That’s Just Your interpretation
How many times have we sincerely sat down with some lost sinner to study God’s word, and eventually landed upon a particular passage that hits a little too close to exposing some pet sin which they wish to perpetually participate in, and we inevitably hear some slightly altered version of the following response: “I disagree with you completely; after all, that’s just YOUR interpretation anyway!”?
My response? With all due respect, it certainly is not: “knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Ptr. 1:20-21). This is why when Isaiah wrote (about 722 BC), he understood the earth was round (Isa. 40:22), even though some of the best and brightest minds of Columbus’ day some 2,200 years later, reportedly still thought that the world was flat. Isaiah had no way to know, or “interpret” that except to accept what God had told him; in other words it didn’t come from Isaiah’s own private interpretation, but explicitly from Divine Inspiration.
And even though Scripture was accepted, received, and written down without men’s interpretation (1 Ptr. 1:10-12) and should also be believed with a whole lot less “interpretation” than it often is today, let’s try this… How would you interpret the following Biblical verses on baptism: “He who believes and is baptized shall be saved” (Mk. 16:16); “…be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins…” (Acts 2:38); and “…baptism doth now save you…” (1 Ptr. 3:21)? Probably exactly the same way I would: That biblically speaking, baptism is essential to salvation, that it is specifically for the forgiveness of one’s sins, and that it is an element which saves you, right? Unless of course, you were raised with the anti-biblical and Calvinistic doctrines that baptism isn’t essential to salvation, occurs after forgiveness, and doesn’t save a person. In that case you would be faced with the impossible task of seeking to reconcile the irreconcilable. So, as you can see, the problem is not so much about Biblical interpretation, as it is one’s anti-Biblical indoctrination! And therein the problem (2 Tim. 3:16-4:4)!