¡Sí Se Puede!

¡Sí se puede! -César Chávez

Forgive me for missing last week – I spent it in Mexico on a very-short (though clearly inspirational) mission trip.  Nevertheless, as I seek to equip people to read God’s Word for themselves, there is one substantial assumption inherent in my attempts; namely, the Bible was written to be understood.  That is, the Bible was written to be accessible to the masses rather than simply the elite.  That doesn’t mean that everyone who sits down with Bible, pen, and notebook will come away with a valid and complete understanding of what’s going on in a passage of Scripture.  But it does mean that anyone can be taught to read the Bible as it was intended to be understood, beginning with a very simple set of tools and assumptions.

While I recognize (and often experience) that the Bible can be downright confusing, this is rarely intentional on the author’s part.  Instead, the Biblical writers used very common language and very common literary devices and forms (many of which we’ll cover in this series) for the purpose of clearly and effectively communicating very specific messages.  What does that mean for us?  Above all it means that the Bible’s authors wanted their readers to clearly understand their messages!  So say it with me, “¡Sí se puede!”

Say What Now?

Literally Greek to Me

I’ve been reading a marriage book lately and while I’m really enjoying it, I keep finding strange little uses of the Bible that get stuck in my craw.  For example, the author comments about how husbands and wives get caught in the back and forth of disappointing and discouraging one another:

The Crazy Cycle is, indeed, “the evil of folly and the foolishness of madness” (Ecclesiastes 7:25; Eggerichs, 2004, 16).

This kind of quotation illustrates some of the greater frustrations I had to work through as I learned to read the Bible.  While the author wants to argue that a husband and wife going around in circles is insanity, he interestingly cites (and only cites) a passage that speaks first about Solomon’s pursuit of wisdom, and second (if one were to press a relational inference from the following verse), the importance of avoiding an ornery woman.

I’ve  noticed many Christian authors and speakers seem to think that nothing can be said on any authority other than the Bible and that presses them to find something (anything!) in the Bible that kinda-sorta sounds like what they want to say.  An unintended consequence of taking passages out of context like this is confusion rather than clarity (both for the Word and the point being made).

This can go in a number of directions, two stand out: (1) The author/speaker who sought authority from the Bible loses authority with the audience or (2)—and here is the problem this used to cause for me (and I assume still does for many others)—since we can’t understand the connection between the Scripture cited and the point being made, we assume we must not understand this portion of the Word of God.

In this next series I’m going to go over a series of key ideas that are imperative for reading and understanding the Bible so that hopefully we’ll all be a little less prone to option (2).

Discussion: What’s most confusing about the Bible for you?