Exegesis vs. Eisegesis: How do we know what the Bible means?
Understanding God's word rightly
It is becoming increasingly clear that many self-professing Christians - meaning those who claim the name “follower of Jesus” - do not know what His word teaches. And the few words they MAY know of it, they do not understand. You see, it’s one thing to be able to regurgitate the words. But another entirely to understand meaning.
Let’s say I tell my daughter to “break a leg” before her volleyball game. If she takes that literally and doesn’t understand it’s a figure of speech, the meaning behind the speech is entirely lost. If I tell my husband I’ll be upstairs “in a second” and he doesn’t understand that to mean “shortly” rather than an actual second, I’d seem like a liar or worry him with my delay.
These are silly examples because of COURSE everyone knows what a figure of speech is and of course we don’t take everything someone says literally. But by the same token, are we the least bit concerned with understanding what scripture actually means by what it says?
What we are seeing happen online (especially on Christian woman instagram) is a million voices who are CONFIDENT they know exactly that Jesus for sure would abolish ICE, but are twisting His word to defend this position. In reality, this is nothing new. In Galatians, Paul writes to the Galatian church and says, “O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified” (ESV). To understand the meaning of the word bewitched, we must review the context of Galatians 3:1–9.
False teachers had persuaded the Galatians that Gentiles should practice circumcision and other ceremonies of the Mosaic Law to be justified before God (Galatians 5:2). This directly contradicted Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith (outlined in Romans 5:1–2; 2 Corinthians 5:21; Galatians 2:16; 3:11–14). This is why Paul finds it necessary to remind the Galatians of the truth he had proclaimed to them.
There are similar false teachers operating today, working for their father the devil to obfuscate what scripture makes clear, to twist what God has made straight and to confuse what Christ has said in His word. The thing about false teachers is they always claim to be the REAL teachers of scripture. The TRUE Christians. The REAL ones who “love like Jesus.”
And so how can we know whether their claims are true or false? Hold it all up to scripture. There is but one standard by which we can know what God’s word means by what it says, and that is - ITSELF. Scripture interprets scripture.
This is a very trusty principle to employ when we aren’t sure what the text means. Often you will see progressives draw on ONE single verse to make their point.
“Rahab was an asylum seeker.”
“Jesus flipped tables in the temple and so he’d for sure abolish ICE”
“Open borders are loving because there are no illegal humans. We are all made in God’s image.”
Always with the out-of-context scripture. Always to serve their agenda. And always untethered from the whole of scripture. But our thread through the labyrinth of false unscriptural claims is letting scripture interpret itself.
When someone says, “Rahab was an asylum seeker” - meaning to insinuate that if this woman in the line of Jesus was counted righteous and saved for her acts of helping the spies escape, surely we should be for open borders. Only - HUH?
