Luke 11:52-54 (NIV) “Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.”
When Jesus left there, the Pharisees and the teachers of the law began to oppose him fiercely and to besiege him with questions, waiting to catch him in something he might say.
Jesus’ final word of woe to the teachers of the law (scribes) and, by association, to the Pharisees, didn’t win Him any friends among them. Luke tells us that after this discourse was finished, the Pharisees and the scribes opposed Him even more actively, peppering Him with questions, hoping to trip Him up or lead Him to contradict Himself, so that His words could be used against Him, to even accuse Him to the Sanhedrin or the Romans, if they were clever enough.
But before He was done, Jesus had one more woe, one final accusation to make about those spiritual leaders. He accused them of preventing those who wanted to know God and His ways from being able to access the true knowledge of God that they were supposedly in charge of overseeing and maintaining.
The way that they did this was to encase God’s actual words, His actual commands behind a screen of additions and interpretations so dense and convoluted that no one could then discern what His original intentions had been. They would not go directly to the words of Scripture to answer those who had questions about how to live, but went instead to the rabbis of old, to their words and their writings. Thus the actual words of Scripture, simple, direct words, became veiled.
A similar thing is happening today. Even though we have a vast number of excellent, clear translations, and wide availability of the Scriptures themselves, there are some who have succeeded in persuading people that the Bible is too difficult, too complicated for them to read and understand on their own. They have convinced them that the plain words of Scripture can’t be understood simply as written, but must be correctly “interpreted”.
But God inspired the writers of the Bible to write His truths plainly and simply, so that they could be understood by regular people without having to go to a scholar to be taught. To be sure, there are some things in the Scriptures that can’t be readily understood until someone has walked a while with God, and there is always benefit in being taught by someone who is farther down the path. But that is different than those who teach “I know that’s what the words clearly say, but that’s not what they actually mean,” and then go on to teach “interpretations” of the truths that are actually contrary to what God actually caused to be written.
As James pointed out (James 3:1), those who presume to teach others will be judged more strictly. They can teach the clear words of Scripture in ways that all can understand and earn God’s praise, or they can obscure those words so that people begin to doubt what the words clearly mean, and throw darkness around those words, so that those seeking the truth despair of ever being able to find it for themselves, and thus earn His condemnation.
Father, it is a fearsome thing to presume to teach others Your ways. Help me, and every teacher, to teach Your ways as clearly and simply as You gave them to us in Your word, so that we can lead others well, ad earn Your praise, not Your condemnation. Amen.