We Don't Always Want To Interpret Correctly - 40
The heart wants what it wants.
Here is an important couple of sentences to keep near to your brain as you wrestle with Scripture in the years ahead. They will remind you to keep your nose clean. They will guard the wonderful truth of Scripture from YOU.
These are the words of the prophet, Jeremiah. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? ‘I the LORD search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.’”1
What do you need to know about yourself? You are selfish and sly. It is very likely that you will not want to obey God in all things and that such a poor condition of the heart, will cause you to read Scripture in a way that allows you to disobey.
Commenting on his film, Schindler’s List, which is a movie based on the atrocities of the Holocaust, Steven Spielberg suggested that people are good by nature, and have to learn to hate. The bible, however, does not support this claim. It is the reverse. Man is born sinful by nature and has to learn to do good.2
The difficult question is, how do you know when you are lying to yourself? If we believe the Bible to be true, then we must conclude that millions upon millions of people have chosen self-deception over truth. How? They have run headlong into false religions, humanistic philosophies and all manner of false teaching that denies God’s good Word and His Gospel. As Romans 1:25 says, “…They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever!”
This suggests the people are mini-tyrants. We think we’re kings! We think we get to decide right and wrong, truth and error, value and worthlessness. We have made ourselves out to be gods.
Thankfully, when God rattles our cage and implants Himself and His Word in us, there comes a constitutional change. We are born again. We become different. However, sin has not been completely eradicated. It still resides in us.
But now we have choices to make in order to grow and mature by setting our hearts on God, or to continue to play around on our tiny thrones and set our minds on the flesh (sinful nature). The deception of our heart is still quite common and much time and love of God is required to mortify the sin in us.
You can see how that old man might get in the way of Scripture interpretation. Can’t you? The old man will look to be influenced by “bible interpreters” that allow him to be comfortable in his own skin. Or, he might simply remain uniformed by avoiding reading passages altogether.3
Jeremiah 17:9-10
Spielberg might be able to make an argument that man was originally good by nature, for God did make man upright in the Garden, but he has gone in search of many schemes. Ecclesiastes 7:29.
This is a more prevalent problem today.