How to Read the Bible Rightly

All of It Is True

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:

2 Timothy 3:16 (KJV)

Given by inspiration means breathed out by God. The Bible does not merely contain the Word of God. It is the Word of God, and Jesus said to his Father, thy word is truth (John 17:17). We believe it, the Confession says, not because a man or a church vouches for it, but because God, who is truth itself, is its Author (WCF 1.4), and his Spirit bears witness by and with the Word in our hearts (WCF 1.5).

You do not sit over the Bible as its judge. You sit under it as a child before his Father. For many of us the hard part is not believing it is true. It is knowing what each part means. This page is for that.

What Reading Literally Means

Taking the Bible literally means taking each part as it was meant to be taken. A psalm is a song, a law is a law, and a proverb is a proverb. The meaning of a passage is the sense its author intended, and behind every human author stands God, who meant it first.

That guards against two errors. A wooden reading makes the words say what no writer meant, as if the floods must grow hands because the psalm tells them to clap (Psalm 98:8). A loose reading turns plain statements into pictures whenever they become uncomfortable. The first mistakes the form. The second refuses the content.

The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself; and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any scripture (which is not manifold, but one), it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.

Westminster Confession of Faith 1.9

Scripture interprets Scripture, so a hard place is read in the light of plainer ones. And the true sense of a passage is one, not many. There is a right reading, and it is worth the work of finding.

Take heart. Not everything in Scripture is equally plain. But what you must know, believe, and do to be saved is set out so clearly that an ordinary reader, using ordinary means, can understand it (WCF 1.7). A hard chapter in Daniel cannot take Christ from you.

Know What Kind of Writing It Is

God spoke at sundry times and in divers manners (Hebrews 1:1). Each kind of writing is read by its own rules, and every one is wholly true.

1. History tells what happened. Luke wrote that Theophilus might know the certainty of those things (Luke 1:3-4).
2. Law commands. Thou shalt not steal (Exodus 20:15) means what it says. Israel’s ceremonial and civil laws have ended with Christ and that nation, but the moral law still binds (WCF 19.3-5).
3. Poetry sings in pictures. The Lord is my shepherd (Psalm 23:1) is a figure, and the care it pictures is real.
4. Proverb tells how God has ordered life to go as a rule. A soft answer turneth away wrath (Proverbs 15:1), though not every angry man softens. See Is Proverbs 22:6 a Promise?
5. Prophecy speaks for God, often in vivid pictures. Micah named Bethlehem as the Ruler’s birthplace centuries ahead (Micah 5:2), and there Christ was born (Matthew 2:5-6). The guide to reading prophecy says more.
6. Parable is a story Jesus told to teach. In the sower, Jesus explains that the seed is the word of God (Luke 8:11), and that lesson is true.
7. Letter was written to a real church about real problems. Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me (1 Corinthians 7:1). Ask what the apostle was answering, then hear it as written to you.
8. Apocalyptic vision shows heavenly things in symbols. John hears of the Lion of the tribe of Juda, turns, and sees a Lamb as it had been slain (Revelation 5:5-6). Both pictures show one real Christ, who conquered by dying.

How to Tell a Figure of Speech

When you are unsure, ask these questions.

1. Would the plain sense be absurd? Jesus said, I am the door (John 10:9). He is not wood on hinges. He is the one way into God’s fold, and that is no less true for being said in a picture.
2. Would it contradict other Scripture? Under his wings shalt thou trust (Psalm 91:4). But God is a Spirit (John 4:24), without body or parts (WCF 2.1). So the wings are a figure, and what they picture is real, his near and sheltering care.
3. Does the Bible explain it? Jesus said, Destroy this temple, and John tells us he spake of the temple of his body (John 2:19-21).
4. Is it overstated on purpose? When Jesus says to pluck out the offending eye (Matthew 5:29), he is not asking you to maim yourself, since sin comes from the heart (Mark 7:21). He means, deal with sin without mercy, because hell is real.

When none of these applies, take the words at their plain face. And remember that a figure always points to something real. The Lamb was truly slain. A figure makes a real thing easier to see and harder to forget.

The opposite error

Some readers, once they learn that the Bible uses figures, begin to treat its history as myth. That does not read the author’s sense. It overrules it, and Christ himself closes that door.

He grounded marriage on what God did when he which made them at the beginning made them male and female (Matthew 19:4-5). He compared his coming to the days of Noah, when the flood came, and took them all away (Matthew 24:37-39). A pretend flood is no warning of a real judgment. He set his three days in the grave beside Jonah’s three days in the fish (Matthew 12:40), and said the men of Nineveh will rise in the judgment (Matthew 12:41). Paul sets Adam beside Christ, one real man beside another (Romans 5:12-19). If Jesus read these chapters as history, his disciples may not do less. And the God who raised his Son from the dead is not strained by a great fish.

Read for Christ, and With the Church

On the road to Emmaus the risen Lord taught his disciples to read their Bibles. Beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:27). Later he showed them that the law, the prophets, and the psalms were all written concerning him. Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures (Luke 24:44-45).

Christ is the center of the whole Book. The Passover lamb whose bones were not broken (Exodus 12:46, John 19:36) and the servant wounded for our transgressions (Isaiah 53:5) lead to him. If you finish a passage and have not seen your need of him, read it again. If you have never come to him, the gospel is where to start.

Context and the church

Read every verse in its paragraph and its book. Most errors start with a verse torn from its setting, the way the unlearned and unstable wrest the scriptures (2 Peter 3:16).

And do not read alone. How can I, except some man should guide me? the Ethiopian asked (Acts 8:31). The Confession and Catechisms are the church’s careful summary of what Scripture teaches, and they keep you from inventing a reading no faithful Christian has held. Trusted commentaries like Matthew Henry help too. Read the text first, then the help, and bring your questions to your pastor.

Where faithful teachers differ

On some questions godly, confessional men have differed. The Confession says God made all things of nothing, in the space of six days, and all very good (WCF 4.1). The Reformed Presbyterian Testimony adds that Genesis 1 and 2 are history, not mythology, and that man did not evolve from any lower form of life (RP Testimony 4.1, 4.4). Most have held the days to be ordinary days, while some confessional teachers have read their length another way. Faithful men differ too on the millennium of Revelation 20 (see The Thousand Years). On questions like these, study, hold your view honestly, and hold it humbly. The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong unto us (Deuteronomy 29:29).

Steps for This Week

1. Pray before you read. Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law (Psalm 119:18).
2. Name the kind of writing before you read each passage.
3. Work through one hard passage. Read the whole chapter, ask the four questions above, and follow the cross references in your margin.
4. Ask where Christ is. Write one sentence on how the passage points to him.
5. Check yourself against the church. Read Matthew Henry on it, or find where the Confession speaks to it. Sojourner puts both beside the text.
6. Obey what is plain. Do not let a hard verse keep you from what a clear one commands today. For a plan to read the whole Bible, see How to Read the Bible.