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The Presence of God Qualifying Interpretation

Human beings made in the image of God are themselves capable of dreaming of the

distant future and the distant past. We can think God's thoughts after him. How much
more when human beings are inspired by the Spirit!

Did Adam and Eve worry only about the fact that they had been cast out of the

Garden of Eden? Did they worry only about the next month's effort to get enough food?
Did they worry only about the next hundred years? What about the Israelite readers of
Genesis? We do not know how far ahead they may sometimes have looked in their
imaginations.

It would be convenient if OT writings were wholly preoccupied with immediate

crises, such as how to escape Philistine plundering or how to determine who succeeds
David as king. That would help give us as scholars the control that we think we need for
objectivity. But in fact the practice of narrow historical focus amounts to a methodological
mistake. Such isolated focus on the immediate is not how human nature works. And is it
certainly not how human nature works when it works under the inspiration of the Holy
Spirit. The Holy Spirit, as Paul indicates, has us in mind as well as the original hearers.

But now what becomes of the historical aspect of grammatical-historical

interpretation? I claim that it remains radically undefined. One can focus on people back
then and there. But one can never isolate that focus from broader questions. And those
broader questions ultimately engage the meaning of the entirety of history. To a sensitive
Israelite reader, the enmity between the two seeds or two offsprings in Genesis 3:15 can
suggest a principial conflict that extends ultimately to cosmic dimensions and long
historical time periods. Any one piece of history is ultimately intelligible only as part of
the plan of God for all of history. One must have the mind of God in order even to begin to
reckon with any piece intelligibly.

In principle, Adam and Eve could understand that the promise in Genesis 3:15

pointed into the distant future. They could have realized that God had a plan whose depths
and details they could not yet see. They could understand that they did not understand.
That is, they did not understand "the meaning" of God in full. They could grasp that full
understanding includes the entire plan of God.

Adam and Eve themselves, if transported by a thought-experiment into the present

time, might be impatient with the fussiness of scholars who insist on long and elaborate
discourses on "original meaning," while they virtually ignore God. Adam and Eve might
justly point out that the real goal, which God already began to open up to them, is to
understand God in full. The scholar who focuses wholly on original meaning fails to grasp
that part of the original meaning is the implication that the original meaning proclaims its
own mystery, insufficiency, and anticipatory character. The message includes an invitation
to wait for and search out that fullness of God's plan that the message announces in seed
form.

And then, when Adam and Eve heard us tell of Christ's redemption, they might

delightedly insist that this was the real meaning all along. They would laugh at modern
fanatics for grammatical-historical interpretation, who foolishly thrust this richer meaning
from them in a desire to be historical. These fanatics are historical in a sense, without
understanding either Adam and Eve, or human nature, or history as it really has
significance according to the plan of God.

7 Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith.