How do we know that we interpret correctly?

Watch the complete sermon here: https://www.bridges.church/messages/paths-straight-proverbs-3-1-12/

Hey, thanks again for sending in questions related to our recent sermons. This last week, we studied out of the book of proverbs. And as an introductory comment, I said, proverbs can’t be taken as some quid pro quo binding agreement between us and God. You know, it’s the chapter that we are studying says, honor the Lord with your wealth and your barns will be overflowing. We can’t take that back to God and say, where is my overflowing barn?

If we had honored him with our wealth. The question is, how do we know that that is the correct way to interpret proverbs? More generally, how do we know how to interpret all different places of the Bible and all of the different types of literature that is in the Bible? How do we know the right way to interpret it? And so, very simply, it’s because the Bible interprets itself.

The Bible tells us how to interpret it at different places. So in the book of proverbs, this is just chapter one of proverbs. These proverbs are for attaining wisdom and discipline, for understanding words of insight, for acquiring a disciplined and prudent life, for doing what is right and just and fair, for giving prudence to the simple knowledge and discretion to the young. That’s what it’s a book of. It’s observations of how life generally goes.

And if you want to live a life well, if you want to be prudent in your life, you would be wise to follow what’s in this book. That does not mean that it is how it works every single time without fail. Proverbs doesn’t claim to be that way. So in proverbs 22, I believe, where it says, you know, raise a. Teach a child the way he should go, or raise a child in the way he should go, and when he’s old, he will not depart from it most of the time.

That’s true. Right. If you want to live a prudent life, if you want to live a life well, raise your child in the way he or she should go, that whatever happens in the end, it is certainly going to be much better than if you didn’t raise your child in the way he or she should go. But again, it’s not some kind of guarantee that the child will turn out certain way. Right?

And we know that that is the right way to interpret proverbs because that is how proverbs tells us to interpret proverbs. Other parts of the Bible that are written as history should be interpreted as historical, that they really happened, you know, in the New Testament, the accounts of Jesus are written as reportage of these things really happened. Luke begins his gospel saying, I set out to investigate these things that have happened, and he’s writing to Theophilus and he says, I wrote this down so you would know what you have heard is true. And he goes around as an investigative reporter and finds out these things are true, which means something like, in the gospels, we don’t want to look at those accounts and say, oh, you know, Jesus resurrection from the dead is only metaphorical, right?

It’s a symbol of how there’s a constant renewal in the world or something that would not be fair to the text.

That is not what Luke said he was doing. Luke told us how to interpret Luke, right? And so the different parts of the Bible explain to us how to interpret what that part of the Bible is. And if we want to interpret it correctly, we need to pay attention to what it says about itself. We can’t impose some other meaning on it and say, well, this is how we interpret it, therefore, that’s what it is.

Right? When you get a bill from the power company, you can’t open it up and say, well, I just think this is a metaphor for, you know, how, how there’s lots of energy in the world or something, right? You. You can’t assign the meaning to it. You have to take it for what the, for what the originator said it was, and that is how you interpret it correctly.

So that’s how to interpret proverbs and more generally the Bible have it interpret itself. Look for these markers in each book describing what the book is, and then that is the right way to approach that particular text. So thanks for the question. We’ll see you next time.