A Hermeneutical Problem

I know that by putting a fancy word in the title some people may not bother to read this, thinking that there is nothing there for them.

I decided to leave it in there, because life is like that.  Growth requires that we stretch ourselves and learn new things.  And those who don’t want to grow will miss out on things, though they often won’t know that they did, because they didn’t see what they might be missing.

I used the fancy word, because you will encounter Bible teachers who will use fancy words in their teaching, and the fancy words might intimidate you into thinking that they knew what they were talking about.

I say this kindly, but this is a very important hermeneutical problem, and you will hear different things, and you need to answer it for yourself. 

The term ‘hermeneutics’ has to do with how to interpret something, in this case, how to interpret the Bible. 

In this case, they will use another fancy word here, genre (john-er, with a softer j-sound).  Basically, what they’re saying is that different types of writing require different ways of interpreting them.  If a poem says that “the cow jumped over the moon,” we should recognize that this is poetry and is not meant to be taken literally.  So, no, a cow did not in fact jump over the moon.

So too in the Bible, we have songs, proverbs, poetry, and apocalyptic literature, and we should not take them literally.

You can make the case that the moon shall not be turned to blood, literally, but then there is the expression: ‘one of you shall chase a thousand, and two of you ten thousand.’  This expression is found three times in the Bible in various forms: Leviticus 26:7,8; Deuteronomy 32:30, Joshua 23:10.

Obviously, we can’t take that literally.  Right?  “One of you shall chase a thousand?”  Really?

Except that it did happen, literally, at least twice in the Bible.

In I Samuel 14, Jonathan went off to face the entire Philistine army by himself, and God gave him the victory.  And Gideon faced an army of over 100,000 soldiers with a force of 300.  Gideon had more soldiers at the beginning, but God told him to send most of them home.  God didn’t want any natural explanations for the outcome of the battle.

People are so smart today that they believe there are natural explanations for everything. 

And you, when you read the Bible, will encounter verses that may sound too good to be true.  And you have to decide if the Bible means what it says or just exaggerated for effect. 

Remember.  For a miracle to be a miracle, the situation has to be hopeless, with no way out.  And God will ask you: Is anything too hard for God?  (Jeremiah 32:27)

The challenge of life and the Christian life is to keep our focus on a God who is invisible and who speaks in a still soft voice, while we are bombarded constantly with noise, music, video, and talking heads. 

So we read the Bible to hear God’s word to us, and it may be in the form of what we call poetry.  And it may say something that sounds too good to be true.  And you have to decide if that’s what God meant or not.  I’m just saying: don’t assume that it is not, just because it’s poetry.  You might just miss out on your very own miracle.