Should interpreting the Bible be left to the “experts”? While certain high-minded scholars have argued this, the Scriptures plainly direct fathers and mothers to train their children up in the ways of God—and this can only happen by them carefully reading His word and explaining it.   

In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by guest Chris Law, encourage parents to actively read and discuss the Scriptures with their children, and they offer some helpful interpretive keys to use. The first is context: who is the author of a particular book addressing, where is he located, and what is he speaking about? Other principles: clear texts interpret unclear texts; specific texts interpret general texts; and literal texts interpret figurative texts. They also urge parents to not miss the big picture, but to make it their chief aim to show their children how great and wonderful God is whenever they open His word.   

Check out our book "Journey through the Bible" 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture, and we're here today to talk about how to interpret the Bible, hermeneutics for busy moms and dads. And so, Jason, we have Chris Law with us from Geneva Lakes Church in Geneva Lakes, Wisconsin. Hey, Chris! Good to be here.

I Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks so much. Chris is in contact with the pastors in our network in his region and just has been a blessing for many, many years. So we really do want to talk to busy fathers and mothers who are trying to saturate their homes with the Word of God, and also in the process to teach their children how to interpret the Word of God. That's really important.

And there are just a number of layers to this, and I think that I want to just introduce a few thoughts before we enter into sort of the more hardcore discussion about hermeneutics. But the first thing is regarding reading the Bible, just do it. Just do it. You know, people have come to me over the years and say, how do I do family worship? And I say, look, here's we're going to give you a 30 second training and that's it.

That's what we do in our church. We give our men 30 seconds. Open your Bible. Step number one. Step number two, read the passage.

Step number three, ask your children what wondrous things they saw from God's Word. And then pray, and if you want to, sing a song. Okay, you're trained. Don't come back to us asking us to hold your hand. Hey, the truth is children need the whole counsel of God.

They need their parents to read the Bible. My view is from cover to cover, to have a sense of the flow of history and the way God has worked is such a treasure. So for years I've just been advocating to read through the Bible over and over again in your family. We did it in our family and it was really, really helpful. We've produced resources to help families do that more effectively.

Here's one, Journey Through the Bible. This is kind of a cheat sheet for busy fathers and mothers. It gives the thrust of that book of the Bible, the outline of the book of that Bible. It gives a brief description so that a father or mother can read a description in about three minutes and tell their family what this book is all about, where Christ is in this book of the Bible. We have a hymn to sing for every book of the Bible in here.

But it's a thick book, but by the way, it's laid out very generously with large print, and it really is a pretty fast study, journey through the Bible. And then also, we're just so concerned that families utilize the local church and the preaching in the local church, the life, the fellowship, the singing in a local church, to edify. And so I wrote this book, The Family at Church, How Parents are Tour Guides for Joy, 20 Days to Transform Your Local Church experience. This is really designed to help families understand the Word of God that's being preached, but particularly how to teach children how to listen, how to teach children how to apply the preaching, the family at church. So we're super concerned about the Word of God saturating a family.

We also believe it's the words that are powerful. Christianity is a word-based religion. God gave us words to guide our hearts, our tongues, our lives, our marriages, everything. And so God has given us this treasure of the Word of God. There are errors that people make.

I'll never forget, I was in Washington state, probably, it might have been 18 or 20 years ago, and I was talking about family worship. And a young father, he had just become a Christian, he was so excited, and I was telling him to read the Bible to his family, And he seemed terrified because his pastor told him, as a new Christian, do not read the Bible to your family until you read Wayne Grudem's systematic theology. He said, do you think that's right? I said, no, I don't. Read the, you don't have to understand everything about the Bible to read it to your kids.

So just read it and keep reading it and the knowledge of God. Yeah, hey, and read a good systematic theology. But we're really here to talk about interpretation. I think, first of all, we want to try to speak to busy fathers and mothers and give some broad principles of interpretation that they can keep in mind, and actually to teach the principles of sound biblical interpretation. So there you go.

Let's talk about it. So, Scott and Chris, there's a verse that I think frames it really well, which is 2 Timothy 2.15. Let me just read it. Paul writes to Timothy, be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. So Timothy was a preacher, and this applies to him in a particular way.

But really, to all of us who handle the Bible, Dad's at home too, we learn a couple of things. One is, it's work. We need to be a worker approved, rightly dividing, so that we don't need to be ashamed. You can handle the Word of God in a careless, thoughtless way, and you don't have to be ashamed. Or actually, what you need to do is to be a worker, meaning take just very common sense principles about how we interpret any book and apply the...

You want to know what the author meant. Okay? So These are all principles you could apply to any book but are especially important for the Bible, because the Bible is the most precious thing we have, and so it's not to be handled carelessly or thoughtlessly. Yeah, I was teaching last week, and I was just recalling what a gift it is that we have the Word of God, that Psalm 19 talks about creation. Romans 1 tells us creation is wonderful.

It proclaims the glory of God, but we're left guilty. We don't have the gospel. The gospel is a written word given to us throughout the Scriptures. And what a blessing it is to read it, to study it, and to see, like you were saying, the glory of God on each page. So let's talk about hermeneutical principles.

What's hermeneutics? It's rules of interpretation of the Bible, but frankly, the rules of hermeneutics for interpreting the Bible really apply to almost any kind of literature. Sure. How do you understand what the author meant? What is this author saying, Right?

You should have disciplines that have you in a systematic way, looking at exactly what was written, what went before it, what came behind it, in order to understand exactly what the author was trying to communicate. You know, there's this academic discipline called the whole book reviewer, and these are people that when they read a book, they can see all the threads, they can see what the author is trying to say, and they review books, because it really helps to have the intellectual capacity to do that. Thankfully everybody doesn't have to have that intellectual capacity to interpret the Bible, but the Bible is a big book and there are central messages to that big book, and those messages keep playing out over and over again. So understanding the message of the Bible is really critical, but then the Bible is broken in so many different pieces. So how do we deal with that?

Well, and I think with all of those pieces, we want to be people of the Word. We know James tells us not to be just hearers, but doers of the Word. And so it's good to be focused on application, but sometimes we skip too quickly to the application. We start applying before we really know what the word is saying. And so we need to take just a few minutes.

It's not like you're saying, not rocket science. We study all sorts of books, even in our reading, many homeschool, and we know how to use common tools, diagramming, thinking through grammar and structure, just to determine what is the author really saying? Because if we don't know what God is saying through the specific authors, we're gonna end up in bad doctrine. And so to keep us on the right rails, we stick to where the text is pointing us. And I am a firm believer and practice expository preaching consecutively through books of the Bible.

But one of the things that can happen is sometimes we slow down too much and we miss that bigger picture, like you were saying, Scott. And we don't we don't see how a particular passage is fitting in the book. And so as we get more and more familiar with reading and rereading a book, we begin to see, oh, this is that theme that Paul keeps bringing up or that Ezekiel has used this same imagery multiple times. And so it begins to give us a good tool for interpretation. You know, this is something that we, Jason and I, we do this in our churches every week.

We have a men's Bible study. We study the texts we're gonna be preaching on on Sunday. We get men and boys together. And the big focus of that time at the beginning is exactly what you said. What is this saying?

You've got to get what it is saying. You have to move to application, but it's very important to understand what the thrust of what that author is saying, actually saying. Not what you think he's saying, not what you feel he's implying, but what does the text say? And then what we want fathers and children who are there to do is to go home and apply it. We want those fathers to go home after reviewing what is this saying, then to take the next steps and teach their wives and their children what it means to them.

So my brain often works like this. We start talking about principles of interpretation, and I instantly have a spreadsheet going in my mind, you know, rows and columns, and I'm thinking disciplines and systems and things like that. Here's an observation I have. I read a lot of commentators. A lot of them, I think, are thinking in rows and columns, disciplines, systems, and I end up reading them and thinking, do they actually have a heart for God?

So we definitely don't want to skip past that. We want to start with hearts that are yielded before God. We actually can appeal to the author. I think when we come to the scriptures, we should always be appealing to the author. Oh, God help, you know.

Where does that fit into the spreadsheet? I don't know and I don't care. Yeah, right at the beginning, speak Lord for your servant is listening. Speak Lord and like we wanna understand what you said so that we can obey you. We need to bring that heart to it at the very beginning.

James says, receive the implanted word with meekness. That's really the beginning of it. That's probably the, most hermeneutics books don't talk about that as the first rule of interpretation, but that's a really important one. I mean, I think one of the blessings and prayers in my own life is as I'm teaching on Sundays or in our home or for any parent that our children see where we get our authority from, that the scriptures are not afraid of us asking questions of, hey, I don't understand this passage, But the answer has to always be not my own feelings, my own what I think, or maybe even what I've been told. But if I come to a passage, I need to stop and to say, hey, this doesn't fit with maybe my upbringing, but always to be submitting to the Word of God.

And as we do that, we show our kids that we have an authority that can be trusted, that too often we go to the, what do I think? Well at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what I think about the Word of God. It's God who has given us this Word that we might see it, and that our children would then understand that, hey, we have a good authority, that in all things we submit to it, and what a good gift that is from God. Chris, as a preacher, I think about this a lot, and I'm guessing you do too. How many of my individual sermons, or worse yet, my individual sermon points, are going to be remembered a week later, a month later, a year later, zero, a very small percentage.

What people will remember is how I approached the Word of God, how I handled the Word of God. So If they get the sense from my preaching that it's precious to me that I really do believe that it's true, that I really do think it deserves our utmost respect and careful handling, then if they go away with that, they can forget the individual sermons and individual sermon points. But if they go to their Bibles thinking, I have to handle the word of God this way too, then I would say mission accomplished. Yes, and let's talk about some of those ways. You know, we talked about introducing the idea of context.

I kind of implied that at the beginning. The Bible is a context, but various books of the Bible have their historical and social context. And then even sections in those books have their own context. Let's talk about just this principle of context, context, context. You have the three parts or the three sales things in real estate, location, location, location, but in biblical interpretation is context.

And it's not just the context leading up to understanding the flow of thought, because these are our letters, the epistles are letters, or the prophets are proclaiming certain things, the gospels, they're cohesive. And to say, how does this fit in the train of thought, but not just what's come before, but also reading ahead and seeing there might be some things, even a couple of weeks ago in preaching, there was something that was helpful to see in the next chapter that Paul was going to bring that back up. So the context isn't always just what we've been coming into, but it might even be in the future as well. Right. There's a famous joke, which is a text without the context is a pretext.

What does that mean? It means that any text of Scripture can be lifted out of the author's flow of thought and be made to say all sorts of things that the author was never communicating in his flow of thought. So the text without the context, what came before it, what will come after it, is just an excuse to say what you're hoping the Bible will support you. Who is he speaking to? Who is he speaking about?

When is he speaking? Where is he speaking? What city? What nation? There are just all kinds of matters of context that are critical.

You know, One thing we're not trying to do is to create a 22-letter acronym, like, now I've got to go through, like, whoa, what letter are we on? Most of these are just ways that you understand anything that you're relating to. So we're really calling attention to the way that you normally operate when you care to get it right. These are not things that are foreign to us. Of course, context is important when we're trying to understand what someone who's speaking to us would say.

So this is just, don't forget the 22-letter acronym. We're talking about what principles would we use to make sure we get it right when we're trying to understand. In a way, it's like how do you read a letter? What's this letter about? And then also, what words are used?

Let's talk about word studies. Now, we're given to word studies, you know, in letters that we receive. Now, as preachers, we're always doing word studies. What are some of the pitfalls of word studies? I think as you're studying a particular word, if you take it out of its context, sometimes you can, like you were saying just a moment ago, you can cause the author to say something he's not saying or with the same weight.

There was a passage a while back that I was teaching on and studying it. And it's almost like Paul put a parenthetical statement and I thought that was going to be the main point of the passage, but in even just spending ten minutes, I quickly saw that that word that I thought was going to be the main point isn't. And so that word, if I just take it out of its context, I can distort it very poorly. Exactly. When you start drilling down on a word, it's giving you primary, secondary, tertiary meanings, and you can actually, instead of getting greater clarity by isolating on the word out of the sentence that the author put it in, you can actually find something very interesting, very new, very innovative the author never meant.

Any of that, it means what it ought to mean within the context of that sentence, paragraph, chapter, book? Yeah. Yeah, the word may have meant something to a Hellenistic reader, but it might not mean the same thing in the context. Also, in the Bible, The same word is translated differently in different places. In fact, this is one of the things that the authors of the new Legacy Standard Bible that John MacArthur's guys put together, is they used the same word.

And I don't know, Chris, if they did it comprehensively, but they tried. Yeah, they tried bondservant slave. It's the same word, you know, and so the authors tried to use the same word, the same English word. And there probably are some difficult passages for that because the context determines the meaning. But just Be careful with word studies.

Just because a word sounds like a modern word doesn't mean it's connected to that modern word. Hey, as three men who do word studies weekly as we're studying passages and look at different translations, my counsel to people would be find one of the really good handful of translations and have a bias to trust it. Thinking you can outsmart the translators is sort of a dangerous game. Most of them have given their life to it, and there are reasons they picked the words. Does it mean that the translation's always right?

No. Does it mean there's no place for word studies? No. But I understand, translation's hard, and the good translations have overwhelmingly done it in a very excellent way. Here's one, the Bible is the best commentary on the Bible.

It's not Matthew Henry. Matthew Henry's wonderful. He's more articulate than the other commentators, most of them anyway. He's not the best commentary on the Bible. Other passages that speak to the same subject are by far the best commentary in the Bible.

Yes, you should always be asking, is this spoken of somewhere else? Because there's an interpretive grid, and often it flows, even from one historical era to another. The themes that begin in Genesis are pulled all the way to the end of the Bible and into Revelation. So it's really helpful to ask, where have I seen this before? Because the types and shadows are really important, and God uses some of the same imagery throughout the whole Bible, and it's very illuminating and beautiful to see the continuity of Scripture.

One of the things I think is helpful also when we think about trying to determine a passage is we're very, I think, driven towards the commands of Scripture. We want to obey the scriptures, but to think about the context of how does the author expect that command to be obeyed? Often in the New Testament epistles, the apostle Paul has laid out what are called imperatives, the truth statements. And it's because of the truth statements that one is able to seek to apply certain things. That if we just put that command out in front of the unconverted person, all it's doing is trying to lead them towards moralism, which leaves Christ out of the picture.

And yet Paul, in his greater context, has showed, hey, these exhortations, Peter, these exhortations are all rooted in the truth of who they are in Christ, that the Holy Spirit indwells them. And by that power, they can put off sin, by that power they can put on the fruit of the Spirit. And so again, the trusting is not in the flesh, but if we just jump to those commands and go, okay, do this, do this, do this, then it leaves it void and we get discouraged of, well, why don't I see any fruit in my life? Well, I'm not looking at the proper engine that brings about the motivation and the ability to accomplish those things. Yeah, the Bible isn't a self-help book.

It does help us, but it's not designed as a self-help book unless you just say, well, the Gospel helps us. Amen to that. We're nothing without Jesus. Let me give you three quick principles that are cousins. They're very similar, but not exactly the same.

Clear texts interpret less clear texts. In other words, when you're in a topic, you want to find the clearest text with the least amount of controversy, the least amount of questions, and use those to set up interpretive parameters around it. It has to mean something within this box, because I have clear text, and then we take the less clear text and interpret them by the clear ones. A cousin of that, specific texts interpret general texts. Some texts are focused like a laser beam on a topic.

Those are so valuable because they, it helps you to go to more general texts that aren't right dialed in on a topic and help you to interpret those. And then finally, literal texts interpret figurative texts. People have gone into a world of trouble trying to know the seven heads of the monsters in Daniel. Okay, let's start with the literal texts and bring those to bear on all the figurative ones. Yeah, I think that's really helpful.

And going back to this matter of obeying, you know, commands, imperatives, it's really interesting the way the book of Revelation is structured. There's a blessing for those who obey the words of the prophecy, but there are almost no commands in the whole book of Revelation. How do you obey things at our commands? Well, you can see what godly implications there are from those principles that are communicated. The Bible is alive.

The Bible is not a wooden book. And it's the Spirit of God that helps us to understand as Scripture interprets Scripture, as we're not injecting our own meaning into the text, but we're taking the text and the context and the words of the text and deriving the meaning. What preachers do is we don't invent. We take what's already been given, And we try to explain what's already there. We're not inventors of truth.

And I think that's one of the most important things for anybody who's trying to interpret the Bible. And I think it was John Snyder in the Behold Your God series said, the first question we need to ask is, what does this teach us about God? And what a great truth that we need to always have before our eyes. And you could, by application, say, what does this teach us about God himself, his character, his work, the person and work of Christ, that we start there. At the end, yes, there's clear application for us.

But what a beautiful way, like you said at the very beginning, to gaze on the glory of God and to not just hurry and say, okay God, I see your word, what about me? I do believe as we have the true vision of God in the scriptures, That is the greatest compelling truth that will press believers into obedience. You know, that was my primary objective when I was raising my children. I wanted my children to see how wonderful the kingdom of God was, how good God the Father was, how kind and powerful is God the Son, and how comforting is the Holy Spirit. I wanted them to see the beauty of God above everything else as we read through the Scriptures.

So there you go. There's some principles of interpretation. There's probably a lot more to be said, but I think we all feel the same way, and it's this. For busy fathers and mothers, don't overcomplicate the reading of the Word of God. Read the Word of God.

Interpret it as best you can. Keep reading it. Keep reading it. Keep reading it. The more you read it, the more you'll understand the glory of God in what you read.

But just keep reading the Bible. That's the primary source of truth for us. It's such a great thing when a family is filled with the Word of God. The words are so powerful, you know, sharper than a two-edged sword. Okay, thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and thank you guys for talking about this really, really important subject.

I hope you And join us next time. See you next Monday for our next broadcast of the Church and Family Life Podcast.