For more devotionals sermons and resources go to http://www.focalpointministries.org/
Weekly devotionals from Pastor Mike Fabarez Senior Pastor at Compass Bible Church in Aliso Viejo, CA and host of daily Focal Point Radio broadcast.
Thursday, July 2, 2015
Bible Interpretation
If
only we could see how often we abuse the Bible (and therefore, its Author) in
an effort to bolster and justify our personal views and proclivities. The
process is called “isogesis” – presupposing our own interpretation and views and
“reading them into” a passage of Scripture when they are not actually there.
The goal, of course, is “exegesis” – extracting God’s meaning from a passage of
Scripture by allowing that text to speak for itself. Knowing which we are doing
when we are reading or quoting the Bible is critical. Unfortunately, it is our
tendency to bring our preexisting understanding of what God is like, our
valuations of the world and culture, our beliefs about right and wrong into a
passage expecting to find it there even when it’s not. We do this most often by
injecting assumed definitions of words into the passage we are reading. We are
not tenacious enough to insist that biblical words be defined by the Bible
instead of assuming their definitions based on our interaction with our
parents, our childhood church, pop culture, our American democracy, our social
institutions or any number of personal twenty-first century experiences.
Avoiding this tendency is what makes Bible study so challenging. Here we find
ourselves confronted with an inspired document that was delivered against the
backdrop of a language and culture that is now two thousand to thirty-five
hundred years past. This is why we can’t just plop our finger on the page and
ask, “What does this verse mean to me?” If we don’t know a text’s historical,
literary and grammatical context we are bound to become isogetes and not
exegetes. So, let’s do our homework, avoiding “Bible abuse” by expending the
necessary effort to derive biblical principles after we have understood
the original context and the biblical definition of words.
For more devotionals sermons and resources go to http://www.focalpointministries.org/
For more devotionals sermons and resources go to http://www.focalpointministries.org/
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