Parchment & Pen Blog

1. Lucky lotto: (eyes closed) – “Umm . . . I will read this verse” You may be tempted to simply ask God a question, open up the Bible, fix your eyes on the first verse you see, and think that verse provides God’s answer to your question. There is an old story about a [...]

My daily Bible reading plan recently took me to the front door of Leviticus. Oh the venerable wasteland of Leviticus and its neighboring partner in crime Numbers. The battleground where so many great Bible reading intentions met their end. If someone is able to survive Leviticus the chronology of Numbers will surely put them out [...]

(Lisa Robinson) Perhaps you have heard of this method of interpretation, that scripture interprets scripture. Basically, it says that if we want to know what a verse or passage means, that we have to look elsewhere where the same word or concept is used to understand what it means. However, I am increasingly coming to [...]

The following except is taken from Interpreting the New Testament Text (Darrel Bock and Buist Fanning eds. (Crossway, 2006), p. 156). David Lowery, New Testament professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, writes about the importance of validating our studies. I don’t think I have ever read a finer exhortation concerning the integrity we must possess when [...]

The following is a practical guide to biblical interpretation following a three step process that I have used for years. The Bible is two-thousand years old and often seems very archaic. This makes it hard to know how it applies to us. It can be very frustrating as all Christians are encouraged to read their [...]

(Lisa Robinson) I have found one of the biggest differences between good Bible reading and Bible reading that is disjointed or otherwise skews what is being communicated, is how we understand the relationship between what is transpiring through the Bible’s narrative vs what we read as directed towards us.   It is understanding what is descriptive [...]

Just after my wife and I were married, she worked as a teller at a bank. One of her co-workers was a devout Muslim who was schooled in Muslim apologetics against Christianity. Every day she would come home with a list of objections that he had to the Bible. Three out of four times the [...]