Understanding the scriptures

Understanding. Gestalt. Seeing the whole and grasping in your mind the wholeness of it and how it all comes together and works together. Spiritual gestalt is very hard to achieve because of our scriptural citation methods. Knowing the individual verses of scripture and how to weave them together to tell a story or communicate a truth is powerful and important – but also severely limiting. The Bible as a collection of verses and stories from which to draw is only a shadow of what it truly is. Much division and controversy in the church is caused not by what the Bible does or does not say, but by our handling of it. Different groups treasure different individual verses while skipping over others. Thus different groups can quote from the same book in the Bible, even using some of the same verses and yet do so in support of opposing ideas. There have been times in fact where I have heard a sermon preached from one verse, that could have been completely overturned had the preacher simply read the next verse.

To achieve true understanding of scripture however, we must mature past seeing collections of individual verses of scripture, to seeing each book as a whole. I am currently studying Romans (I’m actually listening to it in the car over and over again). Within Romans are individual verses that, standing alone, are contradictory. This does not mean that the book of Romans contradicts itself. In fact, we humans use language in the same way all the time. We hold up opposing ideas, we compare and contrast them, we describe different aspects of a more complex whole – and none of these individual parts accurately explain the whole of a concept we are trying to communicate.

Communication…that’s what we must remember the writers were trying to do. They wanted – or God wanted to communicate something to us. We must hear them and him out completely if we are to have any chance of understanding what God is trying to tell us. If we just hear portions of the conversation, we will almost certainly misunderstand.

We hear the words a person says. We consider the meaning of those words. Then beyond that, we must understand what the person is actually trying to communicate, and finally, why.

We must learn to look beyond the mere words a person says to what they mean by those words. Without the greater context of the whole book however, how can we possibly do that?