How Do You Interpret the Bible Without Twisting It

Paul wrote his letter to the Galatians without a single chapter or verse number. Dr. Leo Percer, who teaches New Testament and hermeneutics at Liberty University, made the point plainly in a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation with Lisa Fields: “Paul didn’t sit down and write a letter to the Galatians, for example, to put Chapter one verse one.” That small fact holds the answer to how you keep from twisting a passage. You hear what it meant by stepping outward from the verse, first to the paragraph, then to the whole book, then to the world and the people it was written for. Only after that do you ask what it says to you.

The exercises that follow practice that outward movement on real passages, one layer at a time. You can work through them alone in an hour or two, or with a group over one or two meetings. Bring a Bible with full chapters, not a list of verses. If you lead a group, give people time to read each passage for themselves before anyone explains it. The goal is that participants see the text with their own eyes.

Why the verse is the wrong starting point

Percer notes that chapter headings and “verse numbers came at a later date.” A letter makes one argument from greeting to farewell. A verse number is a modern address label, not a boundary of meaning.

He also points out how these books were first received. According to Percer, “the intention was that someone would stand up in front of a group of people and read these texts out loud to people.” The first audience heard a whole letter in one sitting. They never met a verse alone. Lisa Fields names what happens when we do the opposite: “sometimes we look at scripture and we kind of isolate one verse, and then we don’t look at it in the larger context, and we miss the message.”

The outermost layer, the historical setting, is the hardest. Percer frames it as a question every reader must ask: “how wide is the gap between their experience and my experience?” The gap includes time, culture, geography and language. It is real, but it can be crossed. He holds that “if you dig enough, you can get enough evidence to come to some conclusions about each book of the Bible.”

Exercise one: Matthew 7, the paragraph

Most people know Matthew 7:1 by heart. Fewer have read what follows. This exercise practices the first step outward: the verses around a verse.

Read Matthew 7:1-20 aloud, slowly, without stopping to comment. Then work through these observations.

• Find the picture Jesus uses in verses 3-5. What two objects does he compare, and whose eye is each one in?
• Read verse 5 again: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5). A mote is a speck. Notice the word then. What does Jesus expect the person to do after removing the beam?
• Skip to verse 16: “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). Jesus tells his hearers to recognize false prophets. What kind of evaluation does that require?

Verse 5 does not end by telling the listener to leave his brother’s speck alone. It ends with seeing clearly enough to help. A few verses later, Jesus requires his hearers to tell good fruit from bad. Whatever verse 1 forbids, it cannot forbid all discernment, because the same speech commands discernment.

Percer reaches a similar conclusion by following the measuring language in verse 2. Of Jesus’s teaching there, he says, “It doesn’t rule out the possibility of me judging, but it does temper my judgment.” The beam and the speck make the same point from another angle. The warning targets the hypocrite who inspects others while ignoring himself.

Now test that reading against the verse that sits between them: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you” (Matthew 7:6). Ask what this verse assumes the listener can do. To withhold something holy from those who will trample it, a person has to make an assessment. Many interpreters read verse 6 as a deliberate counterweight to verses 1-5: do not judge hypocritically, but do not abandon discernment either. Others treat it as a separate saying placed nearby, with a looser connection to verse 1. Interpreters also differ on who the dogs and swine are. Either way, verse 6 makes it harder, not easier, to read verse 1 as a ban on every judgment.

If you lead a group, resist explaining any of this before people have found the word then in verse 5 and wrestled with verse 6 on their own.

Exercise two: Philippians 4:13, the book

This exercise moves out to the next layer: the whole letter. Percer does not discuss this verse in the conversation. It is included because it is one of the most often quoted lines in the New Testament and one of the easiest to test with his method.

The verse reads: “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13). On its own, it can sound like a promise that faith guarantees success at whatever you attempt.

Read Philippians 4:10-20. Then read Philippians 1:12-14 to see where Paul is as he writes.

• In 1:13, what is Paul’s situation?
• In 4:10 and 4:18, what has the church in Philippi done for him?
• Read 4:11: “Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content” (Philippians 4:11). What has Paul learned?
• In 4:12, list the opposite conditions Paul says he has experienced.

The answers change the verse. Paul is in chains, thanking a church for a gift. The “all things” of verse 13 points back to the conditions he just listed: being full and being hungry, having plenty and going without. The strength he describes is the strength to be content in either state. This is the reading the paragraph and the letter most naturally support. A reader who uses the verse to guarantee a win has turned a prisoner’s testimony of contentment into its opposite.

Exercise three: Jeremiah 29:11, the first audience

This exercise reaches the outermost layer: the people a passage was written to. Again, Percer does not discuss it; it is chosen to practice his method.

The verse reads: “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” (Jeremiah 29:11).

Read Jeremiah 29:1-14. Then answer from the text itself.

• According to verse 1, what kind of document is this, and who receives it?
• In verses 5-7, what does God tell these people to do where they are? Why might that surprise them?
• In verse 10, how long does God say it will be before he brings them back?

The word you in verse 11 now has a face. It refers to people carried away to Babylon who are being told to build houses, plant gardens and settle in for a long stay. Many would not live to see the return. The promise of a future was real, but it came wrapped in a command to wait faithfully in a foreign city.

Here Percer’s question about the gap matters. We are not exiles awaiting a return to Jerusalem. That distance does not make the verse useless to us. It means the principle must come from what God was actually doing: keeping his word to his people across a long and painful wait. A reading that turns the verse into a guarantee of personal prosperity on our timeline ignores the seventy years in verse 10. The text promises God’s faithfulness. It does not promise that hardship will end soon.

A harder case: the house in Leviticus 14

Some passages resist a tidy reading. Percer raises one himself: the law in Leviticus 14:33-48 about a plague in the walls of a house, which a priest was to inspect.

Read those verses. Percer’s first observation is about distance: “These houses were built in many cases outta mud,” he says, unlike his own office walls. The command was given to Israel, inside the covenant at Sinai. He adds that “we also need to pay attention to what’s aimed at us and what’s not aimed at us.”

He does not stop there. Because he holds that all Scripture is inspired and profitable, he looks for what the passage still teaches. His working rule is: “If the New Testament addresses it, we go with the New Testament interpretation.” Where it does not, he asks what points to Christ, what has been fulfilled in him, and what principle remains. In Leviticus he sees a code of holiness that set Israel apart, and he draws the lesson that God’s people should be distinct from the world around them. He adds that he is not an Old Testament specialist and treads lightly.

Faithful Christians frame the relationship between the Old Testament law and believers today in more than one way, and Percer’s approach is one serious option. What the exercise teaches is narrower and firmer: you cannot apply a law well until you know who it was first aimed at and why.

Testing what you found

Finding a principle can look like an escape hatch. Could a reader turn any uncomfortable command into a vague idea and move on? Percer’s answer is that a principle has to come out of what the passage meant to its first audience, and it has to fit the rest of Scripture. As he puts it, “there are good interpretations, and there are bad interpretations.” For each reading you made today, ask whether the principle traces back to specific words in the passage, and whether another part of the Bible contradicts it. If it fails either test, go back to the text.

Questions for discussion

1. In which exercise did the meaning shift most as you moved from the verse to the paragraph, the book or the first audience? What specifically in the text caused the shift?
2. When you read on your own, where do you usually stop: at the verse, the chapter, or the book? What would it take to go one layer further?
3. How would you use Matthew 7:5-6 to respond to someone who quotes verse 1 to end a conversation? Does verse 6 strengthen or complicate your answer?
4. Compare the isolated and contextual readings of Philippians 4:13 or Jeremiah 29:11. What does each reading claim, and which words in the passage does each one account for?
5. When a passage was clearly aimed at someone else, as in Leviticus 14, what keeps a reader from either discarding it or applying it too literally?
6. Lisa Fields warned that isolating one verse can make us miss the message. Is there a verse you rely on that you have never read alongside its chapter?

For groups: questions 3 and 5 may draw out disagreement. Let people state their readings, then ask each person to point to the words in the text that support them. The aim is better reading, not one approved answer on every law.

A practice for the week: walk one verse home

Choose one verse you know well, ideally one you have quoted to someone, and move it outward over several days.

1. Day one. Write the verse down, with what you have always taken it to mean.
2. Day two. Read the full chapter around it aloud. Note what comes right before and right after.
3. Day three. Read or listen to the whole book in one sitting if it is short, or a long section if it is not. Write one sentence on what the book is about.
4. Day four. Using the opening verses of the book or a Bible dictionary, find who wrote it, who received it, and what was happening to them.
5. Day five. Write what the verse meant to that first audience, then the principle it carries. Compare both with what you wrote on day one.

Whatever you find, you will know why you believe what the verse says. Percer ended his conversation with Lisa Fields by insisting that “God is not afraid of our questions.” He added, “There are answers if we’re willing to look for ’em.” Looking for them starts with reading past the verse you came for.