Here are three simple steps, but they take time and effort. Understand the passage in its original context, understand how the passage fits into the biblical storyline and is fulfilled in the person and work of Christ, and apply the passage to yourself in your circumstances in a way that is faithful to steps 1 and 2.  And we’re not keen on spending time and effort on this. The tragedy is that this is causing great harm within the church. Christians are hurting other Christians because they don’t know how to interpret and apply Scripture faithfully. 

I know, it’s a strange title for an article, but it’s coming from a place of great concern, and the title expresses the sentiment I want to convey. I’ve had a growing frustration about something happening in the church. Let me put it bleakly: vast tracts of Christians don’t actually know how to apply Scripture in popular forms of argument and everyday conversations. They have Scripture memorized; they can quote chapter and verse numbers; they even have an accurate understanding of the central message of Scripture, but they don’t know how to apply it. They don’t know how to use it with faithfulness to what the text really means and how it’s been fulfilled in Christ.
Come to think of it, what I just said is gracious. It’s not that they don’t know how to apply it; it’s that they think they do, but they don’t. They’re confident and they’re ignorant. And that’s far more dangerous. When confidence marries ignorance, the offspring are hideous.
What’s the result? Miscommunication, polarization, and a horrendous witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ, not just outside the church but within it. To be “allowed” to apply Scripture, you have to understand its context. If you don’t, your interpretive privilege is revoked. I’ll say it again: If you don’t know the context for a passage of Scripture, you don’t get to apply it to a popular argument or casual conversation. You and I are allowed to apply to Scripture in an argument or conversation only if we know its context (more on that below) and can match that context to the area in question.
Why the Problem?
We’ll work through an example together, but before that, let’s think about why this is such a problem for contemporary Christians. My working theory has two forms, one less offensive and the other more offensive. Here’s the less offensive form: We live in a culture that encourages fragmentation and discards depth. Fragmentation means that our minds aren’t often putting together threads of coherent thought. Much of the time, we’re pigeons grabbing bread crumbs of information and entertainment. And that crumb-picking habit carries over into our understanding and application of Scripture. We’re not asking questions of a text, working through context in widening circles, or even using our God-given reason to reach understanding. Instead, we’re crumb-picking. We grab a friend’s complaint here, a Facebook comment there, and a Scripture passage we found through a Google search, and boom: we’ve got an “argument,” an arrow to shoot in conversation. And because we’re quoting Scripture, it appears to be biblical. But let’s be clear: Quoting a Bible verse doesn’t mean you’ve made a biblical argument. In fact, it doesn’t even reflect your faith. Satan, remember, dropped Scripture references more than once (see Matt. 4), and he’s pure evil.
Here’s the more offensive form of my working theory: We’re lazy. Looking up a biblical passage in its context, trying to prayerfully discern meaning within the biblical storyline and how the passage is fulfilled in Christ, takes work and time. And we don’t really want to give time to this. We just want to reinforce our perspective and pass off some judgment on “weaker” Christians before we grab our next cup of coffee. Again, what I’m claiming in this article is blunt: We don’t get to do that. We’re not allowed to apply Scripture to something without knowing where a passage is coming from, what its context is. We’re not given a free-pass on laziness just because we grew up in the church and are familiar with Scripture.
What Does Context Involve?
When I say “context,” I’m actually suggesting that you and I have a process for interpreting a passage of Scripture, what we call a hermeneutic. It doesn’t have to be fancy. A simple one is set out by Vern Poythress in God-Centered Biblical Interpretation (p. 116):

Understand the passage in its original context.
Understand how the passage fits into the biblical storyline and is fulfilled in the person and work of Christ.
Apply the passage to yourself in your circumstances in a way that is faithful to steps 1 and 2.

Three simple steps, but they take time and effort (see also chapter 4 in Poythress’s Reading the Word of God in the Presence of God). And we’re not keen on spending time and effort on this. The tragedy is that this is causing great harm within the church. Christians are hurting other Christians because they don’t know how to interpret and apply Scripture faithfully. Let’s flesh this out with an example.
An Example Passage
Take a text that’s often abused in our cultural moment: 2 Timothy 1:7, “For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” How is the text abused? Since people “cherry pick” this verse and don’t understand what it means in context, they take it as a blanket statement that addresses human emotion in general. The popular usage might look something like this:
If you seem to be afraid of something, you’re not being a true Christian, since God has not given us the spirit of fear.
This has the harmful, unbiblical consequence of making people feel guilty for having feelings. It can encourage a form of Stoicism, a rejection of the place and weight of human emotion. In our cultural moment, I’ve seen Christians use this passage to bully other Christians. If another Christian appears (and I say “appears” intentionally, because we can’t see the motives and inner workings of others) to be afraid of something—Covid exposure, judgment of others, performance at work, physical illness, anxiety—that believer gets slapped in the face with 2 Timothy 1:7. 
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TULIP, or the five points of Calvinism, summarizes God’s work of salvation, and it highlights the omnipotent love of God. Christians can rest assured that if they believe, it is because of the work of God, and that work cannot fail because His love cannot fail.

What do tulips, the love of God, and a centuries-old understanding of salvation have in common? They are all reflected in what has come to be known as the five points of Calvinism.
How are these things interconnected? The word tulip forms an acrostic that summarizes a particular understanding of salvation that has at its center the love of God. Let’s see how this works.
Total Depravity
T stands for total depravity, which describes how sin affects human beings. But to understand this, we have to start before sin entered the world. Our triune God from all eternity has existed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, equal in power and glory, enjoying a never-beginning and never-ending relationship of holy love. This holy love motivated God’s free decision to create the universe and to create man and woman in His own image to love Him and each other. However, Adam chose to reject our Creator, and, through Adam’s disobedience, humanity fell into sin (Gen. 3; Rom. 5:12–21). Total depravity says that sin has so twisted us that apart from grace, we love other things more than we love God. Our minds, our bodies, our affections, our spirits—every part of us has been affected by sin, and of our own accord, we cannot escape this predicament. God has not stopped loving His creation, however (John 3:16). And in His love, He restrains sin, keeping us from being as bad as we possibly could be. Thus, even those who do not know Christ can do things that are outwardly good. They can be good neighbors, love their children, and so on. However, outside of grace, none of us does these things with the right motivation to love and glorify God.
Unconditional Election
U stands for unconditional election, which is part of God’s solution to our total depravity. The fall into sin, of course, did not surprise God. He knows the end from the beginning and has ordained history as part of the outworking of His plan and purposes for all things (Isa. 46:8–11; Eph. 1:11). The Lord would have been just to keep us in our state of sin and estrangement from Him, but He decided to set His special love on His people, choosing to redeem them and restore to them their status as God’s children. Unconditional electionis God’s loving choice of specific sinners for salvation without respect to any good in them(Rom. 9:1–29). His saving love for us isnot conditioned on our intelligence, our looks, our kindness, our social status, or anything else. He loves His people not because they are less sinfulthan others. Everydescendant of Adam and Eve (except for Christ) is a sinner. Unconditional electionsays that God chooses to save some people and to pass over others. He has a love for some people that He does not have for others. If you are a Christian, it is because in eternity past, long before you were born, God chose to love you with His saving love. He did not choose youbecause you were better than others. He did not choose youbecause He knew you would choose Him if He gave you the chance. He simply chose to love you, and since His love is not conditioned on anything in you, He will never stop loving you.
Limited Atonement
L stands for limited atonement, which describes God’s intent behind the death of Christ in providing salvation. The question is, Did Christ intend to atone for the sins of all people who have ever lived, or did He intend to atone for the sins of the elect only? Another way of putting it: Did God love people generally, without reference at all to them as individuals, and send Christ to die to provide a possibility of salvation?
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A life that seems to have no interest in Christ and his church nor pays any heed to his commands is not a living, active faith promoted from within by the Holy Spirit. It is a non-existent faith. It is belief that some words you said years ago is good enough to deal with your sin once and for all and to secure a place in Heaven for you. I’m afraid that isn’t a teaching you will find anywhere in the Bible. Apart from ongoing, active faith in Christ there is no salvation and telling people otherwise is not loving them, it is actively encouraging them on their way to a lost eternity.

I have lost count of the number of times I have heard a story approximating the following. Somebody has grown up going to church, hearing the gospel and made a profession of faith or prayed the sinners prayer. They apparently go on with the Lord for a bit until, eventually, drifting away from the church and Christ. If pressed, they might still say they believe, but there is absolutely nothing about their lifestyle that gives any indication that this is any more than mere words. For many, there isn’t even a claim to love Jesus.
This sort of story does the rounds and few Christians wouldn’t be able to tell you of one they know about. But I have also noticed, with troubling frequency, how many people under those circumstances still want to insist that person is a believer and belongs to the Lord. There is no sign of fruit, no evidence of belief and often no understanding of the gospel. But nonetheless, we still hear that the Lord still has them, for some reason. This concerns me deeply for two reasons.
First, it doesn’t do anything to help those people come to Christ. If we continue to affirm that somebody is a believer who has clearly departed from the faith, we are doing nothing other than comfort that person all the way to perdition. In all honesty, I cannot wrap my head around why you would want that for your family and friends. Why would you want them to go on in the false belief that they’re alright as they are by telling them the profession they made years before – despite every evidence to the contrary that it ultimately wasn’t genuine – are somehow still believers?
If we claim to love our family and friends, we surely can’t be content with affirming them in beliefs that are actively damaging to them. They don’t need our reassurance that they’re safe in the Lord; they need the gospel. They need to hear that they aren’t okay and, if they carry on as they are, they will remain outside of Christ and face all the disastrous consequences of being so. To comfort somebody as a believer, to affirm faith that clearly doesn’t exist, does them no favour at all. It is actually damaging the very people we claim to love.
I have heard similar things said to comfort believing parents regarding their unbelieving children. But again, it might feel nice to tell people that the Lord still has their children, but we don’t actually help them or their children by pretending it is so. Instead, helping people see the reality of the situation – that without ongoing, active faith in Christ there is no salvation and that is effected by the Holy Spirit, who is obviously absent in the heart of someone who has no concern for holiness – means they can continue to hold out the gospel clearly to those who need to hear it.
I appreciate with family and friends it is not always the easiest thing to do. Especially if the gospel is considered to be something we have heard hundreds of times before and have no interest in it.
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If the human instinct is to build a kingdom upon those who are strong and mighty, impressive and successful, God’s instinct is to build a kingdom upon those who are weak and lowly, who are meek and merciful.

Back in the 1950s, humanity entered into a great age of space exploration as the United States and the Soviet Union battled to be first to the moon. It seems to me that we are now entering into a second great age of space exploration as billionaires battle it out to see who can be first to establish a permanent outpost in space.
We don’t need to push our minds too hard to imagine a scenario in which one of these billionaires announces he is establishing a new nation somewhere beyond earth. We might imagine him making an announcement and saying, “This world is falling apart, the earth is collapsing under the weight of war and epidemic and pollution, so we are going to start over. We are putting out the call to help create Humanity 2.0. Join me as I found the Kingdom of Space.”
The billionaire who is founding this state might explain something like this: “This new nation will be better and greater than any nation or any civilization in the whole history of mankind. Because we are going to recreate humanity, we need to ensure we bring along only the best of the best—only the sharpest minds, only the most impressive personalities, only the most beautiful bodies, only the most accomplished individuals. We need the wise, the winsome, the winners, the well-to-do so together we can fulfill our potential and become all humanity can be. Come to me all who are mighty and self-sufficient. Bring in the rich and the beautiful, the impressive and the accomplished.”
Jesus, too, has founded a kingdom—the kingdom of heaven—and his kingdom could hardly be more different. It’s a kingdom where the call goes out to the low instead of the high. Its king says “come to me all who are weary and heavy laden,” and “bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame.” But even that’s not enough. He sends his emissaries to the halfway houses and drop-in centers and group homes and says, “Bring them all in!” If the human instinct is to build a kingdom upon those who are strong and mighty, impressive and successful, God’s instinct is to build a kingdom upon those who are weak and lowly, who are meek and merciful.
Keeping these two perspectives in mind, let me present you with two different visions for humanity. Let’s imagine now that our billionaire is ready to blast off to begin his Kingdom of Space. He has chosen the cream of the human crop to accompany him, and now together they are parading toward the great ship will that take them to their new nation.
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Lamentations is worthy of our attention. If, as the Church, we soaked in this book more regularly, we would develop greater sympathy for others, firmer trust in God’s promises, and a deeper understanding of God’s character and what it means to seek him.

As a book, Lamentations is overlooked and ignored. Bible readers often don’t know what to do with it. It’s short and poetic, but it is found among the major prophets instead of within the wisdom literature. It is full of lament, so inspiration-seeking Christians cannot easily hop between uplifting verses. The book is heavy and sad, filled with the sorrows of the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem.
But this book is a gem. God has given it to us as his inspired word, and if we’re willing, we have much to learn from this volume.
An Extended Lament
The main thing we miss if we bypass Lamentations is an extended look at lament.
Many books of the Bible contain lament—including as many as one third of the Psalms. But Lamentations is the only book which is only lament. When we read this book, we face sorrow and grief from beginning to end.
Most Western Christians are not familiar with lament; it makes us uncomfortable. With Lamentations we are forced to wrestle with lament as a legitimate, biblical form of prayer.
The laments in Lamentations differ from those in many of the Psalms in important ways. The author of Lamentations confesses guilt on behalf of the Israelites (Lam 1:5; 1:8–9; 1:18; 1:22; 4:13–16) and recognizes God’s hand in the destruction of the city and the holy temple (Lam 2:1–10). Even though God’s anger is justified against his people, their sorrowful cry in the midst of a terrible situation is still legitimate.
This book of laments also makes Bible readers grapple with the issue of complaint. Complaining to God cannot be inherently wrong because most of Lamentations is a detailed list of all the ways the people are suffering. Therefore, we must learn to distinguish between godly complaint and ungodly complaint. (It may be helpful to use the term “grumbling” instead of “complaining” to make this distinction.)
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We have today what authors Warren Farrell and John Gray call a “boy crisis”—a crisis where boys fail to become men, struggle in school, get in trouble, and have difficulty finding wives. Would we see that crisis begin to be resolved if we encouraged fathers to practice and model their manly virtues?

In an age where feminism seems to rule, there’s a lot of pressure for fathers to start acting softer and more feminine in dealing with their children. Not a trace of that “toxic masculinity” should come through!
Perhaps that is why we see increasing condemnation of competition (“everyone gets a participation trophy!”) or “dangerous” activities like winter sledding (“little Johnny could hit a tree!”), or allowing children to stray a few blocks from home without adult supervision (“they might be kidnapped!”). Why would we want parents, particularly fathers, to stress the traditionally masculine virtues of competition and adventure to their children when we’re trying to root toxic masculinity out of society?
But while this mindset is subtly promoted by today’s culture, it is now being challenged by a new study published in the journal Psychology of Men and Masculinities. The study lists the stereotypical masculine characteristics—“competitive, daring, adventurous, dominant, aggressive, courageous and standing up to pressure”—as positive traits, and fathers who demonstrated these were “rated as showing good parenting behavior.”
Researchers expressed surprise at this link between masculine qualities and good parenting. The study’s lead author, Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, acknowledged, however, that “fathers who see themselves as competitive and adventurous and the other masculine traits tended to be really engaged with their kids.”
Perhaps this is surprising to those living in a “woke,” politically correct, feminist society, but it shouldn’t be to those who look at fathers through history. Take Teddy Roosevelt, for example. In a letter to a friend in late 1900, Roosevelt explained how he had been a sickly child—likely the type who would have been teased and labeled a sissy by other boys his age. His father helped him through this difficult childhood, not only through gentleness, but also through his manly character. Roosevelt explains:
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The theory of intelligent design is often dismissed as religion pretending to be science. Critics argue that the theory doesn’t make any predictions or contribute to our knowledge of the natural world, and plus, it’s not taken seriously in any peer-reviewed scientific journals. However, a new paper published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Theoretical Biology makes a strong case for the need for intelligent design.
The paper is called “On the waiting time until coordinated mutations get fixed in regulatory sequences.” If that title is all Greek to you, don’t worry; you’re in good company. This technical, math-intensive paper was written by intelligent design researchers Ola Hössjer, Günter Bechly, and Ann Gauger. As Casey Luskin explains at Evolution News, the project came out of the Discovery Institute’s ID 3.0 research initiative, which aims, in part, to test how plausible Darwinian evolution is on a mathematical level. And though it’s just a beginning, this paper’s conclusions should make die-hard Darwinists nervous.
Here’s the background. The fossil record has been a perpetual problem for Darwin’s theory ever since it was first published in 1859. Put simply, the fossil record doesn’t look like the theory predicts it should.
If, as Darwin proposed, all the diversity of life on earth developed through natural selection, sorting random variations over untold eons, living things should change very gradually. This means the record of evolution we find in rocks should look gradual, too. Invertebrates should turn slowly into fish, which should turn slowly into amphibians, which should turn slowly into reptiles and mammals, and so on.
What we actually find is the basis of what philosopher of science Stephen Meyer calls “Darwin’s doubt”: the fossil record consists of numerous “bursts” of biological diversity, such as the famous “Cambrian explosion,” in which new body plans and animal phyla appear in the fossil record seemingly without ancestors.
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The ten basic commandments of Cultural Marxism…are violations of almost every one of the ten commandments of the Bible, values that permeate the Constitution of the United States and have informed much of British common law. 

Recently, one of Canada’s best-known rabbis (an American by birth and a graduate of prestigious colleges in the USA) asked me bluntly and simply to explain the essence of Critical Race Theory. This is what I told him.
Critical Race Theory is the latest version of Marxism, except it has gone racial. This means that unlike traditional Marxist theory, which used to focus on the injustices experienced by working men and women in industrial and industrializing societies around the world and preached violent revolution to overthrow the capitalist democracy that persecutes them, the new victims are any kind of minority, usually people of color, but not exclusively. The “white” working class no longer counts.
In the USA, Cultural Marxists have elected African Americans to fulfill the role of those persecuted by capitalism, which is done by white people or people with white skin (despite the fact that more than 50% of self-defined African Americans belong to the silent, non-protesting, law-abiding middle classes or “bourgeoise”).
Almost any grievance group, whose goal is to bring down liberal democracy and capitalism, can join African Americans in their persecuted status. So even wealthy Muslim immigrants can do so. Or sexual adventurers can be granted that status. Privileged women of color like “Ilhan Omar” and others like her can also qualify, as can millionaires like Meghan Markle or Oprah Winfrey.
The key thing is to hate whites, hate capitalism, hate democracy, hate American, Canadian, and British political culture, and believe that “whites” have caused all the trouble in the world. For example, an activist from this thought group once reframed WWII as “white on white” violence.
In an odd but not surprising anti-Semitic twist, Israelis (most of whom look like Sicilians and come from the Arab world) are thought of as colonial whites from Europe oppressing indigenous Arabs—so many of whom claim to have come to the land of Israel from Arabia some time ago. (Historical scholarship and truth are in short supply among the Cultural Marxists).
The last fifty years have seen an unhealthy and growing domination by Cultural Marxists of federal, state (provincial), and municipal bureaucracies, who then provide funds for a growing number of like-minded NGOs.
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The Descent ranks as one of the most subversive texts in human history. Darwin brands the view that man’s origin can never be known—that is, that it might lie beyond the reach of the human intellect to explain—as the product of ignorance, and he sets about showing that it is a problem that can be solved by science.
To say that man’s origin is explicable in scientific terms is truly a radical claim. Whatever it is that makes human beings distinct—our apposable thumbs, upright posture, and complex speech mechanism, as well as our literature, philosophy, and sacred texts—can be explained by the very same forces that shaped blue-green algae.
Human beings, in other words, are solely and entirely the products of natural forces. With a few strokes of a pen, Darwin lays the groundwork for the disenchantment of human nature and human affairs. For example, he opens chapter two of the first volume by declaring his intention to show that “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in mental faculties.”
In sharp contrast to the Cartesian account of non-human animals as automata, Darwin declares it indubitable that non-human animals “feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery.” Animals dream, dogs love their masters, and even insects play together. He even goes so far as to assert that “All animals feel wonder, and many exhibit curiosity.”
The subversive impact of these assertions lies not in the notion that many supposedly exclusively human traits are far from unique, but rather that these traits are not so remarkable as we suppose because they are the product of forces that natural science can describe and explain. To repeat, we are what we are, Darwin asserts, entirely by virtue of natural forces.
One of the longest-running debates in western thought concerns the relationship between the lower and higher. The Book of Genesis, Plato, and Augustine all posit that the lower can only be explained in terms of the higher. Darwin, by contrast, locates himself in the camp of thinkers such as Marx and Freud in arguing that the higher can and must be accounted for in terms of the lower.
In the Bible, for example, creation is often understood as a story of divine love. The world rests not so much on a foundation of matter in motion or laws governing the behavior of molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles, but on stories of how love brings the world into being and helps it to reach its full fruition. Action and reaction are less fundamental than adoration.
In Darwin, by contrast, the key ingredients for the world as we know it are scarcity, competition, and the struggle to survive and reproduce. The weak and infirm are continually culled out, as the forces of nature select for the best adapted among organisms. In Tennyson’s formulation, we are the perfectly natural byproducts of a pitiless nature “red in tooth and claw.”
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Tradition serves to correct our assumptions, expose our blind spots, and cultivate accountability in a garden we have turned into a wasteland. But most of all, she introduces us to creeds so that we do not gather as one but join the assembly of believers now and yesterday to praise the King of glory with one voice.

It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.–G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Today we are experiencing a surge of renewed interest in retrieval. However encouraging that resurgence may be—and it certainly is reassuring—a lingering, even nagging hesitation remains among a remainder of theologians and pastors. Those reluctant are not identical with those alarmist fundamentalist “no creed but the Bible” types. Such an overt, frantic biblicism is conspicuous enough as a theological cancer. Instead, it stems from that type of theologian or pastor who appreciates the past, but nonetheless considers engagement with our Christian heritage as nothing more than a pragmatic recruitment of conversation cronies. At the end of the day, they are far more interested, so they say, in what the Bible says. Putting labels before that word “tradition”—whether it be “Great” or “Reformed”—is precarious business sure to distract from scripture or even overcome its message.
In a strange way, I almost prefer to battle with the overt, alarmist “no creed but the Bible” types than this second, more subtle biblicist. At least the former is honest. Disastrous no doubt, but honest. But the latter represents that quiet, almost indetectable cancer that is never caught by a doctor. Concealed, it infiltrates the blood system over years, even decades. When it’s finally identified for what it is everyone stares at the floor in defeat knowing it’s much too late. “You have three months to live,” says the helpless physician, conquered by a battle he never had the chance to help his patient fight.
Why is this more subtle form of biblicism so fatal to the health of the ecclesiastical body? It is so threatening because it preys on Christianity by means of a half-truth. It acts as if the past is important; it even encourages dialogue. Yet by the end of the day, its reason for doing so is quite secular: talking to the dead is merely pragmatic. If you find the Nicene Creed or a Calvin or an Augustine helpful, then by all means. That is, as long as they become nothing more than practical, mere aids to what really matters.
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