth is still there. The application is endless, but the truth remains. You can apply that to your life wherever you are living. If it is in a different state than mine, then you can apply that to your state, or if it is in a whole different country other than America, you might apply that: it is not how much you know, but how much you love people. And love to you might look different than me loving the people I am interacting with every day, so the love might be a little bit different. That is the application. What you do with the Scripture looks different at different times, in different cultures, and in different regions and areas. I think we express love in 2022 differently than they expressed love in the 1500s, or in 500, and when people are being persecuted, Christians express love in different ways than when they are not being persecuted. So the application is different in the different time periods you are in, but the truth is always the same.
The Big Idea: Catching the Rock
So first we are trying to get to that truth. We are trying to get to that nugget, that core, that rock-bottom truth there. We have been saying we are trying to figure out, okay, what is God saying? What is that one thing He is trying to express? And that is what I have been calling the big idea. The Big Idea Bible Study is that nugget. It is that truth. I had a pastor in Bible college who said, “What is easier to catch, a rock or a handful of sand?” I think it is easier to catch a rock than to try to catch all these individual, tiny little bits of sand. So we are trying to boil all these little bits of sand down into a rock. We want to really get it into a nugget, into a big idea, into one simple truth, and that is going to be our big idea, or our interpretation. When we say, what is the meaning of the text, what is the interpretation of the text, then we want to be able to state it in a simple way, in a sentence. Think of it like a tree. This tree is this beautiful thing we are trying to uncover and unpack. On the cover of our Big Idea Bible Study there is a tree, and as you are studying the Scriptures, out will grow this big idea, this tree. We will look at the trunk of the tree, which is the main core idea, and then the branches of the tree, which are all the supporting ideas, all the beauty of the tree, all the details of the text. And we will say, what is God talking about? We will do that, again, by observation and then interpretation, and we will follow some steps. We will read the text. We will reread the text. We will flag words. We will try to figure out which words we do not understand and look those up in dictionaries. We will try to summarize the text in a word, maybe expand that to a phrase and a sentence, turn that into a question, and answer those questions and fill in that whole tree. We are going to get to the point where we have this idea, this thought from the Scriptures, and once we have this nugget, this rock, this tree, this idea from the Bible, then we want to say, okay, this is what God said; now what is He saying to me? What does this mean to me, Ryan Rench, at Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California, today? God, what are You trying to fix in me, and where can I change based on what I found in the Scripture? That is where we are going to go with the next couple of lessons, just trying to get down to that rock, that nugget, that big idea. God bless you as you do your own Bible studies, and we will see you in the next lesson. Well, thank you for watching this video from our 20-part series on Bible study. I realize this kind of content, or our Baptist perspective, might not be for everyone, and I do not want to waste your time, but if you did find it helpful or enjoyable, would you subscribe to our channel? We are releasing videos every Monday at noon Pacific Standard Time, and I just want to help you bring the Bible home. So we will see you maybe in person this Sunday at our church. That is it for now. God bless you, church. Grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
