Hermeneutics by Apostle Emmanuel Iren: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Clean Doctrine and the Honor of Study

Paul gave a remarkable prophecy in 2 Timothy 4:3, that in the last days people will not endure sound doctrine. The Greek word for sound is the root of the word hygienic, so sound doctrine actually means clean doctrine. There are sermons that make you better, and there are sermons that make you worse than they met you. Paul said the reason some preaching gets adjusted is the appetite of the members, because even faithful preachers feel the pressure when they sense a congregation has no interest in the deeper things.

Some of you have a degree or two, yet something in you wants to numb your intelligence when it comes to the things of God, so that a teaching you would have mastered in any other field suddenly feels too hard. Is it too much to listen to a sermon three times if you did not understand it the first time? Is Christ not worthy of that honor? Every other thing you succeed at has become an indictment against you, because heaven knows that for the things that truly matter to you, you can give effort. When you stand before Jesus with two degrees and a poor knowledge of his word, you can no longer claim intelligence was the problem.

The Pastor You Sit Under

No matter how political it sounds, not every church is sanctioned by Christ, and not everyone with the title pastor was sent. Educated people, doctors of medicine and of philosophy, are easily swayed because we create a false dichotomy that says when it comes to religion we keep our brains at home. Some pastors operate like Simon the sorcerer in Acts 8, and there are marriages that no longer exist and careers that never recovered because of a pastor.

Consider the ordinary power of fellowship. At university you bond with a few friends, pick up their slang, and soon you finish one another's sentences in a private language you never sat down to design. That is koinonia, a thing of the soul, and in the same way the convictions and even the biases of your pastor quietly shape you when you sit before him twice a week for years. That is why the most important step, before any rule of interpretation, is to let God plant you in the right church. In both Testaments the promise stands, in Isaiah 30:20, that your eyes shall see your teachers. One of the ways God shows his love is to cross your path with someone who can teach you his word faithfully.

Interpretation Is Spiritual Warfare

In the parable of the sower in Matthew 13, Satan comes to steal the seed lest they understand it. Notice that his concern is not only your reception of the word but your comprehension, because even wholesome teaching in its full efficacy does not change your life if you do not understand it. That is why comprehension itself must be taught. Hermeneutics simply means the science and art of interpretation, the same discipline lawyers use to establish how a law applies in a given context, and 2 Timothy 2:15 commands us to be diligent, rightly dividing the word of truth. The Greek there is a metaphor for arranging things in proper sequence, so that just because you read something from the Bible does not mean you are preaching it rightly.

The devil himself is an interpreter. When he told Jesus to jump from the pinnacle of the temple, he quoted Psalm 91 word for word. So why was he wrong, since it was written? Because it is also written, in Deuteronomy 6:16, that you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. Here is a law of interpretation: Scripture must agree with Scripture, and using the word out of its context is acting like the devil.

God Trains Men With Men

The word and the Spirit take away the veil of bias that keeps you from understanding rightly, but nine times out of ten God will not take the primary role of your teacher. When the angel came to Cornelius in Acts 10:5, it did not teach him the word; it told him to send for Peter. When the Ethiopian official was struggling over Isaiah in Acts 8:29, God did not thunder the meaning from heaven; the Spirit sent Philip running to his chariot to ask whether he understood what he was reading. The official answered that he could not, unless someone guided him. Anyone who bypasses a proper process of learning and claims direct downloads is often a danger waiting to happen.

And you arrive at truth by reading. In Ephesians 3:1 Paul explains that the mystery of Christ was revealed by the Spirit to the holy apostles and prophets, who wrote it down so that when you read, you may understand. So two texts are commonly quoted out of context. When Jesus promised in John 16:13 that the Spirit would lead into all truth, he was speaking to the apostles, who received that revelation and wrote it. When John said in 1 John 2:27 that you need no one to teach you, the context was the Spirit preserving what they had already been taught, not new information replacing teachers. 2 Timothy 2:2 settles it: what you have heard, commit to faithful men who will teach others. Yet the balance holds both ways, for Galatians 1:8 says that even if an angel preaches another gospel, let him be accursed, and the Bereans in Acts 17 checked Paul's teaching for consistency. A Bible-loving church teaches you the guardrails of interpretation so you can protect yourself even from your own teachers, and church history is a useful guardrail, though never equal in authority to Scripture.

Why the Scriptures Are Hard to Understand

There are three main reasons the Bible is not always plain on the surface.

1. The Scriptures Were Deliberately Veiled

   God veiled his plan in the Old Testament and spoke of it in mystery, because as 1 Corinthians 2:8 says, had the rulers known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. Think of how a child first meets separate superhero stories and only later discovers they were all building toward one endgame. In the same way Isaiah, David, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel each wrote a piece, and the whole picture is Christ. 2 Timothy 3:16 says all Scripture is God-breathed, and Jesus said in John 5:39 that the Scriptures you search actually testify of him. That is why Philip, beginning at Isaiah 53, could preach Jesus to the eunuch; we did not invent that reading. A prophecy can carry both an immediate and a future fulfillment, which is why the sign of Immanuel in Isaiah 7:14 can be true in its day and point ahead to Christ.

2. The Language Barrier

   Language evolves; English from a hundred years ago, or even the slang of the current generation, can already be hard to follow, and the Bible was not written in the language of today. Michelangelo depicted Moses with horns because when the text said Moses came down from Sinai with a radiant face, the Hebrew word for radiant is tied to the word for horn, and a literal rendering by an early translator carried the error into art. A Yoruba expression that means be attentive translates literally as put your ear to the ground; read literally, that could birth a whole dramatic prayer service built on a translation mistake. Many people cannot tell the difference between the Spirit and mere goosebumps, and a gifted man in error is hard to catch without strong discernment.

3. Historical and Cultural Context

   Much of Scripture sits on a background you must recover. When Paul addressed head covering in 1 Corinthians 11, there was a cultural setting in Corinth and Ephesus, including the worship of a female deity, that shaped his instruction, so covering hair today does not carry the same meaning. What some study as Greek mythology, where a deity fathers a superhuman child, echoes what Genesis 6 describes about fallen spiritual entities. And we wear wedding rings, which the Bible never commands, as a way of expressing the faithfulness the Bible does teach.

Four Questions for Interpreting Any Text

If you can answer these four questions, you can interpret rightly.

1. Is It Written?

   Many church people try to bind others to do what the Bible never actually said, so the first check is whether the instruction is truly in the text.

2. What Did the Author Intend to Say?

   You must read in context, before and after. Whisper different roles to two people and the single word shoot means one thing to a basketball player and another to a soldier; the word court means different things to an athlete and a lawyer. The word submission read from your own trauma is not the same as submission in a marriage where the man lays his life down for his wife, so do not carry your anger into a text over something God did not say.

3. How Does the Historical and Cultural Context Affect the Meaning?

   The same principle a text teaches must be applied through its cultural backdrop, the way faithfulness to a spouse can be expressed through a custom like a wedding ring that the culture, not the command, supplies.

4. How Is It Applicable in Christ?

   A command that lambs be slaughtered for atonement is written and was truly intended, yet it is fulfilled and applied in Christ rather than practiced today. The text in Deuteronomy 22:5 against wearing what pertains to the other sex is about a man being known as a man and a woman as a woman, not a rule that a particular garment belongs to one sex, so it must be read for what the author meant.

Diligence as Worship

I end where I began, at 2 Timothy 2:15. Be diligent to present yourself approved to God. This matters to God, and it is one of the ways I show consecration to him, not so I can win arguments or sound smarter than my neighbor, but as honor and worship, to be a worker who need not be ashamed. The Bible itself uses the picture of child development in 1 Peter 2:2, to desire the sincere milk of the word so you may grow, and a newborn cannot feed or wash himself; guidance means walking through it with the person.

When the enemy attacks a body, families run spiritual programs, but when he attacks the mind we treat it with a false sense of low priority. If you are a parent and you do not take your study of the word seriously, you are leaving your children vulnerable. You are your child's first line of defense when questions arise, and an unanswered question can linger until it becomes a stronghold. It is the strategy of Satan to keep parents in bondage while quietly targeting the children, so anticipate their questions and address them in family devotion, and be careful and prayerful about whom you entrust them to.