As I read through an excellent chapter on God’s Discipline in Holiness by Grace, I realized I made a critical error in my talk on Interpreting Scripture. I swung too hard against the “God wrote the Bible to me” mentality in a whole section of the talk entitled “It wasn’t written to you.” I repeatly emphasized that Romans, Corinthians, etc were not written to us and that “we’ve got to get a grip on this if we’re going to interpret the Bible right.”
I still believe this is something we desperately need to “get”, but I regret that I didn’t tell the other half. Though Paul didn’t have you — or anybody remotely like you — in mind when he penned Romans, God did.
God, in His insane foresight and deep love for you, cared enough to preserve the letter and make sure you could, centuries later, read their mail. But you’ve gotta realize it’s still their mail. If you tell yourself, “well, God knew it would get to me, so there must be something hidden between the lines for my 21st-century issues” you’re kidding yourself.
No, God wanted you to get a copy of it and, in His insane mastery of space and time, even intended you to read tonight whatever letter it is that you’re reading. But He intended you to read it as His letter to them, first of all and to piece together what He was saying to them (no easy task, but not rocket science either). Only once you’ve understood His message to those Christians in Rome, only then can you rightly apply the message to your own life and struggles. Taking a sentence here and half-a-sentence there and applying them directly will spell disaster. You’ll find yourself running to your parents with “I was just reading the Bible and… God wants me to say ‘yes’ to Johnny!”
God, in His intricate foreknowledge, planned for you to read the letter you happen to be reading tonight — and for you to learn certain things from it. But those things He wants you to learn are things that’re actually there — the original meaning and principles initially directed to Christians in Rome.
PS: The chapter on Discipline that triggered this post has an amazing section that reveals from Hebrews 12 that every difficulty in life is from God’s intricate foreknowledge. Every single one is intended to train us — either training not to do something wrong we’ve been doing or training us to prepare us for future opportunities. I’ve always approached blessings that way (seeing through rose-colored glasses to read God’s love and care into every blessing of life), but I’d never thought of trials that way.
Update: God has more purposes for our pain than simply Corrective Discipline and Training Discipline (mentioned above). There is Preventative Discipline (Tony), An Opportunity to Witness to Non-Christians (Dax, Lauren) and An Opportunity to Share in Christ’s Sufferings (Peter: this would be a “heavenly” as opposed to an earthly purpose, for instance in the case of someone being martyred).
