The Devil Quoted Scripture Accurately and Jesus Answered With More of It

A verse got used on him in a hallway and it ended the conversation.

It was a true verse. He has checked since, several times, and it says what he was told it says. It is in the book, it means roughly what the person meant by it, and there is no clever argument that makes it disappear.

It was also, and he could not have explained this at the time, not about what was happening in that hallway. It arrived like a door closing. There was nothing to say back, because saying anything back would have meant arguing with a verse, and he had been raised to know exactly what kind of person argues with a verse.

So he went home with it and it sat in him for about nine years.

The part that did the damage was not the verse. It was what he learned in that hallway about his own judgment, which was that it could be beaten by anybody holding a page, and that whatever he thought he was reading, somebody else's use of it outranked him.

The clearest case in the Bible

In the wilderness, the tempter quotes Scripture at Jesus. He does not misquote it. This is the King James Version:

And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. (Matthew 4:6)

That is Psalm 91, and it is quoted almost word for word. Anybody checking the reference would have found it exactly where he said it was.

And it is being used to produce something wrong.

Two things are worth noticing about how Jesus handles it.

The first is what He does not do. He does not say the psalm is wrong, and He does not say Scripture is unreliable, and He does not retreat into it not being knowable.

The second is what He does:

Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. (Matthew 4:7)

It is written again.

The answer to a verse being used badly is more of the text, not less of it. He goes back into the same book and brings out the part that was missing.

And there is one more detail. The psalm says the angels have charge over you to keep thee in all thy ways (Psalm 91:11). The version quoted in the wilderness leaves that clause out.

You are not failing to spot a lie and you were never up against one. Matthew 4 is the case, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as guiding a reader into truth rather than leaving him to be outgunned.

God says it plainly about three men who did it for thirty-eight chapters

The book of Job is mostly speeches, and the speeches are mostly true.

Job's three friends say a great many accurate things. God is just. God is powerful. God does not pervert judgment. If you took their sentences one at a time and checked them against the rest of Scripture, most of them would pass.

And here is God's verdict at the end of the book:

And it was so, that after the LORD had spoken these words unto Job, the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath. (Job 42:7)

Ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right.

They were saying true things about God, aimed at a man, in a situation those true things did not describe. And God does not treat that as a minor error of tone. He treats it as speaking wrongly about Him.

You are not the misfit here and you were never readable backward from what got said to you. Job 42 has God saying so about people whose individual sentences were mostly correct, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than your ability to argue who settles that in a man.

Peter says it happens and names the mechanism

Peter, writing about Paul's letters, is remarkably candid:

As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction. (2 Peter 3:16)

Wrest. To twist or wrench something out of position.

He is saying, in the New Testament itself, that people do this, and that the fact of it is not a reason to distrust the text. It is a description of what some people do with it.

And Paul uses a phrase for the opposite:

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. (2 Timothy 2:15)

Rightly dividing. Which necessarily implies it can be divided wrongly, and that there is a right way, and that an ordinary person is being told to aim at it.

You are being told to aim at handling it well, which is not a job given to strangers. 2 Timothy 2 addresses that instruction to the reader, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the work in somebody trying to obey it.

Try the sentence you were given

Two short verses that give permission most people have never been told they have.

Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. (1 John 4:1)

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thessalonians 5:21)

Try. Prove. Both of those are instructions to test, addressed to ordinary believers, not to a class of qualified people.

And Jesus says who does the guiding:

Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth. (John 16:13)

You are permitted to test what you are handed. 1 John 4 and 1 Thessalonians 5 both instruct it plainly, and it is His Spirit who is named as the one guiding while somebody does it.

What reading around it actually does

Take a verse everybody knows. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end (Jeremiah 29:11).

It gets used on its own constantly, and it is true on its own.

Now read the verse before it:

For thus saith the LORD, That after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place. (Jeremiah 29:10)

Seventy years.

It is written to people in exile who are being told, a few verses earlier, to build houses there and plant gardens and have families, because they are not going home soon and most of them will die there.

Which does not weaken the promise. It makes it enormously heavier, and considerably more useful to anybody in something long.

That is what one chapter does. Not a technique, not a course, just the paragraph the sentence lives in.

You are able to read it and understand it and you were never made dependent on somebody else's summary. The chapter is right there around the verse in Matthew 4, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than your training who does the understanding.