Why is there so much confusion regarding the teachings of the Bible?

Yet, terrible as it was, this and even worse is the condition of the professing Church of God to-day. You may say, "Yes, I see how wrong people are." But look within and you will see the counterpart of all the wrong there is around you, in your own heart. We have not come here to run down our fellow-Christians. We are come to humble ourselves before God and to learn of Him. If we are not spiritual we shall not profit much by the guidance which the scriptures give, and unless we are humble and broken in spirit we shall go utterly wrong in our interpretations. We only understand scripture up to the measure of our spirituality and by the Holy Spirit's teaching, and if we are not spiritual we shall go astray even though we have the scriptures. I will prove this to you. Look at 2 Peter 3:16; there, in speaking of the apostle Paul, he says, "As also in all his epistles, speaking of these things in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction." What did they do with scripture? Why, they turned it up the wrong way, and to their own destruction. It is very easy to do that if unlearned and unstable in the things of God. We may be learned and stable in the things of this world, but this will not help us unless taught of God and established by Him. Our present spiritual condition is the measure of our understanding of the mind of God. Having been spiritual yesterday will not enable me to understand to-day. Hence it is that we see sometimes the mighty man of yesterday misses the simplest road to-day. Why is this? He is out of communion, and is seeking to interpret God by means of his intellect and not by the Spirit of God. There is no possibility of getting the mind of God merely by reading the scriptures intellectually. How differently people interpret scripture. Why is this? Because there is so little spirituality in us.

"No prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation" or, more literally, "of its own interpretation." This does not mean as the Romanists pretend that no private person has any right to concern themselves as to what Scripture means, but only to trustfully accept what the Romish "church," as represented by Pope or council, declares its meaning to be. It is rather a warning against treating each individual prophetic utterance as though it were by itself, a kind of self-contained saying to be interpreted apart from the mass of prophetic teaching. All prophecy is connected and inter-related and to be understood only in connection with the whole. It was never uttered by the will of man but by inspiration of the Spirit of God. He used different men in different ages, but His one mind pervades it all. Each individual prophetic utterance will only therefore be properly understood and interpreted as it is seen in relation to the whole, of which it forms a part.

If an artist in furniture designed an exceptionally fine wardrobe and entrusted the work in twelve sections to twelve different joiners, anybody who endeavoured to "interpret" any one of the resulted pieces of joinery by itself would surely reach some strange conclusions. No reliable or satisfactory interpretation would be found until it was seen as related to the whole design. Thus it is with every prophecy of the Scripture, and here is found the reason of the many opinions and even heresies which we have to deplore.

But there is a notable sign appended. "When he had said this, he breathed on them, and said unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost." Probably there are many in this place who are not ignorant of the correspondence that has been carried on but recently on this very passage. It has clearly proved the conflict of opinion, even in leaders of the same religious system. Nevertheless, many more now present will be surprised to learn the total uncertainty of professing Christian teachers, and that they only agree in being all far from the mark. You, who are accustomed to read the Scriptures in faith of God's teaching by the Holy Ghost given to you, will hardly conjecture the aberrations of Christian men from the truth. We all know that in our day most flatter themselves that there has been a great advance in the knowledge of the things of God. What means, then, this inability to gather and give out with clearness the revealed mind of God in a matter of such moment as these words of our Saviour? How is it that, now eighteen centuries and more since, one hears no better than the crudities of the fathers or the guesses of their children?

All this will be fully admitted in human affairs; but, in the things of God, men think themselves entitled to exercise their private judgement. It is a fatal mistake. God has given us His word; and that word is so plain that wayfaring men, though fools, need not err therein. Hence, therefore, if we were all guided by that word; if we were all to bow down, in a spirit of unquestioning obedience, to its divine authority, there could not be conflicting opinions and opposing sects. It is quite impossible that the voice of holy scripture can teach opposing doctrines. It cannot possibly teach one man Episcopacy; another, Presbyterianism; and another, Independency. It cannot possibly furnish a foundation for opposing schools of thought. It would be a positive insult offered to the divine volume to attempt to attribute to it all the sad confusion of the professing church. Every pious mind must recoil, with just horror, from such an impious thought. Scripture cannot contradict itself, and therefore if two men or ten thousand men are exclusively taught by scripture, they will think alike.

This is one grand leading point throughout the Book of Deuteronomy, as we shall see in the progress of our meditations; and never was there a moment, in the history of the church of God, in which it was more needful to urge home on the human conscience the necessity of implicit obedience to the word of God. It is, alas! but little felt. Professing Christians, for the most part, seem to consider that they have a right to think for themselves, to follow their own reason, their own judgement, or their own conscience. They do not believe that the Bible is a divine and universal guide book. They think there are very many things in which we are left to choose for ourselves. Hence the almost numberless sects, parties, creeds and schools of thought. If human opinion be allowed at all, then, as a matter of course, one man has as good a right to think as another; and thus it has come to pass that the professing church has become a proverb and a byword for division.

Therefore, the sharp-edged teaching of 'all Scripture' tends to be in disrepute today. As men did with Jesus in His day, so now, they bow it out. They seldom allow Scripture to dictate to them where obedience will cost them much. There seems to be only a few people who are ready to receive and welcome all the truth of God. There can be no other reason why all Christians are not of one mind today, than that they do not desire at all costs to follow the truth. The Lord Himself says, “he who wills to do God's will, shall know of the doctrine” (John 7:17). How could it be otherwise? What then does the confusion in Christendom tell of the condition of God's people?

History given before-hand, as One alone is competent to give it, is given; not to gratify curiosity about the future, but as practical wisdom for the wise in heart, that the servants of the Lord may find the path wherein to walk and to serve Him (Rev. 1:1). Exercise of conscience will be needed to understand it, far more than grasp of intellect, and we need not wonder at diverse interpretations. Yet the Lord expects us to be able to see clearly through the veil (Mark 4:13); and without certainty no application can be safely made: Scripture must first of all be for "doctrine," in order that it may be for "reproof, for correction; for instruction in righteousness" (2 Tim. 3:16).

Christendom has suffered for centuries from the insistence by some of a title to interpret Scripture, with disastrous consequences to the individual and to the Church of God: meanings have been read into, and out of, large portions of the Word of God which the terms of Scripture themselves, in the passages concerned, do not authorise or clearly express.

Interpretation: The sceptic, if ever the eye of such scanned these humble pages, might well point mockingly to the divisions of Christendom as evidence of sorrowful divergence in the interpretation of the word, for all alike appeal to the same word. And this may be carried a stage further; even those, such as Christadelphians, who are not recognised as Christians by orthodox belief, appeal to the word as the basis and ground of their destructive doctrines. And nothing would be more foolish than for us to attempt to hide the solemn fact that true men of God have not only disagreed concerning the interpretation of scripture, but have also divided in the Church because of that disagreement. However, in the overruling mercy and goodness of God, a very great body of essential truth has been held throughout the Church, (or, perhaps, I should say, the churches), in all ages. And it is profitable study to consider that body of truth, and to rejoice that it includes so much that is infinitely precious to every redeemed soul.

This leads us to remember how one ought to lean upon the Spirit for the right use of scripture, and also in speaking on it, for He alone knows its right and suitable application. We also learn why the best commentators must be so entirely imperfect, or I would say, we see the evil of the best commentators. For they cannot express the applicable power of the divine mind in the circumstances of the person reading, but merely what their mind has received out of it at the time of writing. But this may not be at all what the individual or church needs, or the Spirit would give at another time: and this too, on the supposition that every comment is right as far as it goes, — is a part of the divine mind in the scripture. Hence the poverty of understanding, and the systems also into which men have fallen, and hence also, partly, that divisions in the church have been established as they are.