KNOWING LITERAL SCRIPTURE IS NOT ENOUGH
The take-away message in this series of pages is that we need to be careful in thinking that we know God just because we can quote the Bible. Knowing the stories and scriptures well enough to locate them and quote them does not equate with understanding them in your heart. It is true that a measure of intellectual understanding generally (but not always) precedes spiritual understanding, but mere intellectual understanding is not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to understand with the heart, and the scope of what that may mean is not limited to the meanings of words created by and used by men.

God has designed a system in which he uses man’s words to communicate spiritual truth, but the truth does not  begin and end with the words. The words are only the vehicles through which God begins to reveal truths that can ultimately only be understood spiritually (i.e. with the heart). It all goes back to the fact that God is spirit and we are basically flesh. He is in the ongoing process of  transforming us from flesh to Spirit. Since words are creations of men, they are creations of the flesh, and God is trying to wean us off the use of literal words (i.e. seeing with our eyes and hearing with our ears) as He trains us to see and hear with spiritual  eyes and ears (i.e. our hearts). We can either work with God in this process or obstruct his efforts to train us. We obstruct when we proudly believe that we know what he is trying to say because we have a good intellectual understanding of the man-made words. That means we have an intellectual knowledge of natural truth but that our hearts have become calloused to spiritual truth. We participate with God in the process of training us when we agree in advance that symbolic interpretations exist, and then work (i.e. study, listen to his voice) until God reveals the spiritual understanding to us.

Since God is spirit, and since we are in the process of being re-created (i.e. transformed) into his image, we should not want to be satisfied with natural truth alone.  Therefore, we participate in the transformation process when we study the words with humility that allows that, in our fleshly nature, we do not really understand what God is trying to communicate to us, and then ask God to reveal the deeper spiritual truths (i.e. beyond the words) to us. If we do our part, he will be faithful to reveal those truths to us. But if we proudly stick to our intellectual knowledge, we inhibit gaining spiritual knowledge and limit our ability to know God more deeply. We can facilitate this transformation process by assuming that Jesus’ principle of speaking in parables is not limited to those scriptures that are specifically labeled as parables in the Biblical text. In other words, it is helpful to think of everything in the Bible as being a parable with a meaning that transcends the literal meaning.

It seems reasonable to us that God would apply that principle throughout the Bible and not just in New Covenant scriptures. In our experience, applying this perspective has made the way for understanding of many scriptures that are obscure, confusing, contradictory, and otherwise impossible to understand. And indeed they are obscure, confusing, contradictory, and downright impossible to understand — but we need to allow that this is true because we are limited by our understanding of the man-made words we read and by our natural intellect. But the real problem is that we do not know how to listen to God’s voice.

Would we dare to conclude that  God himself is also handicapped in his ability to explain what we find impossible to understand? Of course we would not think that, and yet we somehow resign ourselves to believing that understanding is beyond us, that we will never “get it.”

STUDY TIP: The truth is that we will not “get it” until we are know the difference between God’s written word and his spoken voice.

The attitude that some scripture is over our heads is in blatant contradiction to the doctrine that we are being transformed into God’s likeness.  If God can “get it,” we have the very real potential to “get it.” If we do not “get it,” the reason is that we have become so proud in our intellectual understanding of the man-made words that God has seen fit to harden our hearts to spiritual understanding. This is a very bad state to be in for many reasons.

One sad thing about this attitude is that it totally denies the truth that “All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” If we hold to the lie that the meanings of some scriptures are way over our heads and that we will never understand them, we, in effect, call God a liar. When this attitude is at work we not only deprive ourselves of understanding, but we also offend God. This attitude is not at all conducive to spiritual growth. On the contrary, it is an attitude that will yield spiritual death — not life. That is the saddest outcome of all.It is not an easy process to go through.

Part of the problem exists in those scriptures that are obscure, confusing, contradictory, and downright impossible to understand. Many pose real and difficult problems when it comes to taking a strictly literal interpretation of scripture. Consider, for example, many apparent commands to put someone to death by stoning. How does one deal with application of those scriptures when the only interpretation you use can be literal? Obviously something is lacking in our understanding, and that is the spiritual (symbolic) interpretation. So if anyone tries to tell you that the only way to interpret the Bible is literally, and that symbolic interpretations are wrong, don’t listen to them. They are false prophets.