The Two Obstacles to Interpretation: #1 The Nature of the Scripture
Unique individuals wrote the Scriptures at specific times in specific places. The words they used, the imagery and symbols they accessed, and the practices and views of people described in Scripture are bound to the original culture they were written in. We must first understand what the words meant to the original audience before we can apply them to our lives.
We are also bound to their experience in our interpretation. That audience did not experience the automobile, the Cold War, globalization, or the Internet. We cannot read these events and experiences into our reading of the Scriptures. A fundamental rule of bible study is the Scriptures cannot mean for us what it couldn’t have meant for the original audience. A major task of bible study is to recapture the original meaning of Scripture