It is often said that the Bible is a “timeless” book. The Bible certainly is an eternal book, but it is also a book that is not timeless but very much in time. The Bible is an ancient book; its earliest words were written well over three millennia ago, and its latest words were written no later than the first century A.D. The Bible is also a contemporary book through which God speaks to men at this very moment. To call the Bible “timeless” would be to miss the wonder of God’s revelation of himself in time through human language.

But if the Bible is a book both ancient and contemporary, in man’s interpretation of the Bible there is a tension between its being ancient and its being contemporary. We must understand the Bible as it applied historically. For that reason, the normal or literal hermeneutic is often called the grammatical-historical hermeneutic. But we must also apply the Bible as it is understood today. In other words, there is a tension between history and homiletics, between reading the Bible as a historian and as a preacher.

Perhaps an example can illustrate what I am trying to explain. It is common for preachers to illustrate to take a Biblical narrative and paraphrase it in modern terms. Jesse calls David in from the field with his cell phone and tells him to hop in his car and drive down to the battlefield. After getting directions from MapQuest, David arrives at his brothers barracks. There he gives his brothers a care package from his dad before he is called into Saul’s headquarters . . . Of course, reading the Bible as a historian, such a paraphrase is ridiculous and false because it ignores the Bible’s historical context. And though all the modern details that I have given here are inconsequential, there is a real danger that we will read our modern thought back into God’s Word. For example, modern definitions of words like faith, love, or freedom are not necessarily biblical definitions of those words. In other words (and to adapt a common witticism), the text of the Bible outside its historical context can become a pretext to justify whatever one wants it to justify. There is, however, another side to this tension. A historian could lecture on the Bible as a primary source that informs us about a conflict between Israelites and the Philistines sometime in the eleventh century B.C. Of course, reading the Bible as a preacher or believer, such an explanation is ridiculous and false because it ignores the application of the Bible to the spirit of the believer.

To conclude, if we are to understand the Bible as God intends us to, we must maintain the tension between history and application. Tension in understanding God’s Word is not a contradiction in God’s Word. The tension is a check and balance that protects both a proper interpretation and a proper application; it is an indication that God’s Word is both historically reliable and living today.