How to Understand the Bible
When I was a kid growing up I was told to read the Bible and God would speak to my heart through his Scriptures. While that is good advice, I had a hard time. First of all I don¹t remember anyone telling me how to read the Bible. Maybe they did and I was just a distracted kid but I sure felt I was on my own. The Bible I had back then was an ancient translation that was full of archaic words that actually mean different things today. The first guideline for understanding the Bible is to get a faithful, modern translation in your mother tongue. If your first language is Spanish, then get a good, modern Spanish Bible, if your first language is German get a good modern German Bible, not the one Luther used. You get the point. It is important for you to get a modern translation because language changes over time. This past Christmas I was with a group singing Christmas carols and some of the older kids were laughing about the line in ³Deck the Halls² which says, ³Now we don our gay apparel.² This is just one example of how language has changed in just one generation. In the first century there were two styles of Greek, the classical and the common or ³koine² Greek spoken by the average man on the street. It is interesting that God choose to write the New Testament in the common language Greek so the average person could easily understand it. But even when one has a modern translation he must learn how to understand and apply the Bible. When people just open their Bible to any passage and ask, ³What does this mean to me,² they often misunderstand Scripture. This is because the Bible was written for you, but not to you. Every book in the Bible was written to a specific people, at a specific time, for a specific reason and in a specific place. If you do not know any of the culture and history of that book, and ignore the context of that passage of Scripture, you can make it mean anything you want. And that does violence to the message of the Bible. The first step in understanding the Bible is to answer the question, ³What did it mean then?² How would the original readers understand the plain and obvious meaning of the words? A good study Bible will help with the background of the passage. The second step is to answer the question, ³What is the timeless truth?² This is the eternal principle God is teaching in that passage that is true for all people, in all cultures, for all time. Sometimes this is obvious, like God is love or be kind to your neighbor. Sometimes you must dig beneath the service. Examples would be the command to greet one another with a holy kiss or to drink a little wine for your stomach. Finally, once we have discerned the timeless truth we can answer the final question, ³How does this apply today?² This is where you need to be quiet before the Lord and listen for his small still voice to speak to your heart. This is a very different question from ³what does it mean to me?² A Scripture passage only has one meaning, but it has many applications. For example how God may tell you to love your wife will probably be different from how he tells me I need to love my wife. If you will take the time to read your Bible with understanding incredible truth will begin to fill your mind.
