What Causes Us to Fail to Rightly Divide God’s Word?

Nearly all of us are willing to concede that we are not right about everything we believe. We all have errors in our thinking and would love to correct them. Trouble is, we’re not always so sure where to find them. We affirm God’s Word is true in all that it teaches. We affirm that we believe all that it teaches. But we don’t. Why is that?

First, because we are sinners. Though it is unspoken, most of us carry with us this first rule of interpretation- whatever this text might be saying, it can’t be calling on me to change. Though the Bible says otherwise, we tend to think we’re just fine. Sure, we might slip up here or there. But overall, we’re wonderful people. James says the Bible is like a mirror that shows us what we are, and when we move away from it we forget who we are (1:23, 24). We don’t know ourselves because we don’t like what we see in the mirror. So we shroud God’s Word in the cobwebs of ambiguity and confusion.

Secondly, sometimes it isn’t ourselves that we don’t want to change, but what we have already learned. Because truth is one, every change in our convictions has a ripple effect that impacts everything else we believe. We have no hermetically sealed convictions, and so often come with a hermeneutic that says “No changes allowed.”

It may be that we learned this idea, or that system when a student. Maybe it feels like rejecting an idea would mean rejecting the one who taught it to us. We are, in short, sometimes more loyal to who teaches us than the Word they might have misunderstood. We must remember that whenever the Bible changes our view, we have actually remained loyal to our foundational principle, that the Bible is true in all that it teaches.

There is a third source, however, that we often miss. My father used to say that while a lack of knowledge of Hebrew or Greek, or an ignorance of ancient near eastern mores can cause us slip ups, the majority stem from something else. A failure to understand basic logic. It is because we are prone to jumping to conclusions with insufficient evidence that we sometimes err. Or because we miss when the evidence is compelling. We succumb to a bevy of informal fallacies.

We err in our thinking. Just as the fall impacts our bodies, our wills and emotions, so it impacts our minds. Such doesn’t mean we can’t reason well, anymore than wayward emotions mean we can’t feel rightly. It does mean we ought to be on our guard. It means a simple study of logic basics may bear good fruit in our understanding.