You keep from twisting the Bible by refusing to let a verse mean something its own passage, its own book and its first readers would not recognize. Dr. Leo Percer, who teaches New Testament and hermeneutics at Liberty University, states the problem plainly. When two people trade verses, “what we’ve proven is our ability to cite a text of scripture. We haven’t proven whether we’ve actually understood the context of that scripture or not.” Interpretation is the work that closes that gap. It has an order, and most arguments about the Bible skip it.
Why Doesn’t Quoting a Verse Settle Anything?
Start with the habit itself. Percer describes how doctrinal debates usually go: “We find a text that seems to support our view, and instead of looking at the context, we simply quote the text.” The verse is treated as a verdict. The other side answers with a different verse, and the exchange stalls.
The common example is the argument over sexuality. One person quotes a passage. The other answers that Leviticus also forbids shellfish. Percer’s point is that neither move has done any interpretive work. Both people have shown they can locate a sentence. Neither has shown what that sentence meant where it was written. In his words, quoting the Bible “doesn’t always satisfy the argument. It doesn’t end the argument.”
He also refuses to aim this only at critics: “Christians are as guilty of this as our critics are.” That matters for the reader’s question. If both sides are proof-texting, a longer list of verses will help no one. What helps is a better way of reading.
What Does “Context” Actually Mean?
Percer repeats an old maxim, noting that it has been credited to several scholars: a text without a context is a pretext. A pretext is a reason offered for a conclusion already reached. A verse cut loose from its setting can be fitted to almost any conclusion, which is exactly why it persuades no one who disagrees.
Context has layers, and it helps to separate them:
- The surrounding passage. These are the sentences before and after the verse you want to use.
- The whole book. Percer reminds his students that chapter and verse numbers were added later. “Paul didn’t sit down and write a letter to the Galatians, for example, to put Chapter one verse one.” Paul wrote a letter, and a letter makes one argument from start to finish, so a line from its middle means what it means inside that argument.
- The historical setting. Who wrote it, who received it, when and why.
- The rest of Scripture. The verse has to fit the whole Bible’s witness.
Each layer limits what a verse can mean. Together they turn a sentence back into a message.
The book layer is why Percer stresses that the New Testament was largely meant to be heard aloud, read by one person to a gathering. He urges readers to read whole books aloud or listen to audio Bibles, as he once did with the entire book of Hebrews for the class of Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project. Hearing a book in one sitting shows its flow in a way that verse-by-verse reading hides.
Isn’t Having the Holy Spirit Enough?
This is the misconception that most often blocks careful reading. If a believer has the Spirit, the thinking goes, the right meaning will come. Percer answers it directly: “just because you have the Holy Spirit, just because you’re a follower of Christ doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to interpret scripture correctly.” He adds that this holds at every turn, which is the realistic point. A sincere believer can read one passage well and the next one badly.
His claim is narrower than it first sounds. He does not set the Spirit against study. He says faith does not replace method. Sincerity tells you about the reader’s heart. It does not tell you what Paul meant in Galatians 3.
Scripture itself admits that this takes effort. Speaking of Paul’s letters, Second Peter says:
“In which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.” (2 Peter 3:16)
In KJV English, wrest means to twist or wrench out of shape. The verse names the very problem in this article’s title, and it locates the cause: people who have not learned to read the passage carefully twist it. Percer draws the hopeful side out of the same idea. Hard to understand does not mean impossible to understand. It means the reader has to work.
What Are the Steps Most Bible Arguments Skip?
Percer teaches a five-step approach he takes from Grasping God’s Word by J. Scott Duvall and J. Daniel Hays. The book pictures a town on each side of a river. The biblical text lives in one town, the reader lives in the other, and interpretation is the work of crossing. The picture helps because it shows that the gap is real and has a definite width. It breaks down if you imagine the crossing as a single leap, so it is better to take the steps one at a time.
- Understand the text in its own town. Ask who wrote it, when and why, who received it and what their circumstances were. Percer admits this is easy for some books and harder for others, but he holds that enough digging yields reasonable conclusions about each book of the Bible.
- Measure the distance between their world and yours. Percer names several kinds of distance. There is time: roughly two thousand years separate us from the New Testament. There is culture: most modern readers were not raised in first-century Judea. There is geography, which has changed even in Israel itself. And there is language. Most of us read in English, while the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and Aramaic and the New Testament mostly in Greek. Readers without those languages are not stuck. Percer points to translations, atlases, Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias as the tools that let ordinary readers cross.
- Find the main point. Only after you know the original setting and the distance do you ask what the author intended and what timeless principle the passage carries. The principle comes out of the original meaning, so this step depends on the first two.
- Check that principle against the rest of the Bible. A conclusion that fits one verse but fights the rest of Scripture is suspect. Percer frames this practically: if you are defending the Christian faith, you do not want to end up defending a non-Christian viewpoint.
- Apply it. Only now do you ask what the principle looks like in your own life and setting.
Application is the last step, not the first. Most verse-trading arguments start there and never go back.
What Does This Look Like With a Real Verse?
Percer’s chosen example is a verse almost everyone has heard quoted:
“Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” (Matthew 7:1–2)
To mete is to measure out or hand out.
People usually quote only the opening words and conclude that no one should ever judge anyone. Percer points out the first problem with that reading. If I tell you not to judge, I have just judged you. “Well, even that statement is a judgment, isn’t it?”
Then he reads further. The next sentence explains what Jesus is warning against. He is speaking about the way we judge, and the standard we use will be applied to us. That changes the meaning. The passage tells the person judging to ask whether they would want God to use the same measure on them. It tempers judgment rather than banning it.
Percer adds a check from the wider Gospel picture, which is step four at work. Jesus himself makes judgments throughout the Gospels. “So if he’s saying, don’t judge, he broke his own rule.” Ordinary life also requires judgment every day: whether an approaching car is too close, whether food is safe to eat. Judgment in itself is not the sin. The verse addresses how judgment is used. That reading appears only when you keep reading past the first five words.
Where Do the Steps Get Hard?
The clearest test is the Old Testament law, which is exactly where the shellfish argument lives. Percer calls it a complicated conversation and says one podcast cannot address all the issues. That honesty is part of the answer.
His approach goes like this. Christians read the Old Testament with Christ at the center, and they also pay attention to what was aimed at them and what was not. Leviticus was written within the Mosaic covenant for Israel. Yet because Percer holds that all Scripture is inspired and profitable, he believes it still has something to teach a Gentile follower of Jesus. His working rule is simple: “If the New Testament addresses it, we go with the New Testament interpretation.” Where the New Testament is silent, he asks what in the passage points to Christ and what has been fulfilled in Jesus’s life, death and resurrection. Sacrifice is his easy case, because the book of Hebrews argues at length that the blood of bulls and goats could not do what the blood of Christ did once for all.
The harder case shows the steps doing real work. Leviticus gives instructions for a house whose wall shows a spreading mark: a priest was to come and inspect it (Leviticus 14). Run it through the steps:
- In its own town, the rule addressed Israelite homes, which Percer notes were often built of mud, under a priesthood God had appointed.
- The distance is obvious, and Percer names it with some humor: his office walls are not mud, and he will not be calling a priest to check them. So the command does not carry over directly.
- The principle: Percer reads the whole Levitical code as a code of holiness, showing how Israel was meant to be a people set apart by God, distinct even in how they kept house. A rule about walls says that God’s claim on his people reached into ordinary, domestic life.
- The rest of Scripture: the New Testament picks up the same call directly. Peter writes to believers, “Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16), citing the language of Leviticus itself. The command about mud walls has ended, but the call to holiness passes the fourth test.
- Application comes only then, and Percer makes it pointed: “if the church looks just like everyone else, then what distinguishes us from the rest of the world?”
He is careful to add that he is not an Old Testament specialist and treads lightly there.
Readers should know that faithful Christians frame the relationship between the Old Testament law and believers today in more than one way. Percer’s rule is one serious approach among several. The steps will not hand every reader the same answer on every law. They do require that the answer come from reading Leviticus as Leviticus and Hebrews as Hebrews, rather than from pairing two verses that seem to clash.
There is a fair objection here. Step three, finding the principle, can look like an escape hatch. Could a reader turn any command they dislike into a vague principle and move on? The safeguard is the order of the steps. The principle has to come out of the original meaning, it has to fit the rest of Scripture and, where the New Testament speaks to the matter, its reading governs. The wall example shows the difference: the principle survived because Peter repeats it, not because a reader found it convenient. A principle that fails those tests is just a pretext.
Can Ordinary Readers Actually Do This?
Fields explains why this cannot stay in seminaries. She describes talking with someone who had left the faith partly because the Bible seemed to contradict itself, especially the Old Testament against the New. Her read was that the person had been taught to read Scripture but never taught how to study it. Everyday believers, she says, need this training because “they’re the ones who are on the front line.” Someone at work or in the family will quote a verse at them, and they need more than a counter-verse.
Percer agrees that the work is real, and he contrasts it with what he calls a Sunday school approach of occasional reading plus a few memorized passages. But he does not make it an academic privilege. Of Grasping God’s Word, he says, “if you can read English, you can make your way through this book.”
He frames the whole effort with a conviction about God rather than a technique: “God is not afraid of our questions.” Careful reading belongs to faith. It is what taking God’s words seriously looks like when you want their actual meaning and not just their support.
So the next time someone quotes a verse to end an argument, ask what the passage around it says and to whom it was first written. The verse-trading argument assumes the Bible is a supply of ammunition. The steps assume it is a set of books written by real people who meant something. Only the second assumption lets the Bible correct you, which is the whole reason to read it.