How Jesus Interpreted the Bible

The following is an exert from my book, Romans Roadblocks Chapter 1.

Matthew 22:29 “But Jesus answered them, ‘You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.'”

The Scripture verse at the beginning of this chapter comes from an interaction between Jesus and a group of Sadducees. The Sadducees were “sad you see” because they did not believe in the resurrection. In fact, they didn’t believe in angels, miracles, the spirit, the Messiah, or the resurrection from the dead. The only books of the Bible that they accepted were the Torah (the first five books of the Bible). While they were a very powerful party of the Jews because they held the priesthood, the Sadducees also enjoyed the power and influence of Rome. They were the theological liberals of their day, enjoying their faulty hermeneutic because it gave them worldly power and influence.

Yet they had seen Jesus work miracle after miracle. They had seen Him raise the dead, give sight to the blind, cast out demons (which are fallen angels), and many other miraculous things, but they still refused to believe in Him. This group of Sadducees tried to catch Jesus in a theological trap by using the Old Testament law about a brother marrying his brother’s widow to raise up children for his brother. They proposed a hypothetical scenario where seven brothers had this one woman as a wife, had no children, and died. They then asked to whom she would be married after the resurrection.  They were implying that, since this scenario didn’t make sense, the resurrection couldn’t be true. The Sadducees must have thought this was an ingenious theological trap.

Jesus pointed out their faulty worldview, however, by saying, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:29 ESV). Jesus continued to give helpful insight into what the resurrection will look like when he said “they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven” (Matthew 22:30). Also, He pointed out where they were interpreting the Scriptures incorrectly by quoting the Scriptures they did accept: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32). We can see that Jesus interpreted the Bible by the literal, grammatical-historical method because He interpreted that God is the God of the living simply by pointing to the tense of the verb “am.” This is a great example of how literally Jesus interpreted the text of Scripture.

To see the rest of the chapter you can buy the book on amazon.com. Go to the resource page. Please feel free to comment. Please no cursing or pornography.