notions. Too frequently God's Word is marred by traditional ideas, or is cited merely to support some peculiar

concept that appeals to the person concerned or the denomination to which he or she belongs.

The Lord Jesus warned the religious leaders of His day in Mark 7:13 that they made `the Word of God of none

effect through' their tradition. They emptied it of its real meaning so that they could keep their own ideas (7:9), and

there is scarcely anything more spiritually blinding than human tradition. The task of the interpreter is to discover

the true meaning of Holy Scripture, not to verify his prejudices or to try to bolster up the peculiar tenets of the sect

to which he belongs. God's Word must not be used as a peg on which to hang religious opinions.

Sometimes the searcher for truth is confronted with two or possibly more probable interpretations as far as

grammatical rules permit. The rule then is to choose the clear rather than the obscure and the one that fits in best

with the context and the general teaching of Scripture. Obscure passages must give right of way to clear passages.

We can be thankful that everything essential to salvation and man's basic needs is clearly revealed in the Word of

God. Essential truth is not tucked away among incidental remarks, nor is it contained in passages whose meanings

are not yet understood. Furthermore, obscure and difficult portions of Scripture should not be used as a sole basis

for doctrine. This betrays weakness. For instance, our conception of future punishment should not be based on the

book of Revelation alone. This part of Scripture is universally admitted to be difficult of interpretation. When this

sort of thing is done it nearly always is an indication that the Scripture is being used to support preconceived ideas

and is therefore suspect.

The next guiding principle for us to observe is that Scripture interprets Scripture. The apostle Paul expresses it

in this way:

` ... we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing

spiritual things with spiritual' (1 Cor. 2:13).

The spiritual things we are to compare are the words of the Holy Scriptures, the words of God the Holy Spirit.

We can only do this effectively by using a good concordance like Young's Analytical Concordance. This enables us

to dig into the treasury of God's Word with all its riches. If we have difficulty in understanding a Biblical word, we

should open the concordance and note its occurrences, or the way God has used it and, more often than not, the

problem will be solved in another passage. Any interpretation that is forced to go entirely outside the Bible should

be suspect. If we keep within the covers of God's Book and let Scripture interpret Scripture we are safe. This does

not mean that we shall never use Bible dictionaries or commentaries, or read books of exposition, but these must

never be exalted in importance to the Scriptures themselves.

Words are the bricks, as it were, of thought, and a sentence is a unit of thought. The many shades of thought can

only be expressed in sentences. Grammar states the principles that arrange the formation of words into sentences

that clearly express meaning. Some of us may look back to our school days with distaste when we think of lessons

in grammar, but these need not be dry and uninteresting. It all depends on the way the subject is taught. God has

conveyed His truth in words and sentences, and the more we know of these and their construction, the better we

shall understand the truth they seek to reveal. Nothing should be extracted from Scripture as interpretation but what

is yielded by its grammatical sense. This can scarcely be overstressed. When this is not observed, fallible human

thought is bound to creep in. There is great value in paying attention to grammatical details. When dealing with a

word of action or being, which is called a verb, it is obviously important to notice its time value, whether past,

present or future. If we do not do this we shall confuse past truth, present truth and future truth.

There are little words called prepositions which are used hundreds of times a day in conversation and writing,

e.g., by, through, in, towards, up, down, and so on. These have a theology all their own; for instance the word

`believe' either as a verb or a noun occurs many times in the New Testament chiefly in the Gospel of John. It can be

used with what the grammarians call the dative case after it, when it means to acknowledge mentally a fact, such as