Wednesday, June 29, 2016

MANY PEOPLE SAY THAT THE BIBLE IS HARD TO INTERPRET. Maybe They Mean The Bible Is Hard To Understand. This is because everybody interprets everything they see, hear and read.

Harry Riches
Happy Riches answers



People find the Bible very easy to interpret. This is because people are always interpreting what is written in the Bible to mean what they want it to mean.
Why are people always interpreting the Bible? This is because every one of us interprets everything we hear and see according to our own worldview.
We might say that we will accept the definitions of words as described in a dictionary. We then use the definition of those words to interpret all the other words we read and hear. Even if we do this, we are still going to color our interpretation of events in accordance to our own experiences and our understanding of those experiences.
When you seek to ask what people think is the hardest verse to interpret in the Bible, we really need to look for a verse that is so obvious to everyone in what it states that it is impossible to interpret.
The first verse in the Bible says, “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.” We might think that the meaning of that verse is so obvious that there is no need for interpretation, yet people will begin interpreting “the beginning” to be something different to what another person understands it to be. People have different interpretations of who God is. People will interpret how the Heavens and Earth were created differently. As for the Heavens, these do not necessarily mean the night sky; they can mean anything.
The Earth might be the only thing that is difficult to interpret in that verse
because most people will accept this as a reference to the ground upon which we stand.
Surely, “You shall not steal” (Exodus 20:15), would have to be the hardest verse to interpret, because people understand that this means, which is “not to take anything without permission”. Every law court understands this.
However, when it comes to “you shall not murder” or “you shall not bear false witness” or “you shall not commit adultery” the interpretations are numerous.
Some will say that I am addressing the idea of misinterpretation rather than interpretation, but that is merely a moot point because people will say that anyone who does not interpret as they do has misinterpreted. People are always misinterpreting the Bible according to someone else’s interpretation.
The questioner is probably seeking to find out if somebody understands everything in the Bible and has one verse that the person finds difficult to interpret. This is an assumption, of course. Which indicates the difficulty that comes with understanding much that is written; for often, what is written (or said) is misinterpreted because everything is interpreted.
However, there are some things that when you read them, are so obvious that they make sense. (As you will find at the link below.)

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