UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE
UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE – 1. When God gave mankind the Bible, He also summarized His wisdom and eternal plan in it, but mankind did not understand much about the Bible, but on the contrary, condemned the Bible according to their own personal views. The mystery of the Bible is that God used metaphors and figures as examples and arranged His words in no particular order, so that mankind could not use their own abilities to interpret the Bible, but could only understand the Bible by its own interpretation, that is, comparing and contrasting, cross-referencing the Bible verses with each other, especially using the entire Bible to explain the Bible verse being studied, not picking up a certain Bible verse and interpreting it according to one own ability.
Before going further on this issue, let us consider a typical example from the Bible, that is, the horror of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages. At that time, the Catholic Church did not fully understand the meaning of believing in God and worshiping Him with the heart, as revealed in John 4: 23. God is omnipotent, He sees the hearts of those who come to Him, so forcing people to follow a religion and accepting certain rituals from a human perspective is not pleasing to God. The actions of the Catholic Church have given the world today an excuse to criticize the belief in God. At that time, they did not understand that loving God must come from a willing heart and must follow God’s standards, not through coercion or fear of being killed if they did not follow it. Forcing others to come to God in this way only creates hypocrites, believing in God in outward form but with hearts filled with anger, resentment, bitterness, and hatred for faith in God and the organization that forced them. Because of their ignorance, wickedness, and plots to gain personal and institution benefits, they forced others to come to God according to their views, not the Bible views. Today in the world there are still religions that force others to come to their beliefs in this way, such as Islam, and even threaten to kill those who leave the religion in the form of honor killing.
UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE – 2. The Bible is criticized and condemned not only because of the errors of the churches but also because of the errors of individuals in understanding the Bible. Many people think that with their own abilities, with their education and higher degrees, with their positions in the church, they can easily interpret the Bible verses. But such thinking is wrong. Let the Scripture speaks for itself is a clarion against the hubris that turns God’s Word into a mirror for mankind own biases. It’s like Isaiah 55: 8-9 puts it: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Stack a thousand doctorates against that vastness, and they crumble like sandcastles at high tide. The Bible isn’t a puzzle for human intellect to crack; it’s a living voice (Hebrews 4: 12) that unfolds its depths through its own harmony, cross-referencing light to shadow from the creation symphony in Genesis to the eternal chorus in Revelation. The trap that so many fall into, even believers, is that they lean on commentaries or credentials like crutches, forgetting Proverbs 3: 5-6: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight.” Peter warned against private interpretation in 2Peter 1: 20. It’s the root of so much distortion, where a verse gets yanked from its thread in the divine tapestry and twisted to fit agendas. For example: On slavery, folks grab Exodus snippets and miss the Jubilee freedom bells in Leviticus 25 or the brotherly bond in Philemon. On freedom, they spotlight license in the garden and overlook the relational wisdom woven through Psalms and Proverbs that guards it. The whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27) is the antidote, verse upon verse, building like stones in a wall, each locking the next into place. Therefore we should understand that God doesn’t leave us floundering in that humility. He invites us to “search the Scriptures” (John 5: 39), promising the Holy Spirit as our guide (1Corinthians 2: 10-12), Who searches “even the depths of God.” No seminary required, just an open heart, time in the text, and ears tune to its echoes across the Bible, then we can understand why the fisherman Peter got revelation on a rooftop, and why it happened as the scholar Paul bowed to Damascus dust.
UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE – 3. Let’s take Psalm 137:9 as an example to illustrate what we are discussing here. Many people have condemned this verse, and Palestinian terrorists killed the daughter of an Israeli official in the same way. But what does this verse really mean? We must rely on the truth of the Bible to explain difficult verses (John 8: 32), not just take it at face value. The truth of the Bible is eternal and unchanging, and one of those truths is that God is Love (1John 4: 8), and the mystery of the Bible is that God uses everything from real-life situations, historical events, to songs and poems to teach mankind about avoiding sin as soon as possible. So when Psalm 137: 9 speaks of crushing the children of Babylon against a rock, it is referring to the need for mankind to be completely free from sin and pride, because Babylon is a symbol of Satan’s sin when he was in Heaven (Isaiah 14:12-14). That means that when the desire to commit sin and pride just appears in the heart, like a child who has nothing to cause fear, people, especially those who have believed in God, must immediately and decisively eradicate those thoughts, because those things do not please God (Proverbs 8:13, Colossians 3:5, Jude 1:3). Understanding verses like this means using the Bible to interpret the Bible, not using one’s own ability to understand the surface meaning of the original verses.
UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE – 4. The Bible does not justify slavery or subjugation. People make that mistake by misunderstanding the Bible, because they picked just one verse to criticize the whole book. The Bible does not want slaves to revolt because of the violence would affect everyone, but the Bible teaches everyone should love others like loving oneself. That teaching was lost on the slave owners. God give everyone the freedom to choose to follow His teachings or not, so, if the slave owners really loved God, they should free their slaves, because they, the slave owners, surely, don’t want to be a slave. But they, even were Christians, liked to follow their selfish interest rather than to obey God’s command and the world think the Bible is wrong.
The cherry-picking verses is a fast track to misunderstanding the Bible’s deeper ethic, it’s like judging a symphony by just one note. The texts regulating slavery in places like Exodus 21 reflect the harsh realities of ancient Near Eastern societies, where bondage was often economic or war-related debt servitude rather than the chattel racism of later transatlantic horrors. God meets people in their cultural mess, offering guardrails to humanize it (no kidnapping into slavery, fair wages, Sabbath rest for all), but never an outright blueprint for oppression. The real message is in the New Testament’s arc toward liberation: Paul’s letter to Philemon urges the release of the runaway slave Onesimus “no longer as a slave but a beloved brother,” subverting the system from within. And Galatians 3:28 levels the field: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. That’s not endorsement, it’s a quiet detonation of hierarchies. And there is the Golden rule in the Bible that many have been forgetting about it, as Matthew 22:39’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself”. It is the litmus test for any Christian practice. If empathy were the default, slavery crumbles instantly, no one chains another after imagining the irons on their own wrists. Yet, selfish interests blinded slave owners to that truth, twisting Scripture into a prop for profit. It’s the ultimate irony: The faith birthed by an enslaved Messiah who flipped tables on exploiters became a shield for the very chains He broke. History vindicates the effect of the Golden rule if people actually followed it, as abolitionists like William Wilberforce and Harriet Beecher Stowe wielded that same love ethic as a sword against the trade, proving the Bible’s trajectory bends toward justice when not warped by sin. God’s gift of choice amplifies this: Freedom isn’t just escape from Pharaoh’s whips but the daily grind of choosing love over license, as in Galatians 5:13 “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love”. Slave owners had the volition to obey, and they did not, because pride and selfishness had locked the door from inside. Therefore, the fault lies in human selfishness, not in the teachings of the Bible.