I didn’t realize it at the time, but two days in seminary way back in January of 2001 changed my life forever. No, I didn’t get saved on one of those days — that happened in 1977 — but on those two days, one of my professors, Steve Wellum (who today I count as a dear friend), taught us something I probably should’ve known all along: We interpret the Old Testament, and indeed the entire Bible, through Jesus Christ and the gospel.
Simple, but life changing.
Previously, though I had always believed in the full inspiration, inerrancy, and authority of Scripture, I had always been profoundly intimidated by the Old Testament. Thus, I didn’t fully understand the Bible.
In those two day-long lectures, I learned that the way we are to interpret Scripture is every bit as inspired by the Spirit as the Word of God itself. Jesus and the gospel are the key. Like Martin Luther when the Spirit opened his eyes to understand justification by faith, it was as if the gates of paradise swung open, and I walked through. This is the hermeneutical method of Jesus, Paul, and all the other New Testament authors, and, by extension, it should be the method of every Christian.
There are numerous false ways to interpret Scripture, some that are correct in part, but not the whole, others that are out to lunch altogether. Here are a few ways we typically misread the Bible (and I have been guilty of many of them, especially before that epiphany in seminary):
MORALISTICALLY/LEGALISTICALLY
(See companion article on why confusing law and gospel leads to a miserable life)
As Dan Doriani puts it, this approach makes us “Class 4 legalists.” That is, we so accentuate piety and works righteousness that grace dries up. Our lives become a constant effort to be good enough to curry favor with God. David and Goliath become how to face the giants in your life and not about the great God to whom the battle for redemption belongs. Jesus’s feeding of the 5,000 is about the little boy and sharing instead of the One who is demonstrating that He is the Bread of Life.
Yes, the Bible is a moral book, but unless we understand the gospel, we’ll never comprehend the law accurately, and our lives will be one long, slow, frustrating slog as we attempt to earn (or keep) our salvation. A quote often attributed to John Bunyan perhaps puts it best: “Run, John, run, the law demands, but gives neither feet nor hands; far better news the gospel brings: It bids us fly and gives us wings.”
MORAL EXAMPLE
We read the Bible as all moral example, all “What Would Jesus Do?” Jesus is merely an ethical example to be followed. Or there’s a belief in two Gods: The angry God of the OT, who is dismissed as outdated, and the NT God, Jesus, who is nothing more than a wise-cracking ’60s radical who serves as the ultimate example of social justice and wokeness. In this approach, we stand in judgment over the Scripture, and humans determine what parts are true and what parts are false. And Jesus is a good man, but He’s not the Son of God.
READER RESPONSE
What the text means to me. Texts do not possess a single, objective meaning, but a personal meaning and application. The Bible becomes about private interpretation — in violation of 2 Peter 1:20. With this approach, we have as many interpretations as there are brains.
END-TIMES ENTHUSIAST
We understand the OT as being only about God’s dealings with Israel, His ethnic people, and we see it as having nothing to do with the church because that is a subject unique to the NT. We use the Bible to create two peoples of God with two ways of salvation: Salvation in the OT was by works (keeping the law), and salvation in the NT is by grace.
But the NT makes it clear that Christ is the true Israel (Matt. 2:15), and the church is the new Israel of God (Rom. 2:28–29; Eph. 2:14–22; Gal. 6:16). The Bible is, in a sense, entirely eschatological — Christ will return literally, bodily, and He will win in the end, and His people will be glorified — but focusing entirely on the timing of His return and issues such as the millennium leaves out much meat that our souls need for daily nourishment.
THERAPEUTIC
Some readers use the Bible like a self-help manual. This plays into our need for therapy and mollycoddling so widespread in modern Western culture. This happens when we embrace the Oprah gospel in which we see the problem as being outside of ourselves and the solution as being inside ourselves.
We read the Bible as if it were “Chicken Soup for the Soul.” Sin is not seen as our most fundamental problem, but, as one popular TV “life coach” puts it, our main issue is not realizing that God has our pictures on His celestial refrigerator, and getting in touch with reality.
HERMENEUTIC OF HUMILITY
This is particularly trendy today. You have your interpretation, and I have mine. We can’t know which of us is correct, we can’t know what the Bible is about, we can’t be dogmatic about its meaning and certain about theology because none of us is infallible, so we have to be humble enough to admit that. We just have to follow our heart. Problem is, Jesus seemed to know exactly what the Bible was about: Himself. And as for our hearts? They are desperately wicked and cannot be trusted (Jer. 17:9).
TRAJECTORY HERMENEUTIC
Subtle but fashionable today, formalized in a 2001 book by William Webb. Scripture is adjusting to cultures as they change and advance. For example, the Bible seems to uphold slavery, but we’ve finally figured out slavery is sinful, so we now understand Scripture to condemn slavery; in the same way, the Bible is catching up with the culture on issues such as homosexuality, transgenderism, gender, and abortion. It must be adjusted to fit our changing cultural mores.<
CHRIST AT THE CENTER
God gave us a narrative, and He theologically annotated it. That’s the way the Bible was meant to be read. Once you begin to understand the glorious drama of redemption that is progressively unfolded in Scripture, you realize that every passage in Scripture relates in some way to Christ and His rescue mission. Every passage reveals the plan of a sovereign God to bring about redemption through His Messiah. Every passage reveals the grave reality of the human condition east of Eden, that the human heart is utterly wicked above all else and in need of a righteousness outside of itself. Every passage reveals that the problem is inside of us, and the solution is utterly outside of us in a sovereign, unilateral work of God’s grace.
Every passage reveals the “light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.” To treat the Bible in any other way is to fail to read it as Christian Scripture.