Garba had been a tailor in the same small shop in Wuse Market for twenty-six years. He had sewn wedding outfits for half the families in his street and burial clothes for some of their grandparents. On the wall above his cutting table, in faded marker on a piece of cardboard, he had written a single line for his apprentices: Lay it out first. Then cut.
His newest apprentice was a bright, quick young man of nineteen who learned faster than anyone Garba had trained in years. That was part of the trouble. One Friday afternoon, with Garba out at the bank, a regular customer brought in six yards of expensive lace for her sister’s wedding. The style was agreed. The measurements were taken. The young man was eager to show what he could do, and the wedding was close. He spread a portion of the lace on the table, picked up the big scissors and began to cut.
When Garba returned, he stood beside the table for a long time without speaking. The lace had a bold border and a floral motif that ran in one direction. The bodice had been cut so that the flowers hung upside down. The border, meant to fall at the hem, now ran across the shoulders. Worse, the boy had trimmed away a long strip he took to be waste, and that strip was exactly the piece Garba would have used for the sleeves.
“The cloth was good,” Garba said finally. “Your hand is good. Your scissors are sharp. But you cut before you looked.” He pointed at the sign on the wall. “You must lay the whole thing out. You must see which way the pattern runs. You must know what every piece is for. Only then do you cut, and you cut straight.”
The apprentice had not damaged the fabric through lack of skill. He had damaged it through haste and through deciding in advance what he would find, instead of looking at what was actually on the table.
PunchlineThere is a word in the New Testament for what Garba was trying to teach.
What Paul asked of Timothy
Near the end of his life, writing from prison to the young man he had trained for ministry, Paul gave Timothy a charge about the handling of Scripture:
Of these things put them in remembrance, charging them before the Lord that they strive not about words to no profit, but to the subverting of the hearers. Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. But shun profane and vain babblings: for they will increase unto more ungodliness.
“Rightly dividing the word of truth.” The phrase translates a single Greek word, orthotomeo. It is built from orthos, meaning straight or right, and temno, meaning to cut. Literally, it means to cut straight.
Commentators have suggested several pictures behind the word. Some think of a road-builder cutting a straight path through difficult country; the Greek translation of the Old Testament uses this same word in Proverbs 3:6, where God promises to direct, literally to make straight, the paths of those who acknowledge Him. Others think of a farmer ploughing a straight furrow, or a stonemason cutting a block to fit precisely. Paul was himself a tentmaker, and some have pictured a craftsman cutting leather or cloth along the correct line, so that every piece fits. We cannot be certain which image Paul had in mind, and they all point in the same direction. The word of truth must be handled with accuracy and care, so that it is cut along its own lines and every part is put to its proper use.
Notice the setting. Paul has just warned Timothy against people who “strive not about words to no profit, but to the subverting of the hearers.” He goes on to name two men, Hymenaeus and Philetus, who taught “that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some” (2 Timothy 2:18). Mishandling Scripture is not a harmless academic error. It overthrows faith. It wounds real people.
Notice also the motive Paul gives. “Study to shew thyself approved unto God.” The word translated study means to be diligent, to make every effort. The approval Timothy is to seek is God’s approval, not the applause of a crowd or the admiration of other teachers. And the workman who handles the word rightly “needeth not to be ashamed.” He will not be embarrassed on the day his work is inspected, because he has cut along the true line.
This is a charge for every believer who opens a Bible, not only for pastors. Each of us is handling the word of truth. Each of us can cut before we look.
Lay out the whole cloth
The first rule of rightly dividing the word is Garba’s first rule: lay the whole thing out. A verse lives in a paragraph, a paragraph in an argument, an argument in a book. Before we decide what a sentence means, we need to see the cloth it was cut from.
Take a verse quoted at the opening of countless prayer meetings, including some very small ones on wet weekday evenings:
Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.
“Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” It is usually quoted to reassure a thin congregation that Jesus is present even though attendance is poor. Lay out the cloth. Begin three verses earlier, at Matthew 18:15. Jesus is giving instructions about what to do when a brother sins against you: go to him alone, then take one or two others, then tell it to the church. The “two or three” are the witnesses of Deuteronomy 19:15, whom Jesus has just mentioned in verse 16. The binding and loosing, and the agreement of two on earth, concern the church’s judgement in a case of discipline. Jesus is promising that when His people gather in His name to deal humbly and truthfully with sin in their midst, He stands with them in that grave responsibility.
Does that make the verse smaller? It makes it weightier. Jesus is certainly present with His people when they pray; other Scriptures teach that plainly. But this particular promise was given for one of the hardest things a church ever has to do, and it should steady every group of elders who must confront a brother with tears. A careless cut had turned a promise for the courtroom of the church into a consolation for low attendance, and lost the real treasure in the process.
Sometimes the context reverses what a verse appears to say. Colossians 2:21 reads, “Touch not; taste not; handle not.” Many sincere people have quoted those words as a command for holy living. But read the verses around it, and you find that Paul is quoting the rules of false teachers in order to reject them. He asks why believers who have died with Christ should be “subject to ordinances” (Colossians 2:20), and calls those rules “the commandments and doctrines of men” (Colossians 2:22). The verse is a quotation of what Paul opposes.
The book of Job gives us another example. Job’s three friends speak for many chapters, and much of what they say sounds pious. Yet at the end God says to Eliphaz, “ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” (Job 42:7). A preacher who lifts a sentence from Eliphaz and presents it as God’s settled word to a suffering believer has cut the cloth without looking at the whole pattern.
So the first questions are simple. Who is speaking? To whom? What is the surrounding paragraph about? What question is being answered? It takes a little longer. It saves a great deal of spoiled lace.
Who was being spoken to
The second rule concerns audience and covenant. All Scripture is written for us. Not all Scripture was written to us. Paul tells Timothy that “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable” (2 Timothy 3:16). Every page is profitable. But to receive its profit, we need to know whom it first addressed and under what arrangement.
Consider a verse that hangs framed in many Nigerian homes:
For thus saith the LORD , That after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD , thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.
Verse 11 is a beautiful promise, and it reveals the heart of God. But notice verse 10, which is rarely framed. The promise was given to Jewish exiles in Babylon, and it came with a timetable: after seventy years, God would bring them home. Jeremiah was telling them to settle down, build houses, plant gardens and pray for the city where they were captives, because the return would not come quickly. The “expected end” was the end of the exile.
Does the verse speak to us? Yes. It shows us what kind of God we serve, one whose thoughts toward His people are thoughts of peace, and who keeps His word across long years of waiting. But we receive that comfort through Christ, in whom “all the promises of God” are yea and Amen (2 Corinthians 1:20). We do not claim that God has promised to end our particular hardship within a given period because He said so to the exiles.
The same care applies to 2 Chronicles 7:14, often quoted at national prayer gatherings. God spoke those words to Solomon at the dedication of the temple, concerning Israel and the land of Israel under the old covenant. The verse can teach us much about humility, prayer and repentance. But rightly dividing it means recognising that the church is not ancient Israel, and Nigeria is not the land God gave to Abraham’s descendants.
Covenant matters most of all. The Bible contains several covenants, and the old covenant made at Sinai is not the covenant under which believers now live. “In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away” (Hebrews 8:13). When we read a command or a promise, we should ask under which covenant it was given, and how the coming of Christ affects the way we receive it. Other articles in this series look closely at how to read the Old Testament through the new covenant. For now the principle is enough: we must know which way the pattern runs before we cut.
Each kind of writing has its grain
Cloth has a grain, the direction in which the threads run. A good tailor cuts with the grain, or the garment will hang badly. Scripture has a grain too, in the different kinds of writing it contains.
A proverb is wisdom about how life generally works. “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6) is a true and precious principle. It is not an unconditional guarantee, and parents whose grown children have wandered should not be told that the verse proves they failed. The book of Proverbs itself shows us this. Two verses placed side by side say, “Answer not a fool according to his folly,” and then, “Answer a fool according to his folly” (Proverbs 26:4-5). Both are true, in different situations. Wisdom literature asks us to think.
A psalm is often a prayer or a song. It gives voice to joy, grief, anger and confusion, and it teaches us to bring those things honestly to God. Not every line in a psalm of lament is a doctrinal statement about how God always acts. Apocalyptic books such as Daniel and Revelation use vivid symbols, and they must be read as symbols. Narrative tells us what happened, which is not always the same as telling us what should happen. Letters address particular churches in particular situations, and their commands are often given with reasons that help us apply them faithfully.
There is also a grain that runs through the whole of Scripture: revelation grows. God did not say everything at once. The writer to the Hebrews opens his letter with this truth:
God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds.
“At sundry times and in divers manners.” God spoke in many pieces and in many ways through the prophets. Each piece was true. But the revelation was partial and progressive, like the light of dawn that grows until the full day. Then, “in these last days,” God has “spoken unto us by his Son.” Jesus is not one more prophet in the line. He is the fullness of what the prophets anticipated.
That means we read earlier revelation in the light of later revelation, and all of it in the light of Christ. We do not correct the Son by the prophets. We understand the prophets by the Son. Progressive revelation does not mean that earlier Scripture was false. It means that earlier Scripture was preparing the way, and that the clearest light falls on everything from the face of Jesus Christ.
NuggetLay out the whole cloth before you cut. Read every verse in its paragraph, every paragraph in its covenant, and every covenant in the light of the Son.
Reading the Gospels through the cross
This brings us to a question that divides sincere believers, and I want to state my own conviction plainly while being fair to others.
The four Gospels record the life and teaching of Jesus before His death and resurrection. Paul reminds us that Jesus was “made of a woman, made under the law” (Galatians 4:4). He lived as a faithful Jew under the old covenant. He told the healed leper to “shew thyself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded” (Matthew 8:4). He told His hearers that the scribes and Pharisees sat in Moses’ seat, and that whatever they bid them observe, they should “observe and do” (Matthew 23:3). The temple was still standing. The new covenant had been promised but not yet sealed in His blood.
Some believers conclude from this that the Gospels belong mainly to Israel, and that the church should look chiefly to Paul’s letters for its instruction. Others go in the opposite direction, and treat every word Jesus spoke to His first hearers as direct instruction for the church today, with no attention to the change the cross brought. Both groups are trying to honour Scripture, and both have points worth hearing.
My conviction is this. The Gospels speak to the church. They are not a Jewish appendix to be set aside. But they speak to us through the cross. We hear the words of Jesus as people who know how the story ends, and who stand on the far side of His death, resurrection and the coming of the Spirit.
Jesus Himself pointed us to this way of reading:
I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come. He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you.
“I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.” Jesus knew that His disciples could not yet understand everything, because the cross and resurrection had not yet happened. He promised that the Spirit would come and guide them into all truth, taking what belongs to Christ and showing it to them. After the resurrection, Luke tells us, “Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures” (Luke 24:45). The apostles’ letters are the fruit of that Spirit-given understanding. They do not replace the Gospels. They help us read them.
Take a concrete example. In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus says, “But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:15). Read on its own, that sounds as though God’s forgiveness of us depends on our forgiving others. Paul writes after the cross: “forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” (Ephesians 4:32). In Paul, our forgiveness of others flows from the forgiveness we have already received. Both texts are the word of God. Many believers who read through the cross understand Jesus’ words as a solemn warning that an unforgiving heart is incompatible with a life that has received mercy, and they hear the call to forgive as fully binding, while resting their own forgiveness on the finished work of Christ. Others hold that Matthew 6 describes the believer’s ongoing fellowship with the Father rather than his standing. Sincere teachers differ on the details. What matters is that we lay both passages on the table and do not cut one away.
Reading the Gospels through the cross does not mean softening the Sermon on the Mount. It means hearing it from the right side of Calvary, as the description of a life that grace makes possible in those who belong to Christ.
Without fear of losing verses
Some believers are afraid of the phrase rightly dividing. They have heard it used by teachers who seem to take scissors to the Bible and throw away whatever they find uncomfortable. “That was for the Jews,” they say, and a whole chapter disappears. “That was under law,” and a warning goes into the dustbin. People who love the Bible are right to be wary of that.
But rightly dividing the word is the opposite of throwing pieces away. Garba’s rule was that nothing on the cutting table is waste until you know what it is for. Every verse remains. Rightly dividing simply asks where each piece belongs and how it fits the whole.
The Bereans in Acts 17 give us the right posture. When Paul preached in their synagogue, Luke says they “received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11). They did two things together. They received the word eagerly and openly. And they searched the Scriptures carefully, testing what they heard. Eagerness without examination leaves us vulnerable to attractive error. Examination without eagerness becomes cold suspicion. The Bereans held both, and Luke calls them noble.
There is another kind of fear, and it is common among those who love the message of grace. It is the fear of hard passages. Hebrews 6 and Hebrews 10:26 speak of falling away and of wilful sin. James says that “by works a man is justified, and not by faith only” (James 2:24). Some grace-loving believers avoid these passages, or rush past them, because they are afraid the passages will undo the gospel. That fear is unnecessary. God’s word does not contradict itself. If a passage seems to clash with the finished work of Christ, the answer is to lay it out more carefully: read the whole argument of Hebrews, or of James 2, and ask what question the writer is answering. You do not have to protect the gospel from the Bible. The gospel came from the Bible, and it can bear the Bible’s full weight.
Without bias toward our favourite doctrines
Garba’s apprentice did not only cut in haste. He decided in advance what he would find. He assumed the long strip was waste because he had already pictured the garment in his mind. That is bias, and every one of us is vulnerable to it.
We all come to Scripture with a framework. That is not wrong in itself. A framework helps us gather what the Bible teaches and see connections between passages. But a framework must remain answerable to the text. If we find ourselves repeatedly silencing verses because they do not fit, we should examine the framework.
Few subjects show this more clearly than the relationship between Israel, the church and the end of the age. Here is a fair outline of the main views held by sincere believers.
Dispensational teachers generally hold that God has distinct purposes for national Israel and for the church. Many expect the church to be caught up to meet the Lord before a future tribulation, after which God will restore Israel as a nation and Christ will reign on earth for a thousand years. Progressive dispensationalists keep the distinction between Israel and the church but see more continuity between them.
Covenant or Reformed teachers generally see one people of God across both testaments, with the church as the continuation and fulfilment of Israel in Christ. Many of them are amillennial, understanding the thousand years of Revelation 20 as a symbol of the present reign of Christ. Some are postmillennial, expecting the gospel to bring a long period of flourishing before Christ returns.
PunchlineHistoric premillennialists expect a future earthly reign of Christ after His return, but usually without the sharp distinction between Israel and the church, and many of them expect the church to pass through the tribulation.
Paul’s words in Romans 11 are central to the discussion: “blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved” (Romans 11:25-26). Some read “all Israel” as the Jewish nation in a future turning to Christ. Others read it as the whole people of God, Jew and Gentile together. Others as the full number of elect Jews across history. Each view has able defenders who love Christ and honour Scripture.
I am not going to give you a verdict here, and that is deliberate. What I want you to notice is how easily our position on these questions can become the lens through which we cut every other passage. A believer who has settled his end-times chart can stop reading Romans 11, or Revelation, or the prophets, and start reading his chart into them. Hold your convictions. Study them. But hold them with open hands and with charity toward brothers and sisters who see it differently. Peter admitted that in Paul’s letters “are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest” (2 Peter 3:16). If Peter found Paul hard in places, we can afford some humility.
The same caution applies to the doctrines we love most. Those of us who treasure the message of grace must be careful not to cut every passage to fit it. If a text calls for repentance, let it call. If it warns, let it warn. Grace does not need us to edit the Bible on its behalf.
The workman’s character
Paul’s charge to Timothy does not end with technique. A few verses later he describes the kind of person who handles the word rightly:
And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men , apt to teach, patient, In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth.
“The servant of the Lord must not strive.” The word means to fight or quarrel. Rightly dividing the word is not a contest to win arguments. It is a service to help people know God. Paul says the Lord’s servant must be “gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves.” The aim is not to crush the person who disagrees but to help him come “to the acknowledging of the truth.”
That has implications for how we teach and how we learn. When Ezra read the law to the returned exiles, the Levites “read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading” (Nehemiah 8:8). Good teaching shows people how the meaning is reached. It does not simply pile up verses to create an impression of authority. It distinguishes between what the passage says and the illustration we use to explain it. And it is willing to say, “I need to study that further.”
A cell group leader in our fellowship, a careful woman who had taught the same group for years, was once asked by a young member why her explanation of a passage left out its final verse. She felt defensive at first. Then she went home and read the chapter again, and saw that the question was fair. At the next meeting she said so, and explained what she had reconsidered. Her group did not lose respect for her. They gained a lesson about the Bible and a better one about humility. She had shown them that the authority belonged to the word, not to her previous interpretation of it.
Garba did not shout at his apprentice that Friday afternoon. He sent him to buy two bottles of cold water, and when the boy came back, the master had cleared the table. He spread out what remained of the six yards, every piece, including the strip the boy had thrown into the corner. He turned the lace this way and that. He studied the border and the flowers. He found which way the threads ran. For almost an hour he did not cut anything.
Then he showed the boy how, by reversing the bodice panels and lowering the waist slightly, the flowers could be made to stand upright again. He took the discarded strip and made it into a border for the neckline. The customer, when she collected the outfit, said it was the most beautiful thing her sister would wear that year. She never knew how close it had come to ruin.
The apprentice stayed with Garba for four more years before opening his own shop. On the wall above his cutting table there is a piece of cardboard with a single line written in marker: Lay it out first. Then cut.
Take that line with you to your Bible. You do not need to fear any verse, and you do not need to protect a favourite doctrine from any passage. Lay out the whole cloth. Find the grain. Ask what every piece is for. Then cut straight, as a workman who needs not be ashamed before the God whose word it is.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Which verse do you quote most often? Have you read the whole paragraph around it recently? Does your usual use match what the writer meant?
- What is the difference between Scripture being written for you and being written to you? How might that change the way you read a promise like Jeremiah 29:11?
- How do you respond to the conviction that the Gospels speak to the church through the cross? Which passages in the Gospels does that help you to read more clearly?
- Are there passages you avoid because you fear they will undermine what you believe? What would it look like to approach them like a Berean?
- Which doctrine are you most likely to read into every passage? How can you hold it with open hands?
This Week
Choose one verse you love and have quoted often. This week, read the whole chapter it comes from each day, and on the last day read the whole book if it is short enough. Write down, in a few sentences, who was speaking, to whom, under which covenant, in what kind of writing, and what question was being answered. Then write one paragraph on what the verse meant to its first hearers, and one on how it speaks to you through Christ. If you lead a group, invite someone to ask the hardest question they can about your explanation, and answer it from the passage.
A Prayer
Father, thank You for Your word of truth. Forgive me for the times I have cut it in haste, or decided what I would find before I looked. Give me a diligent heart, like the Bereans, ready to receive and careful to search. Deliver me from the fear that would keep me from any passage, and from the bias that would bend every passage to my favourite ideas. Let me read every word in the light of Your Son and through His cross. Make me a workman who needs not be ashamed, gentle and patient with those who see differently, and quick to say when I have been wrong. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.