ok so you observed two possibilities, right; but what if there are three? Four? And dont both of your current choices violate the vv Quoted?
There are as many possibilities as there are imaginations. That's my point. Each has their own imagination, or, it means a certain thing.
So let's say, it means a certain thing, but you have to be "in the know" to know what that is. "The Bible is a book of riddles", I remember reading in a post. So then, one says, I've been given to understand what none of you can, and I'm here to explain it to you.
The more esoteric their explanations, the less verifiable they are, and the greater the risk of false teaching. As we know false teaching is rampant!
So many teach so many things in great disagreement with each other.
There is something I find common in every doctrine which I find at odds with the Bible, and it's just that. There somewhere, some passage, where someone ends up saying, well, yes, it says That, but it really means This.
And in my experience, and what I see taught in the Bible, is to not do that particular thing, but to receive the Word of God - Isn't Jesus your God? - to receive the Word of God whole and unadulterated.
I find so many times, that someone will say, You can't really look at the words used, because I'm telling you what it really means.
But I believe that God gives His Word to all His children, and gives revelation and teaching from His Holy Spirit to us all.
It seems to me that you and I have fundamentally different Ideas about God, the Bible, Jesus, but at the end of the day, if we are not reading the Bible as clear language giving propositional statements as well as all the rest, then how do you tell the true from the false? Is that the same? Nothing you can really point to, you just "know"?
The same way that you "just know" the meaning of the parable of the casting of the bronze pillars?
Much love!