The Devil knows his Bible. That is not a comfortable thought, but it is a scriptural one. When Satan came to tempt Jesus in the wilderness, he did not come with open blasphemy or obvious error. He came with the Word of God on his lips — accurately quoted, properly referenced, and completely wrong. He opened Psalm 91 and said, in effect, It is written. And every word he cited was true. The problem was not the text. The problem was what he was doing with it.
This is the disturbing reality that runs through the whole of the New Testament: quoting scripture and speaking truth are not the same thing. False teachers quote scripture. Unstable men build entire systems from scripture. The Pharisees could recite the law and miss the Lawgiver standing in front of them. And the apostle Peter, writing near the end of his life, warned that there are those who will take even the letters of Paul — hard as they sometimes are to understand — and wrest them to their own destruction.
Wrest. It is a violent word. The Greek is strebloō — to twist, to torture, to rack. It is the word for what happens to something that is wrenched from its natural shape by force. The image is not of a man who reads carelessly but of a man who grips the scripture and bends it, strains it, forces it into a position it was never meant to hold. And Peter's warning is that this is happening. Not somewhere else. Not in some obvious cult. But among those who handle the scriptures regularly.
How do we guard against it? How do we receive the Word of God in a way that is genuinely open to what it actually says, rather than confirming what we already want it to say? That is the question this article tries to answer — not from cleverness, but from the scriptures themselves.
The Devil in the Wilderness
We should sit with Matthew 4 a little longer than we usually do, because it is one of the most instructive passages in all of Scripture about the misuse of the Word of God.
Satan comes to Jesus after forty days of fasting. He has studied his target carefully. He knows that Jesus has come as the Son of God, that He lives by the Father's Word, that He trusts in divine provision. So the enemy builds his temptations on exactly that foundation. He does not ask Jesus to sin in an obvious way. He asks Him to act on scripture.
The second temptation is the sharpest: Satan takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and says, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee. He is quoting Psalm 91, verses 11 and 12. And he quotes it correctly. Those words are there. God really did promise to protect His own.
Jesus does not say, "That is not in the Bible." He says, It is written also, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. Notice that word: also. Jesus meets a scripture with a scripture. He does not deny the first passage — He places it within the full counsel of the Word. The enemy's error was not misquotation. It was selective quotation. It was using one truth to override another truth, isolating a promise from its proper context of faith and obedience and turning it into a tool for something it was never meant to do.
Scripture used without the Spirit who inspired it, or without the humility to receive it plainly, becomes a weapon in the wrong hands — and the hands can appear very religious indeed.
This is one of the great lessons of the temptation narrative: the enemy's use of scripture was real and recognizable. It sounded right. It would have convinced many. What it lacked was not biblical language but biblical integrity — the willingness to receive the whole Word on its own terms, rather than bending it toward a predetermined end.
Wresting: What It Actually Looks Like
Peter's warning in 2 Peter 3:16 names two characteristics of those who wrest the scriptures. They are unlearned — the word carries the sense of being untrained, unstable in their grasp of the Word — and they are unstable. That second word is important. It points not just to intellectual weakness but to a certain instability of soul, a condition of the inner life that makes a person susceptible to twisting what they read.
The wrester is not always ignorant of the Bible. Sometimes he knows it quite well. What he lacks is a settled, submitted heart. He comes to the scripture with something already decided — a desire he wants justified, a position he wants confirmed, a grievance he wants validated — and the Word becomes raw material for his purpose rather than the voice of God calling him to account.
Paul describes one version of this in his second letter to the Corinthians. He contrasts his own ministry with those who corrupt the Word: But we have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God (2 Corinthians 4:2). The phrase "handling the word of God deceitfully" translates the Greek word doloō — to bait, to use trickery, to adulterate. It is the word for a merchant who mixes cheaper grain into the good grain, or who adds water to the wine. The result still looks like the real thing. It still has the right label. But something has been mixed in that was never there to begin with.
Romans 16 shows us what this sounds like from the outside. Paul warns the church to mark those who cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine they had received, for they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple (Romans 16:17-18). Good words. Fair speeches. These are people with vocabularies that sound exactly right. What gives them away is not their language but what they are serving — not Christ, but themselves. The scripture has become a vehicle for self-interest.
The Pharisees: Scripture Without the Living Word
No example of this is more sobering than the Pharisees. These were not careless men. They had devoted their lives to the study and preservation of the scriptures. They taught in the synagogues, debated the finer points of the law, memorized vast portions of the sacred text. By any outward measure, they were men of the Word.
And then Jesus stood in front of them — the very one to whom every word of the scripture pointed — and said: Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me. And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life (John 5:39-40). They had the scriptures. They were searching the scriptures. They believed the scriptures held life. And they missed the one who was Life itself, standing among them.
Later, when the Sadducees came to trap Him with a question about resurrection, Jesus said something equally devastating: Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God (Matthew 22:29). These were men who carried the scrolls, who had been raised in the temple, whose entire identity was wrapped up in the text. And He told them they did not know it.
How is that possible? Because knowing the scriptures is not the same as receiving them. The Pharisees came to the text to find confirmation of a way of life they had already constructed. The Word was read through the grid of tradition, status, and self-justification. It never had the chance to do what it was meant to do — break in from outside, unsettle, convict, and lead them to the one who stood at every page.
It is possible to be a man of the Book and still miss the Author entirely — if the Book is never allowed to speak on its own terms.
The Marks of a Wrested Scripture
It is not always easy to spot, which is precisely why Peter warns us. But the New Testament does give us enough to work with. A few marks are worth naming plainly.
The first is the presence of another gospel. Paul writes to the Galatians in near disbelief: I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel: which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ (Galatians 1:6-7). And then, twice, he pronounces a curse on anyone who preaches it — even an angel. The Galatians had not abandoned scripture. They had added to it and shifted its center. The result was a gospel that was not the gospel, though it still used all the right vocabulary.
In 2 Corinthians 11, Paul describes the danger with painful clarity: As the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him (2 Corinthians 11:3-4). Another Jesus. Another spirit. Another gospel. These come, not from obvious enemies, but from those within reach of the congregation, from those who sound persuasive enough that the church is tempted to simply go along.
A second mark is that wrested scripture tends to serve the wrester. Paul puts it plainly: those who handle the Word deceitfully serve their own belly (Romans 16:18). This does not always mean obvious greed or carnality. Sometimes it means a man uses scripture to protect his position, to justify his decisions, to win his argument, to avoid the hard obedience the plain text demands. The scripture, rightly received, will always call us to something costly. When a reading consistently makes things easier, or removes what Christ plainly required, it is worth asking who is being served.
A third mark is the presence of itching ears. Paul warns Timothy: The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables (2 Timothy 4:3-4). Notice the sequence: it begins with what people want to hear. The desire precedes the theology. Then teachers are found to supply what is desired. The scripture follows the appetite rather than forming it. This is wresting on a congregational scale.
The Bereans: Receiving with Readiness of Mind
Against all of this, the Acts 17 portrait of the Berean believers stands as one of the most quietly important passages in the whole New Testament. Luke records: These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so (Acts 17:11).
Two things mark them, and they belong together. The first is readiness of mind. The Greek word is prothumia — eagerness, willingness, a heart that is already leaning forward before the Word arrives. The Bereans were not suspicious. They were not coming to debate. They were not looking for what they already knew. They were ready — genuinely open to receiving whatever the Word actually said, even if it meant being changed by it.
But readiness of mind alone is not enough. Enthusiasm without discernment produces a different kind of error. So the Bereans also searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so. They brought what they heard under the light of the full Word of God. They did not simply accept Paul's teaching on his authority; they tested it. They were not skeptical of Paul, but they were accountable to something beyond Paul — the scriptures themselves.
This combination — a willing heart and a searching mind, openness and discernment together — is the posture that protects us. The willing heart without searching becomes gullible. The searching mind without willingness becomes merely critical, always questioning but never receiving. Together they produce something rare and beautiful: a person who genuinely wants to know what God has said, and who is willing to keep looking until they find it.
The Bereans were not trying to win an argument. They were trying to know the truth. That difference in motive makes all the difference in what you find.
The Tenor of Scripture
There is another question worth asking — one that sits beneath all the others. Even if we come with readiness of mind, even if we search diligently, how do we know we are reading with the grain of scripture rather than against it? How do we recognize when a teaching, however fluent in the text, is moving in the wrong direction?
The answer is that scripture has a tenor. Not just individual verses with individual meanings, but a consistent note sounding through every page, a direction in which the whole Word is always moving. You can feel it when you read long enough and honestly enough. And once you hear it, a wrested scripture begins to sound the way a wrong note sounds in a familiar melody — not obviously wrong to someone who has never heard the song, but immediately wrong to someone who has.
That tenor can be heard in three things that the Kingdom of God consistently requires of everyone who enters it.
The first is complete allegiance to King Jesus and the abandonment of our own agenda. This is not a peripheral theme in scripture — it is the thread that runs from the first commandment to the last invitation of Revelation. Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind (Matthew 22:37). All. The Kingdom has room for one King, and it is not us. Paul understood his former life — his credentials, his zeal, his position — as loss: What things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ (Philippians 3:7). The person who reads scripture while protecting their own agenda will always, without fail, find a way to make it agree with them. The tenor of scripture never does.
The second is complete allegiance to the Kingdom expressed in service to others — a Kingdom of priests. God's design from the beginning was not a people served by priests, but a people who are priests. Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation (Exodus 19:6). Peter carries it into the new covenant: Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light (1 Peter 2:9). A priest does not gather to himself. A priest stands between God and others, offering, interceding, serving. Revelation sees the whole redeemed community in this light — kings and priests (Revelation 1:6, 5:10) — not a hierarchy of the privileged, but a body of servants. Any reading of scripture that draws us inward, that uses the Word to secure our own comfort, our own doctrine, our own position at the expense of others — has missed the priesthood entirely.
The third is the deepest and the most costly: absolute surrender of self. The dethronement of our own agendas. Jesus said it without softening it: If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me (Luke 9:23). Paul wrote of his own experience of this: I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me (Galatians 2:20). The shape of Christ's own life — described in Philippians 2 as a voluntary emptying, a descent from glory to servanthood to the cross — is held up not merely as something to admire but as the pattern we are called to follow: Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus (Philippians 2:5).
This is where the wrester is most reliably exposed. His reading of scripture will always, in some way, stop short of the cross. It will find a verse that softens the demand, a qualification that preserves the self, a reinterpretation that makes surrender optional. The tenor of scripture never permits this. From Genesis to Revelation, the Word of God is calling every reader off the throne of their own life and into the service of the King. Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness (Matthew 6:33) — not your own kingdom, not your own righteousness.
A scripture that consistently leaves you on the throne — comfortable, unjudged, unchallenged — has almost certainly been wrested. The tenor of the whole Word is always moving toward surrender, toward the Kingdom, toward the cross.
This does not mean that every passage rebukes us. Scripture comforts, encourages, promises, and rejoices. But even its comfort is the comfort of the one who has laid down his life and found it again — not the comfort of the one who avoided laying it down at all. The grace of God in scripture is always the grace that transforms, never the grace that excuses. When a teaching uses grace to bypass the very surrender grace is meant to produce, the tenor has been lost.
The Fruit Test
Jesus gives us one final, practical tool. In the Sermon on the Mount, He warns of false prophets who will come in sheep's clothing — visibly religious, apparently harmless — and says: Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? (Matthew 7:16). And later, with sober weight: Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven (Matthew 7:21).
The fruit test does not ask: How fluent is this person with scripture? How many passages can they cite? How theologically articulate are they? It asks: What is being produced? What is this teaching doing in the lives of those who receive it? Does it lead to humility, repentance, love, simplicity, obedience? Or does it lead to pride, self-justification, license, and a comfortable distance from the hard words of Jesus?
The early Anabaptists understood this with great clarity. They lived among both Catholics and Protestants who quoted scripture at length to justify persecution, infant baptism, the state sword, and the silencing of plain conscience. The Anabaptists replied, not by out-quoting their opponents, but by asking the simpler and deeper question: What does the plain word of Christ say? And what does obedience to it look like in a life? Michael Sattler, hours before his execution, did not argue with elaborate theological systems. He said simply: if the scriptures command it, we will obey. That was the test.
Paul wrote to Timothy that all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness — and the goal is that the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works (2 Timothy 3:16-17). The scripture, received rightly, does something. It forms. It corrects. It furnishes a person for obedience. When scripture is being wrested, it ceases to do this — or it produces a counterfeit version, a person furnished not for good works but for impressive-sounding religion.
Receiving What Is Actually There
There is a simplicity in Christ that can be lost — and Paul feared losing it more than he feared persecution. He feared the day when another Jesus would be preached and received, when the serpent's subtlety would do to the church what it did to Eve: not with obvious lies, but with a slight, plausible shift away from the plain truth.
The protection is not complexity. It is not a more elaborate system of interpretation, a better commentary, a sharper theological method. The protection is a heart that comes to the Word wanting what God wants — not what confirms us in our comfort, not what justifies our choices, not what wins our argument, but what is actually there.
That kind of readiness is itself a gift. We ask for it. We cultivate it by returning again and again to the plain words of Jesus and asking the most straightforward question we know how to ask: What does He say? And are we willing to do it?
The Bereans were noble because they were willing. The Devil was wrong because he was not willing — he was strategic. The Pharisees missed Christ because they were not willing to be disturbed by Him. The martyrs of every age received the Word rightly, often at the cost of everything, because they wanted truth more than they wanted safety.
That is the difference. Not fluency. Not scholarship. Not how many scriptures we can quote. The difference is whether we receive the Word as it is, in truth, the word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe (1 Thessalonians 2:13) — or whether, unlearned and unstable, we take it in our own hands and wrest it to our own destruction.
The Word stands. It does not need our help to say something more convenient. It needs our willingness to hear what it already says.