Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Marsha's Musings: Rightly Handling the Word of Truth

Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. (2 Timothy 2:15 ESV)

The important thing here is rightly handling the word of truth.  In other words, not twisting up Scripture to our own liking, adding to it, or subtracting from it, but believing what God has said. 

Because it is translated into English from Hebrew and Greek, sometimes it's good to have a Greek/English inter linear New Testament on hand or a Strong's Concordance or Vine's Expository New Testament Dictionary on hand. These will help you gain a better sense of what some passages of the Bible are saying.

More than just rightly interpreting the meaning of Scripture, though, we need to correctly apply it to our lives.

Both, correct interpretation and application are necessary to rightly handling the word of truth. First, we need to correctly understand it before we can correctly apply it.

If we let our Bibles just fall open and read without learning the context, we might read one day that "Judas went and hanged himself" and the next day read "go thou and do likewise".  Without proper context and understanding what are we to make of this?

Of course this is exaggeration and a funny well known example but it gets the point across. Rightly handling the word of truth would solve a lot of problems in this world.

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children. (Hosea 4:6 ESV)


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