Growing up in the Pentecostal movement and now having a Torah-based perspective has left me wondering how it was that I could have misinterpreted the Bible. There are many things that I wasn’t taking into account but I’d say the main interpretative mistake I was making was having the “New Testament” be more authoritative than the rest of the Bible. Simply speaking, taking the Torah seriously and literally was not even a thought that entered into my head as I interpreted the Bible.
The dispensational paradigm I was studying within didn’t allow me to simply accept the whole of God’s Word as authoritative. If the Torah said “keep the Sabbath,” I had to filter that through what I thought the New Testament had to say about the issue. It wasn’t enough that God Himself simply commands the Sabbath to be kept in a specific way; I had to find the “deeper meaning.”
Additionally, I didn’t really seek to find the historical and cultural context of the Gospels and Epistles. So, not only was I interpreting the Torah through the New Testament, I was interpreting the New Testament as if it was written by modern day Evangelical Christians.
The fact that there are explicit examples of Yeshua, Paul and the Apostles keeping the seventh-day Sabbath and participating in the Temple/Synagogue model of worship didn’t even make a dent in my thinking process in regards to my own life.
Too often, we as Believers, have tried to make the Bible fit our lives. It’s time to make our lives fit the Bible!
January 8, 2009 at 1:27 am |
I think the whole bible should be read IN CONTEXT. It’s a dangerous thing to read and apply it any other way.