Suppose that a history test contained this question: "What is the large coastal city in the western United States in which a prominent Democratic politician named Kennedy was assassinated in the 1960's?"

Many people would say, "It must be Dallas! President John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, was shot and killed there in 1963, and it is a large city in the western United States." There are many parts of that answer that correctly match the terms in the question, but the problem is that Dallas is not a coastal city.

What should people do when they realized that there was a flaw in their answer? Should they 1) ignore it and move on, certain of their answer; 2) try to make Dallas "coastal" by insisting that making the word figurative (for example, the Dallas Chamber of Commerce might say that the city was "on the shore of an ocean of opportunity"); 3) redefine the words of the question by considering the coast to extend very narrowly up the Trinity River 300 miles from the Gulf of Mexico into Dallas; 4) or look for another answer that fit everything in the question?

Those who take the fourth (and correct) option might soon recall that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in Los Angeles, a large, western, and definitely coastal city.

Missing a question of a history test is merely unfortunate; how could this apply to interpreting the Bible? Many people fail to understand and obey the Bible fully because they choose one of the three wrong options above when confronted with a passage that does not harmonize with what they already believe and practice.

Some ignore the passage entirely (the first option). Matthew 23:8-9 plainly prohibits using "Father" as a religious title, but some religious groups do that anyway. I once spoke about this with a woman who was part of such a church. She looked troubled momentarily and then brightened, evidently deciding to ignore the contradiction between her practice and the New Testament.

Some take a word or phrase that is literal and make it figurative (the second option). Revelation says that it deals with "things which must shortly take place" and that "the time is near" (1:1, 3; 22:6), but many still think that most of the prophecy has not yet been fulfilled. Some try to get around those verses by saying that "with the Lord one day is as a thousand years" (2 Peter 3:8), but changing "shortly" into several thousand years abuses the passage. Confusing literal and figurative causes people to misunderstand the time and meaning of Revelation.

Some try to redefine words (the third option). Christ said in Matthew 24:34 and Mark 13:30 that "this generation will by no means pass away" before the things described earlier in those chapters would happen. Many people teach that the tribulation and judgment that Jesus prophesied in those passages are yet to come, but the generation of people from Jesus' time are dead. To accommodate their teaching, they claim that "generation" can mean "race" instead of "people living at a certain time." There is no New Testament example of such a meaning. We should look for the fulfillment of Jesus' words in the lifetime of His listeners rather than our own. The destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, about 40 years after Jesus spoke, fits the time He described.

With every subject we need to consider and apply every word of God's instructions if we want to have confidence that we are truly obeying Him.