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The Danger of an Open Bible

July 22, 2020 By Peter Krol

Jared Olivetti has an intriguing piece at Gentle Reformation, where he reflects on how dangerous it can be for people to read their Bibles the wrong way.

When Jesus and Satan had their showdown in the wilderness, what was the Enemy’s great tactic? To quote, misquote, and under-quote God’s Word, giving his lies the appearance of evil (don’t all the best lies do that?). Every great heretic in the history of the church has been an expert in the Bible and has used the Bible to do terrible things. An open Bible is a dangerous thing. More specifically, poor Bible reading is dangerous Bible reading. In all seriousness, consider how many people have been horribly abused with the Bible.
We certainly don’t have the option of not reading or preaching the Bible! But this is a double-edged sword…and just as I wouldn’t want you swinging a sword around without learning how to use it first, Jesus wants you to read and to read well.

I particularly appreciate his concern with the danger of Bible dissection:

…to read with dissection is to read the Bible with a microscope, to read atomistically, on the most minute level possible. This happens when we read without any sense of the context, just waiting for a verse to jump out at us. And when said verse does jump, we make it our verse for the day (or, worse, our “life-verse”), never bothering to wonder what the author intended to say, what the first audience thought, or how it fits into the whole scope of the Bible. This is the instagram way of reading the Bible.

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Mastering the Middle Books of the Psalms

July 15, 2020 By Peter Krol

I’ve written before about my study of Book I of the Psalms (Psalms 1-41), sharing the spreadsheet I created to help with the analysis. I’ve now proceeded through books II (Psalms 42-72), III (Psalms 73-89), and IV (Psalms 90-106), updating the spreadsheet accordingly.

I propose the following as the main point of each book:

Book I: Though the Messiah, like David, suffers at the hands of men, God accepts him as his own.
Book II: We need a king greater than David.
Book III: We are desperate in our exile.
Book IV: We have hope our exile will eventually end.

In addition, I have a strong suspicion that books III and IV are each structured as an extended chiasm, where the second half is parallel to the first but in reverse order.

Please feel free to check out the spreadsheet, make a copy, and use this information in any way that may be helpful to you. The spreadsheet also links to each of the daily devotional videos I recorded over the last few months.

For future reference, you can find a link to the spreadsheet on the Resources page. I’ll let you know when I complete my work on Book V.

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Can You Trust Your Bible Study if You Don’t Know Hebrew and Greek?

July 8, 2020 By Peter Krol

Tommy Keene has a fabulous piece at his blog entitled “How do I do good exegesis if I don’t know Hebrew or Greek?” Perhaps you’ve been plagued by this question, wondering how far English translations can really take you.

This uncertainty causes some people to question any conclusion drawn from a Bible translation whatsoever. And it causes others to do foolish things when they use original language tools without knowledge of those original languages (for an example, see my post on how a little Greek can be a big distraction).

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Keene proposes an utterly sensible way forward. Here’s a taste:

Let’s say that you want to do some serious exegetical work on a passage of Scripture–perhaps you need to write an exegetical paper, or you’re running this week’s Bible Study, or counseling a client through a trauma, or answering your friend’s very specific and theological questions in a coffee shop–but you don’t know the original languages and therefore feel some lack of confidence when it comes to explaining what the biblical text really means.
Can you deeply and analytically study and reflect on a text of Scripture without making use of the original languages, and if so, how?
The question is particularly important if you’ve already been convinced, as I’ve argued previously, that you shouldn’t make definitive conclusions based on the original languages if you don’t possess a working knowledge of them. The present post began as a kind-of appendix to that argument, but on further reflection deserves a series itself.
“So I shouldn’t come to definitive exegetical conclusions from the Hebrew and Greek if I don’t know the original languages?” one might respond. “If that’s the case, is it still possible for me to mount an exegetical case for my position, and if so, how do I do that?”
The short answer: yes it’s very much possible, but it is vitally important that you account for the limitations of working with the text “in translation.” If you want to properly exegete a passage without the evidence provided by the Hebrew and Greek, you need to (1) trust a native language translation while simultaneously (2) being perpetually aware of its limitations.

The rest of this piece is well worth your time.

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A Typically Overlooked Reason to Trust the Bible

April 15, 2020 By Peter Krol

Michael Kruger explains one of the most important reasons we can trust the Bible, a reason that often doesn’t come up in discussion about the Bible. That reason we can trust the Bible is simply because Jesus trusted the Bible.

Now, of course, Christians don’t overlook Jesus generally. He is central to about everything Christians think and do. But, strangely, he is not often the ultimate court of appeal when they are deciding what to think about the Bible. But, just a few moments of reflection suggest he should be.

Kruger explains briefly why it is not a fallacy to argue from the Bible that Jesus trusted the Bible, and he goes on to draw implications for the value of the Old Testament.

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Maintaining Both Human and Divine Aspects of Scripture

April 8, 2020 By Peter Krol

Daniel Rowlands has a helpful piece about how to maintain both the human and divine aspects of Scripture. When we aim to read Scripture “in context,” we must keep in mind both the immediate literary/historical context of the human author and the canonical context of the divine author.

In each place there is the immediate context, but there is a broader context—the context of the entire revelation of God contained in the Bible. There are different human authors (i.e. Moses, Hosea, and Matthew), yet there is one divine author—God himself. There is an immediate context, and there is an overall biblical context—the overarching story of God’s mighty acts of redemption in Christ Jesus.

We do not have to choose between these matters in our study of Scripture. We ought to maintain both.

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One Easy Way to Grow Your Church

March 25, 2020 By Peter Krol

Colleen McFadden has a terrific piece on one of the easiest and most effective ways to grow your church: one-to-one Bible reading.

If you would like to grow as a Christian, be more disciplined in reading the Bible, reaching out to unbelievers, and discipling other believers unto maturity—and if you would like to see others grow in these ways as well—all you have to is read through a book of the Bible with one other person and talk about it.

Perhaps it sounds too simple. But McFadden has some great stories to tell about how it works.

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Applying Proverbs to the Right Situation

March 18, 2020 By Peter Krol

A common piece of conventional wisdom is that “proverbs aren’t promises.” That is, that they are only true sometimes. Though well-intentioned, such principles are often misleading and unhelpful.

Tremper Longman has a more helpful way to fulfill the good intentions of such advice. He says of proverbs: “They are not true in every situation.” He then gives a number of examples showing how you can easily go wrong if you try to apply a proverb to the wrong situation.

So proverbs are not simply “sometimes true.” They are true in the situation intended by the proverb. And they are not true in other situations.

This is far more helpful and pastoral than causing people to question the validity of proverbs, as though they are simply rules of thumb, but you can’t really trust them. Longman’s examples are worth considering.

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A Commentator on Proper Use of Commentaries

March 4, 2020 By Peter Krol

Regardless of whether you agree with Tremper Longman on the best way to read the book of Genesis, his advice on how to properly use commentaries is terrific:

There is a right way and a wrong way to use a commentary. Actually, there are two wrong ways. The first is to ignore completely the use of commentaries. Some people do not consult commentaries because they believe that, since all Christians are equal as they approach the Scriptures, scholars have no privileged insight into the biblical text. The second error is to become overly dependent on commentaries. “These people have devoted their whole lives to the study of the Bible. How can my opinion measure up to theirs?”
Those holding the first position are wrong because they forget that God gives different gifts to different people in the Church. Not all people are equally adept at understanding the Bible and teaching it to others (1 Cor 12:12–31). Those holding the second position err in the opposite direction. They forget that God has given believers the Spirit by which they can discern spiritual things (1 Cor 2:14–16).
The right way to use a commentary is as a help. We should first study a passage without reference to any helps. Only after coming to an initial understanding of the passage should we consult commentaries.
Neither should we let commentaries bully us. Many times they will be of great help, but sometimes the reader will be right and the commentaries will be wrong.”

The piece at the Logos blog reflects further on the best use of commentaries.

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Why Study Esther

February 26, 2020 By Peter Krol

Jesse Johnson has another great post at The Cripplegate, this time about the book of Esther. (I previously linked to one about Ezra.) In “Why Study Esther,” Johnson delves into the mystery of why God is never named or explicitly mentioned in the book.

To drive this point home, Esther is the only book of the Bible that does not mention God or God’s name. In fact, the author goes out of his way to avoid writing it (consider the pains he took in Esther 4:14, writing an ambiguous sentence when every Jewish child would know God was the one working).
But this too is by design. No book of the Bible has its focus on God’s sovereign direction of history to the extent that Esther does. It’s masterful. It’s clear. It’s unambiguous. But it’s also subtly beautiful.
Only a fool would look at a backyard covered in animal tracks and declare that because the animals can’t be seen now, they must not have been there at all. Similarly, only a fool would look at Esther and imagine that because God is not seen on stage that he is not there at all.

At the end of 2019, I spent a few months saturating in Esther, reading it 20 times in a row. I agree with Johnson on the book’s high value. The full article is worth your time.

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