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The Presence of God Qualifying Interpretation

the God who is present now is sovereign over history. As redeemer of human beings, he
cared for the people long ago. Hence, a proper reckoning with the character of God leads
to an affirmation of and interest in what God was saying and doing long ago, to people
back then and there. It does not short-circuit the process of interpretation and wipe out the
sense of history, history which after all God governs to his planned goal.

We may illustrate using Genesis 3:15:

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her
offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.

What does Genesis 3:15 mean? Does it make any difference if we reckon with God's
presence in addressing the text to us? If an ordinary layman is informed by the New
Testament, he can easily read the verse as a direct statement about Christ's defeat of Satan,
as described in Colossians 2:15, Hebrews 2:14, Revelation 19:11-21, 20:10, and Luke
11:17-23. He sees in it what the New Testament teaches. He knows that God had in mind
the defeat of Satan by Christ when he originally caused Genesis 3:15 to be written.
Therefore, that is the "meaning."

Some people are bothered by such a process for several reasons. For one thing, it could
potentially lead to arbitrary readings. Whatever meaning someone claims that the Spirit
has shown him becomes normative. A modern reader belonging to the Unification Church,
the cult of the messianic figure Sun Myung Moon, could read the text as prophesying the
coming of Rev. Moon rather than the coming of Jesus Christ. But such aberrant
interpretations can be avoided by genuine submission to God, the God of Scripture, whose
scriptural instruction in the total canon guides and provides a context for the interpretation
of any one verse. The principle of having the clear interpret the unclear also has a role.

People may also be bothered by the fact that a Christological interpretation of Genesis 3:15
appears to ignore the original context with Adam and Eve, and the context of the Book of
Genesis addressed to the OT Israelites. But again this problem can receive a solution
within the context of divine authorship. If one appreciates the greatness of God, one also
begins to appreciate that God has a plan for history that encompasses Adam and Eve and
the Israelites. So within the total plan of God one then learns to affirm not only that God
teaches what one can see when one looks back from the NT, but also that God teaches at a
more elementary level what Adam and Eve and the Israelites might grasp before the
coming of the NT.

So the affirmation of the presence of God implies, not the end of rational reflection,

but beginning rational reflection within the context of obedience and submission to God. It
implies, not the end of meaningful historical appreciation, but its genuine beginning,
because God as the ruler of history is also the source of its meaning.

The presence of God as author

But we are still left with the question of just how God is present as divine author in

a biblical text. We can acknowledge a general principle of "organic inspiration," in which
God through his providence brings it about that the human authors are just the people that