The Sense of Scripture: Studies in Interpretation . . .

"IT MEANS WHAT IT SAYS" 

       In our effort to become more responsible in our interpretation of the Scriptures we must guard against those careless habits that tend to minimize the difficulty of our task. "What does it mean? It means what it says!" is one of these. It is a fallacy named in logic texts, equivocation, which means to use equivocal terms in order to deceive, or to be deliberately ambiguous. A politician, pressed for an answer on how he will vote on a controversial issue, answers, "I will vote for what is best for the country," is equivocating. 

To say the Bible means what it says is to equivocate, for that is precisely the issue: what does it say? Yes, of course, the Bible means what it says, but what does it say? So, one is hedging when he resorts to such a tactic. 

Not only is he hedging but he is also guilty of another damaging fallacy, denying reality. He doesn't know and he won't admit it, so he takes the easy way out, It means what it says. Or he denies the difficulty of the passage. No problem, for it means what it says. We do ourselves a disservice when we try to sheer the Scriptures of their difficulty and their mystery. While the Bible may sometimes be very simple to understand, it is overall a difficult book, one that abounds with obscurities. Honesty demands that we admit that often we don't know what the Bible means by what it says. Therein lies its greatness. Any literature that would propose to communicate the mind of God to mortal man could hardly be without mystery. We are always challenged to probe its depths, only to conclude with another who was smitten by its inscrutability: "Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out!" (Rom. 11:33)

The simplest statements of Scripture are often the most profound and transcendent, "past finding out" in any final sense. The idea of knowing God is an example. When the prophet Jeremiah points to the coming of a new covenant for a new people, he names an impressive characteristic: 

No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying "Know the Lord," for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sins I will remember no more. (Jer. 31:34) 

This great passage is in the context of "This is the covenant that I will make in those days" (verse 33), and so we can see that knowing God would be experienced in a new and glorious way. But what does it mean to know God? It was a concept close to the heart of Jeremiah, for in Jer. 9:23-24 we have:  

"Thus says the Lord. 'Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, let not the mighty man glory in his might, nor let the rich man glory in his riches; but let him who glories glory in this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord, exercising loving kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight,' says the Lord."  

The prophet places knowing God above all earthly values - wisdom, power and influence, money - and relates it to justice and mercy. And what a glorious line we have right from the mind of God himself: In these things (mercy and justice) I delight! This indicates that one knows God when he shows mercy and practices justice. There is Jeremiah's judgment upon king Jehoiakim, son of the righteous Josiah, in Jer. 22, whose destiny was to be "the burial of an ass" because his reign, unlike that of his father, was filled with violence and oppression.  

       Speaking to Jehoiakim of his father, Jeremiah said, "He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well. Is this not to know me?, says the Lord." To the incumbent king he said, "But you have eyes and heart for dishonest gain, for shedding innocent blood, and for practicing oppression and violence." (Jer. 22:17)  

       Here the Bible is its own interpreter of what is involved in knowing God: Is this not to know me?, says the Lord, referring to Josiah's compassion for the poor and needy.  

       If we read the Bible through the eyes of third-world people who have never known anything but famine, violence, and oppression, we could identify with Jeremiah's concept of what it is to know God better than we can as the most affluent nation on earth. It is easy for us to see knowing God in terms of going to church, saying prayers, and supporting missions. We might be able to see how oil-rich Arab sheikhs with their millions in Swiss banks while many of their own people suffer from poverty would come under the prophet's judgment, but not ourselves. Our economic status in the world makes it next to impossible for us to comprehend the pitiable plight of the world's poor. And our religion is such, centered as it is in forms and institutions, that we are hardly prepared to accept Jeremiah's verdict that knowing God is equated with showing mercy to the poor and needy. This judgment is all the more serious when we realize that our wealth is at least partly at the expense of the dispossessed people. Ours remains the kind of world where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And are we all that concerned? The Bible says that that concern is what it means to know God.  

       This is also the verdict of the New Testament, especially as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, who, while he was not in stark poverty, was a poor man. But he was not always poor. According to 2 Cor. 8:9 he was once rich in heaven, but for our sake he became poor "that you through his poverty might become rich." But it is heavenly riches that Jesus brought to us. In that passage Paul, like Jeremiah, identifies the grace of God with rich sharing with the poor like Jesus did. Likewise in Philip. 2:5-8 the apostle refers to the preexistent Christ as being in the form of God and equal with God, and yet "he made himself of no reputation, taking the form of a servant, and coming in the likeness of men." He goes on to say that Jesus humbled (or emptied) himself, taking on human form, and at last died on the Cross. That is how the Messiah knew God: giving himself to others. It is in that context that Paul urges us to have the mind of Christ and to be like him. And we are never so much like Jesus and never so close to the heart of God as when we are giving ourselves to others. 

       If we interpret the Scriptures aright on this subject, we can only conclude that, whatever else may be involved in knowing God, there is no way to know God apart from a sacrificial concern, motivated by love and mercy, for the wellbeing of others.  

       In fact, the verdict of Scripture demands that this is the essence of religion, fellowship with God and a compassion for suffering humanity. One prophet weighed the question as to precisely what God requires, and he got his answer in terms of "Doing what is right (justice), loving mercy, and walking humbly with God" (Micah 6:8). When Jesus moved toward a bottom line of what religion is all about, he came up with the two greatest commandments: loving God with all our hearts and loving our fellow human beings as we love ourselves. (Mk. 10:29-31)  

       What is religion all about? Knowing God. And what does that mean? Love (mercy) and justice. In the Bible love and justice come to mean the same thing, or we might say that justice is love distributed. Just as knowing God and loving God are often equated. As in 1 Jn. 2:3: "Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments." As the apostle continues it becomes evident that the main point of keeping God's commandments is to love (do justice to) one's fellow human being: "He who loves his brother abides in the light" (verse 10); "He who hates his brother is in darkness." (2:11)  

       Knowing God is many things. It is making God the center of our lives; it is enthroning Him as King in our hearts; it is practicing the presence of God; it is fellowship with God; it is seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. And to the Christian knowing God is to know Jesus Christ, who is the prefect revelation of God. And it is in Jesus that we find the perfect expression of what is basic in knowing God, the giving of oneself to those in need. 

       While I have used the subject of knowing God to illustrate how we should not neglect the profundity of the Bible with such oversimplification as "It means what it says," the subjects that could be chosen are endless. What did Jesus mean by his frequent references to the kingdom of God, whether "Thy kingdom come," The kingdom of God is within you," or "Everyone is violently pressing into the kingdom"? Clearly, it does not help all that much to simply say it means what it says.  

       I was impressed with this insight from John C. L. Gibson's commentary on Genesis, in reference to the first chapter of the Bible: "It has that strange mixture of simplicity and profundity which is the mark of all great literature." And he might have added that you don't interpret any great literature by simply saying it means what it says.  

       What is the meaning of Bacon's immortal line "Knowledge is power" or Socrates' "The unexamined life is not worth living," or Shakespeare's "To thine own self be true"? Or these gripping lines from Tennyson? 

Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing 
      purpose runs,  
And the thoughts of men are widened with the 
      process of the suns.  

       And so with Paul's love hymn in 1 Cor. 13: "Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." We probably never do more than to play around the edges of what great minds have sought to convey to us. The words themselves may be simple enough, but the tapestry of the thought is woven at a level that seems always to be just beyond our reach. I am amazed that so much sadness, meaning, and truth could be crowded into a single sentence as this one from old Abe Lincoln not long before his assassination: "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." We might say that Lincoln meant what he said, but one could write a long chapter on our country's most tragic era around that single sentence. It means what it says? That is to trivialize it. 

       It remains to be said that the Bible sometimes does not mean what it says. The commentaries are not sure what Jesus meant by "Lead us not into temptation," but since God does not tempt man anyway they are sure that Jesus did not mean what he seemed to have told his disciples to pray. And we all agree that when he said, "If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you," he did not mean that sin is to be dealt with through eye surgery. And Ps. 121:1 means the opposite of what it says, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help" (KJV), for the poet is saying his help does not come from the hills where the gods of the Canaanites dwell, but, as the next verse indicates, his help comes from the Lord.  

       This is enough to make the point that the Bible is not as simple as we sometimes try to make it. It is a book (or many books) that needs a good teacher, and so God has placed teachers in the church. And the Holy Spirit is our teacher. And with a few helpful aids, one can go far in teaching himself, especially when with childlike faith he comes within understanding distance in his passion to know. -the Editor