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How should we read the Bible, and what should we expect to “get out of it”? Perhaps you have heard that we should read the Bible like any other book. Reading any book entails getting at the author’s intent by asking good questions. What is the book’s aim? How does the author make his or her case? If it is an old book, then what factors in the author’s context affected what he or she wrote? Are we listening to authors on their own terms or just seeing our own reflections by reading our ideas into theirs? Author intent gets tricky, however, when the author implies things without spelling them out. In saying that the Son always obeys the Father, did the author intend to say that the Son obeys the Father eternally, or rather only during His earthly life? Does a passing statement that Christ died for all mean that He died for every individual without exception, or rather that He died for all kinds of people without distinction? Were the authors ambiguous on purpose, or did they mean to imply something?
Thankfully, the Bible is not like any other book. The Holy Spirit set apart “holy men” to write Holy Scripture (2 Peter 1:21, KJV). These “sacred writings” can make us “wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15) because they are “breathed out by God” the Holy Spirit. Divine authorship means, as the Westminster Confession of Faith puts it, that “the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture” (1.6). Scripture alone makes “the man of God . . . complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:17), because God intended its teaching, examples, and good and necessary implications to lead to every “teaching,” “reproof,” “correction,” and “training in righteousness” (v. 16) needed for faith and life. Singling out “good and necessary consequence” uniquely illustrates why we should get more out of the Bible than from any other book. My basic point is that the divine Author intends the implications of His words, and He expects us to gather implications from His words.
First, God intends implications through His words. The prophets and Apostles experienced no slips of the pen. Jesus expressed a high view of the divinely inspired verbal inspiration of Scripture when He said, “Until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Matt. 5:18). Among other things, this means that everything in the Bible is there on purpose and there are no unintended consequences unforeseen by the divine Author. Jesus practiced what He preached in the classic example of His interchange with the Sadducees, who denied the resurrection (22:23–33). Every defense of “good and necessary consequence” includes this example, risking making it cliché. The Sadducees concocted a seemingly impossible conundrum, reflecting bad and unnecessary inferences. Falsely assuming that marriage in the next life (if there was one) had to be just as it is now (v. 30), they asked to whom a woman would be married if she had had seven dead husbands in this world. They presumed that the resurrection of the dead would put this woman in an impossible situation, aiming at a reductio ad absurdum argument against the resurrection itself. Jesus effectively replied that they drew bad inferences, blinding them from seeing good ones. Summarizing His twofold indictment, He said, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God” (v. 29). First, why should we assume that marriage continues in the next life in the form it has now, or even at all (v. 30)? Second, they had not read their Bibles carefully, missing the present tense of Exodus 3:6 (Matt. 22:31–32). If God is “not the God of the dead, but of the living” (v. 32), and God is still their God, then they must still be alive. The unspoken assumption (that we can miss) is that both Jesus and the Sadducees agreed that life involves union of body and soul, restricting the options to two possible conclusions: either separation of body and soul at death meant an absolute end, or life in some sense after death demanded a bodily resurrection.
Two lessons stand out from this complex example. First, Jesus’ inference fit the text and its biblical context. God promised life to Adam in the garden (Gen. 2:9), which he lost through sin. Death did not have the last word, since God resumed the promise of life with Noah, Abraham, and Moses, life being God’s presence with His people. The patriarchs knew that earthly land, burial plots, and outward blessings were merely pledges of “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (Heb. 11:16). Historical context is key here, since Jesus assumed that Jewish hearers believed that life meant life in body and soul or not at all. We see here both sound inferences and contextual exegesis. Second, Jesus’ inference was a necessary implication of God’s covenant with His people. Though not really an additional point, it is worth noting that the inferred resurrection is both “good and necessary” (not arbitrary) in that the whole Old Testament narrative falls apart without it. Examples of such inferences in both the Old Testament and the New Testament are legion, but this one establishes clearly that God intends the implications of His words.
Second, God expects us to gather the implications of His words. It is telling that “the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees” (Matt. 22:34). Jesus accused them both of not knowing Scripture and of having a faulty doctrine of God’s power (v. 29), and they buckled under His logic. Would we want to be accused of not knowing Scripture by misconstruing divine promises and divine attributes? Fears may creep in here that our logical deductions from Scripture might pull us off the rails, however, leading to an infinite number of potential theological train wrecks. Yet “good and necessary consequence[s]” stem from careful and prayerful reading of texts, asking, “What needs to be true to make this statement or tell this story?” If hope of eternal life was central to the patriarchs, then resurrection as a means by which God continues to be their God is prerequisite. If God intended redemptive history to culminate in Christ as God-man, then it makes sense that Psalm 110:1 should imply that He would be both David’s Son (man) and David’s Lord (God; Matt. 22:41–45). If the Lord has always saved His people through His Word and by His Spirit (e.g., Isa. 59:20–21), then inferences drawn from God’s work in the New Testament should lead organically, through some sanctified detective work, to concluding that this is possible only because the one God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, working in that order in time because that is who He is in eternity (Eph. 1:3–14; 2:18). Every church creed, including the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Definition, and the Westminster Confession of Faith, abounds with examples of what this looks like. Such creeds also mean that we are not left on an island with our Bibles, trying to figure things out. The Spirit speaks in Scripture, and He has faithfully taught the church to spell out the assumptions that need to be true for Scripture to say what it says. Armed with these tools, we can, and we must, prayerfully seek out divinely intended implications in the Bible.
Should we read the Bible like any other book? Yes and no. Yes, we should read the Bible carefully in ways that are compatible with what the human authors intended. No, we should not restrict Bible reading to the intent of the human authors. Seeking authorial intent brings bad and good news. The bad news is that our search for authorial intent ends up being more limited than we realized. Uninspired authors might fail to realize the consequences of everything they wrote. Even with inspired authors, we know what Moses, Isaiah, and John wrote, but we don’t have full access to what they thought or were feeling when they wrote. The good news is that divine authorship is different. The Father inspired the biblical authors to reveal His intent through His Word by His Spirit. Enabling us to see the intent of the divine Author, the Spirit turns the lights on in our hearts and minds so that we can see what God said, what He shows us to do, and what He wants us to assume. Bible reading is both a mental and spiritual exercise. It is mental because we have some hard thinking to do, but it is spiritual because, through prayer, God meets us in Scripture as we read to “understand what the will of the Lord is” (Eph. 5:17).