Lecture 4: Four First Principles: Clarity, Accommodation, Progressive Revelation, Cross-Reference

The lecture, section by section

1. Clarity: the fog is ours, not God's

   Some give up on the Bible as too hard, but God is the best communicator of all and is not trying to mystify anyone. If we are in a fog, we imposed it ourselves through sin, neglect, laziness, or hostility. The principles of interpretation are keys that open doors, and as context, word study, and cross-reference are used, the treasury inside God's house keeps yielding: the word is a lamp to the feet, and the Spirit gives the believer the ability to appraise it.

2. Five evidences that Scripture is clear

   First, Scripture declares that men will understand, making wise the simple. Second, much of Scripture is clear immediately on reading, though passages like Hebrews 6 remain genuinely hard. Third, God promises to guide, directing paths by clearing the obstacles from them. Fourth, whole doctrines come into clarity when correlated: one God, the Trinity, the deity of Son and Spirit, inspiration, man's sinfulness, salvation by grace through blood. Fifth, even problem passages become clear on proper, prayerful study.

3. Knowing where to tap

   Every realm of life is unclear to the uninitiated: baking a cake, repairing an engine, a child's game an eight year old grandson must explain to grandpa. Rosscup tells of the repairman whose itemized bill read one dollar for fixing the problem and ninety nine for knowing where to tap. The principles of this course are the knowing where to tap, and he adds the story of a young John MacArthur told by his dean that he had missed the whole point of the passage, who resolved in humility that it would never happen again.

4. The wrong kind of accommodation

   Liberal theologians have long claimed the Bible's writers accommodated themselves to the errors of their day: that sacrifice is a slaughterhouse religion God never really wanted, that Adam was invented to meet a psychological need, that miracles need not be taken seriously, that Jesus erred or played along when he called the mustard seed smallest of seeds. The answer to the last is simple honesty about context: he spoke of the garden seeds of that day and place, and the whole objection melts. This kind of accommodation indicts Scripture and stirs unbelief, correcting God's word from a throne of intellect.

5. The right kind of accommodation

   God has wisely accommodated his revelation to human forms of speech so that man can understand, associating truth with things already familiar. The sower and the soils open the heart's response to the word; I am the door builds on the sheepfold already described in the context; the pure milk of the word nourishes growth as milk nourishes a body; the overcomer made a pillar in God's temple stands immovable forever. This accommodation does not falsify; it illuminates, and it reaches its grandest form in the Old Testament types that picture greater realities to come.

6. Accommodations we invent

   The interpreter can also fog the picture himself. One commentator read Jacob wearing Esau's garments as a picture of the believer robed in Christ's righteousness, turning an act of lies and deceit into an emblem of righteousness, a falsification out of his own brain. Well meant is not the same as true: man's word had been imposed on God's.

7. The branches put forth no effort?

   A second invented accommodation reads John 15 as teaching a Christian life of no effort, since a natural branch simply rests in the vine. Cross-reference dissolves it: the Scriptures ring with walking, fighting the good fight, and Paul's own testimony that he labored more abundantly than all, yet not he but the grace of God with him. The true point of the vine is union and communion, the close contact through which Christ's sufficiency bears fruit in active, dependent servants.

8. Progressive revelation is not evolution

   Progressive revelation must be distinguished from the naturalistic scheme that says religion evolved from many gods to one, read back into Genesis by later priests and carved into documentary theories. God could reveal truth in any age on the spot, and earlier records, genealogies carefully kept, even a log from the ark, could pass down under his providence. What the principle does mean is that God reveals himself gradually, with continuity, building light upon light, each generation accountable to be faithful with the light it has.

9. What the progression allows

   The progression allows advanced truth early, as monogamy stood in Genesis 2 as the original blueprint Jesus reaffirmed against divorce. It allows truths to remain, as nine of the ten commandments are carried into the New Testament. And it allows movement from the embryonic to the matured: prophecies given, then fulfilled in the birth, cross, and resurrection; the sacrificial system gathered up into the one offering. Galatians calls the old covenant elemental and preparatory; Hebrews opens with God's fuller speech in a Son; Peter shows the prophets searching what their own Spirit-given words meant.

10. Daniel's son of man, filled out in Revelation

    Prophecy shows the progression at work. Daniel sees one like a son of man come on the clouds to the Ancient of Days and receive a kingdom over all peoples. Revelation takes up the same figure, describing him in blazing detail in its first chapter and crowning him with gold in its fourteenth as he treads the winepress of the wrath of God. Later revelation does not correct Daniel; it expands him, agreeing and filling in the picture.

11. Incomplete is not incorrect

    If the New Testament fills out the Old, was the Old defective? No: partial, foundational, preparatory, even temporary, but never false. Arithmetic is not corrected by algebra; the type is like a soldier's photograph of his wife, precious and true, but no rival to the embrace when he gets home. So Leviticus 11 drilled Israel for centuries in distinction, until on a Joppa housetop God lowered the sheet three times and taught Peter that the lesson was about people: in Christ the dividing customs fade, not because they were wrong, but because what they pointed to had come, and God is no respecter of persons.

12. Scripture interprets Scripture: born of water

    The fourth principle is cross-reference. John 3:5, born of water and the Spirit, carries competing views: baptismal regeneration, the water of the word, and others. Rosscup argues the natural background for Nicodemus was not Ephesians, which did not yet exist, but Ezekiel 36, which a teacher of Israel knew: the Spirit at work, newness of life, and cleansing water, the same three features John 3 presents. Psalm 119 adds its witness that the word cleanses the young man's way. The most natural, defensible connection wins.

13. Ransack the passage before you travel

    Cross-reference carries a trap: leaving the passage too early, snatching a connection before the original text has been milked, ransacked, every stone turned. Study the first passage deeply, then the second just as deeply in its own context, then join them. And keep the authorities in order: Hendriksen, Bruce, Morris, and O'Brien are riches, but they are not the authority; the word is, the same word to which those men themselves submitted. God has made it possible, through context, word study, and grammar, for the interpreter to be his own man.

1. The fog is ours, not God's. Which part of Scripture have you quietly given up on as too hard, and which of this lecture's keys, context, word study, cross-reference, prayer, would you actually try on it first?

2. Completion, not correction: how would you use the photograph analogy, or the arithmetic analogy, to explain to a skeptical friend why the Old Testament's sacrifices were never a false religion?

3. Rosscup honors Hendriksen and Bruce and still says goodbye to them when the text demands it. Where is the line in your own study between healthy respect for teachers and letting them become your authority?