A Letter in the Attic
Imagine you’re helping clean out your grandmother’s attic after she passes away. The boxes are full of old photos, yellowed newspapers, and brittle postcards. As you’re sorting through them, you come across an sealed envelope. It is addressed to your grandmother and written in your grandfather’s handwriting.
You recognize his neat cursive right away. He died before you were born, but you’ve heard the stories: He was a man of faith, a careful thinker, and deeply in love with your grandmother. The letter is dated 1944. It’s postmarked from Europe while he was serving in the war.
You hold it carefully. It’s addressed to your grandmother, but never opened. Maybe it got tucked away in the wrong place. Maybe she never saw it. But here it is, in your hands, unopened for decades.
So, what do you do?
You open it and you read slowly.
This is a personal letter, not a puzzle. You’re not looking for codes or trying to reinterpret every sentence. You want to understand what he meant, what she would have heard, and what he hoped she’d know. His message matters, not just because it’s sweet or sentimental, but because it reveals something true about their lives, their love, and their world.
You read it as it was written: one person reaching out to another, in real language, shaped by a real moment in time. And because you know who wrote it, and who it was for, the meaning is clear. It’s tender. It’s wise. And it’s not just for your curiosity. It’s a gift, a window into something deeper than you expected.
That’s how we approach Scripture.
The Bible isn’t a secret codebook or a vague collection of spiritual thoughts. It’s God’s message, delivered through human authors to real people in real history. And like that letter in the attic, it deserves to be read carefully and reverently, with an eye toward the intended meaning.
When we understand what the original author meant, we’re not just uncovering human wisdom, we’re hearing the voice of God.
And just like that wartime letter, Scripture may not have been written to us directly, but it is written for us. Once we understand what it meant in its original context, we can begin to ask what it means for us today.
2Pe 1:19 And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts,
2Pe 1:20 knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation.
2Pe 1:21 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.
This is why authorial intent matters so much. The biblical authors weren’t just writing down their own ideas or personal insights. They were taught by the Holy Spirit. That means when we take time to understand what they meant, we’re also uncovering what God meant.
We don’t get to rewrite the message or treat it like an inspirational quote generator. Our job is to open the letter, read it carefully, and let the Author speak.
So, how do you know if you’ve successfully understood a passage of Scripture?
6 Convictions to Bring to the Bible
Before we dive into bible study, it helps to start with a few core convictions. These are foundational truths I’ve come to trust after years of study, and they shape the way I approach Scripture:
1. The author’s intended meaning is crucial.
When we study the Bible, we’re not trying to guess at hidden meanings or decode secret messages. We’re asking a straightforward question: What did the author intend to communicate to his original audience? God didn’t inspire a riddle. He gave us words with meaning, written by real people in real places at real times. That’s where we start.
2. The Bible is not just another book.
The Bible is in some ways no ordinary book: God inspires it, without error, and it is authoritative.
Scripture is unique. It’s not ordinary in its origin or its authority. God inspired it, preserved it, and uses it to speak to us today. That means it’s trustworthy and without error in what it teaches. We can rely on it completely, not just for spiritual inspiration, but for truth that holds up in every season of life.
3. But it is ordinary in how it communicates.
In the way we understand its meaning, the Bible is ordinary. It conveys meaning through normal, human communication from a human author to a particular human audience.
Even though the Bible is divinely inspired, it still uses normal human language: sentences, stories, metaphors, logic. It was written by human authors to human audiences in human cultures. That means we interpret it like we would any other text: by considering grammar, context, and intent. The Bible may be inspired by God, but it doesn’t speak in some heavenly code. It speaks through human words we can understand.
4. When we know the human author’s intended meaning, we also know God’s intended meaning.
God chose to speak through human authors. He didn’t override their personalities or bypass their minds. He worked through them. So when we discover the author’s intended message, we’re discovering what God intended to say. We don’t need to look behind the text or beyond it for some deeper, divine layer of meaning. It’s right there on the page, in plain sight.
5. The goal of biblical interpretation (exegesis) is to uncover the author’s intended meaning to his original audience.
Before we ask, “What does this mean for me today?” we need to ask, “What did this mean for them back then?” Scripture can’t mean something now that it never meant then. Our first job is to uncover the original message in its original context. That’s what biblical interpretation—also called exegesis—is all about.
6. Once we understand what it meant then, we can begin to apply it now.
Application always comes after interpretation. We look for timeless truths (principles grounded in the character of God or the nature of humanity) that still hold true today. We ask how those truths speak into our lives, our choices, our relationships. But that step comes second. First, we listen carefully to what the text meant to them, and from there, we bring it forward to us.
What Bible Study is Not
Consider these points from chapter 3 of Bob Smith’s Basics of Bible Interpretation:
Sermonizing is not Bible study.
Sermons are often emotional, motivational appeals to action. Teachers frequently springboard off phrases in the text into platitudes and catchy stories designed to inspire us to the chosen call of action. At their worst, these stories have nothing to do with the Scripture read. As Smith writes: “The speaker wheeled back and forth like an eagle over the text but he never came to rest upon it.”
Whipping up three or four good exhortations from a text is not Bible study.
Exhortations are great, as long as they come from the passage at hand. Often they are merely calls to action and repentance. As Smith writes: “After the text was read there issued a torrent of words exhorting us to five different things. God knows that we needed at least ten exhortations, but God also knows that the relationship of the text to the exhortations was completely accidental.”
Academic exegesis is not Bible study.
While most sermons today don’t regale us with their understanding of the aorist or the jussive, they often regale us with their scholarly analysis of popular culture, psychology, and research statistics. Again, impressive, but not the goal of bible study.
Propagandizing is not Bible Study.
Smith wrote it best: “Like the fingers of the pianist race up and down the keyboard, so his fingers raced through the Bible, finding the relevant verses. Plunk, ping, plunk! It did not take long before I realized we were not having Bible study but a party line. The Bible was a keyboard, and the teacher was playing his own tune upon it.”
Pious observations are not Bible study.
Smith again: “The poor man of God does everything but explain the text. I got 30 minutes of various and diverse unrelated and uninspiring pious observations. Each observation was a worthy one. But the passage itself remained untouched. We had been all around the text but never in it.”
Smith concludes:
“The actual goal of Bible study is to convey the meaning to the people of a set number of verses. …. The heart of Bible study must always be the matter of meaning. The first question of Bible study is not: ‘What is devotional here?’ nor’ What is of practical importance here?’ nor ‘What is inspirational here?’ but ‘What does this passage mean?’”
If you’re looking for a refresher course on Bible study or to begin learning how to study, Basics of Bible Interpretation by Bob Smith is still a good choice and it’s now free online.
Photo by Eilis Garvey on Unsplash
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