How to read God’s Word
Recently, I watched Mufasa with my kids. It’s fine, has some fun songs, and has some good leadership and family dynamics to talk through with kids. Two scenes stood out to me this time through it. Towards the middle of the movie, Mufasa meets Rafiki who is a crazy monkey with visions. One of his visions is that he will find his lost family when he gets to the “promised land,” and he will find them in a particular tree. Mufasa asks him if any of his visions have ever come true. He basically says no but he has faith. Fast forward to the end. Rafiki finds THE tree that he had been looking for the entire movie. He runs up to the tree, looking through the boughs for his brother and family, and the tree is empty. Mufasa follows him up to the tree and asks Rafiki where his brother is at. Mufasa shows remorse for Rafiki because he didn’t have his happy ending. The vision, the promised land, was not all that it was chalked up to be. Rafiki turns back to the lion and laughs at him. The lion is at the base of the tree and Rafiki re-interprets his vision. Basically, that his vision of finding his brother monkey was not what his vision meant. Really, it meant that he would find his new family and brother in Mufasa, who was now standing at the base of the tree, so his vision was right all along. He just didn’t understand what it meant.
Now, this follows in line with the old witch doctors of Africa, which is what Rafiki is meant to portray. I’m not taking a jab at Africa here. This is how all old myths portray their prophecies. Greek, Roman, Egyptians, it is all the same. Visions are allegories for their true meaning. It is the same as the palm readers of today. This is because this is the best that demons can do. Demons have been around and know some things. Stories tend to repeat themselves. Just look at history. Demons know the story lines. So they can guess at what is to happen.
A famous proof is this can be found in Genesis 3:4-5, when the serpent, filled with the devil, doubts the retelling of God’s word from Eve. He brings in doubt. He redefines what she knows. He says, “God doesn’t mean that.”
This is the great lie of the devil and sadly, the people that I hear repeating it the most are people who say they are Christians. People who say they love God. People who say they love and study the Bible. People who say that they love the Word of God.
For example, in Revelation 21, when it talks about New Jerusalem coming down, I have heard it said, “it can’t mean a literal Jerusalem coming down, that would throw off the rotation of the earth.” This comment is cosmically comical to me. The God who wrote the laws of physics can’t ignore, change, or alter his own laws when He creates a new heavens and earth? Why not? Even if He wanted to follow the current laws, there is so much information that we don’t know about this future city that it is wild conjecture to say that it would alter the rotation of the earth.
God made everything. He made language and literature, and it is a glorious blessing to man that he did. I love the fact that I can dive into the minds of geniuses of old to see how they thought. It is a gift. They can communicate with me because of how literature and language works. I can understand what they mean by looking at the historical, grammatical, and literal words that they wrote. A good example of this is the Greek word Arete with Aristotle. This word is commonly translated to Virtue. In order for me to understand what Aristotle meant by this word, I have to understand his context, not my own. My own context is influenced by the Catholic church, which, news flash, came after Aristotle. To Aristotle, Arete/Virtue meant the pursuit of excellence within a discipline. It was a positive and a negative thing. He had a virtue of drunkenness and sobriety. The Catholic split this word into Virtue and Vice a few hundred years later to help clarify their meaning.
When it comes to the Bible, I should read the Bible and follow the rules of literature by considering the historical, grammatical, and literal rules in order to find what God was trying to communicate to His people. He is not a God of smoke and mirrors. He is a God who brings clarity.
He is also a God who used human authors. A question I appreciate asking when considering a text is, “if I was the man writing this, how would I write it if I was trying to convey the same message? How could I have been more or less clear?” If I am reading a text, and there is a plain reading, like in Revelation 21, I am going to take the plain reading. Again, if John were trying to write down that a literal city was coming down from heaven, how could he be more clear? He knew what Jerusalem looked like. This was all a vision. The angel wasn’t telling him what to write, it was showing him. How are we to understand these things? Probably by the words that John used.
A common thing that I hear is that God could have meant more than what He communicated to/through these people. There is the meaning that God revealed to the authors of the Bible, and then there is the meaning that He really meant for the church. Weirdly, there is another view that the people in the Old Testament knew just as much as we do now, they just didn’t write it down. These are both hogwash. Now, there is a clear progression to revelation in the Bible. Adam knew a lot less about Jesus Christ than we do today, because Jesus hadn’t been born yet. Adam was saved by his faith in a Messiah to come. It was a very basic faith because he was given a very basic prophecy. Abraham, Moses, and David all had more layers of the prophecy revealed. Unlike Rafiki, the promises were not redefined. They were given shape and color. God meant all the words He used. He just added more to them over time.
A common defense to these views on Scripture is the appeal to church tradition, particularly to Origen and Augustine. Augustine defined a lot of things for the church. He did some great things. All Christians should have an appreciation for him. The thing I appreciate about him is how much he changed his mind as he learned more. This is why so many different sects of Christianity claim him as their own, because he basically held every possible view at some point in his life, and he wrote about them. You can find reasoned arguments from Augustine on most every major doctrine. Some are better reasoned than others. Some are more biblical than others.
I’ve been studying church tradition and history for a while now. Something that has become clear to me over the past few years is that you can basically find every single belief/heresy in each generation or every few generations. Generally, the beliefs are slightly re-packaged every time it comes up new, but there is little categorical difference. Each time, there is a refinement to the old version. An example from science is the atom. Lucretius believed that each thing is a thing, no matter how small. Bohr’s model was more correct than Lucretius. The Quantum model is probably better. It will keep getting refined as man learns more.
For theologies, AMil, Pre-Mil, and Post-Mil were all valid ways to view eschatology in the first century. These three views stemmed from the literal vs allegorical hermeneutics which were also valid then too. There were even schools devoted to these different veins of thought that got along fairly well. Besides the name calling between the two. Neither branded the other as heretical back then as we shouldn’t now, even if we know better.
Here is the question that I would pose to anyone who wants to say that they honor the Bible, or more strictly, would say they believe in Sola Scriptura (I am ruling out Catholics and Orthodox Christians here because they have bigger problems). If the Bible is the Word of God, why would someone ever say that God doesn’t mean that, when it comes to a simple reading of scripture? If Scripture is inspired, then God chose the words used. If he wanted to say one thing, why would he say something else? Is God inadequate to communicate His thoughts to His people? Or is it that you just don’t like what He is saying? Or worse, are you being like the demons and doubting the Word of God? Saying, “God didn’t mean that” is a rather terrible thing to say about God. It means that you know better than Him. When it comes to the Word of God, I submit my understanding of history, science, health, politics, ethics, and any other “ics” to a simple reading of the Bible. If God took the effort to communicate to His people, He probably did it the way He meant to do it.