“Knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation.”

This section of Second Peter deals with Scripture itself. No book in the world is as valuable as the Bible. God’s Word is indispensable because it only tells us the truth about God, Christ, sin, and eternity.

Knowing this first

Invariably, what God asks us to know, we do not know. God wants us to come to grips with the subject of this verse “first.” Above everything else, God wants us to know something about divine inspiration. When we interpret Scripture, we need to know as a leading principle that God inspired the Bible, not men. This is the priority.

Peter’s opponents denied the divine origin of Scripture. They claimed their writings came from personal visions, signs, and dreams. Their prophecies came from themselves, from their own origin or source. Peter says that apostolic writings originated from God, not the human author.

that no prophecy of Scripture

The word “prophecy” here is the written message of a prophet or a writer of Scripture.

“Scripture” denotes writing. Peter here refers to the Old Testament and the writings of the New Testament written to this point.“Scripture” is singular. The Word of God is one single unit; it does not contradict itself. Some verses are obscure to our understanding, but we must interpret these verses in light of most passages dealing with that subject. Also, we should interpret unclear passages of Scripture in the light of the clear passages and with the majority of passages. If a Scripture is crystal-clear, that portion of the Bible must interpret the unclear passages.

God is the Author of all of Scripture and makes no mistakes. He used human authors to write His Book that never personally knew the other authors of Scripture. About forty different writers wrote at different times and in different places over a 1,500-year span. Although they lived centuries apart, all sixty-six books fit together and complement each other as one.

PRINCIPLE:

The Bible is one in its teaching.

APPLICATION:

It is a dangerous practice to pick certain verses out of their context to establish a doctrine. We understand each verse in light of its context. Otherwise, we could distort the meaning of that passage and operate on misleading and distorted information. This is much like misleading advertising. Misleading advertising misrepresents its product.

Verse-by-verse Bible exposition saves us from this problem. By taking each verse and all of its words successively, we can come to the true meaning of Scripture. This also presumes that we interpret the Bible in the time, to whom, and on what occasion it was written. It is also of great advantage to know the original languages in the Bible. This is the way to discover what God indeed said. Otherwise, we can make the Bible say what we want it to mean.

2 Ti 2:15, “Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”