Hank's Bible Study Resources

This is part eight of Feed Yourself, a series on learning to study the Bible with your own two hands. Today, the tool that Satan himself demonstrated the need for, in the wilderness, with Scripture open.

In Matthew 4 the devil quotes the Bible to Jesus, and he quotes it accurately.

“Then the devil took Him up into the holy city, set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him, ‘If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down. For it is written: “He shall give His angels charge over you,” and, “In their hands they shall bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone.”‘”

Matthew 4:5-6 NKJV

That is Psalm 91, verses eleven and twelve, quoted nearly word for word. The devil did not misquote the text. He misread its genre. Psalm 91 is a poem of trust, a war psalm sung by people who take refuge under the shadow of the Almighty, and the devil reads it like a promissory note. If the document says angels will catch you, then jump, and make the promise pay on demand. He treats poetry as a contract and calls the test faith.

Jesus answers from Deuteronomy. “You shall not tempt the LORD your God” (Matthew 4:7 NKJV). A promise of protection is not an instrument for extracting protection, and trust does not manufacture emergencies to prove the Promiser. If Satan’s favorite Bible study method is misreading genre, the tool deserves its own post.

You Already Have This Skill

Here is the encouraging part. Nobody reads a recipe like a love letter. You already shift reading gears a dozen times a day without noticing, a news story, a song lyric, a legal notice, a text from your wife, and you bring different expectations to each one. You do not accuse the songwriter of lying when the song says he would walk five hundred miles. You do not read the parking ordinance for its imagery. Genre awareness is not a scholarly skill. It is an ordinary human skill that we mysteriously switch off when the book is the Bible.

The Bible is a library, and the library holds law, narrative, poetry, proverb, prophecy, epistle, and apocalyptic. Each one plays by rules its first readers knew. Read each kind by its own rules and most of the famous difficulties shrink. Read them all flat, as if every sentence were the same kind of sentence, and you will end up with the devil’s hermeneutic from Matthew 4. Let me walk the shelf quickly and name the misreading each section invites.

A Walk Through the Library

Narrative describes what happened, not always what should happen. The historical books report polygamy, deception, and revenge without stopping to editorialize, because the story itself carries the judgment, watch what those choices harvest. This is why Gideon’s fleece is a story and not a system. The text reports a fearful man testing an already-given promise, and Jehovah’s patience with him, and nowhere turns it into a method for guidance. Description is not prescription.

Proverbs are compressed wisdom about how life usually goes, not promises. “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6 NKJV) is how the world generally works, the same way early to bed, early to rise generally works. It was never a guarantee, and knowing that spares the reader from breaking that verse over the head of a grieving parent whose grown child walked away. A proverb tells you which way the grain of the universe runs. It does not promise you will never see an exception, and the book of Job sits next door in the same library section to prove it.

Poetry speaks in image and hyperbole, and it is true the way a psalm is true, not the way a contract is true. When David says his bed swims with tears, no one fetches a mop. Mountains skip like rams, trees clap their hands, and Jehovah is a rock, a shield, a fortress, a shadow. The truth is real and the language is picture language, built to be felt as much as parsed.

Law comes to us through covenant, which is why part five’s bridge matters so much there. Prophecy is mostly covenant enforcement, calling Israel back to known obligations, and its predictions often carry near and far horizons at once. Epistles are occasional letters, one side of a conversation, which is why the audience questions from part three matter most there. And apocalyptic, Daniel and Revelation, is vision literature with a symbol grammar its first readers knew from the inside. Getting that whole genre wrong is how a thousand prophecy charts got sold.

Back to the Pinnacle

Now read Psalm 91 as the psalmist meant it, and it grows, not shrinks. This is a war psalm. Terror by night, arrows by day, pestilence, ten thousand falling at your side. The singer is not promised a life without a battlefield. He is promised the shadow of the Almighty on the battlefield, a refuge in the middle of things that kill people. Israel sang this psalm and still buried their dead, and kept singing it, because its truth runs deeper than a force field. The psalm promises that nothing reaches the one under the shadow except what passes through the Almighty first, and that His faithfulness holds in the terror, not just after it.

And the deepest irony of Matthew 4 is this. The angels did come and minister to Jesus, at the end of the temptation, after He refused to demand them (Matthew 4:11). The psalm was true. It was true for a Man who trusted His Father all the way to a cross, through death, and out the other side. Psalm 91 read as poetry, through Christ, is worth a hundred of the promissory note the devil offered.

The Words Under the Psalm

For the One Holding a Proverb That Broke

Before the questions, a word to one reader in particular. You trained up your child in the way he should go, and he departed from it, and somewhere along the line a well-meaning saint quoted Proverbs 22:6 at you, and it landed like a verdict. Either the Bible failed or you did.

Neither. A proverb was never a guarantee, and the ones who told you otherwise misread its genre, the same category of mistake the devil made on the pinnacle. The Bible you trust also contains Ezekiel 18, where righteous fathers have wayward sons and the soul who sins is the one who answers for it. It contains a Father whose first two children, given a perfect garden and a perfect upbringing, rebelled anyway. Jehovah knows exactly what it is to grieve a child’s departure, and He is not standing over you with Proverbs 22:6 as an indictment. Keep praying. The story is not over, prodigals have a long history of coming up the road, and the Father who watches for them watches with you.

Discussion Questions

1. Name one verse you have seen treated as a promise that its genre says is something else. What does it become when read rightly?
2. Read Psalm 91 whole, then Matthew 4:5-11. What exactly did the devil’s use of the psalm get wrong, if the quotation was accurate?
3. Why is description is not prescription an important rule for reading Bible stories? Where have you seen it violated?
4. How does knowing Proverbs are wisdom rather than guarantees change how you use them, and how you comfort people with them?
5. Which section of the library do you read most naturally, and which one do you tend to read with the wrong rules?

Going Deeper

Read Psalm 91 and Psalm 44 back to back. Same covenant, same God, one psalm sung in confidence and one from the ashes of a lost battle, and the psalter keeps them both on purpose. Then read Judges 6 and watch the fleece in its own narrative, asking only what the text actually reports. Fee and Stuart’s How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth organizes its whole table of contents by genre, one chapter per shelf of the library, which makes it the natural companion to this post. And next time, the last tool before the capstone. Why your translations disagree, and why that is a gift.