Season 5 - Episode 3

To listen to an audio version of this post, visit www.covenantchurch.ca/podcasts/covenant-weekly.

On Sunday morning, we read one of the most difficult and debated stories in the Bible. The story in which God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, his only son, the son whom he loves, Isaac, is deeply troubling to many people. But it would be naive to think that it is the only troubling story in the Bible. Is it any less troubling to read about a God who would drown virtually the entire world, command the slaughter of entire people groups, explicitly including women and children, or even where the wholesale slaughter of animals is viewed as necessary to appease the divine? As I mentioned on Sunday, there are some who reject God as a result of these passages. They take them at face value and say, “If that’s what God is like, count me out!” Others take these at face value and say, “That is what God is like!” Many things that we would otherwise count as horrors have been, and currently are, excused as being “godly” because they align with this seemingly bloodthirsty God of the Old Testament. But what if there was more going on in the story of the Bible, in God’s revelation in history, than we can get by reading each text on its own at face value? What if, read within the context of the Bible as a whole, God is doing something deeper and truly beautiful in the divine pursuit of loving relationship with humanity? We’re going to talk briefly about that on this Covenant Weekly for September 16, 2025.

What we are talking about today is something called hermeneutics. That’s a fancy word for how to interpret something, usually something written. In this context, it is about the interpretation of the Bible. Within Christian history, there have been many different ways of interpreting the Bible. There have been different hermeneutical methods. The challenge has always been that, while the Scripture is presented as being “God-breathed,” it doesn’t tell us how it is God-breathed. The Bible is presented as carrying some kind of divine authority, but it doesn’t actually tell us how it carries that divine authority. Whatever way of interpreting the Bible we use, it is a conclusion we come to based on secondary reasoning, not explicit Biblical instruction. This is important to say out loud because it highlights a flaw in some hermeneutical claims.

For example, some people say, “We don’t need to interpret the Bible. We just take it at face value and do what it says.” They are arguing for a literalist interpretation of the Bible. It is a means of interpreting the Bible, but it seems to be ignorant of this fact. They seem to miss the fact that what a text means at “face value” will be different in different places, in different contexts, and in the radically different times of history in which the Bible has been read. There is no one such thing as “face value” or “literal” reading of the Bible.

Others say, “My way of reading the Bible is the only way the Bible could ever be read! It is the biblical way.” While they may not take everything literally, those who believe this about their way of interpreting the Bible make it impossible to disagree with them on what the Bible might say. The word “Biblical” as an adjective becomes an argument stopper. They might claim certainty about what biblical womanhood or manhood is. They might argue for a certain biblical way of political engagement. They might even defend biblical approaches to topics as wide-ranging as vaccines or immigration or church structure. Their insistence that their way is the only way to read the Bible demonstrates a lack of awareness of the many ways faithful Jesus followers have engaged with Scripture throughout the past millennia.

The truth is that most of us, whether we’re aware of it or not, combine a variety of interpretive methods when we read the Bible. I’m not able to solve huge academic debates in this short message. But I want to highlight one hermeneutical method that I believe is essential, especially when dealing with the deeply troubling texts of the Old Testament.

Good hermeneutics works to interpret the Bible based on its historical setting. It also seeks to take seriously the language and grammar of the text. Alongside those things, I believe we must also maintain a Jesus-centred hermeneutic to help us wrestle with, properly understand, and think about the implications of the Bible.

Here are three things I mean when I say we need to have a Jesus-centred understanding of the Bible - 

• First, we need to align ourselves with the Bible’s teaching that God looks like Jesus and has always looked like Jesus. We don’t believe that the God of the Old Testament is somehow different from the God of the New Testament. It is one God, throughout. And when we get to the New Testament, we learn that Jesus fully reveals God to us.
  • This is made clear by the writer of Hebrews who starts the letter to Jewish Christians with these words:  In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. 3 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. The writer is telling people of Jewish descent that God has spoken through the prophets and through scripture. But it is the Son, Jesus, who is the exact representation of God’s being.
  • Paul affirms this in his letter to the Colossian church. He says simply, “The Son is the image of the invisible God.”
  • This is what the writer of John’s gospel is saying at the start of his account of Jesus. He says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Later, he confirms that this “Word” he’s speaking of is Jesus, “The Word [who] became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

If we’re going to make sense of the Bible in a way that is consistent with the God of the Bible, we need to have a clear picture and understanding of that God. We need to start with Jesus.

• With that foundation for our hermeneutic in place, we need to recognize that throughout the Bible, people had incomplete and, in some ways, incorrect views of God.

Throughout the Bible, God met with people in ways they could understand in order to gradually move people towards a full and true understanding of God. Some explicit examples include:
Sacrifices.

• • In Leviticus, sacrifices are assigned by God. Reading those texts at face value tells us that God demands sacrifices for us to have a connection with God. But within the Old Testament, we get to the words of the prophet, Micah, who tells the people of Israel that God isn’t after sacrifices! He says, “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” It is, perhaps, important to note that this indictment of sacrifices is long before Jesus. But, in case we weren’t sure about what God thought of sacrifices, Jesus came and went to the cross, declaring with his self-sacrifice that “It is finished.” No more of that old way! God had met them in a way they could relate to him, but that didn’t reflect the true heart of God.
  • Women. Throughout the Old Testament, women are treated as second-class people. There are rare but significant glimpses in which God shows a higher value for women than the cultures around Israel. But by and large, women are still treated as significantly “less than” men. But when we get into the New Testament, we see women consistently honoured by Jesus. Even women who are outcasts or vulnerable are treated with respect and value by Jesus. And when we get into the New Testament church, Paul honours women alongside men as church leaders, even though the general culture around him rejected women in these leadership roles. The most significant of these is Junia, who in Romans 16:7 is listed as “outstanding among the apostles.” In a very patriarchal society, the early church embraced women, at least some women, as significant leaders.
  • Meat sacrificed to idols. We talked about this during our summer series. In the Old Testament, eating meat sacrificed to idols would have been equated with idol worship, which is expressly forbidden in the Ten Commandments. As the early church wrestled with what kind of instructions should be given to gentile followers of Jesus, we read in Acts 15 that this is one of the few restrictions they should follow: Don’t eat meat sacrificed to idols. However, not long after, Paul writes to both the church in Rome and the church in Corinth, saying that in some contexts, eating meat sacrificed to idols was just fine!

Each of these examples demonstrates how God, in the Bible, has consistently met people in ways they could understand. But the intent was always to move them into a greater and more accurate understanding of who God is.

If you’d like to read more about the Bible showing a gradual redemptive move of God drawing his people into a fuller understanding, and particularly about how this helps us make sense of some of the difficult Old Testament texts, I recommend the book Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric? wrestling with troubling war texts by William J. Webb and Gordon Oeste. Drs. Webb and Oeste both teach at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto, and their work on this has had a significant impact in the world of Biblical interpretation.

Understanding that God is like Jesus, and that God consistently meets people where they are within history and the Biblical account, doesn’t erase the discomfort many of us have with many of the deeply troubling texts in the Bible. And for those of us who have been raised with a literalist reading of the Bible ingrained in us as the only right way to read the Bible, it can be deeply uncomfortable to consider something different. That is where the foundation of a Jesus-centred hermeneutic can be helpful.

• A third element of a Jesus-centred way of interpreting the Bible is that, when we come to something in the Bible that seems to conflict with what is revealed in Jesus, we can hold firmly to Jesus as our understanding of God, God’s heart, and his way in the world and wrestle with the text in light of that.

This is some of what I sought to do on Sunday as we considered the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. If we’re forced to read the text as fully and properly showing the heart of God, it is an agonizing text. But if we know and are committed to Jesus as the exact representation of God, we can sit with confidence and do the hard work of wrestling with the challenging text. We can say, “We know what God is like. And this isn’t consistent with the God revealed in Jesus. So how can we understand it in a way that is consistent with the narrative itself and consistent with God as revealed in Jesus?” Reading Abraham’s test as a test of understanding through which God was leading him into greater knowledge of the Divine is an attempt to do just that.

The key here is that the foundation of our understanding of God and our faith isn’t “the Bible” per se. It is Jesus who is revealed in the Bible, but isn’t bound by the Bible. Jesus is a real, living person who remains the resurrected God-in-the-flesh. He is the author and perfector of our faith. He is our rock. By holding on to Jesus, we don’t have to get upended when parts of the Bible are hard to understand or downright awful to engage with.

We know what God is like. God is like Jesus. If we can’t make sense of how parts of the Bible align with that, it doesn’t shake our foundation. It should just spark a humble acceptance of our limitations and a desire to more deeply wrestle with the Bible through which God speaks.

If you’re interested in a deeper dive into how a Jesus-centred way of reading the Bible can make sense of some of the most troubling Old Testament texts, I encourage you to look at the book Cross Vision by Greg Boyd. That book is a summary of his two-volume and 1400-page work The Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament’s Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross. If you’re really ambitious, you can check out the longer version, but Cross Vision is enough for most of us to understand his point!

At the heart of all of this is a question we should ask ourselves, not just when trying to understand the Bible, but in all kinds of interpretation. Is a teacher of the Bible a valuable resource? Ask, “Does their life and does their teaching align with Jesus?” Is that influencer worth heeding? Consider, “Does what they say align with what we see in Jesus?” When judging an ethical decision, ask yourself, “What seems consistent, as best we can discern, with what we see in Jesus?” This doesn’t guarantee we’ll always discern or interpret perfectly. But we’ll almost certainly be closer to the heart of God than if we were led by other questions.