(A)

TRUTH OBEYED – WILL HEAL AND RESTORE
“My Son, pay attention to what I say; turn your ear to my words.
Do not let them out of your sight, keep them within your heart;
for they are life to those who find them and health to one’s whole body,
Above all else, guard your heart,
for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:20-23)

These words of wisdom correspond with what the Lord Jesus exhorted in the New Testament when He told us to keep our hearts with all diligence, for from them flow the issues of life. This is also in line with the exhortation to be doers of the Word and not hearers only.
Consciously and constantly keeping and obeying God’s Word and instruction keep us on the right spiritual path as well as bring healing and spiritual health to our lives.
Whether we like it or not, or whether we admit it or not, we are all spiritually sick – sick through sin, which is a wasting and killing disease of the heart. The unconverted are sick unto death; those who have come to know Christ and been born again continue sick, but they are gradually getting better as the work of grace goes on in their lives.

In one sense, the church is a hospital in which nobody is completely well, and anyone can relapse at any time.
Pastors, teachers, leaders, and elders are no less than others weakened by pressure from the world, the flesh and the Devil, with their lures of profit, pleasure, and pride, and they must acknowledge that they, the healers, remain sick and wounded and therefore need to apply the medicines of Scripture to themselves as well as to the sheep whom they tend in Christ’s name. All Christians need Scripture truth as medicine for their souls at every stage, and the making and accepting of applications is the administering and swallowing of it.
The ability to apply God’s truth therapeutically implies the prior ability to diagnose spiritual ill-health, and diagnostic ability is learned as much by discovering and keeping track of one’s own sin and weaknesses as by any other means.
I recall what one patient told me in my medical practice: he said that the previous doctor he consulted told him to give up smoking in the light of his poor respiratory system – and he replied to him – ‘Doc, you yourself are a heavy smoker; and yet you are telling me to give up smoking!’
How true is the adage – “Physician, heal thyself”. There is a parallel truth with regard to spiritual health and the need for good example on the part of the healer.

(B)

SAFEGUARDS AND GUIDELINES FOR INTERPRETING SCRIPTURE
We know and affirm that the Word of God is wholly trustworthy and reliable; also wholly true. The Scripture’s teaching is the utterance of God “who never lies” (Titus 1:2), whose word, once spoken, “remains forever” (1 Peter 1:24), and that it may be trusted implicitly.

However, this does not guarantee the infallibility and inerrancy of any interpretation or interpreters, of that teaching, nor does it in any way prejudge the issue as to what Scripture does, in fact, assert.
This can only be determined by careful Bible study; we must allow Scripture itself to define for us the scope and limits of its teachings.
The Bible does not profess to give information about all branches of human knowledge; it claims, in the broadest terms to teach all things necessary to salvation (2 Timothy 3:15-17).

How then can we avoid subjectivist eccentricity in our own biblical interpretation? The first thing to realise is precision in handling texts.To discover what each passage meant as a message about God written on his behalf to a particular readership must be our first step.
Then, to determine what meaning God has for us in this historical material, we must go on to a theological analysis and application according to the analogy of Scripture. The term “theology” may cause some to ‘retract’, but theology is basically a study or knowledge of God, and all Christians are theologians, to different degrees.
By theological analysis, we mean seeing what truths about God and his world the passage teaches, or assumes, or illustrates. By theological application, we mean reflecting on how these truths impact our lives today.

We must be careful to ensure that nothing must be read into texts that cannot be read out of them. Nothing taught by any text may be disregarded or left unapplied – that is what it means to be faithful. When we speak of the analogy of Scripture, we are referring to the traditional procedure of letting one part of Scripture to throw light on another that deals with the same subject; that means we ought to interpret ambiguous passages in harmony with unambiguous ones and allow the things that are primary and central to provide a frame of reference and a perspective to look at those things that are secondary and peripheral.

Now we come to probably the most important part: taking the Word of God to heart. Hearing Scripture preached, reading it regularly, internalising it by meditation, and applying it to give content to our personal worship, as well as to find direction for living our lives are in line with developing our communion with the Father and the Son.
The transforming impact of our devotional interaction with the BIble is, in the most direct sense, the work of Christ. He walks, as it were, out of the pages of the Bible into our lives. He writes on our hearts the faith set forth by the Bible writers, so that again and again we find ourselves turning back to him in contrition, humility, in excitement, in love, and in gratitude. We know inwardly that it is Christ himself who by the Spirit made this happen. Thus more and more we come to see how much we owe to him and how faithful he is in leading us.

(C)

THE PURPOSE OF BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION
Interpreters often operate on the premise that the purpose of studying and interpreting the Bible is to find the one right interpretation of a passage; this is something we should strive for, but it is truly not the chief purpose of biblical interpretation.
Our task in interpretation is not so much to find the right interpretation (although this is needful) but to use the Bible for its intended purpose of Christian nurture. This intention is carried out in Preaching and Teaching in the church; hence the tasks of preaching and teaching the Word. Preaching has fared better than teaching; seminaries have required courses in homiletics, and there are many books on preaching. But Bible teaching is the medium of neglect in the contemporary church. It is no wonder that polls conducted on believers who believe the Bible to be God’s inspired Word uncovered some individuals who cannot even name four of the Ten Commandments.

Part of the problem is that the church has failed to equip lay people to study and teach the Bible. The church has unintentionally handed the task of interpreting the Bible to its pastors and ministers. And the problem is compounded when those who ‘graduated’ from three years of Bible college have among their ranks those with theological degrees who have not even read the whole Bible, and are not familiar with God’s progressive revelation in the Bible; many ministers simply do not know how to use the technical biblical scholarship that they learned in the seminaries and ‘transfer’ them to the lay people and congregation. Pastors have been known to ask, “how can I pass on in a few hours what it took me three years of seminary to learn?” On top of that, the three years are invested in different modules, including the study of the Greek and Hebrew languages, which take years for someone to master, and three years may realistically be too short to cover many aspects which would prepare ministers to minister effectively. Many pastors have been trained to study the Bible from an academic perspective. In seminary they studied biblical languages and devoted considerable energy to learning the technical tools of biblical interpretation. Consequently, many pastors do not know how someone lacking biblical languages and technical exegetical skills can be trained to interpret the Bible well. Pastors usually exhort their parishioners to read and study the Bible and are distressed when the advice goes unheeded. But seldom do ministers provide their congregations or even their Sunday school teachers with a method for reading, studying, and teaching the Bible. Hence the principles of Biblical Interpretation (hermeneutics) are important for both Biblical Preachers and Biblical teachers.

It is important, at the outset, that when we refer to Bible teaching, we are focusing not so much on teaching in Sunday schools for children (although this is also important in the life of the church), but we are referring to Bible teachings for the lay people (young and old adults) in a systematic way (sometimes referred to as “Catechism”, which unfortunately has been generally abandoned in the Protestant churches, but still practised in the RC churches, the content of their teaching may not be agreeable to us). Catechism has been employed in the past to ensure that someone is ready to be baptised and to be received by the church – but catechism has also evolved to instruct various ones on the Christian faith (which include the Creeds, the essential beliefs and doctrines of the Faith). A comprehensive instruction in Catechism can go a long way to help adults to understand their faith and to grow in oneness within the church.
It is helpful to have small groups which meet to study the Bible and to encourage one another in spiritual growth; however, the result expected may not be forthcoming if various ones spent much time in seeking to understand the basic tenets of the faith and the rudimentary doctrines of the faith (implying that the majority has not graduated from ‘spiritual milk’ to ‘spiritual food’).

But even if the majority has some basic understanding and appreciation of the tenets of the faith and the rudimentary doctrines of the BIble, some rules or principles of interpretation of the BIble are needful to ensure wholesome spiritual growth, including the ‘ability’, like the Berean believers, to check the Bible whether the preaching and teaching are truly in line with the revelation of Scripture.
The Bible as a whole (the biblical canon) is an organic whole in which the parts fit together harmoniously; hence one should interpret individual passages in an awareness of what is said elsewhere in the Bible. In the case of difficult or obscure passages, the interpreter should give precedence to biblical passages where the doctrine is clear (Scripture is its own interpreter),
If the Bible is an organic whole, then the Bible in its entirety is the context and guide for understanding particular passages within it.

To believe that the Bible as a whole is based on a principle of progressive revelation follows naturally from what we have been saying; written by numerous writers, over a span of many centuries, the Bible displays change and progression in some of its ideas and practices. The most notable development is of course the progress from the Old Testament (Judaism) to the New Testament (Christianity).

The next principle: Unless a passage declares itself to be allegorical in nature, do not allegorize biblical passages. To allegorize means to translate the details of a passage into another set of meanings, usually a set of conceptual meanings.
Allegorizing violates a number of foundational principles, including the intention of the writer, the normal conventions of language, what we know about literary genres, the clarity of Scripture, and the relative objectivity of Scripture as a shared body of truth. Allegorizing is also too arbitrary and subjective to be valid.

For every passage in the Bible, assume a conscious intention or purpose on the part of the writer, and the unity and coherence of the passage – the writer had a purpose in mind and that he worked out that purpose in a unified and coherent way.
Do not forget the genre: interpret a passage in the light of what we know about its genre. Every genre has its own conventions, its characteristic ways of operating.
If a text is narrative in form, we know we need to approach it in terms of setting, character, and plot. When we read a poem, we know we have to divide the poem into theme and variation and to interpret figurative language. Another rule for interpreting passages is to realize that meaning is usually derived from literary wholes – whole books, whole chapters, whole paragraphs, whole stories, whole poems.
It is generally a liability to “think verses” when proceeding through a passage. At the very least, the context of the whole unit will provide a richer or more specific content for individual parts. Often, an individual statement in a passage, or an individual event in a story, will be nearly meaningless by itself. It may even assert something different from what the whole passage does. The most frequent violation of this principle is a distressingly common practice of trying to get a separate theme out of every verse in a passage.

A final rule of interpretation for dealing with individual passages is to interpret passages in keeping with what we know about their context in the Bible. Their context is actually multiple – the immediately surrounding material, the book of the Bible in which the passage appears, the Testament (Old or New) in which it appears,and the Bible as a whole.
We live in an age of cheap and available information. Factual information about the Bible is readily at hand. But despite all the biblical information available, the church is often lacking in maturity and spiritual understanding and its biblical illiteracy is often alarming.
In our information age we desperately need people who understand the big idea of their faith and who can use these to guide their lives and the mission of the church. It is the use of Bible knowledge, not the mere possession of Bible facts, that produces growth towards godliness!!

People who think themselves prepared to teach the Bible are often teaching about the Bible. In other words, they are teaching doctrinal persuasions or outlines of systematic theology. One aspect that leads to this is the inability to teach a biblical passage in terms of the kind of writing it is. Many who teach could not state the essential differences between a story and poem if they had to. To teach a psalm without realizing that poets speak a language of images and metaphors is to cut against the grain, yet this is how biblical poetry is often taught. Earlier on, we mentioned identifying the ‘big idea’ of a biblical passage. This ‘big idea’ is the thought that unifies a biblical passage and that ought to govern the teaching and preaching of that passage.

Ineffective teachers and preachers tend to focus on isolated facts in the dim hope that if they throw out enough ideas a few will stick. So the teacher or preacher does everything but explain the text. Hence it leads to a “escape from the biblical text to other material”. We find them talking about matters beyond the text itself – about the writer, the cultural context, and the perennial favourite – ‘background material’. Teachers or preachers who do not know how to talk about the text talk about other things. They share anecdotes, tell jokes, moralize, and introduce illustrations related to the subject of the passage under consideration but they do not analyse the passage itself. We need to reach a point that we can see the overall pattern of a Bible passage and the big idea of the Christian faith based on the Bible. Interpretation is simply another word for this process of reaching the vantage point from which to see the big picture.

Coming back to genre, it may be helpful for an illustration closer to home. We have been studying the Gospels: the Gospels do not narrate how Jesus developed as a child into an adult, nor do they use chronological precision. What is striking about the Gospels is that they focus on one week of Jesus’ life – the final week in his life up to his death on the cross. Everything points to that one week, and the Gospels devote about a third of their words to that final week: Matthew 1/2 of book; Mark 1/3 of book; Luke 1/4 of book; John nearly 1/2 of book.
One-third of the Gospels is devoted to Jesus’ final week and the other two-thirds prepares readers for that final week. The heart of the Bible is the Gospels, and the heart of the Gospels is the sacrificial, redemptive work of Christ. The Gospels are essentially passion narratives with extended introductions; they can be looked upon as biographies. The events recorded in the Gospels and recounted are actual events that took place. The authors of the Gospels intended that the readers recognise that what they wrote is actual history. Luke for instance has been noted to be both a historian and a theologian as well. History and theology are inseparably connected. Historical matters matter to the Christian faith. But note that all history is selective; it is impossible to say everything.
We need to distinguish between description and prescription: there is a big difference between ‘this event happened’ (descriptive) and ‘we must do this today’ (prescriptive). Just because the Gospels tell a story about an event does not mean that we must repeat that event today. We must locate where the events fit in salvation history and reflect on the nature and purpose of the story.
For instance, we cannot treat the first disciples’ coming to full Christian faith exactly like the coming to faith of people today. For the first disciples, for fully Christian faith they had to wait until the next major redemptive historical event – the cross and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Thus their steps in faith can never be exactly like ours, for we look back on those events while they had to wait for them. This means we must never teach or preach from the Gospels as if they were written simply to provide psychological profits in discipleship, or as if they were exemplary “how-to ” manuals for Christian living (though they certainly provide rich materials for such constructions). Rather, they are more like books that tell us how-we-got-from-there-to-here; above all they focus on who Jesus is, why he came, how and why he is so largely misunderstood, how his teaching and life led to the cross and resurrection, why he is worthy of all trust, the purpose of his mission and much more. And as we focus on Jesus Christ himself, we are called to trusting and faithful discipleship (from the writings of D.A. Carson).
A practical illustration from Matthew 8:23-9:8: Matthew is telling people about Jesus. Many of those people had never even seen Jesus. Matthew could have
simply rattled off impressive facts: Jesus is God, Jesus is the Creator of the world; Jesus will judge the world; Jesus is all-powerful; Jesus is all-knowing; Jesus performed miracles; and so forth. But that is not the way that Matthew presents Jesus here. Matthew tells a string of stories in Chapters 8-9 for specific reasons, and here he tells three stories that cohere to make the very same point.
And what is the common thread? The three miracles show Jesus’ authority.
In 8:23-27, Matthew tells the story about Jesus’ calming a storm to show that Jesus has authority over nature.
In 8L28-34, he tells the story about Jesus’ healing two men with demons to show that Jesus has authority over demons.
In 9:1-8, he tells the story about Jesus’ healing a person who could not walk to show that Jesus has authority over sin and sickness.
Jesus’s story parable is an extended metaphor or simile with a story. Eg. “The kingdom of heaven is like…..(Matt13:31) – we must not overinterpret parables. The stories in the parables cannot be assumed to be historical; do not propose allegorical meanings that are not clearly anchored to the text.

Conclusion:
Because Scripture is God’s Word for all time and because every biblical passage has a broader context (historical, literary, and biblical), exegesis (narrowly defined) moves us into various theological disciplines:
Biblical theology considers how God’s Word connects together and climaxes in Christ.
Systematic theology examines what the Bible teaches about certain theological topics.
Practical theology details the proper Christian response to the BIble’s truths.

Biblical interpretation is not complete until it gives rise to application through a life of worship. Exegesis moves to theology, and the whole process is to result in a personal encounter with the living God disclosed in Scripture. Doxology – the practice of glorifying or praising God – should colour all biblical study and preaching.
Having said that, biblical interpretation that culminates in application demands God-dependence; the process of moving from study to practice is something that only God can enable, and he does so only through Jesus.
The biblical authors’ ultimate intent included a transformed life, the foundation of which is a personal encounter with the living God. This will not be experienced apart from the Lord’s help. We engage in exegesis and theology in order to encounter God – we approach humbly and dependently and never with manipulation or force. Biblical interpretation should create servants of God, not kings.

Wholesome preaching and teaching of Scripture change us more into Christ’s likeness. May I express that this long sharing is not to be taken as ‘teaching’ but rather as ‘unpacking’ the burden in my heart for brethren and the church. I have seen and heard too many ‘preaching’ and ‘teaching’ in various contexts that caused much ‘sadness and sorrow’ in my heart, for I sincerely believe that God desires the preaching and teaching of His Word to help His church to grow unto spiritual maturity; and it is very concerning to observe, after years have passed, that there is not much progress that is substantial and the church is general, still remains in the doldrums as far as spiritual transformation and growth are concerned. I declare that I am still learning, and I am one that is ‘work in progress’ but the Lord has placed the burdens (which can be overwhelming at times) in my heart and I cannot but discharge them in obedience to Him.
God bless!

(D)

REASONING AND THINKING IN CHRISTIAN LIVING
The gospel does in truth proclaim the place of reasoning and thinking as part of a Christian life of faith and homage to God.
All truth is God’s truth; facts, in a sense, are sacred, and it is un-Christian to run away from them.
“Reason” means reasoning just as “faith’ means believing and trusting. The Christian is also called to think about all things in such a way that his life of thought is part of his life of faith in God. Whereas the non-Christian is led by faithless reason, the Christian should be guided by reasoning faith.

“Lead me in your truth and teach me.” (Psalm 25:5)
The first task of reason is to receive the teaching of God – this echoes the above request of the Psalmist. Scripture pictures the believer as one called to the attitude of a child, and who is looking to his divine Teacher for instruction (Psalm 25: 4-5).
God teaches the church through the Word, interpreted by the Spirit; accordingly, the Christian seeks the help of the Holy Spirit to enable him to learn what Scripture teaches. The implication is that as believers, we should be humble and open to the teaching of God’s Spirit through the Scripture and revelation of God’s Word. Just as a child needs to learn from an adult teacher, the child should be open to receive instruction even though his mind and reasoning as a child is not fully developed. Refusing to accept instruction because, to him, it is not reasonable, leads to a path of being ‘hardened’ and unreceptive to valuable instruction and truth, and the damage may be irreparable.
In my interaction with some of my young patients, time and again, I have heard many of them expressing regrets for not listening to the advice of their parents and teachers – some ended up in probation, in trouble with the law, and some lamented that their lack of diligence caused them current difficulties in suitable employment and lack of skills for certain jobs.

The second task of Christian reason is to apply the teaching of God to life to bring it into constructive relationship with our other knowledge and interests, and to work out its bearing on the practical problems of daily life and action – moral, social, personal, political, aesthetic, or whatever they may be. The Bible is a book of life, and the BIble instructs us as to the practical bearings of its teachings.
This is a very significant point: whatever our position in church, whatever our physical age, whatever our status in society, our response to the preaching and teaching of Scripture must lead to application – otherwise it is just accumulation of knowledge that is not ‘alive’ in God’s eyes.
And whatever inconvenience, whatever is seen as ‘unacceptable’ – if the teaching of Scripture requires us to apply and respond in a certain manner that is contrary to our own desires and approvals, are we prepared to apply the truth in our lives? In the later part of Luke 6, the Lord said, “But those who hear my words and do not put them into practice are like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. The moment the torrent struck the house, it collapsed and its destruction was complete.” (vs 49).
It is no use to say that a particular teaching gleaned from a Bible study or from a session of counselling is very familiar to us and we already know it – so stop elaborating on it and repeating it – and the fact may be that we really do not know it, as least in principle, in the depth of it, or in the actual application of it – for our unteachable response and position straightaway reveal our lack of understanding and application of this particular truth.

The third task is to communicate God’s truth to others. The duty of Christian witness involves reasoning. Faith is not created by reasoning, but neither is it created without it. And the one who communicates God’s truth to others must necessarily be one who knows and practices the same truth in his or her own life for the communication to be really effective and life-giving.
It is not just a matter of rattling a long list of ‘truths’ without really assimilating it in our own lives – neither is it answering certain questions with “set or pet answers” which do not communicate the wholesome truth revealed in Scripture.

This is a serious point: Whether we are called to preach, to teach, or to share truths from the Scripture, it is obligatory, or even mandatory, to ensure that we be faithful in our communication of the truth (for all truth is God’s truth). And to do this requires reasoning faith, dependence on the Spirit, and also the openness, in the evaluation, to acknowledge our own lack of wholesome understanding and appreciation of the truth we seek to communicate, when some other brethren point out certain aspects that are missing in the communication. Are we truly concerned for God’s truth, God’s glory in whatever we are assigned to do for Him? Or are we more concerned for our own reputation, our own standing, before others, and even before the brethren?

(E)

HONOURING THE WORD OF GOD
The way the Spirit of God creates, sustains, and renews our fellowship with our Creator is by applying the Word of God – that is, God’s message as his inspired messengers set it forth, whether verbally (orally) or in writing.

The Old Testament use of the phrase “the word of the Lord” for such prophetic oracle points to the organic unity of all the particular “words” of God, as part of a single composite manifestation of a single speaker’s mind – i.e. the one Speaker is God himself; the unity of the communication comes from the mind of the One Almighty- in every single revelation it is always the whole word of God that expresses itself.

In the New Testament, apart from its Johanine application to the Son of God (John 1:1-14), the phrase “the word of God” denotes specifically the Christian message as a whole, the many-sided good news of divine grace through Jesus Christ, as proclaimed by Jesus and his apostles. The New Testament itself, and indeed, in a large sense the whole BIble, may properly be called “the Word of God” in this material sense, as being proclamation of the gospel, no less than in the formal sense of having God as its source and speaker (cf Old Testament).

What this means is that as we study the Bible, from the Old Testament to the New Testament prayerfully and in dependence on God’s Spirit, we are uncovering the total and progressive revelation of the mind of God in His desire to communicate, orally or by writing, His whole plan of salvation, and His affirmation, “You shall be my people, and I shall be your God” – stretching from the original intention in the Garden of Eden (which was ‘spoiled’ by sin and disobedience), through the calling of Abraham, the nation of Israel (which failed God ‘miserably’), and the coming of the Messiah (God’s Son) who inaugurated a new creation (as the Bridegroom, the Prophet, the Priest, and the King) to bring about the recreated humanity (through the apostles and the church), to the ultimate Garden in the new Heaven and new Earth – all these through grace, love and mercy of the TRIUNE GOD which makes the ‘impossible’ possible.

What God blesses to us is his truth,and only his truth – that is, the teaching of Scripture, as faithfully echoed and reproduced in the preaching and witness of the church. It is only with his truth that he feeds our souls.
God’s Word has the nature of a call. It comes as a summons to each hearer to respond to God in light of its application to himself, and the way the Holy Spirit blesses it is precisely by causing us to understand and receive it as God’s call, and to answer accordingly.

However, unfortunately, even from the times of the Old Testament until today, the people tend to reject the truth from His Word and refuse to answer and respond accordingly:
“I have spoken to them and they have not listened,
I have called to them and they have not answered” (Jeremiah 35:17)
It is natural for sinners to think of themselves as wise, not by reason of divine teaching but through the independent exercise of their own judgment,and to try to justify their fancied wisdom by adjusting what the Bible teaches to what they have already imbibed from other sources (and these sources, mind you, can also be apparent Christian literature and ‘modern knowledge and theology).

The process of assimilating God’s revealed truth to the current religious and philosophical opinions of men is the essence of the speculative method in theology which Scripture repudiates and rejects. Yet we all constantly do it, more or less, for sin is present with all of us. As usual with sinful habits of mind, we are largely unconscious of our lapses, and become aware of them only as we test ourselves by Scripture and ask God to search our minds and teach us to criticise our own thinking. This is a discipline that none (who are genuine Christians and disciples) can shirk.

Note and beware: NO synthesis between the gospel and non-Chrisians sy systems is permissible! The gospel is complete in itself, to supplement it with extraneous ideas is not to enrich it, but to pervert it.
None recognised this as clearly as apostle Paul when he wrote:
“But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let that person be under God’s curse! As we have already said, so now I say again: if anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let that person be under God’s curse!” (Gal. 1:8-9)