Episode 20: Are You Adding Meaning to the Bible?

It’s easy to read the Bible and feel like we understand it. The language is familiar, the ideas feel clear, and we move on quickly.

But sometimes what feels obvious isn’t actually what the text is saying.

In this episode, we unpack how we read meaning into Scripture without realizing it and how learning to slow down and observe more carefully can change the way we read.

Transcript

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Welcome to Routage with Emily Talento, where we explore who Jesus is through context, culture, and coveted. We're jumping back into regular scheduled programming where we're talking about how to read the Bible well. The last week we talked about Holy Week, which, if you haven't listened, even if it's not Holy Week, I recommend going back. Those are actually two of my favorite episodes I've ever recorded, especially Tuesday's episode, the one about the crowd and how we are the crowd, how we have expectations for Jesus and we could be following him and still miss completely everything that he's doing. And so that was last week. This week we're jumping back into reading the Bible. There's, I don't know if I want to tell you what's happening. I'm very excited about what's happening in the next couple episodes. Alright, I'll tell you quick. So this episode and next episode are continuing on with how to read the Bible well. This episode I'll tell you about in a second. Next episode is going to be a more practical how does the Bible change us, practically speaking. But we are going to be looking at the Bible as a whole from a 30,000 feet view. Now, what makes this very exciting to me, even more exciting than even just, you know, getting to do that, is we're doing it in chronological order. So I don't know if you know this, we did talk about this a couple weeks ago. The Bible isn't written from beginning to end, especially in the Old Testament, are not sequenced in the correct order that the events took place. So, an example, Ezra is in the Bible before Psalms, but really took place far after Psalms. Just a quick example. So we're gonna be looking at the books in chronological order, just a brief overview. I'm so pumped I can't even begin to tell you. So that's exciting, and then after that, we are going to be pivoting pretty majorly, and I'm pretty excited about that too. So lots to look forward to. Today's gonna be a very important episode because I think now I don't want you to walk away feeling like this is discouraging or feeling like you can't trust what you read. However, I do want us to feel a sense of doubt in our own understanding. Let me explain. Wherever you're from, you're likely not reading scripture through the lens that the original recipients would have been understanding it through. Does that make sense? Now, in this episode, we're going to be unpacking some of the ways that we do that and the dangers of it. Why is this such a concern? The big concern is that we are reading ourselves, our own understanding, into text for it to say things that it was never intended to say. And it actually gets very, very dangerous. And I don't think we fully realize how deep this issue really goes. I'm going to show you how there are words that we take at surface-level meaning, but they actually mean very, very different things in the biblical context. So before we go any further, I would like to start with our rooted moment today. Actually, this entire episode could be viewed as a rooted moment because this is all about bringing us back to the original context and culture of what the authors of the Bible were saying and filling in the gaps that we are likely missing in 2026. So there are so many words that we take at face value meaning. For example, the word heart, it doesn't mean what we understand it to mean today. When we're reading the Bible and the word heart comes up, we interpret it to be referring to our feelings, to our emotions. But that is not what it was understood to mean in the biblical context. But in the biblical world, the heart referred to your will. It referred to how you think, how you decide, what directs your life. Similar but different, and changes the way we can interpret verses. Another example is the word peace. We understand it as calm, no anxiety, but that is not what the biblical context is referring to at all. It refers to wholeness, it refers to restoration, it refers to things being made right. So, what does this mean? This has serious implications. We pray for peace, we but we're totally missing the point. So peace isn't about how we feel, it's about whether things are being made whole. That's that's a really, really massive distinction. Another example, the word blessing, we read that as comfort, things going well. But that is not what scripture is referring to. We talked about this briefly uh a few weeks ago. But in scripture, blessing refers to alignment with God, walking in his ways. We could see this in Psalm 1.1. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked. Blessed is the person who's walking in alignment with God. And we could see that throughout that whole chapter. But again, that's a serious implication. We pray for blessings. Okay, sure. But do we recognize that part of that, part of what we're praying for when we use that word in the scriptural context is praying for alignment with God? No, we're oftentimes referring to physical things, our physical needs being met. That's not the same thing though. And if we're constantly viewing things through our imperfect lens, we're just missing what scripture is saying all over the place. I have another one for you. Last one. The word faith. We understand it as belief, we understand it as confidence. However, but biblically, that's just not what it is. It's trust that acts. It's trust that shows up. There's a level of obedience that's built into the biblical definition of faith. We miss that step. It's not about what we believe in our head, it's about what our life reflects. I know I said it before, but like these definitions, these are just four. These are just four words that we do not have correctly. If you don't follow me on Instagram, you should. I'm gonna be posting a whole list of words and their proper biblical definitions. What the authors meant when they were using these words. Remember, we're not reading it in the original language. It was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. And so translations can be good, but they're not perfect. And even on top of that, even more than the translational error of it, our own definitions of words change over time. We're reading our own experience and culture in. And so I believe it's our job to clear that up. So follow me on Instagram, I'll be posting a full list to kind of help you out. So it's I my concern is that this will feel overwhelming, right? Where it's like, there's just so much that I don't understand, and I really want to make things as easy as possible. And so what's good is this is creating foundation. You don't have to keep building foundation. Over time, it does get easier to understand the Bible, to recognize God's character through, because you're building a relationship. You there are things you know to be true because you've seen them play out in scripture, you've seen them play out in your life, and you know that they're solid. A lot of these things you only have to really learn once. And so, if I can help build that biblical foundation, help help strengthen that biblical worldview, that is my goal. So I'll be posting that. Hopefully, it'll be up by the time this episode is. If not, it will be up soon after. Because I do think this is a game changer in being able to understand scripture thoroughly and what it's actually saying. So definitely check that out. I'm very excited about it. The words and definitions of the words are the big one, but today we're gonna be looking at four different ways we are reading ourselves into the text. Now, before we jump in, when I was writing this episode and thinking this through, the one word that kept coming back to me is we need to remain curious. And we're gonna elaborate on this a little bit in a second, but we know that the Bible is a living, breathing book. And we could read the same verse a thousand times and walk away with a thousand different takeaways. So as we're looking at these four points, the overarching theme for all of them is remaining curious, not settling for what we've been taught or what we think we know. And it doesn't matter how long that we've been studying the Bible, there should always be a sense of, okay, God, what are you here to teach me in this today? Number one, we talked about this in depth, we're not gonna talk about it in depth again, but we define terms too quickly. We assume we know what they mean because they mean something in our current culture and context. What I recommend doing, because I don't want to leave us here without answers or without practical steps on things how we could fix these problems. Number one, look at different translations. I love my ESV. However, it is helpful to look at different translations to get a more full view of the text. Even better than that, I would recommend downloading the app Blue Letter Bible. I think they have a website too, but I use their app. It's not the best app, it's a little janky, but it gets the job done. Basically, what it is, is it allows you to look at the Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic for each word, and it shows you where the word has been used in other parts of scripture. On top of that, it gives you the original meaning of the word, what the author intended. So highly, highly recommend that resource. I use it regularly in my own study. Okay, number two, we assume understanding without slowing down. We read things one time and we expect to get it all. Now, that's not how this works. A couple weeks ago, before Holy Week, we talked about helpful patterns in reading the Bible. When we open the we open our time in scripture, what should it look like? And I highlighted this piece of it, which is writing down observations. As annoying as it may sound, sitting in that time of observation is way more important than you realize. Because what it's doing is it's forcing our brain to question our assumptions. It allows us to think more critically about the context and prevents us from moving too quickly into application. Not that there's anything wrong with being in application, but we can't apply things appropriately if we're missing what it's actually saying. So, summing this up, stay in observation longer than it feels natural. Number three, we extend truth further than the text does. So something could be true and we apply it wrong. And I think we do this actually pretty frequently. We hear God is good, which is true, he is good, but then we apply that to an area in our lives, assuming that the situation is gonna go the way we want because God is good. Does that make sense? Or we hear God is faithful, which is true, he is faithful. So surely this situation in our lives must work out because God is faithful, and so on and so forth. You get what I'm saying? We take something real and then we attach outcome to it and think it's the same thing. We don't realize what we're adding to the equation, and we do this all the time, where we read our own expectations into scripture. This was what happened with the crowd on Palm Sunday. If you haven't listened to that episode, again, highly recommend it. Probably one of the episodes I'm most proud of. This is where confusion starts, not because scripture fails, but because we're adding our own expectations to it. Got it? Great. Number four, we read from memory, not observation. This comes back to that piece of curiosity. Ideally, hopefully, every single time we read a passage, we should be seeing something we didn't before. Or even if it's not a tangible seeing something different, God is doing something different in our hearts upon this read than a previous read. Because we're different when we're reading it from the previous time. Does that make sense? We need to get out of the mindset. I've heard this, I know it. Because that's where growing stops. It doesn't matter how long we've been reading the Bible. There should always be a sense of we're approaching something new, or God could be doing something new in this familiar text. Okay, I know that was a lot. I don't want you to walk away feeling discouraged. The goal isn't for you to be questioning everything, the goal is to help you see more clearly, and a huge part of that is understanding the original context and culture. The fact that there's more depth in the Bible doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. All it means is that it was never intended to be just surface reading. So many of these misunderstandings that we have of Scripture can be solved if we simply just slow down, stay curious, and are willing to look again. That's it. It's not that complicated. I've said it before, I'm sure I'll say it again, but you having a hard time understanding the Bible isn't your fault. No one taught you how to do it, which actually speaks to a much larger problem, which is lack of discipleship in the American Church. But that's something we'll talk about a different day. Today we're talking about understanding the Bible through our misconceptions. The faster we could take off the lenses that we see the Bible through from our experience from our current day, the faster we could actually get to the heart of the text. The faster we could actually see what God intended for it to be. Now, again, I hope this episode wasn't too discouraging, but rather empowering. And hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, if you could like, comment, subscribe, do any of the things that you would do for any of the other podcasts that you like, I'd really appreciate it. You could also follow me on Instagram at Emily Talento and at rooted with Emily Talento, especially if you want to see that list of words from the Bible that don't necessarily mean the same things that we expect them to mean today. I hope you have a great day, and I'll see you next time.