Wrestling with the Spirit's Role in Interpreting Scripture

I’ve been reading for my Biblical Interpretation class this afternoon and have been excited by, but have also been wrestling with, what it means that the Holy Spirit illuminates Scripture for the Christian.

“The Spirit convinces God’s people of the truth of the biblical message, and then convicts and enables them to live consistently with that truth. The Spirit does not inform us of Scripture’s meaning.” (Biblical Interpretation, Klein, Blombert, Hubbard Jr.)

This makes sense to me and I don’t disagree with it. Though the Spirit could give us supernatural knowledge of what the word “propitiation” means without having to look it up, He rarely if ever does so. No matter how hard we might pray to be able to understand what’s happening in a given story or verse from Scripture, we generally have to do the hard work of looking it up in a commentary or doing some historical research.

I’ve often wondered how, if all Christians are filled with the same Spirit of Jesus Christ (which I do believe), and if the Spirit teaches us the meaning of Scripture, how is it that we come to so many different conclusions and implications based on the same passages of Scripture? How does one congregation in the Bible Belt end up regularly protesting the funerals of soldiers while other groups of Christians choose to love and serve the families of those soldiers? We’re reading the same Bible, aren’t we?

Maybe, in light of what I’ve been wrestling through, Christians can take the same passage of Scripture and do two drastically different things with it because one person has an incredibly incorrect view of that passage’s meaning – regardless of the fact that they’re both filled with the same Spirit.

In my 8 years as a Christian, I have almost always asked the Spirit to “teach” me when I open up the Word, but I’m beginning to wonder if that’s what I should be praying for.

Maybe I should be asking the Spirit to reveal the Father to me as I seek to understand Scripture correctly, to increase my passion and conviction that God wants to use the Bible to change my life and the lives of others that He might get more glory, and to help me apply the truths that I discover.

“Though scholars possess an arsenal of methods and techniques with which to decipher the meaning of the biblical texts, interpretation falls short of its true potential without the illumination of the Spirit. Neither methodology nor the Spirit operates in isolation from the other. Neither is sufficient in itself. (emphasis mine)

…Yet in seeking to hear His voice, the interpreter becomes open to true understanding – to allow the text to fulfill God’s purposes for it…We must ask God to assist our study and to speak to us through it so that we might understand his truth and will for our lives.”

I’ll be wrestling and praying that the Spirit might illuminate for me even here and now more of how His ministry works that I might be able to more fully allow Him to use the Word to work in and through me.

-CK