Daily Devotional By Desiringgod Ministry – John Piper Ministry 2 SEPTEMBER 2024 | Topic: How to Find the Meaning of a Bible Verse
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How to Find the Meaning of a Bible Verse
Today’s Labor Day for us in the States. We’re taking a break from our work. But we can still use the day to learn new skills, specifically to become better Bible readers. Of course, we have dozens of episodes covering a host of very practical tips on overcoming the challenges of studying the Bible for ourselves. And I took all those episodes on Bible reading, Bible study, Bible memorization, even the struggle with Bible neglect — all those many episodes I put together in one big digest to show you all the ground we covered, in the APJ book in that first section, on pages 1–46. It’s the section I’ve heard the most compliments about, too.
And this episode will add to it. So, what do you do when a Bible verse doesn’t make sense on first read? The question is from Chris, and it’s specific: “Pastor John, hello and thank you for this podcast. You have said in the past that you didn’t understand Matthew 6:22–23 for a long time. But then you spent more time looking at the context before, in the treasuring focus in Matthew 6:19–21, and more time after the text, in the money focus in Matthew 6:24 — those contexts helped make sense of everything in between. Also, what you learned in Matthew 20:13–15 you brought into your discovery, too.
“Can you explain how you came to understand Jesus’s teaching on the healthy and sick eye using both the close context, before and after it, and the broader context together? These seem like Bible interpretation principles we all need to master when the text in front of us doesn’t make immediate sense. Thank you!”
Well, that’s true. Matthew 6:22–23 just seemed to dangle without connections to what went before, what went after. I couldn’t see it. I mean, it was my problem, not God’s problem, not Jesus’s problem. It’s my problem. I just couldn’t see it. Then one day, as I was reading in Matthew 20 — that’s 14 chapters later — and the ESV footnote clarified a phrase I saw, I said, “Oh, that’s going to help. That’s going to help make sense back in chapter 6.”
Lamp of the Body
So, here are the verses:
The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Matthew 6:22–23)
Now, if we just take those two verses by themselves, I think I can make sense out of them. If you close your eyes, everything is dark. But if you open your eyes, there’s light, and it fills you with light. You can walk. You can not run into walls, you can not fall off a cliff.
And so, the eye is like a lamp. I get that. I like that, that it’s a lamp. And when it’s lit and burning, you can see where to go. If your eyes are shut or if your eyes are sick, if you have cataracts or something, then you can’t see where you ought to go. So, if the body is going to not kill itself by running into the wrong thing, it needs a healthy eye. “The eye is the lamp of the body.” I get that. That’s a good image.
But what puzzled me was that it just seemed to come out of nowhere. Why are you saying that here, especially in the sequence of these sayings?
Considering the Context
Before those two verses comes the familiar saying about not laying up treasures on earth:
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matthew 6:19–21)
“Pray for eyes that look upon the things of this world as ways of serving God and loving people.”
So, before the saying about the good eye and the bad eye comes a saying about money — laying up treasures in heaven and on earth. Don’t hoard money here as though your life and your security were in money. Use money here in ways that piles up treasure in heaven. Use it in acts of love. Then, with no explicit connecting word, Jesus simply says, “The eye is the lamp of the body” (Matthew 6:22). And I just found that puzzling. Why do you follow up “lay up treasures in heaven” with “the eye is the lamp of the body”?
And then, after these puzzling verses — 22 and 23 — comes the saying, “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24). So, the sayings before and after the words about the good and bad eye deal with treasure or money. That seems significant to me.
So, the one in the middle seems like it should have something to do with that. But as far as I could see, the good and the bad eye don’t have any clear connection to money. So, the saying seemed to just dangle there, and I didn’t get it for a long time. And Chris, in his question, is right to notice a principle of interpretation that’s driving me here, and you can hear it’s been coming out all the way along.
I really don’t like it when I can’t see an author’s intention in how his words are connected to each other. Seeing connections in a paragraph, in a chapter, is really important. I don’t think I’ve got a good handle on what the author is communicating if I can’t see how his connections are working. So, why does Jesus link these two sayings about money with a saying about a good eye and a bad eye?
The Key That Unlocked the Meaning
Then I stumble upon the key in Matthew 20:15. Jesus had just told the parable of the workers of the vineyard, and some of them, you remember, had agreed to work from 6:00 in the morning till 6:00pm for one denarius, a day’s wage — a fair wage, a good wage. Others were hired at 9:00am. Others were hired at noon. And finally, he hired some at 5:00pm. All he had to do was work an hour.
And when the day was done at 6:00, he paid all the workers the same thing, a denarius each. In other words, the master was lavishly generous to those who worked only one hour, and he paid a fair, agreed-upon wage to those who worked twelve hours. But those who worked all day, it says, “grumbled at the master of the house” (Matthew 20:11). They were angry that those who had worked so little were paid so much. They didn’t like the master’s generosity. They did not like grace.
Then the master used a phrase about the bad eye, which is just like the one in Matthew 6:23. He said, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?” That’s Matthew 20:15. Now, that last phrase, “Do you begrudge my generosity?” is not a literal translation; it is a very loose paraphrase. And fortunately, the ESV gives the footnote and gives you the literal translation, which is, “Or is your eye bad because I am good?”
Oh my goodness, that made bells go off, right? Oh, the bad eye back in chapter 6. The bad eye here parallels the bad eye in Matthew 6:23, the verse I was puzzled about. So, what does the bad eye refer to in Matthew 20:15? It refers to an eye that doesn’t like generosity. It doesn’t like grace. It’s greedy. It’s a greedy eye. It’s a kind of eye that would treasure up things on earth. It’s the kind of eye that would serve money over God.
Pray for Good Eyes
So, if we interpret the bad eye in Matthew 6:23 the same way as in 20:15, the connection starts to make sense. The flow of thought would go like this. Matthew 6:19: “Don’t lay up treasures on earth. Lay up treasures in heaven. Show that your heart is fixed on the value that God has for you.” Now comes Matthew 6:22–23: “Make sure your eye is good and not bad. That is, make sure your eye is not greedy for earthly gain. Make sure that you see with this eye. See heavenly treasure as more precious than earthly, material treasure.”
When your eye sees things this way, you’re full of light. You know how to walk without falling off the cliff of greed. And if you don’t see things this way, you will, as Matthew 6:24 says, serve money instead of serving God. You will seek money, not God, as your treasure.
So, the bottom line lesson for us is this: pray for good eyes, healthy eyes — namely, the eyes that don’t disapprove of generosity or disapprove of grace. Pray for eyes that don’t look upon the things of this world with greediness, but look upon them as ways of serving God and loving people. Pray for eyes that see God as your supreme treasure.
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