Thou shalt remember that the Bible is an old book.
Can the Word of God mean one thing today and the opposite tomorrow? Obviously not. Therefore, the meaning of a Bible passage is not what you understand it to be, but what the original writers meant and the original readers understood. Did Jesus rise on Sunday or Monday? Europeans think ``the first day of the week,'' John 20:1, is a Monday, but the original readers under stood it to be Sunday.
If there is an argument about what the original readers actually believed, remember what Charles Hodge said:
We must distinguish between what the sacred writers themselves thought or believed, and what they teach. They may have believed that the sun moves round the earth, but they do not so teach. (Systematic Theology, page 170. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995.)The reason the Bible does not change its meaning as words change their meaning is that the meaning is what God intended, not what the original writer understood, and certainly not what today's reader understands.
For another instance, in Jn. 13:14-15 you would think that Jesus meant that foot-washing is a sacrament for all time, necessary for salvation. But it didn't mean that to the Apostles. To them, foot-washing was a necessary but menial service which you either did for yourself or accepted from the lowest slave on the totem pole. Therefore when a host offered his slave he offered a great courtesy, and when he provided water so people could wash their feet he was enabling them to freshen up, look their best and be comfortable at his dinner table. (Where, incidentally, the feet would be visible to all -- Da Vinci was more of a painter than a theologian, and at the Last Supper the Twelve reclined like banqueting Romans. They did not sit on chairs and neither Mary of Bethany nor Jesus went crawling under the table to do their foot-washing.)
Christians should be willing to do such things, if necessary, for the brethren. (Brethren? But what about the sisteren? Don't be silly, the cistern is where we pour the dirty water. But in Bible times it wasn't -- it was where they kept their fresh water between rainfalls.)
So to us also that passage means -- not that we wash each other's feet, which would be an embarrassing annoyance and an unpleasant inconvenience -- but that we be willing to do necessary menial services out of courtesy. If you want to do me a necessary menial service, leave my feet alone and volunteer to do my photocopying.
In similar fashion, we no longer ``greet the brethren with a holy kiss'' because that's not how brethren greet each other. In our culture, we obey Romans 16:16 by shaking hands.
We take historical context into account wherever possible, but remember that internal Biblical information is always more reliable than external historical records. A lot of history, as H. L. Mencken is reputed to have said, is bunk, self-serving propaganda, or downright lies.
In 1 Corinthians 11, St. Paul says it is a shame for a man to have long hair. How long is long? Why didn't Paul just give a maximum length? The reason is that Paul never intended to condemn hair of a certain length. He meant to condemn effeminate men. What his hearers understood him to say was that a man should look like a man to the people around him, and a woman like a woman. Among Americans, braids look feminine. To American Indians, the Vikings, and the Chinese, braids were a masculine hairstyle. Cutting his hair to my length would perhaps have made Cochise look womanish to his people -- affected and feminine. And some of today's female hairstyles are shorter than mine, but yet there's no doubt the wearer is a woman, from any angle or distance. Once when a college co-ed with a butch hairstyle bumped my fender and said ``I suppose you want my phone number,'' I answered her nasty tone of voice with an equally nasty ``I probably would, if you looked anything like a woman.'' And I heard a girl tell a guy that she thinks long pony tails make a man look like ...never mind.
Another area where you can get in lots of trouble by forgetting this Sixth Commandment is in time-reckoning. I almost got sucked into Herbert W. Armstrong's heresies because of this. He got a lot of mileage out of the fact that Good Friday to Easter Sunday doesn't add up to the ``three days and three nights'' required by Mt. 12:40. Well, as a matter of fact, yes it does. Please consider the following exercise in interpretation.
Mt. 12:38. Then some of the Pharisees and teachers of the Law said to Him, ``Teacher, we want to see a miraculous sign from you.'' He answered, A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of man shall be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.
To us, ``three days and three nights'' would be from sunrise one day to sunrise 72 hours later. But to a Hebrew, each day starts with the evening before (Genesis 1:5).
That should shake you up a bit. Let's shake you up some more. In Esther 4:16 we read that Esther commanded the people to fast and pray for her for three days and three nights before her visit to the king. But in chapter 5 we read that she went to see him on the third day -- that is 48 hours later or what WE would call TWO days and TWO nights. This is neither because Esther couldn't wait any longer nor because the people got too hungry. It's because the Jews count time differently. It's because the Jews count any part of a day as the whole thing. It's because the Jews call any day or any part of a day ``a day and a night.'' And we can see from the fact that there were only TWO dark periods in the 48-hour stretch which she calls ``three days and three nights'' that the Jews extended their time-reckoning back to the sunset preceding the first daylight.
So if you will let the Bible interpret the Bible (see ``The Third Commandment of Bible Interpretation,'') and remember that the Bible is an old book, you will see that Jesus did spend ``three days and three nights'' in the tomb. The three days were Friday, Saturday, and a tiny part of Sunday. The three nights were Friday night, Saturday night, and also the Thursday night which the Jews include as a part of Friday. Do not let your reason overrule these clear Scriptures. It is merely a matter of language and culture. The Hebrews would be just a puzzled by our insistence that George Bush was president for only four years, when by their time-reckoning they would call it five.
Exercise for the reader: Look up all passages that speak of and prohibit ``usury.'' See whether the word doesn't really mean ``interest that exploits the poor in time of need.''
Be careful to distinguish between what the ancient writers taught and what they thought. They evidently thought of a woman as a garden, passively receiving seed from the man, perhaps in the form of microscopic manikins. But they did not so teach. They may have thought that the world was a flat disk around which the sun revolved. But that isn't what they taught.
Unfortunately, this Sixth Commandment is used as a ``license to kill'' by the majority of modern ministers and Bible scholars (comparable to what the Bible calls ``scribes and Pharisees.'') Because it is an old book, modernist believe they can treat it as a human old book. Because many of the ancients believed myths and superstitions, they think the Bible is also full of myths and superstitions. Because some ancient writers made up faked speeches that great men might have spoken, modernists believe that the words of Jesus are faked speeches which the church thought He might have spoken. This form of unbelief goes by various names: Higher criticism, religious liberalism, modernism, ``the best results of modern scholarship,'' demythologizing, the New Hermeneutic, neo-orthodoxy.... All of them come down to one basic idea. That the Bible does not mean what it says; it means what some man says it means. And in so doing, modernists break the Third, Fourth, Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Commandments of this article. More important, they answer the serpents question ``Did God really say'' (Gn. 3:1) with a resounding, ``Of course not!''
The essence of modernism is to take a Bible passage -- say the ones that prohibit fornication -- and say, ``Ancient man believed that women were men's chattels and thus it was injuring some man if a woman had extramarital relations, but we don't believe that anymore.'' Unfortunately, every year they do that to a few more chapters of the Bible. Soon it becomes, ``Ancient man believed that the gods came down to earth, but we don't believe that anymore.'' Eventually, everything in the Bible becomes something that ``we don't believe anymore.'' Liberalism is unbelief in embryo. Eventually their ``interpretation'' of Holy Scripture winds up as Lenski described it in The Interpretation of Hebrews and James (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1966), page 516.
Modernists regard the whole Bible as outmoded Jewish literature and pick and choose from its contents what they need for their moralizing lectures.
By their fruits ye shall know them, as Jesus said. While individual liberals may be Christians, after a generation or two they are reduced to do-goodism. And even their do-goodism enters the service of evil as they support immoral sex education, the ``rights'' of pornographers and homosexuals, abortion, revolution, Communist regimes, and the socialist scheme to replace God and heaven as man's greatest good with the welfare state.