“My heart is steadfast, O God;
I will sing, I will sing praises,
even with my soul.”
Psalm 108:1
Sometimes, when I read my Bible, I can’t get through the first verse before I collapse into the need for my soul to be honest. All real Bible study starts with honesty. Without an honest soul–a willingness to be honest–the mind will either hide from, deny, or pervert the truth, but it will not bow and embrace the truth. Psalm 108 reminded me of that today.
In Bible study, to understand the truth, we have to bow to it as true and embrace it as the will of God.
This morning, I was teaching an adult Sunday School class on David. I have been laboring to not just teach but to train the class in how to interpret the Scripture. In one-hour sessions, broken up by Easter and other church calendar issues, it is a disjointed class looking at broad themes and the particulars of interpreting narrative literature.
Along the way, I have given a small synopsis of how to treat different types of literature in the library of the 66 books that comprise our Bibles. Today, in response to a question, I simplified my previous summaries even further. Turning to the whiteboard, I wrote:
- Didactic Literature — by brute statement
- Narrative Literature — through its structure
- Poetic Literature — with its metaphors
To that, we might add,
- Wisdom Literature — through its comparisons, contrasts, parallels, and repetition
All of those, while helpful, are also over-simplified. Didactic literature also uses metaphor and structure. Narrative literature uses metaphor and parable as well as poetry and poetic literature, which falls into the Wisdom Literature tradition, uses all of the elements mentioned above.
But this afternoon, I opened my Bible to Psalm 108 and realized that all of this interpretive knowledge and help is WORTHLESS without an honest, submitted heart to God. And it only took one verse to convince me. Read it again.
“My heart is steadfast, O God;
I will sing, I will sing praises,
even with my soul.”
Psalm 108:1
I read that first line, and a series of questions rose up in my heart. “Really? Is my heart steadfast? Can I pray this prayer? Does my heart sing . . . even with my [whole] soul? Is that true of my spirit today?”
And then it hit me, I need to add this to my “principles of interpretation.”
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