Once you’ve found a place to start reading the Bible, the next step is to learn to read for detail. The best way to accomplish this, of course, is through repetition over the course of your life. I have read the Bible cover to cover many times at this point, and new stuff leaps out at me each time. A good starting point for reading for detail is to ask the same questions that drive journalism—the who, what, why, when, and where. Not every passage contains all five of these elements near at hand—many of the Psalms come to us with next to zero obvious clues about who specifically wrote them at what moment in time. However, taking a moment to consider what sort of person in general wrote it and how their time might differ from ours is still a useful exercise. For the stories of the Bible, these blanks are easier to fill; they usually have everything right there. Some parts of the Bible rely on an understanding of other parts of the Bible to decipher. Paul’s letters make much more sense with the events of Acts in mind. Many of the prophetic books (like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the 12 minor prophets) in the second half of the Old Testament make little sense without at least a cursory glance at the history books that come earlier. While you can follow the basic story of the Gospels easily enough in isolation, it’s easier to absorb more of what Jesus has to say after at least a cursory trip through the five books of Moses. Revelation is well-nigh indecipherable without Daniel and a number of other Old Testament books. This brings me to an important point: “A text without context is only a pretext.” If you are struggling to understand what you’re reading, try casting a wider net. Read the chapter before and after it. If you’re still stuck, read the whole book and come back to it. There are many things in the Bible which become clear when you read what’s next to them. Taking a single verse out of context is a great way to get the Bible to say whatever you want it to, rather than respecting what the text is actually trying to say. The greatest danger in reading Daniel and Revelation, for example, is to skip over the data in the text to jump to conclusions. I grow weary of hearing about all the different theories about the antichrist and the mark of the beast. The first time I read Revelation, I was struck by what a great story it was about Jesus vanquishing the forces of evil. So often when people study Bible prophecy, they miss the large arc of the story in their quest to validate their pet theories. The details you pick up on will largely be determined by your life experience so far. I’m glad I started reading the Bible early, because the older we get, the more preconceived notions we have about the Bible and its contents. Some of these come from sermons, some come from movies, some come from Sabbath school classes, and so much filters in from the general culture. When a child reads the Bible, they may not understand everything they read, but they’re bound to notice a few things many adults aren’t willing to admit are in the text. For example, the first time I read Song of Songs, I was in the 4th grade. I didn’t understand the majority of its details, but I could plainly see that it was a beautiful and passionate poem about romantic love. It kind of reminded me of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which I had also read for the first time that year. (I was a very precocious 4th grader.) Imagine my surprise when I revisited Song of Songs in college to work out some of the detail that had previously eluded me, only to discover that various commentators thought it was a drama, a funerary text, or an allegory. One woman at a camp meeting even tried to tell me it was about a unicorn hunt. She actually gave me a typewritten paper about her theory, which I now keep in one of my favorite Bibles as a reminder not to do the same sort of thing. There is value to looking at scripture from odd angles, but those cannot be safely explored until we actually look at the text. I am convinced that Song of Songs in particular suffers a good deal of abuse because people are uncomfortable with its plain meaning. It explores a side of human nature that many Christians are brought up not to see as beautiful and good, but shameful. The intense emotions of the poetic passages of the Bible challenge the idea of an exclusively intellectual, disembodied faith. Until we can accept the emotions of the passage as written, we have no business veering off into allegorical territory. Even if the comparison were valid (Jesus does actually use Song of Songs allegorically later on), it would have little to teach us once deprived of its emotional depth. The process of noticing details may be mostly a head thing, but over time, it changes our hearts because emotions are a part of the data. If you really want to get into the text, you intentionally engage with it emotionally. That is what we will discuss next week. However, you cannot skip this week’s process. If we take the Bible seriously as truth, it behooves us to make an effort to listen to the actual content of the words instead of skipping straight to the emotional part. There’s a reason why, in Hebrew, the word “know” was also used for intimacy; true love involves learning and familiarity far more than it involves pleasant feelings. Fortunately, the feelings tend to follow, and when they come from a place of knowledge, their roots run far deeper than a brief infatuation.
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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