Why Is the Bible Difficult to Understand Sometimes?
What is a Good Way To Study The Bible?
Sometimes the Bible can be life-changing. Sometimes it can be hard to understand. For example, what did Paul mean when he said that:
“when we were underage, we were in slavery under the elemental spiritual forces of the world” (Galatians 4:3)
When was I a slave? What are ‘elemental spiritual forces,’ those stoichia? I’m confused!
I’ll try to answer that question below. For now, let’s see what’s possible.
It is no wonder that we might be baffled by a book written between 2000 BC and 90 AD in three different languages, from a dozen countries, 60% of whose authors were immigrants residing in locations from which they were not native.
Studying At the Kitchen Table
It is very important to begin Bible study by learning an inductive approach where we let the Bible speak for itself. We should engage the scriptures by understanding what it meant at that particular time. We call this the historical-grammatical method.
If you want to do Bible study properly, you should follow a three-part process.
Experts in the Bible move from observation to interpretation to application. When you observe, you then have to interpret. Once you interpret, you then struggle through layers of application.
At Summit, students are also taught how to depend on the Holy Spirit’s guidance, and they learn how to supernaturally bridge cultural, literary, and historical gaps between the scriptures and the contemporary listener.
This results in a more worshipful understanding of the Bible and makes them more sensitive in making relevant and engaging applications to both themselves and also contemporary settings with diverse audiences where they will go to minister after graduation.
But Where Does The Power Come From?
It may sound strange to say that students interpret better by the power of the Spirit, but a heavy dose of dependence on God clarifies principles of hermeneutics (the science of interpretation). It is not the other way around.
People should not learn the science of interpretation before they know the Interpreter of scripture. This is what John tells us in John 14:26. Many people go wrong here. Once a student sees how the Holy Spirit illuminates the text, Christ can then use him/her to reach audiences never thought possible.
Show Me How To Do It?
Before opening a Bible, a student should pray for the Spirit’s wisdom. A.I. cannot give you the Spirit’s wisdom. It is the Spirit and the Spirit alone that makes things happen in our mind by searching the deep things of God (1 Corinthians 2:11–14). If we get caught up in historical-grammatical methods, we risk forgetting that this process is a love story between God and us.
What might you do if you read the following passage and are baffled?
“When we were underage, we were in slavery under the elemental spiritual forces of the world” (Galatians 4:3)
Begin with the three-step process outlined above:
Observation
Interpretation
Application
If you run an A.I. search on this, sure, you will get a fabulous outline of details. It will be amazing, but it is not yours. You learned nothing about Bible study process. You were given some answers on a silver platter. Neither did it come from God with the subtlety of His Spirit. It’s just an A.I. outline without supernatural power or prophetic exactness.
While we do need to know the context of the passage, we don’t have to research for three hours and write an Advance Dilemma Term Paper, something I make students do, to get to the bottom of a text!
When we observe the writing situation and context (something you can research on your phone) for this passage, we see that Paul was writing to a region that is today in central Turkey. The audience was influenced by Greek philosophy, where they were taught that there were basic cosmic forces under spiritual control. Sounds like today, doesn’t it?
Basic Cosmic Forces, The STOICHIA, Are Under God’s Spiritual Control
I genuinely desire that students have a working knowledge of the tools to understand interpretative issues–concordances, wordbooks, lexicons, databases, commentaries, etc., but to even dream that the literary elements replace the influence of the Holy Spirit on my mind would be like trying to find my way out of the Amazon in the pouring rain at midnight without a knowledgeable guide. So when they go to an online wordbook and look up this term in the Greek, they must ask the Holy Spirit how to apply what they read.
This leads to the issue of how we take a text and use it to speak to OUR cultural setting. The Bible often is very simple in terms of relationship, emotion, desires, and behavior. Yet, ONLY the Holy Spirit can tell me what is important today or what is relevant to the people I am talking to at any given moment.
In our day-to-day classroom life here at Summit, I try to teach application method intensely–analogy, story, parable, behavior, feelings, genre, typology, and other important models of meaning-transfer to an audience, yet when it comes to application, who knows what is relevant to me or to any student on a given day? It is only the Spirit of God.
Application settings into which our students migrate after graduation will certainly involve taking a 3000-year-old text to a faithless, depressed teenager that knows nothing about the Bible. To be blunt, that individual will not care until the power of God falls on him/her. At that moment, they are transferred to the kingdom of light, and the basic cosmic forces (the stoichia) that controlled that young person’s life are washed away in the torrent-wave of God’s loving Holy Spirit. That’s the power of Bible study method in process.
Author: Dr. Dan Sheard
Summit Faculty & Chair of Curriculum
When I first began to prepare for the ministry, I was determined to go to Israel to live there. At the age of 18, I was studying in Jerusalem trying to understand the Bible and figure out Ancient Near East complexities.
Still not satisfied, and knowing that the New Testament was written in Greek, I decided to enroll the following summer in school in Greece. These early years laid the foundation for a lifetime of cross-cultural reading of the Bible. But is that really necessary? It is amazing what you can do from your living room chair or kitchen table.
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