HGB-06 Discovering Meaning

Children usually don’t appreciate how much their teachers do for them. Their teachers work hard to give them all kinds of new discoveries. But often, young students do little more than grumble and complain every step of the way. Now of course, as adults we look back on our childhood teachers, and we understood how good it was that we didn’t have to learn our lessons on our own. We’re grateful for all they did for us. But when you think about it, we should be even more grateful for the countless opportunities our childhood lessons have given us to learn more and more every day of our lives.

In many ways, that’s how it is when it comes to the meaning of Scripture. God didn’t leave us to discover the meaning of Scripture on our own. He provided guides to help us. But more than this, one of the most remarkable things about the Bible is that as we go through our lives, we can return to the Bible over and over and always learn more about its meaning.

This is the sixth lesson in our series He Gave Us Scripture: Foundations of Interpretation, and we’ve entitled it “Discovering Meaning.” In this lesson, we’ll focus on some hermeneutical strategies that can help us figure out the original meaning of Scripture.

Countless factors contribute to the process of discovering meaning in the Bible. But for our purposes, we’ll draw attention to just two. First, we’ll talk about some important guides that help reveal the significance of a biblical text. And second, we’ll see the value of making multiple summaries of that meaning. Let’s begin by looking at the guides that point us toward Scripture’s meaning.

In an earlier lesson, we mentioned that most evangelicals today refer to their general hermeneutical strategy as the grammatico-historical method. Now, this terminology is relatively recent, but it represents an approach that can be traced back throughout church history, especially from the time of the Reformation. In effect, the grammatico-historical method seeks to discover the meaning of Scripture in terms of the grammar of Scripture — what’s written on its pages — and in terms of its ancient historical context, especially the context of its human authors and audiences. These grammatical and historical factors serve as guides to discovering the meaning of Scripture.