Gary responds to recent comments made by Glenn Beck on Tucker Carlson’s national tour.
The literal meaning of Scripture “embraces the normal, everyday, common understanding of the terms of the Bible. Words are given the meaning they normally have in common communication.” The interpreter should be mindful of the “historical setting.” Sentences of Scripture “should not be taken out of the space-time, cultural context in which they were uttered.” This next point is important: “It is the means by which the interpreter mentally transfers himself into the context in which the author uttered the words. This guards against the interpretive error of making the reader’s historical or cultural context the norm for understanding the text.”
Popular prophecy writers today introduce numerous qualifiers to the so-called plain sense/literal approach that applying the methodology consistently becomes nearly impossible for the average student of the Bible. That’s why many Christians are dependent on Bibles loaded with notes to tell them what the Bible means even though the text is right before their eyes and is clear enough on its own! Eager Bible students read bows and arrows, and someone’s note tells them it’s really missiles and launching pads.
The interpretive solution is found within the pages of Scripture itself. Those who first read or listened to the prophecy read and heard familiar place names that are mentioned elsewhere in Scripture. There was no need to have a scholar’s understanding of ancient languages or knowledge of distant geographical hot spots. These first readers could comprehend the rudimentary elements of the prophecy if they had only a basic knowledge of the Bible. The same is true for someone studying the Bible today. Setting, language, grammar, context, audience, and author perspective are all very important when interpreting the Bible, but these elements only take on meaning when they are compared with other Scripture passages. The biblical writers did not write in a vacuum. They wrote against the backdrop of what was written before, and in the case of the prophetic books, of what was to come. If you want to know what a word or phrase means in one passage, you will need to find other passages that use the same word or phrase. It’s not always this simple, but it’s the best place to start. The Bible is one book with a unified message.
This is why the Bible is the best interpreter of itself.
The Gog and Magog End-Time Alliance
Jet planes … missiles … and atomic weapons. You will search in vain in Ezekiel 38 and 39, and you will not find them. You will, however, find horses, bows and arrows, shields, clubs, and chariots. If the Gog and Magog prophecy was written for a time more than 2500 years in the future from Ezekiel’s day, why didn’t God describe the battle in terms that we could relate to and understand? Why confuse Ezekiel’s first readers and us?
Buy NowGary responds to recent comments made by Glenn Beck on Tucker Carlson’s national tour. Beck makes claims about the end times that he hasn’t studied or given thought about the implications. If we are “close” to the end, which is a prophetic inevitability, there is nothing we can do about it. The historical context must be considered to properly understand the biblical text.
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