Stress Test Devotional April 20
April 20, 2024
DAY 24
The fundamentalist solution to fears about the status and authority of the Bible will not stand however. For it misses the way the meaning of words is connected to context. Comparing contexts is what allows us to decipher the meaning of ancient words to begin with. Words depend on sentences, sentences on paragraphs and privacy graphs on literary units and literary units on the broader story of scripture. Interpretation is inevitable as the contexts grow. The Bible is simply not a collection of simple propositions.
Jesus uses story and parable and various figures of speech to convey his truths, and this does not mean that he has a low view of scripture. In fact, he insists that scripture is eternal, authoritative, and unchanging. Why, if God wanted to reduce his truth to simple propositions that were somehow obvious or self-authenticating, would Jesus have taught us as he did?
Do you have a method for understanding scripture?
Start with Jesus as the center of the story and read back to the O.T. and forward into the N.T. beyond the gospels. Use faithful intelligent tools.
FAMILY TIME—
Which is your favorite story told by Jesus.
Pick one and interpret it together.
