I grew up a few miles away from the Jimmy Swaggart complex, where he regaled hundreds of thousands with his health-and-wealth gospel. One of my family members bought into the scam for a little while, believing the dynamic preacher’s promise that giving $100 he could ill-afford to give would reap $1000 or more soon afterward. “It says so, right in Scripture,” I heard my relative say.
He might have been referring to Malachi 3:10, where God dares Israel to start bringing “the full tenth” (tithe) and watch him pour out blessings on them. Proverbs 3:9–10 says, “Honor the Lord with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.”
What’s the deal? The passages seem to be promising a reward that resembles the gift. How do we parse out what God is saying in Scripture?
Holy Complications, Batman
As a source of wisdom treasured by millions across the world for almost two millennia, the Bible is a beautiful, holy, and unified piece of literature. But as a compilation of sixty-six documents written by over forty authors across a 1,500-year span, it is also complicated.
Because Christians consider the Bible to be the Word of God, written by people inspired by the Holy Spirit, we read, listen to, and study it so that we can know God better. Some of us learn to read and write Greek and Hebrew, the original languages in which the books of the Bible were written. We learn how the entire collection of books includes multiple genres such as narrative, poetry, law, apocalyptic, letters, and more. And we start to discover the historical realities of each time and place discussed in the text.
That’s a lot, y’all. Bible study involves more than simply sitting down with a Bible and reading for a few minutes. We have to investigate language and genre and history—all of which add up to context—to understand what’s going on in a given passage, and interpret it accurately. Only then can we apply the truths hidden within it to our own lives. But the journey from reading to applying is fraught with obstacles.
So let’s review some basic rules of interpretation, called hermeneutics, to help guide our Bible reading. I think most of my readers will know these key ideas, but even pastors sometimes skip crucial parts that can lead to some whack applications. So whether this post is new information or just a good reminder, I hope it helps.
Genre
It matters whether we’re reading poetry or narrative, parables or apocalyptic literature. We inherently know the difference between musical notes and a legal document, right? Because the rules of each genre are different, we read them differently. So also we treat the genres of the Bible. When Isaiah says the trees will clap their hands (55:12), we don’t expect to hear the redwoods keeping the beat. He is using figurative language, personification and metaphor, to communicate how God’s presence will bring joy and worship to all the earth.
Narratives do not generally offer the direct “do this” and “do not do that” sorts of didactic lessons found in the epistles (letters) of the New Testament. So we must draw our application of Old Testament narratives only after we’ve established context, authorial intent, and the broader principles being taught.
Now we are ready to establish the who, what, when, where, why, and how of things. Examine the text’s content like a reporter, taking note of names, places, repeated and unusual words, connections to other passages, etc.
Author’s Intent
Aim to discover what the original authors were trying to convey. Words do not exist in a vacuum. They have context. And context is KING in Bible interpretation. If Paul is talking to Timothy about leading his church in Ephesus, and he uses a word never before seen in any scripture passage (1 Timothy 2:12, for instance), due diligence asks us to study extra-biblical usage of that word, to look at the surrounding sentences and chapters, and to explore what we can of the historical background.
Remember the Bible is One Story
We are used to seeing individual verses or short passages posted to Instagram or set atop our daily/weekly devotional. But those short sayings have been plucked out of a larger narrative, giving us a very myopic view of biblical truth. To gain an understanding of what the whole Bible is about, read it front to back.
My recent post “How do you like to read your Bible?” offers some ideas on how to accomplish an entire read-through in a doable manner. The benefit is that we see the beginning, the middle, and the end—even though the end hasn’t happened yet—like a telescope scanning the entire sky, while a microscope dives deep into the invisible world of cells. The Bible as one story gives you the telescopic viewpoint. Having the big picture enables you to identify God’s trajectory as he works out his plan for creation.
Know Where You Are in the Story
Having a decent idea of how the big story goes helps us when we want to use our microscopes, so to speak, to study a smaller passage more deeply. We must know where we are in the big Story.
In the Old Testament, Genesis puts us in the very early days before the foundation of the nation of Israel. In Exodus we are with the descendants of the patriarchs and matriarchs we met in Genesis. Now they are escaping slavery and becoming a united people devoted to God. In 2 Samuel that nation now has a powerful king.
In the Gospels we meet Jesus, the savior promised throughout the Old Testament. The letters of Paul, Peter, and other apostles were written to believers after Jesus died, rose, and ascended. Their teachings to the church are super practical today. In all of the books we learn about people, places, and events, but mostly we learn about the character of God.
Trouble comes when we read Old Testament passages and skip the steps of correlation and contextualization. We cannot move straight from OT to our own lives. First we must place a passage in its scriptural context. We suss out the principles the author may be trying to communicate. We examine the Hebrew, if we are able, to discover grammatical clues hidden by translations. And then, the most important step…
We interpret the Old Testament through the New Testament. How does Jesus affect what we’ve seen in Old Testament passages? Two examples follow.
Menstrual Cycles and Worship Practices
Might sound strange, but In Leviticus 12:6–8, the ritual laws in the tabernacle (and later, the temple) dictated that, after giving birth, women wait til their menstrual discharge was complete before returning to worship. Do we apply the Israelite practice for new mothers’ worship to the church today?
No.
We do not ban new mothers from attending worship services. Church, though made up of holy people, is not a sacred space governed by the ritual purity laws of the Mosaic Covenant. We do not make a one-to-one correlation; rather, we ask what the New Testament is doing with a given text or practice from the Old. In this case, the Mosaic ritual laws have been laid aside, fulfilled and now unnecessary for worshiping the Messiah, Jesus, who fulfilled them. The church works under the New Covenant. So our daily practices are different from those of the ancient Israelites.
Blessing and Cursing
Back to the prosperity gospel conundrum: In Deuteronomy 11 we find blessings and curses. If the Israelites obeyed the covenant, they would be blessed. If they disobeyed, they could expect curses. Among those blessings? Financial security and abundance. By tithing as instructed (Deut 12), giving their firstfruits and best of the baby flocks, they showed their trust in God as their provider. In Malachi 3, God rebukes them for being stingy in their offerings, not following the Law. He invites them to test his generosity—his character—by returning to his ways. The passage hearkens back to the covenantal agreement between Israel and God in Deuteronomy.
Our job is to remember where we are in the story. We cannot make a direct correlation—we are not Israel, we are not under the Mosaic Covenant. The New Testament tells us that the curses of the covenant fell on Jesus at the cross. He paid the price. We Christians are not being told to give a tenth. But as we will see below, we can still learn something from these passages.
Learning from the Old Testament
How could our two examples be “applied” today?
Purity Laws
Leviticus reveals God’s holiness. His rules about ritual purity, for both men and women, set boundaries for them that reinforced the magnitude of his holiness. By obeying those laws, the people submitted to his kingship, respected his Person, and showed outsiders that their God was better and in all ways different from their false gods. Maybe what the church should be taking from the passage is a sense of awe and wonder at our holy God.
Prosperity
Deuteronomy’s blessings and curses have long been misapplied by health-and-wealth gospel preachers promising big payoffs to anyone who will send them money. God isn’t concerned with our pocketbooks. The Israelites’ tithe was an act of obedience to the covenant law demonstrating their faith in God as provider, and their refusal do to so in Malachi demonstrated their lack of faith. We are not bound to give ten percent under the Mosaic covenant, but we are called to trust the unchanging character of God. He is our provider, the giver of all good things (James 1:17). So, yes, we too should be generous givers, but not because the Old Testament commands it. Rather, because our God’s love, grace, power, and generosity should compel us to similar character and behavior. “Each person should do as he has decided in his heart—not reluctantly or out of compulsion, since God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7).
Beautiful Complexity
We live in light of the cross. Truth from the Old Testament can cross over into applications beneficial for us now, but they will not always look exactly the same as those the Israelites experienced. Ignoring the rules of Bible study—genre, context, author’s intent, etc.—in favor of a literalistic, flat reading of the text, will lead us to erroneous and even harmful interpretations and applications. It’s worth the slow study, using proven methods, to glean the truths God intended us to know through his Word. Most of all, the text points us to our all-powerful, good and loving God himself.
Love this. Thanks! Good reminders for me.
Very good overview and excellent examples of how to interpret scripture today.