Can You Make the Bible Say Whatever You Want?

Tom: Thanks, Gary. You are listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth, to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him.

Our topic for today is “the reliability of the Bible,” which is critical because as most of you know, if we can’t be confident that the Bible is reliable, then we can’t be sure we are really hearing from God even though the Bible claims to be God’s specific revelation to mankind. However, we have every reason to have confidence in the Bible and we’re supplying many of those reasons throughout our series on the reliability of the Bible. We’re utilizing Dave Hunt’s book In Defense of the Faith to furnish some questions on the subject as well as some answers. So, if you want to do a more in-depth study of the topic, Gary will let you know how to order the book.

Dave, our first question: “My psychology professor at the university claims that anyone can get any idea he wants out of the Bible. It can be made to say anything the person reading it wants to believe. And he says that’s the reason why there are so many differences among those who claim to follow the Bible, for example, between Catholics and Protestants and between the hundreds of Protestant denominations. How can anyone rely on the Bible for anything?”

Dave: Well, Tom, I’ve heard that idea expressed quite a few times. It’s amazing! Just logically, it couldn’t be true. If you could make the Bible say anything, then words apparently have no meaning. On that basis alone the Bible would be the most remarkable book the world has ever seen. If you can write a sentence and you can get many meanings out of it, that would be very difficult. You can’t possibly . . .

Tom: Satisfy—at least to satisfy lots of different people from different perspectives.

Dave: Yeah, the reason you can’t do that is because words have meaning. There are grammatical rules, and you just can’t make a sentence say anything you want it to say. The Bible, of course, does have some passages that are difficult to be understood, that would only be expected. If everything can be understood by a five-year-old in kindergarten, or let’s say a six-year-old who’s just learned to read—now there are many things that can be understood by a child, but there are other things that have much more depth.

In fact, the Bible—one of the things that I love about the Bible, I love this book, it’s God’s Word, you cannot escape that conclusion, but the Bible has such depth. You know, you wouldn’t take Shakespeare—and Shakespeare is fabulous writing; the man was a genius, brilliant, and had some tremendous insights, and so did Dickens—but you wouldn’t take their writings and study them over and over and over and find deeper meanings every time you studied them, that this just goes on and on and on. I learn more from the Bible every time I read it! I find things there I didn’t see before! It doesn’t mean you can make it say anything you want to, but it has a tremendous depth to it.

Tom: Dave, you know, there are two aspects of this. As long as we’ve been working together in ministry and looking . . . trying to encourage discernment, first in ourselves and then in others, we’ve seen people take scriptures, and it’s amazing—scriptures without any ambiguity, but they have twisted them around, or certainly interpreted them in a way that you would say, “That couldn’t be.”

I was trying to think, when we were putting together this program, about an example. Now, let me give you one, Dave. Now be kind to me on this, all right?

Dave: All right.

Tom: Suppose I invited you over to dinner . . .

Dave: Are you cooking?

Tom: I’m cooking.

Dave: Uh-oh.

Tom: No, wait!

Dave: Oh, you do very well on a barbecue.

Tom: Yeah, I do, I do—but this is spaghetti.

Dave: Spaghetti.

Tom: So I am having spaghetti, and you’re there. It’s just the two of us—our wives are off, and so on, and so you sit down and you look at your meal and you say: “Tom, what is this? What are these white things in my spaghetti?”

And I’d say, “Dave, that’s spaghetti and golf balls.”

And you’d say, “What are you doing here?”

So, Dave,  I say, “I got it out of the Betty Crocker Cookbook.”

Dave: I don’t believe this!

Tom: And you would say, “No, wait a minute! You misread that. It’s spaghetti and meatballs!”

And I’d say, “Well, what’s the difference, balls, golf balls, whatever?”

Dave: Sure.

Tom: The point is, anybody who is listening to this says, “This guy is a moron. He’s ridiculous!”

But, we have seen somebody take the scriptures and use almost as an obvious an error as something like that, but be satisfied with it.

Dave: Well, unfortunately, many people bring preconceived ideas to the Bible. We have to be very careful that we don’t. You can search through the Bible to try to find a proof text—you know the old saying, “A text without a context is a pretext.” You can try to find a verse that will support something if you pull it out of context. And, you know the ridiculous ideas—a man just opens his Bible at random and waves his hand and points to a verse and it says (he’s looking for guidance from God); it says “Judas went out and hanged himself.” Well, he doesn’t want that! So he closes the Bible and then flips it open again and points to a verse, and that verse says, “Go thou and do likewise.”

Well, you could get that sort of thing out of the Bible, but no one with any common sense would approach the Bible in that manner. You have to have a context, you have to know to whom this is being written, and you have to take the whole context of what it is saying. Now you could do that with anybody’s writing. You could do that with Shakespeare, or you could do it with anything if you take an isolated phrase or an isolated sentence here and there.

Now, this is what this person . . . I don’t remember this question, it’s many years ago—but if that’s what that person was thinking, then it just is irrational. You could do that with a law textbook or anything—just take an isolated phrase.

But the Bible—it holds together, it is consistent from Genesis through Revelation, though it’s written—we won’t go into details of that again, but by forty different people over a period of about 1,600 years, most of whom didn’t know one another. They had no contact, they came at different times in history, different cultures, and yet, their culture and their time is not found in the Bible, it does not influence the Bible. There is a continuity of this book, and this book is talking about God. It is introducing us to Him; it is telling us about man, and when you read what the Bible has to say about man—when you read, for example, the book of Proverbs, a terrific book for parents to read to their children every day. I can remember when I was a young person—believe it or not I was young once. And I would have verses from the book of Proverbs, stuck on the mirror, and on my desk, and in various places. In those days, if you started any verse in Proverbs, I could finish it. I don’t think I could do that—I’m sure I couldn’t do that anymore. But this is the Wisdom of Solomon.

Now, unfortunately, he didn’t always abide by the wisdom that God gave him, but tremendous counsel, tremendous advice to his son! But you have history in the Bible. You can’t just turn that into anything. You have specific incidents, you have places and people at certain times and events; you have prophecies. And, to make that statement about the Bible, it shows—I’m sorry—ignorance; it shows an unwillingness to learn. Anybody who is going to give some attention willingly, give some attention with an open mind to the Bible and will study it, they will just absolutely fall on their face in recognition that there is no book like this in the world! This is God’s Word, and to say, “Oh, you can just make it say anything you want,” it sounds like the person doesn’t really know the Bible, they don’t care to know the Bible, they’re simply trying to attack it, but that isn’t going to work with someone who knows the Bible.

Tom: Dave, what we find too many times—again, that’s the attitude: somebody just wants to pull it down, and they’re going on the basis of they “heard somebody else say . . . ,” and it tends to feed their attitude toward it, but they can’t justify it.

Two things—first of all, when you were talking earlier about when you read the Bible and then you read it again and pick up some verses here, and as you are going through, God is always speaking to your heart. Well, you just said that this was written over 1,600 years by more than 40 authors—and it’s the coherence—that’s what stuns me! Because, as we have said on this program many times, the Bible really interprets itself. You go from one scripture to the other, the cohesiveness, the continuity, but also, it helps you understand. Verses in this book help you understand, many times, verses in other books and so on. It’s fantastic.

Dave: Mm-hmm. Now, the Bible is written by God. It is spiritually discerned. You would expect there would be simple things for those who don’t know God that would convict them in their conscience with their need of a Savior, who would remind them of their sin. And, as you read the Bible, I mean, it just reveals the heart; it reveals the heart of each person who reads it and who will heed it, and it gives the solution. Now, you don’t have to be a spiritual giant to understand that. The Bible makes that very clear.

But there are other things that you have to be, first of all, born again of the Spirit of God, a believer indwelt by the Holy Spirit, because the things that are written are spiritually discerned. First Corinthians chapter two, for example, Paul says, “The things of a man only a man can understand. The things of God . . .”—I mean, your dog can sit there and whimper when you talk about your tax problems or whatever, but the dog doesn’t . . .

Tom: Empathy pains.

Dave: Right.

Tom:  It’s going to affect his meal.

Dave: But the dog does not understand, obviously, because only a man can understand the things of a man, the things that . . . and that is a tremendous subject in itself: the meaning of words, and the concepts that words carry, and these are all nonphysical ideas. We’ve talked about that in the past. Justice, for example, doesn’t have any texture, doesn’t have any weight, doesn’t have any smell, no taste, and so forth. It has nothing to do with this physical world, and yet, we have these concepts that are nonphysical, they’re not the result of electrical current in the brain, or chemical reactions, and so forth.

But there are things that are really only discerned, only understood. Now, that’s amazing again, because “only understood by the Holy Spirit,” so that a person can read this and not understand it at all. But those who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, because they have believed that Christ died for their sins, that He rose again, that He offers pardon as a free gift, and they have opened their hearts to Him. Christ has come to indwell them, the Spirit of God has come to indwell them, then they have spiritual understanding.

Now, even then there are concepts—for example, the Bible talks about “a babe in Christ.” A new Christian doesn’t understand everything that they one day will. Hopefully, as they grow, they mature, they read the Word of God, they study it, and they allow God to speak to their hearts through His Word and they become obedient to Him.

Now, if you’re not obedient, and you do not put into practice what God reveals in His Word, then don’t expect to understand much. He is not going to teach you when you are unwilling to learn. Now, Peter, in his second epistle, talks about the epistles that Paul wrote, so we have the testimony of Peter that Paul was writing scripture.

He says, “There are things that are hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable twist like they do the other scriptures to their own destruction.” So, going back to what you were talking about, yes, there are people who will try to make the Bible say what they want it to say, and you can take something . . . well, Tom, maybe I shouldn’t even mention this, but, you know, we have been dealing a bit with Calvinism in our newsletter, and I have just finished writing a book about it. Now when, for example, John:3:16For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
See All..., says, “For God so loved the world.” Well, I think it means world, but the Calvinist would say no that means the elect.

Tom: Dave, is that close to my golf ball analysis?

Dave: I think so. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever . . . ” (It sounds like He means whosoever), and you can go through the Bible and you can take that word, “whosoever,” and I challenge you to find anywhere that it means anything but, whosoever. When Jesus says, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink . . . .” Any man. He says, “If you are weary, heavy laden, come to me, I will give you rest.” But the Calvinist would say, no, that means the elect. And when Paul writes and says “God is not willing that any should perish,” the Calvinist says, no that means any of the elect.

Well, you just cannot find a basis in the Bible for making that change in the meaning. The only reason for it is because Calvinism requires it. I don’t want to offend my Calvinist friends out there—I have a lot of friends who are staunch Calvinists. We have a difference of opinion on this. But what I am trying to say is, if you take the Bible for what it says, take it at face value, don’t impose some idea upon the Bible that you’ve come up with or someone . . . John Calvin has come up with, and Augustine before him, and so forth. When the Bible tells us that God is not willing that any should perish, then I don’t think I can make predestination mean that He has predestined certain people to go to hell, and there’s nothing they can do about it! When He says to us to “Go into all the world, preach the gospel to every creature . . .” it sounds like, and He says, “Whosoever will may come,” and Jesus says, “If any man wills to do God’s will, he will know,” and then they try to tell you that you don’t have a will. So, I think I’ve got to accept what the Bible says, and I must be very, very careful, that out of determination to support a particular view, I do not impose my ideas on the Bible and make it say what it doesn’t say.

Tom: Dave, going back to the question, this person talks about the differences between Catholics and Protestants in terms of, I assume, how they interpret the Bible or understand the Bible. As a former Catholic, as a Catholic, I couldn’t really interpret the Bible myself. I could read it—not that I ever did or that we were really ever encouraged to—but still, Catholics today who read the Bible, they have to interpret it according to, not their own conscience, or their own study of the Bible, but according to the teachings of the Church.

Dave: Yeah, the Catholic Church is very clear: only the Magisterium can interpret the Bible, therefore, they must accept what the Magisterium says. Now, that simply isn’t true, and, you know, our ministry, and the very title of this program, Search the Scriptures Daily, comes from Acts:17:11These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.
See All..., where the Bereans are commended—these weren’t even Christians! They are up North of Greece, and it says, “They searched the scriptures daily to see whether what Paul said was true.” The scriptures can be understood by anyone, and we’ve gone over that before too. For example, Psalms:119:9(BETH.) Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto according to thy word.
See All..., “Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed thereto according to thy word . . . ” so that a young man can understand the Bible. Or 2 Timothy:3:15And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.
See All..., Paul says to Timothy, “From a child you have known the holy scriptures, which are able to make you wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.”

Well, Timothy learned the scriptures from his mother and grandmother, the epistle tells us, in his home. He didn’t check with the Magisterium. In fact, there was no Magisterium that existed. Psalms 1: “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly . . . ” and so forth. “ . . . but his delight is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate day and night,” and so forth.

So, we’ve talked about this before. You said earlier in the program, if the Bible isn’t God’s Word, forget it! If God hasn’t spoken to us . . . But just to claim that the Bible is God’s Word, if we can’t prove it, wouldn’t help either, so we must be able to prove it’s God’s Word. But finally, we must be able to understand it! If I have to look to some bishop or the group of bishops that make up the Magisterium in concert with the pope, they’re going to tell me what the Bible means, then the Bible was not written for me, and God is not in touch with me. I can’t know God, I can’t know what He says. So, just common sense would tell you that this is wrong.

Tom: Dave, there are many—not a lot—but those who were formerly Protestants, formerly evangelicals, who decided, they would say, “I want a one truth, I don’t want all of the diversity, all of the differences that I find in Protestant denominations. I want to go back to a religion that has a central truth.”

Dave: Sure. It’s a very simple problem, Tom. How do you know that this is the truth? So, why would you trust this religion? Why would you trust the pope? Why would you trust this church any more than any other church? “Oh well, we are the oldest church, and we go back to Peter.” Wait a minute! You don’t go back to Peter—we don’t have time to deal with that, Tom, but these popes were voted in. They were put in by mobs, some of them were put in by the emperor; they fought wars against one another; they killed one another. Some of them bought their way into the papacy, and to say that these are the successors of Peter . . . !

Even if they were the successors of Peter, never in the Bible does it say that Peter is the only one who can interpret. Never is Peter given some special authority. When Christ said to Peter, “I will give to you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, whatever you bind on earth . . . ” and so forth, that’s in Matthew 16. Christ said exactly the same thing to all of the disciples in Matthew 18. So, to suggest that one person can do your thinking for you and that he is the intermediary between you and God—we have talked in the past also. Matthew 23, Jesus says to the rabbis—He chastises them for this. He says, “You scoundrels! You set up a system of religion that is so complicated it would take a Philadelphia lawyer to unravel this thing, and the people are at your mercy. They’ve got to go through you to get to heaven!” And Jesus says, “That’s wrong!” He says, “If any man . . .” (going back to what we were talking about earlier) . . . if any man thirsts, let him come unto me. If any man wills to do God’s, he will know. God must be able to speak to every human being.

Tom: Dave, there is also another erroneous idea with regard to the Catholic Church having a central unified truth. Anybody who is a Catholic, or has been a Catholic, knows there is such a diversity from the extremely conservative, the Latin Mass, all the way to kind of an eastern mindset that’s very much into Buddhism and so on. So, there really isn’t that unity. But  . . .

Dave: They have as much diversity as the Protestants.

Tom: Exactly. So, how then should we live? By God’s Word. We’re going to be personally . . . this is why personal accountability is so important, because we all have to individually stand before the Lord, not as a group, not as a denomination, not as a church organization.

Dave: Amen.