Our small group just finished reading through Dane Ortlund’s book – “Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners” (which I highly recommend), and in chapter 8 we came across a really helpful section on how to avoid the pitfalls of reading the bible from the wrong lens. He gives a list of 9 common but wrong ways to read the bible and finally what he believes is the right way. For me personally, I could identify different seasons of my life where I fell into primarily reading scripture from many of these wrong approaches. Perhaps when you read them, you will notice the same thing. While these approaches have some truth to them, if you make them your dominant lens by which you read scripture, the result will be shallow, confused, despairing or cold reading of God’s Word. My prayer is that each of us will turn and read our bibles through the lens of the gospel.
“Perhaps it seems obvious that the Bible is good news. How else would we read it? Here are nine common but wrong ways to read the Bible:
- The warm-fuzzies approach – reading the Bible for a glowing, subjective experience of God, ignited by the words of the text, whether we understand what they actually mean or not.
Result: frothy reading. - The grumpy approach – reading the Bible out of nothing but a vague sense that we’re supposed to, to get God off our backs for the day.
Result: resentful reading. - The gold-mine approach – reading the Bible as a vast, cavernous, dark mine, in which one occasionally stumbles upon a nugget of inspiration.
Result: confused reading. - The hero approach – reading the Bible as a moral hall of fame that gives us one example after another of heroic spiritual giants to emulate.
Result: despairing reading. - The rules approach – reading the Bible on the lookout for commands to obey to subtly reinforce a sense of personal superiority.
Result: Pharisaical reading. - The Indiana Jones approach – reading the Bible as an ancient document about events in the Middle East a few thousand years ago that are irrelevant to my life today.
Result: bored reading. - The magic-eight-ball approach – reading the Bible as a road map to tell me where to work, whom to marry, and what car to buy.
Result: anxious reading. - The Aesop’s Fables approach – reading the Bible as a loose collection of nice stories strung together independently, each with a nice moral at end.
Result: disconnected reading. - The doctrine approach – reading the Bible as a theological repository to plunder for ammunition for our next theology debate at Starbucks.
Result: cold reading.
There is some truth to each of these approaches. But to make any of them the dominant lens through which we read Scripture is to turn the Bible into a book it was never intended to be. The right way to read the Bible is the gospel approach. This means we read every passage as somehow contributing to the single, overarching storyline of Scripture, which culminates in Jesus. Just as you wouldn’t parachute into the middle of a novel, read a paragraph out of context, and expect to understand all that it means, you cannot expect to understand all that a passage of Scripture means without plotting it in the big arc of the Bible’s narrative. And the main story of the Bible is that God sent his Son, Jesus, to do what Adam and Israel and we ourselves have failed to do – honor God and obey him fully. Every word in the Bible contributes to that message… The Bible is good news. It must be read as gospel. And the result of this approach is transforming reading. We grow.”
– Dane Ortlund, Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners
