In a previous article, we reviewed Duvall and Hays' book, Journey into God's Word, and the four-step "interpretive journey" it lays out for reading the Bible responsibly: grasping the text in its original setting, measuring the differences between that setting and ours, crossing the "principlising bridge" to identify the timeless theological principle a passage teaches, and finally applying that principle to our lives today. This article zooms in on the first and most foundational of those steps—grasping the text in their town—and on the tool that makes it possible: the fact that context determines meaning.
Scripture Is Clear and Able to Be Understood
The central thesis of this article is that Scripture is clear. It was written for ordinary people to understand. We call this the doctrine of the perspicuity (clarity) of Scripture, which affirms that "in His Word God has spoken so as to be understood; Scripture is understandable" (see a fuller treatment of this doctrine here).
The Bible Was God's Word to Others Before It Became God's Word to Us
That said, the Bible is a historical document, and so in our interpretation we must always ask: what did the original author intend for the original audience to understand? This matters because although the Bible speaks to us today, it had an original audience for whom God cared deeply. As William Klein1 puts it, the Bible was God's Word to others before it became God's Word to us. Scripture's message is time-bound, but it carries eternally relevant theological principles we can discover and apply. Our task in interpretation, then, is to move from what God spoke to the original audience to its significance for believers today, and context is what helps us recover that original intent.
Context Determines Meaning
When we ignore a text's context, we stand over the text rather than submitting ourselves to it, and we lose any real hope of recovering what the author (both divine and human) intended when the verse was written. Ignoring context lets us twist Scripture to prove almost anything. It also means we skip over the original audience entirely, jumping straight from the text to our own application without asking what it meant to the people who first received it. Every violation of context is a serious matter, because it treats the original audience as if they were merely a conduit God used to get His words to us. And ultimately, it dishonours God and impugns His character, as it suggests God did not care about the original audience at all. That would be inconsistent with His nature and attributes.
One Meaning, Many Applications
There is only one meaning for each text, though there are many applications. This principle is captured in the Westminster Confession of Faith, 1.9 ("The Unity and Clarity of Scripture"), which emphasises that:
the true meaning of any Scripture passage is "not manifold, but one." This rejects readings that impose multiple, conflicting meanings on a text. Instead, every passage has a single, coherent meaning intended by the Holy Spirit, though that single meaning may have many applications, and may itself be theologically rich or complex.
Jesus and the New Testament authors often argued that a text does not mean a but means b. In , for example, Paul clarifies his own earlier letter: "when I wrote to you... not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world." (See also ).
Jesus likewise often corrected the rabbis' misreadings of the Old Testament. And so, the meaning we derive from a biblical text must stand up to scrutiny. It must be consistent with the meaning the original audience would have grasped from the text. Only once we've established that meaning do we move to application.
The Problem with Subjective Interpretations of the Same Text
How often, in real life, do we say one thing but mean ten different things by it? Practically never. I'm writing this article while on holiday with my wife and three of our kids. Our oldest is at a church festival in another part of the country, and each evening we catch each other up via our family WhatsApp group. In today's update to our son, I wrote that we spent the day at a bookshop, went for walks, and spent time at a public park.
That message had one purpose: to keep my son updated. I chose my words carefully to convey how we'd spent our day, and when he reads it, he should understand exactly what I mean, based on the words I used and how I used them. The message means one thing, not two, three, or four. If it meant several things at once, my son would have no idea what I was actually telling him, and I'd be a poor communicator. If even we fallen creatures take such care in how we communicate, how much more does God?
It is true that God, the divine author of Scripture, being so much greater than we are, may mean more by than the human author understands – as we observe with the prophetic writings for example (). However, as Wayne Grudem points out, this fuller divine meaning is never less than, and never contradictory to, what the human author intended and understood.
Keeping all these in mind, how do we arrive at the meaning of a text?
Read Quickly and Slowly
The first step in interpretation is careful reading. As we argued in a previous article, we should train ourselves to read the Bible both quickly and slowly. Fast-paced reading lets us cover the whole Bible at a regular interval; knowing what the whole teaches is essential for rightly understanding its parts. Slow-paced reading, by contrast, is for serious study and memorisation. This is the pace at which we notice things like word repetitions, comparisons and contrasts, lists, conjunctions, and figures of speech.
The Meaning of Individual Words
A careful study of individual words, and how they're used elsewhere in Scripture, is a valuable part of the interpretive journey, what's often called word study. Open-access tools (such as crosswire.org or bible.org) let anyone check Greek and Hebrew roots and get a sense of a word's range of meaning.
For years, I thought James contradicted Paul on justification. says, "You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone." Paul, in , says, "For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law." I struggled to reconcile the two until a word study showed that "justify" carries two senses in Scripture: to be declared righteous by God, and to be shown to be righteous before other people.
That second sense is similar to how we use the phrase "the end justifies the means", by which we mean the end proves the means was warranted. Jesus uses this second sense in and : "Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds." James, then, corroborates Paul rather than contradicting him. God justifies us by faith alone; the justified believer proves that faith to others through good works.
The Immediate Context
Here we attend to the verses surrounding our passage, including the rest of the chapter, and the book as a whole. An example: I used to hold up as an anchor text for sexual purity, until I seriously considered its surrounding context (following Duvall and Hays).
A recurring theme in 2 Timothy is "the truth" (2:15, 18, 25; 3:7-8; 4:4), representing a summary of the whole Christian faith (1:14), which Paul calls the good deposit entrusted to Timothy, to be guarded and passed on to faithful men who will teach others also (2:1-2). Earlier in the chapter (vv. 14-19), Paul warns Timothy about false teachers in the Ephesian church, illustrated by the analogy of a household (vv. 20-21). The verses that follow (vv. 23-26) return to the content of that false teaching and how Timothy should counter it with gentleness. Right in the middle, in verse 22, Paul tells Timothy to "flee youthful passions". Verse 23 immediately clarifies what those passions are: foolish, ignorant controversies and arguments. Instead of being enticed by foolish, ignorant arguments and controversies, Timothy is to pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace with the true people of God. Read in context, it becomes clear that sexual temptation isn't in view here at all.
The Meaning of the Whole Bible
The Bible is one coherent message (), so any meaning we derive from a particular text must be consistent with the rest of Scripture. The Westminster Confession calls this the infallible rule of interpretation. WCF 1.9 states that the "infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself". This is also called the analogy of faith, meaning unclear passages must be read in light of clearer ones. Because all Scripture is God-breathed () and reflects His unchanging character, it never contradicts itself (; ); any passage can and must be interpreted in harmony with the whole.
The whole Bible is about God, so our interpretation should be God-centred. As God's self-revelation, every text invites the question: what does this tell us about God? And since Jesus is the centre of the whole Bible—as Wayne Grudem puts it, the New Testament flows from Him and the Old Testament looks forward to Him—we should also ask what a text reveals about the greatness of Christ. Jesus affirms this Himself on the road to Emmaus:
"And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself" ().
Biblical Interpretation as a Spiritual Discipline
Finally, we mustn't forget that the Holy Spirit is the supreme author of Scripture, and we can never interpret it rightly without His help (). We need to pray for His help to understand and apply Scripture rightly, and to remain humble, diligent, and submissive as we press on to know God in His Word. is a fitting prayer before any serious study of the Bible.
Closing Thoughts
Our interpretation of Scripture must be defensible; provable from the text itself, and able to withstand scrutiny. Meaning is not determined by the reader but by what the author intended to communicate. So, the right question isn't "What does this passage mean to me?" but "What does this passage mean?"
We haven't had space to consider application: what we do with that meaning once we've found it, our response to it. Knowing what a text means isn't enough; it must lead to action. And knowing how to apply a text is different from actually applying it. At the application stage, we should observe how the text's principle addressed its original situation, find a parallel situation today, and make the application specific. That, though, is a subject for another article, where we'll finally cross into "grasping the text in our town."
Notes
1. William W. Klein, Craig L. Blomberg, and Robert L. Hubbard Jr., Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 4th ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017), 312.
2. Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology: How to Interpret the Bible, on Apple podcasts; https://podcasts.apple.com.