As Christians, we orient our lives around studying, reading teaching, and trying to understand the Bible. The Bible is the most mysterious book. The more insight we gain, the more we realize how much we don’t know. It inspires, encourages, frustrates, and provokes. The Bible is the most amazing, beautiful, deep, inspired, engaging collection of writings ever.
But sometimes when I hear people quote the Bible, I want to throw up. Sometimes people will back up their points with Bible quotes, and everything within me says “There’s no way that’s what God meant.” For example, the verse that has been used to oppress and mistreat women. There are verses before and after and in other places in the Bible that suggest women have the authority over men, and men must submit to their wives as Christ submitted to the church, basically, He died for us, the church. The point here is that it is possible to make the Bible say whatever we want to.
Let’s take a straightforward verse, Leviticus 19:18. Even people who don’t believe in God would agree that loving your neighbor is a good thing to do. But even this simple verse raises questions: How do we live this verse out? What does it mean to love? What isn’t love? Who is your neighbor? Is your neighbor next door or is it every single human being on the planet?
Who decides the answers to these questions? Who decides if they made the right decisions? Someone has to make decisions about this verse. Someone has to decide what it looks like to put flesh and blood on this command. The verse has to be interpreted, because if it isn’t, the verse can’t be put into action. Somebody has to decide what it means to love your neighbor.
The ancient rabbis understood that that Bible has to be interpreted, and they understood their role in the community was to study, meditate, discuss, pray, and then make those decisions. A rabbi would put actions into two categories: things the rabbi allowed and things the rabbi disallowed. Example, Exodus 20:8, one rabbi would day you could walk a certain distance, and another rabbi would say you could walk farther, but had other limitations. Different rabbis had different sets of rules, basically, lists of things they allowed and disallowed. These rules came from their interpretations of the Scriptures, and it was called a yoke. When you followed a rabbi’s teachings, you were taking up that rabbi’s yoke. . Jewish culture was about action, so taking up the yoke did not mean to know it, it meant to live it.
The rabbis had technical terms for allowing and disallowing. Allowing was known as loosing, and disallowing was known as binding. So the rabbi would bind and loose certain actions. Eventually, the rabbi would give his students the authority to bind and loose. This was called “giving the keys of the kingdom.” (Matthew 16:19)
Jesus gave us, his followers, authority to make new interpretations of the Bible. Also when we do debate, discuss, pray, wrestle with the texts and then make decisions about the Bible, somehow God is involved.
The Bible is a communal book. Back in the days, one town may have one copy of the Scriptures. It was written to people in community with each other. Binding and loosing can only be done in community. This way one person could never get too far in a twisted interpretation because others would be able to give him or her insights and perspectives he or she would not have had. (Matthew 28: 18-20) Everyone’s interpretations are based on their perspectives.
People are still doing this today. Ever notice the vast selection of interpretations of the Bible? There are the HCSB, NIV, NIR, KJV, NKJV, CEV, and many other editions in English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and many, many other languages. There are words in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic that do not directly translate into English which leaves the translators with the challenge of how to best represent the text. I’m sure they asked colleagues, prayed, and reviewed their translation many times until deciding that it seemed good to them and the Holy Spirit. (Acts 15:19) What if we were to say about everything we do “It seems good to the Holy Spirit.”
We can only bind and loose if we believe the Bible is as alive today as it was ever. God brought the Israelites from the kingdom of Egypt, where they were slaves, into freedom, and God continues to do this day. Everyday, God brings people, who were in darkness and bondage, slaves to their sins, into freedom and light, and continues to bring us out. It happened then, and it happens now. David and Goliath. Adam and the Apple. This is why the Bible is so powerful: these ancient stories are our stories. These stories are reflective of how things are.
The rabbis would say the Bible was like a gem with seventy faces, and each time you turn the gem, the light changes, giving you a reflection you have not seen before. The Bible has authority because God has authority and this book is a collection of stories that teach us about what it looks like when God is at work through people. This is why binding and loosing is so exhausting and exhilarating. We can only do it if we believe and see God at work now, here in this place. The Bible tells a story; a story that isn’t over; a story that is being told; a story that we have a part to play in.
At some point we have to have faith. Faith, that God is capable of guiding people; faith, that God has not left us alone; faith, that the same Spirit who guided Paul and Peter is still with us today. To bind and loose, we have to wade in and deal with all the parts of the Bible, the good parts, the bad parts, the parts we wish were not there, and the hard to understand parts. In Genesis 32, we find a metaphor for struggling with the Bible. Jacob is wrestling with an angel, and during the struggle, his hip was injured. God ends up blessing Jacob, but he still walks away limping. When we wrestle with the text, we walk away limping.
I think God knows what he is doing with the Bible. The question is, do we know what we are doing with the Bible? I believe the answer is yes, because every time we come together to discuss the Word, we are binding, loosing, wrestling, and limping away.
God has spoken, the rest is commentary, right?
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