WHO WHAT WHEN WHERE HOW WHY
By Richard P. Joseph
I am a Medical Technologist, what is commonly called a lab tech. Since I work in a hospital lab, I understand the importance of accurate documentation. Every test I run has my initials on it so I am responsible for every move I make. Recently our hospital posted placards of what they call “Narrate Your Care”. I was surprised because every hospital I ever worked for spends most of their time promoting sexual perversion and offending Christians. This poster, however, is actually a good thing (for once). It promotes the idea of accurate communication and documentation. Why is this important?
This is vital to the treatment of patients. Let’s say for example that a patient presents to the Emergency Department with a critically high glucose. Let’s say the first reading is 500 ml/dl. Then the doctor begins treating the patient with insulin or whatever. Then they take readings, let’s say every 3 hours. The next reading might be 300, then 200, then 90 eventually bringing the patient into safety. But what would happen if the doctor disregarded the time of each blood draw and simply looked at the chart and said “I see a result of 500 and so I will treat it as if this is the current result”. He might end up killing the patient. That is why each tube drawn is marked with the exact time it was collected by the phlebotomist and therefore accurately shows the progress of treatment. To disregard these time statements could be fatal. In other words, for proper charting, one must have all of the patient information correct as far as “what, who, when, why, where, how”. If any of that information is inaccurate, the patient will suffer. So what does this have to do with the bible?
Hermeneutics is the art of proper biblical interpretation. The application of proper hermeneutics is very similar to medical documentation. You must ask those same questions in order to properly interpret scripture. Just like reading a medical chart wrong could cause damage to the patient, reading scripture wrong will damage our understanding of the bible. We are in an epidemic of faulty theology today for this exact reason. It is inexcusable for bible colleges to continue teaching and regurgitating inaccurate doctrine. Once someone gets off track and begins teaching bad doctrine it becomes entrenched and hard to pull out of. This is how we now ended up with nearly all pastors preaching a future return of Christ. The few of us who stopped and questioned the false narrative, are looked upon as heretics. But in reality all we did was to stop and ask “what, who, when, why, where and how”. As you read your bible and you want to interpret your text, just stop and ask those questions. I guarantee a whole new world will open up to you that you never thought was there. Find out and ask, who is speaking, when is he speaking, what time parameters are noted, where are they at, what year is it, how are the people listening going to interpret it, what culture are they in. Put yourself in their shoes. Also, what did the apostles teach concerning that issue? It is hilarious to watch all of these pastors pretending that they figured something out that the inspired apostles never figured out. For example, not one apostle ever taught a second coming that would be delayed for thousands of years. They all taught an imminent return. Attempting to interpret an ancient Middle Eastern document using modern western thought is ludicrous and yet that is exactly what people are doing. Please stop and ask questions. Ask me questions. Ask yourself questions. Ask God questions. Ask, seek, knock and the door will be opened up to you. Your entire worldview depends on it!
