Interpretation Matters Series, Part 5

“I know God’s going to bring my children back to me,” he said. It was difficult for me to hold back a grimace. He’d been divorced, and his children had been estranged from him for years. Yet he exuded confidence that God would reunite him with his children. “God’s been showing me these promises in the Bible that he’s going to bring my children back,” he continued.

This was a sad scenario. I knew what passages he was talking about, and they didn’t make such promises. This man’s confidence was as strong as a rock, but it rested on a foundation as thin as a spider’s web. He had tragically misunderstood God’s Word, and it had given him a false hope. What could have prevented this? Among other things, one of the most helpful would have been understanding the author’s intent behind those Bible passages.

One of the best tools in your Bible study toolbox is the author’s intent. Try to figure out why the author wrote the passage you’re reading. What did the author intend for the original audience to understand when they read that passage?

Why Does the Author’s Intent Matter?

When someone writes something, they intend to communicate a certain message. This means readers cannot reinterpret the writing to mean whatever they want, and if an author’s writing is misunderstood, they may rightly be upset. Imagine if you wrote a letter to someone you love, intending to communicate how much you love them, but they interpreted it as sarcasm that mocked them. You’d understandably be upset.

Or imagine the consequences if a general communicated orders to his soldiers, but they thought, “Surely that’s not what he wants us to do. He must mean this.” Then they follow their reinterpretation of the orders.

Similarly, if we want to understand the Bible correctly, we must seek to understand the message that the author originally intended to communicate. That is the true meaning of the text, and if we ignore that, there may be serious consequences. Many applications or theological conclusions may grow out of that one meaning, like branches from a singular tree trunk, but there is still only one meaning. And for those applications and theological conclusions to remain accurate and legitimate, they must remain in line with that original intended meaning.

What about God’s Intent?

Some argue that Bible passages can have multiple meanings because the human authors intended one thing while God intended another. However, the Bible never indicates this. Instead, when God moved men to write his inspired Scriptures, his intended meaning included the intended meaning of the human author. God’s intended meaning may have included more than the human author understood (1 Peter 1:10-12), but it was not different.

For example, when Isaiah wrote Isaiah 53, predicting the suffering of God’s Servant Messiah, he didn’t know the details of when or how that would take place. God obviously did, but that doesn’t change Isaiah’s original meaning.

How do You Find the Author’s Intent?

Sometimes figuring out the author’s intended meaning is easy. In John’s Gospel, John clearly tells us that everything he wrote in his gospel account was to show that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, so that we would believe in him and have eternal life (John 20:30-31). Everything in John’s Gospel contributes to that intended meaning in some way.

Sometimes it’s harder to figure out the intended meaning, but through the Holy Spirit’s illumination and your own diligent study, you should be able to come to a reasonable conclusion. To work towards this, first find out who the original author and audience were for whatever passage you’re studying. Next, figure out the culture in which those groups lived, and when the author wrote the passage. Then seek to determine if the author wrote for a specific occasion, such as correcting problems in a church. Finally, look at what kind of genre the writing is and how to interpret that genre. (We’ll look more at history, culture, and literary genre in future articles.) You may not be able to answer all these questions, but you should be able to find enough information to give you a confident understanding of the text.

With that in mind, how should the man I mentioned at the beginning have understood passages where God promises to bring back children? Those passages, such as Isaiah 60, are Old Testament prophecies. They were written by prophets, like Isaiah, to encourage Israelites who had been exiled from their homeland. God was promising to restore and rebuild Jerusalem, which had been destroyed. Some passages predicted the historical rebuilding of Jerusalem under Zerubbabel, Ezra, and Nehemiah, while others predict the end-times glorification of Jerusalem. These are not blanket promises for anyone who has estranged children.

Furthermore, these prophecies were written as poetry, meaning that not every detail needs to be taken strictly literally. For example, the “mother” in these passages is usually Jerusalem. And while the restoration literally included children returning to Jerusalem, the “children” in these passages more broadly refer to God’s exiled people returning to their homeland. So, then, what relevance do such passages have for us? That’s somewhat beyond the scope of this article, but we can answer it briefly. These passages remind us of our identities as exiles living in a foreign world, and they encourage us that our exile will also end (1 Peter 1:1-9). Just as God promised to rebuild historical Jerusalem and then fulfilled that promise, so he has promised to bring us safely to our eternal home, the New Jerusalem in the new heavens and earth (Revelation 21-22). That’s an interpretation and application in line with the original meaning of those passages, and it’s a promise in which you can have a solid, true hope.