Five Principles for Rightly Handling Scripture

God’s word is our most important and indisputable authority. This is not to say it is the only authority. R. C. Sproul notes that the Reformation notion of sola Scriptura does not mean the Bible is the only authority for the Christian, but that it is the only infallible authority—for the simple reason that God himself is infallible.

1. Scripture should speak to all of life
We should not see the Bible as a manual for how to escape this world, but rather as a book of wisdom for, in part, applying God’s revealed truth to all of life now. Scripture should be both the foundation and impetus for all our knowledge pursuits.
 
2. Scripture should define your paradigm
All of us tend to like the parts of Scripture that support our paradigms while we ignore or downplay the parts that threaten our status quo. But bad things happen when we start shaping Scripture around us rather than ourselves around Scripture. We must always be on guard against force-fitting Scripture into boxes of our liking.
 
3. Scripture is valuable as a whole, not just the parts
Context is everything in Bible study. The truth of any given verse becomes clearer when we see it in the larger context. We get the most out of the Bible when we read it in big chunks and grasp its grand narrative. The Bible is a cohesive narrative.
 
4. Scripture should spark worship and obedience
We must “be doers of the word, and not hearers only” (James 1:22). Our lives should be beautifully transformed by the Bible because we obey what it says. Part of this is acknowledging that the Bible should engage not only our minds, but also our hearts, leading us to love the Lord and trust him more and more. We read the Bible to know its author, to behold the beauty and glory of Christ.
 
5. Scripture doesn’t have to make complete sense
This doesn’t mean we turn off our brains, throw up our hands, and tolerate theological fuzziness. Rather, the difficulties of Scripture should invite us to even more rigorous and precise examination, going deeper and wider in our study as lifelong learners, not because we have to know everything God knows, but because the more immersed we are in Scripture, the nearer we feel to his sweet presence.
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

 

What Does Agape Love Really Mean?

Maybe you’ve already heard that agape (ἀγάπη) is the standard word for love in the Greek New Testament, and maybe you’ve heard that it points to a specific kind of love: a selfless, giving, non-emotional love—as opposed to the friendship love of philia (φιλία).
 
What does agape love really mean?
 
And now to love, because John 21 provides a perfect example of what Dr. Decker is talking about. I actually remember the day as a college freshman when I was given the (supposed) secret Greek key to unlocking Jesus’ famous conversation with Peter in that passage. Jesus asks three times, “Do you love me?” Peter replies each time: “Yes, I love you.” I was told that, hidden underneath the surface of the weak, imprecise English word “love” were two different Greek words: agapao (ἀγαπάω) and phileo (φιλέω). I was further told that these two Greek words pointed to two vastly different kinds of love, the one selfless and non-emotional and the other merely emotional and friend-ish. Peter, so the interpretation goes, twice couldn’t bring himself to say he loved Jesus selflessly and unconditionally, so Jesus asked him, in effect, “Do you even love me like a friend?”
 
…The fact is that the Bible never says anywhere that real love, ideal love, is non-emotional. In Jesus’ conversation with Peter, he appears to be varying agapao and phileo for purposes of style, not meaning.
 
One of the problems with using Greek without knowing it well is that you tend to fail to apply your principles rigorously. Are all synonyms in John 21 used to point up their differences rather than their similarities?
 
As D. A. Carson points out… Jesus doesn’t just vary his words for love in his conversation with Peter, he varies his word choice for the noun “sheep”:
 
“Feed my lambs,” he says.
Then, “Shepherd my sheep.”
Then, “Feed my sheep.”
 
Is it lambs or sheep? If Jesus intends to highlight a significant difference, he does not choose to make that clear. There do not seem to be obvious differences among the three imperative verbs, either: “feed,” “shepherd,” “feed.” The verb “shepherd,” in fact, also means “feed” sometimes, especially in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament). 
 
And John 21 isn’t the only place where Jesus varies his use of agapao and phileo in the Gospel of John. In John 3:35, Jesus says, “The Father loves the son,” and in John 5:20 he says precisely the same thing—only in one verse he uses agapao and in the other phileo, with no discernible difference in meaning. Jesus isn’t invoking two radically different kinds of love in his conversation with Peter.
 
One of the most popular linguistic and exegetical fallacies in modern times is that the Greek word for love, agapao, carries in it the implication of a divine love that is unconditional and comes to us in spite of our sin.
 
That is not true. Context must decide if agapao refers to our proud, cliquish love for our cronies (as in Matthew 5:46) or if it refers to God’s merciful and sacrificial love for sinners (as in John 3:16), or if it refers to our love for leaders, not unconditionally but precisely because of their labor (1 Thessalonians 5:13)
 
To be clear, the New Testament does speak of a special kind of love, but we don’t know that by looking up Greek words in the dictionary. We know it by reading the New Testament. People who can read the Bible only in English can still know what love is.
 
Debunking beloved interpretations of Scripture is a favored pastime of young seminarians. But constructive help, not destructive criticism, is my goal here. It is my impression that the church in general—and perhaps the most studious of us in particular—put too much weight on looking up Bible words and not enough weight on reading Bible sentences in their contexts. There is nothing necessarily wrong with looking up words, and Logos can do it so incredibly well! I do it all the time—and if you’re curious as to what I think “love” really means, I actually believe the standard Greek dictionary defines it pretty well if you put senses one and two together: “to have a warm regard for and interest in another; to have high esteem for or satisfaction with something, cherish, have affection for, love, take pleasure in.”
 
But you’ll learn far more about “love” by reading the resurrection accounts in the Gospels, or by reading the story of the Good Samaritan—Scripture passages which don’t even use the word—than you will by looking up agape in a dictionary. By all means do both, but know in advance which one weighs more than the other.
 

Excerpt from: https://blog.logos.com/what-does-agape-love-mean/