What Is The Point Of "Line Upon Line" Teaching?

For a number of you this is a very familiar saying, "Teaching line upon line." It is interesting to me that the saying 'line upon line, precept upon precept' seems to have been taken from the KJV translation of Isaiah 28:10&13. However as the New American Commentary says of the original Hebrew, "The message in v. 10 is made up of a series of monosyllables repeated several times. The meanings of these words are somewhat mysterious. ... They could be the stuttering words of a drunk, which makes about as much sense as the babbling of an infant." It seems that the KJV's mistranslation of the Hebrew text has become a well known part of our Christian vocab. But why?

Just to clarify right at the beginning of this post, this is the method of teaching that I wholeheartedly agree with. It is my preference to teach straight through books of the Bible. I believe this approach helps us to stay true to the context of the chapters and verses found within each book of the Bible. My concern is that we all have a tendency to major in the minors, or to make non-essential issues into huge life or death essential issues. Personally, I have been deeply grieved by comments that I have heard regarding churches that are not teaching 'line upon line' as if those churches are less Biblical.

Is this style of teaching really to be elevated to the place of an essential test to whether a church is Biblical or not? I believe that taking this position abuses what the Bible teaches us about itself, and that it is very judgmental to say that this is the only, truly acceptable method for teaching the Bible.

Some have said that teaching line upon line is the only way to teach "the whole counsel of God." While I personally agree that this is the best way to do so, it is certainly not the only way. For example, it seems that even Jesus did not teach in this systematic fashion. In fact rather than teaching verse by verse through large sections of the Old Testament, Jesus said in Matthew 22:40 that the whole of the law and the prophets was summed up in loving God and loving others. Now clearly He is paraphrasing to make a point, but this would seem to indicate that teaching on a theme that is prevalent in the Scriptures is certainly not a sin, or less Biblical than teaching verse by verse through a passage every single time we teach.

At other times, as in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus would teach on and expound upon some of the 10 commandments, but again He did not take a line upon line approach to them. Instead Jesus does something that floored those of His day. He taught that while they thought the commandments gave them standards to live by, in fact the standard was perfection and no one achieves it. We find out from Romans 5 that Jesus is the second Adam, but unlike the first He was perfect. The only way that man can stand in the presence of God is to be perfectly righteous as the Law demands. But since the human race is fallen we could never hope to enter into God's presence, which is why Jesus Himself came to fulfill the Law right down to every "jot and tittle". He lived a perfectly sinless life, and according to the end of 2 Corinthians 5 Paul tells us that God has accredited Christ's perfect record of righteousness to us! We are now free from the curse of the Law because Jesus fulfilled it perfectly.

The thing that I believe we should be looking at is how Jesus taught from the Scriptures? We see a great example of what Jesus considered to be of supreme importance when teaching the Scriptures in Luke 24. The context is that Jesus has risen from the grave, but the disciples have not seen him yet, here we find two disciples on the road to Emmaus when Jesus appears to them.

Luke 24:25-27
25 And He said to them, "O foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! 26 "Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and to enter into His glory?" 27 Then beginning with Moses and with all the prophets, He explained to them the things concerning Himself in all the Scriptures.

Notice Luke says that Jesus explained to them the things concerning Himself from ALL the Scriptures. We must recognize that Jesus could not have done this in a literal line upon line fashion while on the road to Emmaus. Clearly Jesus was summarizing and showing them how the major themes and ideas found in the Law and the Prophets were meant to point us to Him and ultimately to the world's need for a Savior.

Later in the chapter in verses 44-47 Jesus appears to a larger group of disciples and says, "These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. 45 Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, 46 and He said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead the third day, 47 and that repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem."

This passage is incredible, Luke tells us that Jesus showed the disciples how the Old Testament had to be fulfilled, and that it is supposed to point us to the necessity of His death, burial and resurrection. Then He opened their minds to the Scriptures. It seems that Luke felt (and under the Divine guidance of the Holy Spirit!) that the disciples did not fully understand the Scriptures until AFTER Jesus showed them how the Scriptures testified of Him!

To say that Jesus failed to teach His disciples the "full counsel of the Word of God" simply because He didn't take them verse by verse through the entirety of the Old Testament seems to fly in the face of what the Holy Spirit communicated through Luke. The point of the Scriptures is to point all of mankind to their desperate need for a Savior, and while many of us may prefer and believe that doing so by systematically teaching through the Bible is the best means, let us not be so arrogant and ignorant to say that it is the ONLY way. Doing so would seem to be dangerously close to diminishing Jesus' own teaching ministry.

My greatest concern on this topic is that we honor what God says about His Word. Jesus (who we all would agree is God) clearly taught that His atoning death, burial and resurrection was/is the centerpiece and the key that unlocks the Scriptures for our understanding. How then can we judge other churches' teaching practices if they are honoring God in proclaiming the Gospel week in and week out?

Another concern that I have about our zealous approach to teaching 'line upon line' is that we can have a tendency to teach each line as completely divorced from the whole book. Just because we read each verse of a passage during a teaching does not mean that we are honoring the text! In earlier posts I have argued that we need to honor the context of each verse within the passage, the passage within the book, and the book within the Bible.

It seems that perhaps the dependency of teaching 'line upon line' has led some teachers to get lazy and simply share some nice thoughts on each verse. Maybe they even tie some of their thoughts back into the context of the passage, but is this really how we are to approach teaching the same Scriptures that Jesus said were all written to testify about Him?

It seems that often times the 'line upon line' approach has even caused many Bible teachers to miss the entire point of the passage as a whole unit, and how the position of the passage in God's grand Plan of Redemption specifically leads us to the finished work of Christ. By being so concerned about addressing each and every verse sometimes we can get so caught up in details that were never meant to be details. While I have learned from and appreciate the Inductive Bible Study method, we are drastically misusing it if we do not also zoom out of the immediate passage and see how and where it falls within the larger story that is presented to us in the Bible.

Again, I fully endorse and encourage us to continue in our desire to teach verse by verse through the Bible, but if we forget that the 'lines' all point us to Jesus and His incredible work of Redemption then we have completely missed the whole point of the Bible!

Finally, I rejoice that we are wholeheartedly committed to reading and studying through the Bible verse by verse. But Lord forgive us if we have used this preference to then judge the ministries of fellow ministers of the Gospel.