Don’t Be Deceived! 5 Steps to Interpret the Bible Correctly

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:1-5 ESV)

There is a disconcerting trend when it comes to the Bible, and it is reflected clearly in the direction of many of our churches and our nation in general.

It is simply not read, and if it is, it is treated like a self-help book to be mended and shaped to our preferences and political affiliations. Preachers have softened its content in order to make God seem more “likable,” “tolerant,” and “inclusive.” This has led us down a path that in many respects is even more dangerous than lack of Bible reading altogether. We have shaped an infallible and perfect word into our own image, and it shows.

We all read ourselves into the scripture to a degree. We are fallible human beings and the lens that we read the word in is certainly shaped by our experience and culture. We cannot be perfect in our interpretation, although we could use a huge amount of improvement.

In this article I want to show you how to take the word as it is, enjoy it, and live it out in a way that gives you access to the life and life more abundantly Jesus promises us in our submission to His will. This is the very first step in approaching the word correctly; we come to the word in submission to it, not in order to make it fit our perspective. The phrase is often used, “Let the Bible read you.”

I got my very first Bible when I was 12 years old. My dad walked me into a Christian bookstore (they still existed when I was a pre-teen). I had no idea what I was choosing as far as translations are concerned or the world I was about to step into. I did know I liked leather and liked the smell of the pages. I ended up devouring it. I read the Bible from cover to cover at the age of 12 for the first time, in New American Standard. I certainly didn’t understand everything I was reading, but it set a foundation in my life for consistent Bible reading that I am eternally grateful for.

I still read the Bible daily. I have to. I do not understand how a believer with complete access to a book that is thousands of years old, is absolutely true, and has all the answers required for life will not pick it up and simply start by reading. I’m not even mentioning proper study, just simply reading it and thinking deeply about what it is saying about who God is and how He should be worshiped. This book tells what the world is, what human beings are, and who you are and need to become. If you could simply answer those questions, wouldn’t that make so many other answers fall into place?

Imagine having the actual power that formed the universe readily available to you. How did our world begin? With words. The weight of this truth is astounding in the very least. The study of language and words—indeed, how words create the cultures we live in—is at the very center of our world now. We have the words of life out of the mouth of Jesus. A whole book written by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Unassailable historically, theologically coherent, profound in its simple truth while displaying the dense complexity of humanity, the beginning and end of all literature, and powerful beyond what we can comprehend. The very word of the Emperor of the universe at our fingertips. How lightly we take it, and it shows.

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Hebrews 4:12 ESV).

So much of what we do in life is unimportant. I would suggest that we do not waste time taking in the word; we waste time when we don’t. Imagine standing in the courts of heaven when your life is over and you are standing in the presence of the King. He asks you a few simple questions.

“Could you read?”

“Yes.” (This is my assumption as these are words and you’re reading them.)

“Did you have a Bible, did you have My word?” “Yes.”

“What did you do with it?”

“_____________________________________”

Enter your own answer thus far in your life. I am sure that, whether a person is a scholar with multiple PhDs or a layman with three different versions of the Bible lying around their home, neither will be able to answer the King that they had spent sufficient time reading and practicing the word. Of course we have to understand that it will never be “enough,” but that there is always more.

We all have deep-seated questions that need answering, or at least a peace that the answer is in the hands of someone we trust.

Who is God and how do I worship Him? What is this world we live in?

What are human beings? Who am I?

Who do I need to become?

These are deep questions with answers only found in the person of God revealed in scripture. You cannot find the depth, profundity, simplicity, and tension of real practical wisdom for life anywhere else.

So where do you even start? Well, Genesis, the beginning, sets a brilliant stage for the unfolding of the rest of the biblical drama. It tells us that out of Spirit and the spoken word came life. It tells us that the Bible, from the start, is a book of the Spirit and the word—seemingly invisible things, but the two most valuable things to human meaning and modes of being.

You’re Religious Anyway, Make Sure It’s the Right One

For example, human beings simply do not live life without religion, without a form of worship. You can usually find your religion, or more appropriately your god, by seeing what you ask permission of on a daily basis to live. Anything that holds precedent over the call of Christ—whether it’s work, or the gym, or friendships, or your kids—if you have to ask permission from that other thing in order to follow Jesus, and the answer more often than not determines your action, you’ve found yourself a god.

In the same way, you cannot go through life without communication. The spoken word, whether it plays in your head or comes out of your mouth, is the most powerful force in the human race. It builds up and tears down; it encourages and eviscerates. But for all the importance of the spoken word, we aren’t exactly one hundred percent sure why it is so important. However, every single person is acutely aware of its power because they have felt it on the receiving and the giving ends. Whether you have been insulted or belittled or encouraged by a word, you understand its power over your life.

So we know from the outset of Genesis that the source of absolute truth and Spirit created the physical and spiritual universe that we live in.

My point—the Bible is a spiritual book, and the authors had a spiritual perspective and philosophy. In the West, we read it washed in materialism, but the material we see and experience in the world did not come first. God, who is Spirit, is pre-existent and eternal, is the “prime mover.” This sets an important stage for the rest of what we read in scripture. The creator is, ipso facto, the owner of everything He makes.

So as we begin reading the Bible, we must see it as a book about how God, who is Spirit, is dealing within and through humanity for His glory. It is a spiritual book graciously given to us in a physical plane to show us reality as it truly exists.

We must come to terms with the fact that our experience is far from the whole picture, and our broken perception has the danger of removing truth from our perspective altogether.

The word of God is truth in a deeper sense than we can comprehend.

If the Bible is the fundamental basis for understanding reality as it truly is, how should we approach it in our sometimes sleepy quiet time on the couch?

Right here is where I will refuse to give you a Bible reading plan. The daily practice of reading, studying, and meditating on scripture is what you actually need. A plan can so often be a feel-good method of failing to actually be in the word. If you like to check boxes, though, have at it. In all seriousness, if that works for you there are 10 billion resources available for reading plans. But you should beware of shallow, half-hearted “devotionals” by celebrities that say more about the person writing them than the word itself. We all need to be taught the word, from the tiny toddling child to the triple doctorate in any field of theology. We are all trying to practice, to learn, this perfect word. Or, as C.S. Lewis cleverly suggested in his well-known fiction, take our “bent” way of thinking and make it straight.

Before we jump into the actual practice of daily reading and study, I want to give some basic guidelines that will help you read scripture correctly.

How Should We Interpret the Bible?

First, get yourself a good translation of the Bible. I say translation because there are quite a few paraphrased versions of the Bible that are good for the market, but terrible for study and accuracy. The concern with many paraphrase versions is that the words are changed for emotional effect and do not accurately translate what the original author was trying to convey through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. If God is writing a book, let’s try and hear what He’s saying the way He meant to say it. The word has already made its way through two languages to make its way to you. Make sure that when you are reading it in your native language it is a version that you can really trust. I like the English Standard Version and New International Version for study.

Second, the Bible can never mean what it never meant in the first place. This is a good starting point for reading and study because it leads to the correct questions regarding the passages you’re meditating on and then applying to your daily life. We can so often read a passage and apply a metaphor to it that simply does not exist and wasn’t meant by the original author.

Take, for example, the parable of the good Samaritan. How many times have you heard this preached and taught with every character representing someone in our daily lives, teaching us how to be kind or generous with our income? While all of these things may have their place in the overall narrative of scripture, this is not what Jesus was aiming at or how to interpret the parable.

The meaning of a parable is the parable itself—the whole story comes together in order to answer a question or make a particular point about the Kingdom Jesus is aiming at. Breaking up the parable into sections and making a point of a particular verse or a metaphor out of a section of the story is mostly bad practice.

Jesus was answering the lawyer’s (the expert in the Mosaic Law’s) question, which was, “Who is my neighbor?” The lawyer was trying to justify being a neighbor to some and not to others. Jesus used this story to answer the real question at hand and flipped it on its head. The real question, “Who was a good neighbor?” narrowed in on the personal responsibility of the lawyer. The crux of the parable was not an answer the original question asked. It was using a hated Samaritan as the shock to get attention for how you can be a good neighbor. Even the Samaritan knew that this man needed help and that setting aside laws of purity made sense when a human life was in peril.

So we can see that along with all the other parables, the whole thing is the metaphor; the entire narrative of the story makes a singular point. This is what makes parables memorable, even unforgettable. After all, that’s what makes all the great stories great.

Remember, the Bible can never say what it has never said. The intended meaning of the writer is the intended meaning of the Holy Spirit. The fancy word theologians use for how you interpret the scripture is exegesis.

Here is an example of poor exegesis that everyone who’s been in a church for more than 30 seconds will have heard before. It’s in the story of David. Many teachers and regular Bible-reading folks read the story of David and Goliath and think, “God wants me to conquer my giants and this is proof of that.” In reality, the story is much deeper than that. It’s a story of an intimidated people who did not have the actual resources to defeat a descendant of the Nephilim. David—anointed, but not yet king (the now king but not yet)—killed him and cut off his head and led the people of Israel to victory, removing the stain from the land (see 1 Samuel 17).

The question we have to ask before we start declaring the promise of giant killing over our lives or ruminating on the meaning of the five smooth stones is, “What was the author trying to say?” He was telling a story of a savior of Israel—the early days of a savior of God’s people. By the Holy Spirit, he was foreshadowing Christ, helping us long for a Savior in the midst of a battle that we simply cannot win against sin and death itself, the stain of humanity. In this regard, we cannot slay the real giants that affect our daily lives—the bad habits, the habitual sin, the anger, the lust. Fortunately, the anointed King, Jesus, can.

The Bible needs to mean what it originally meant at the time of writing before it begins to unfold before us as a book for our daily lives. Start here. Then watch your whole world change.

Third, who was this written for, by whom, and in what context? To gain a fuller and deeper understanding of the word we must, to the best of our ability, understand these concepts. Take the often quarreled over “women in ministry and preaching” question. No matter what side of the debate you land on, you had better know why Paul the apostle was writing this letter to the Corinthians, what the context was, and then we can begin to apply this to our current context.

Fourth, let the Bible interpret itself. If you are really struggling with a passage of scripture, look at the edges of your Bible or the footnotes and you can clearly see where that scripture is cross-referenced. You can also just go online and look it up. A world of interpretation is at your fingertips, but use caution when it comes to commentaries and blogs. Your best bet is to find related scripture and add it together in a journal to create a kind of “recipe” for biblical interpretation.

So sit down and put a journal next to you, maybe two, and here is what I recommend you do.

Put one journal down in front of you for distraction—I’ll explain that in just a moment.

Put one journal down in front of you that is for questions and thoughts regarding the word you are reading and meditating on.

As you read through the Bible, you must realize that it is not about you. It is about God. This is a relief to me. Why? Because we couldn’t carry the weight of the story. We sabotaged it in the first few chapters, then God began His redemptive work that culminates in Christ, the Redeemer Himself.

Once you have begun to read this way, it’s a good starting place to meditate on scripture. That word, meditation, has been hijacked by new agers and “spiritual people” in the West. There is a remarkable difference between biblical meditation and eastern mystic-style meditation.

The eastern mystics and all their derivatives attempt to empty themselves of all thought, to go blank. This is, from a spiritual perspective, a great opportunity for demonic powers to place their own thoughts on that blank page of their minds.

Biblical meditation, on the other hand, is to fill yourself with the word of God. Paul says in Philippians 4:8 (ESV):

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

And again in 2 Timothy 3:16-17 (ESV):

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

In Joshua, we are commanded to meditate on scripture:

This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success (Joshua 1:8 ESV).

So how do you do that? The way I got started was simply reading a passage, reading it again, then reading it out loud and finding ways to carry it with me beyond my secret place to let it wash over me all day long (notecards and phone reminders, etc.). You are constantly eating spiritual meat and bread when you are aiming your thoughts at scripture.

Many Christians come to us for prayer because they feel they are in a dry spiritual season. In many cases, they are simply bored and not truly searching the scriptures for their spiritual sustenance from God. They want the word to tell them something that will make them feel better. This is not always the case—the word of God won’t be bartered with or manipulated to fit you. You were created to take the shape of the word, and not vice versa. Then you will have real satisfaction, not just fleeting happiness.

Let the word of God be your comfort, your supply, and your strength. When things are good, you’ve got the word. When things are hell on earth, you’ve got the word. When you are in cruise control, you’ve got the word to snap you out of it. Hear what I am trying to say—spiritually dry places are where demons go when they are cast out, not the children of God. There is always as much food at the table as you want to eat. Cut out the donuts; eat the meat. It’s life to your bones and a river of living water that will flow out of you.

Learn to meditate. Practice meditation. But not in the idiotic way the world teaches. You must be filled with the word of God to fulfill your calling. No prophetic word or good message from a pulpit will fill this void.

To conclude, the last and often forgotten portion that provides the real power on your path to being victorious is to simply do what the Bible says.

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it (Matthew 7:24-27 ESV).

Jesus says that the commandment of His Father leads to eternal life.

I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say (John 12:50 NIV).

The implications of this are almost too expansive to comprehend. Jesus the Son of God submits Himself to the Father and obeys His commands. What this tells us is that much of the power of scripture is in acting upon it. This is where I want to dissuade you from locking yourself in a closet for eternity and just thinking about the word. It is the command to go and do that really cements the word of God into our hearts.