Of course today, well, on the one hand you have the church of Rome. This is the great problem: that the people who teach wrong things – whether they may deep down be genuine, or whether it is the phonies who are in the majority among them – have never grasped the nature of the Bible. They do not see that this is God's inerrant word. This has all the authority of God. When we come to the Bible, it is the sacred Scriptures. It is, in the sense that it is God's word, a holy book, and we come with care, and we caution ourselves. ‘I must be careful. I am answerable to God. I cannot just freely go through this book, interpreting it as I would like, making it mean what I want it to mean, looking for confirmation for something which is my idea. I have got to learn how to interpret and understand what the Bible actually says, because it is my authority, and God will judge me on the basis of how I behave towards his word. So I come with a degree of fear in the wholesome true sense, and I deeply respect it. But these unruly ones don't understand. ‘Oh, it is the word of God’, they think in their minds. ‘The gist of what God desires is in here.’ But they don't seem to grasp, it is not just the gist of what God desires; it is everything: his commands, his examples, his promises, his warnings. All the doctrines that are here are perfect.
This Bible is perspicuous; it is understandable. It isn’t a mysterious book. It doesn't have an esoteric nature – in other words, only a special anointed person can understand it. In the church of Rome, the pope's interpretation of Scripture is everything, and down the years Catholic tradition has interpreted the Bible to very often mean the exact opposite of what it means to you and I according to plain sense. The Catholic says, ‘Oh, that is the way it is; it’s a mystery book. It has this esoteric aspect. Only the anointed, the pope, can interpret it, and has the right to do so. And even some Bible believers think rather like this: ‘This Bible means what it means to you as an individual. Another individual can read a different meaning.’ No, although some things are difficult to understand., It is understandable. It provides us with rules for interpretation.
One of the great rules of interpretation in the Bible is that we compare the word with the word, Scripture with Scripture. We don't land on one text and build a great castle of understanding on that text. We refer to other passages that teach the same kind of thing, and we put them together, and we learn and understand. At the time of the Reformation, Martin Luther had a term for this. He spoke of the analogy of faith. It sounds like a mysterious term, but what he meant by this was that all the unassailable, incontrovertible doctrines of the Bible must be brought to bear on every individual passage. The faith interprets the faith. The Bible gives you some principles and teachings which it repeats ever so many times, and if you learn them in a systematic way, they form a kind of grid for your understanding. An example is in the letter to the Hebrews 6:4-8. You could get the impression that even as a true and earnest Christian you could lose your salvation. But when you understand the doctrines that are constantly taught and are unassailable in the New Testament – one of them teaching the perseverance of the saints: that a true believer cannot lose his salvation – then that cautions your initial hasty understanding of Hebrews 6. With that in mind, you say, ‘I must have read this wrongly’, and you read it more carefully and, inevitably, you realise, I was too hasty. It doesn't teach that a true believer can lose his salvation, and you see the full sense and the real meaning. The light of Scripture shines on the more obscure or difficult passage and brings its sense to light; Scripture interpret Scripture. You have to know the rules for the interpretation of Scripture. That is why when someone comes to the Lord. we always recommend that they read a good book of Christian doctrine. We love the old one: Thomas Watson's Body of Divinity. It is quite short. He was a Puritan, but he wrote in the style of a much later writer, almost a twentieth century writer, and is easy to follow. There he takes all the unassailable doctrines of the faith – working according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism – and he puts them in one simple volume. It's like going into a garden, a beautiful garden, and seeing a tremendous array of flowering plants, all kinds of things, all mixed up. But if you want to study them, you have got to arrange them in their families to understand them, and that is what a book on botany, or a good book on gardening will do. It will put all the plants in their proper categories and families. That is what a book of doctrine is. It takes Scripture and it puts it into an easy to see order, the main doctrines. And that is your key to interpreting so many passages that you never understood before. Every believer is helped by reading something like that early in the Christian life, in order to grow fast and understand the word.