Lesson 8: The Right Use of Scripture
The Use of Scripture
The “use” of Scripture refers to the process of working with and from Scripture to construct and to cultivate a biblical vision for life or, in other words, making disciples from Scripture by developing doctrine, determining ethics, and ordering worship with Scripture.
This lesson considers how we can obey the call to use the Bible rightly as we interpret diverse genres (Lesson 5), read theologically (Lesson 6), interpret the whole Bible with Christ as the key (Lesson 7), and apply the text (Lesson 9). It seeks to answer questions like:
- How can we use narratives from the OT as we teach Christians today?
- How should Christians use OT laws as we formulate answers to pressing ethical questions?
- Can we use OT promises to encourage one another in the faith?
- Should we use the OT vision for flourishing in Wisdom literature as we seek to walk in wisdom’s path today?
- How should we use the Gospels and Acts as we develop a vision for a new church plant?
- How should we use the commands in a NT epistle to order a church today?
- How can we use Revelation as we seek to make sense of our world and to live faithfully in a tumultuous age?
When we use Scripture rightly (that is, as God intends), we develop true and life-giving doctrine, faithful ethics, and worship that pleases our Lord. Yet, we have to consider a sobering reality: We can also use Scripture wrongly. When we do so, the cost is immense: false and death-dealing doctrine, faithless ethics, and worship that our Lord detests.
The Wrong Use of the Bible
Scripture and history recount numerous examples of those who have used Scripture wrongly, often because of their wicked desire to justify their own sin, to deceive others, or to establish idolatrous worship (2 Peter 2). We see this today in the West when people use Scripture to affirm LGBTQ+ identities and practices or to promote the idolatrous worship of a political leader or movement.
We can see the cost of using Scripture wrongly by considering one example from history. In the mid-1800s, some American Christians used the Bible to construct an idolatrous theology that affirmed white supremacy, to develop wicked ethics that promoted the abhorrent system of American slavery, and to wrongly order churches according to unjust racial hierarchies.¹ Government leaders and church officials misused Scripture by ignoring or omitting verses, stories, and whole books of the Bible that would have confronted such an idolatrous system. Laws prevented enslaved people from obtaining whole Bibles and from learning how to read them. Church leaders and denominations depended on tithes from the profits of slaveholding members and so used Scripture to justify their wickedness as a means of appeasing them.
Revivals in religion, and revivals in the slave trade, go hand in hand together. The church and the slave prison stand next to each other, the groans and cries of the heartbroken slave are often drowned in the pious devotions of his religious master....While the blood-stained gold goes to support the pulpit, the pulpit covers the infernal business with the garb of Christianity. —Frederick Douglass, quoted in Through the Storm, Through the Night by Paul Harvey.
Some even used Scripture to develop deceitful catechisms. These wicked catechisms misused Scripture to control enslaved people by the idolatrous theology that undergirded this wicked institution:
What did God make you for? To make a crop. What is the meaning of “Thou shalt not commit adultery?” To serve our heavenly Father, and our earthly master, obey our overseer, and not steal anything. —quoted in Jones, African Americans and the Christian Churches: 1619-1860, 89.
To see the Bible used to accomplish such vile and unjust ends ought to grieve and disgust us.
But to see the Bible misused so grievously ought not to shock us. God’s Word is utterly good and completely trustworthy. But, Satan has been twisting God’s words to accomplish his wicked schemes since the Garden. Was not our Lord crucified by the Scribes and Pharisees, who used God’s Word to justify their killing of the Living Word? Still today the children of the devil murder and lie, twisting and misusing the Scriptures like their father, the devil. Indeed, twisting the Bible and using it wrongly is one of Satan’s favorite strategies:
- In Genesis 3, Satan twisted God’s Word to deceive Eve.
- In Jeremiah’s day, false prophets misused God’s promises about the Temple to wrongly comfort the people of Judah as they continued in their wickedness and idolatry (Jeremiah 7:1–15).
- In the Gospels, Satan tempted Jesus with Scripture (Matt 4:5–7).
- In the epistles, the apostles warned against opponents who misused the Law to obscure the gospel, to deceive Christians, and to dismantle the church (Gal 1:6–9; 2 Pet 2:1–3).²
- In Revelation, false prophets teach and deceive among the churches (Rev 2:14–16, 20–23) and deceive the world by speaking with Satan’s own deceiving tongue (Rev 13:11, 14–17).
List one other example from the Bible where Scripture is misused to deceive or to otherwise harm others.
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The Right Use of Scripture
The only antidote to the wrong use of Scripture is the right and proper use of Scripture.
Our call is to use Scripture rightly. To use Scripture as God intends, we must...
- ...develop doctrine rooted in the true Christ
- ...determine ethics that represent him rightly
- ...order worship and churches in a way that pleases him
The only antidote to the wrong use of Scripture is the right and proper use of Scripture. Indeed, the Bible does not merely note that Satan and his children use the Bible wickedly and deceitfully, it demands that we resist such wickedness by using Scripture rightly. Take some time to read through the following Scripture texts. Some of them, like Jeremiah 7 and Matthew 4, demonstrate an instance when someone countered the wrong use of Scripture with the right use of Scripture. Other texts, like Deuteronomy 8 and 2 Peter 3, call us to use and to live upon Scripture generally. Finally, in the passage from 1 Timothy, we hear Paul denounce false teachers for not using Scripture (specifically the Law) properly.
And you shall remember the whole way that the LORD your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. —Deuteronomy 8:2–3
This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: “Stand at the gate of the LORD’s house and there proclaim this message: Hear the word of the LORD, all you people of Judah who come through these gates to worship the LORD. This is what the LORD Almighty, the God of Israel says: Reform your ways and your actions, and I will let you live in this place. Do not trust in deceptive words and say, ‘This is the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD, the temple of the LORD!’ —Jeremiah 7:1–4 NIV
Then the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, “‘He will command his angels concerning you,’ and “‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.’” Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” —Matthew 4:5–7
We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murders, for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjuerers – and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me. —1 Timothy 1:8–11 NIV
This is now the second letter that I am writing to you, beloved. In both of them I am stirring up your sincere mind by way of reminder, that you should remember the predictions of the holy prophets and the commandment of the Lord and Savior through your apostles... —2 Pet 3:1–2
The good news is that the Bible does not merely demand that we use it rightly. It also provides us with its own example regarding how to use Scripture rightly. In lessons 6 and 7, we established what the proper use of Scripture involves: (1) reading theologically (the four branches) and (2) reading with Christ as the key. In this lesson, we consider more closely how the Bible models the proper use of various genres (Lesson 5). To accomplish this aim, each step focuses on one biblical genre, considers biblical examples of the proper use of that genre, and proposes an interpretive principle rooted in the Bible’s own example.