Tidings for Tuesday
Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. 2 Peter 1:20,21
Oh, how the Roman Catholics loved to recite the first part of our text, verse 20, during the centuries of the Middle Ages! They used this verse to keep the Bible out of the hands of the laity, insisting that only the clergy, under the direction of the pope, had the authority to read and apply the Scriptures. There are also people today who will use this verse to declare that it is wrong for the ordinary person to study the Scriptures. Those people fail to point out that the private interpretation that this text is speaking of is not the interpretation of the readers of the Scriptures, but of the writers of the Scriptures.
It is absolutely true that you and I cannot interpret the Scriptures to suit our own ideas or agendas. What the Bible declares for one, it declares for all, and what it says for one does not change when it speaks to others. It is because the Word of God is absolute in its meaning that we can study and explore it, to learn as much as we can of it. Godly Bible students will often disagree about what the Bible intends in certain portions. But those same godly students will also agree that their personal views are often the product of personalities and backgrounds. But truth is truth, and we will find that truth if we rely on the Holy Spirit to teach us what the Bible says and means. That’s because it was the Holy Spirit Who guided the writers to pen that truth.
The second part of our text – verse 21 – is the explanation of the prophecy of the Scripture being of no private interpretation. It is telling us that no prophet of the Old Testament came up with his own ideas about the future. Those holy men of God must often have failed to grasp the meaning of the words they were writing. But they wrote. And their words did not come from themselves but from the One Who was moving them. Daniel was such an example. He knew he was writing of great things to come, but confessed that he did not understand it all: ‘And I heard but I understood not, then said I, O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things?’ (Daniel 12:8) Today, Bible scholars look into the book of Daniel and use it in light of other revelations to see that what Daniel wrote fits perfectly with what the Holy Spirit guided others to write. He has given to us a Book of absolute harmony and unchanging and unchangeable truth.
We hold an amazing Book in our hands today, a message from God to men, not an interpretation by men about God. – Jim MacIntosh