Christian Publishing House Blog
Apologetic Defense of the faith, the Bible, and Christianity
The context (the surrounding Bible verses) will enable us to understand what the author meant, not what we think, feel, or believe. The context also runs throughout the Bible, so if our view of a verse is at odds with other Bible verses elsewhere, we must rethink our view, as the Bible does not contradict itself.
However, what happens if and when we do commit sin? Have we tried in vain to be holy? Do we start all the way back at the beginning and lose the spiritual ground we’ve gained?
Many find the Bible hard to understand. Would you like help to understand the Bible? Free Bible blog articles are available for you. So seek help to understand what you are reading. Seek out those who study the Bible with a humble attitude.
The infallibility and divine authority of the Scriptures are due to the fact that they are the word of God, and they are the word of God because the inspiration of the Holy Spirit gave them.
The city of Smyrna was located approximately thirty-five miles north of Ephesus. It was a prosperous city with a population of over one hundred thousand in John’s day (c. A.D. 95). That location had been inhabited for over three thousand years and no one knows for sure who founded Smyrna or exactly when it was established.
Ancient biographies often opened with the noble background of their subject, background that would shed light on the identity or character of the person about whom they wrote.
Have you ever been quoted out of context? Sometimes people quote something you said, but by ignoring the context of what you said they can claim that you said something different—sometimes exactly the opposite of what you actually meant! We often make this same mistake with the Bible.
In Josiah’s day, the book of the law was found in the temple, and Josiah’s humble response to its demands changed his generation. Jesus later confronted religious teachers of His day who, for all their attention to the law, had often buried it beneath their religious traditions.
We have grammatical-historical-interpretation and grammatical-critical-historical interpretation. The former preserved objectivity in interpretation, the latter subjectivity. The former preserved the integrity and trustworthiness of the Bible writers and the text; the latter made both the Bible writer and the text untrustworthy. In other words, New Hermeneutics, with its pseudo-scholarship has done nothing more than weaken and demoralize people’s assurance in the Bible being the inspired and fully inerrant Word of God.
In discussions concerning interpretations of the Bible, we often hear the phrase, “you took that out of context.” In fact, we often hear that in discussions outside the Bible, as when the media quotes a politician and the politician feels he or she has been unfairly treated. In its popular usage, the phrase seems simply to mean, “You got that wrong.”