William Whitaker offers a few examples of scripture interpreting scripture:
 [T]he scripture, where it speaks with some obscurity, explains its meaning sometimes immediately after in the very same place, sometimes accumulatively in several other places. This I will briefly illustrate by examples of both sorts of interpretation. In Isaiah li. 1, we have: “Look unto the rock whence ye were hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye were digged.” The language is obscure and ambiguous; but the obscurity is wholly removed by the words which follow: “Consider Abraham your father, and Sarah who bore you.” What better expositor do we require? Gen. xv. 2, Abraham says to the Lord: “What wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless, and the steward of my house is this Eleazar of Damascus?” These words are somewhat dark, but light is thrown upon them presently after: “Behold, thou hast given me no seed, and lo, my servant born in my house is my heir.” What could possibly be spoken more plainly? Gen. xi. 1, the whole world is said to have been of one lip; and, to make this better understood, it is immediately subjoined, that their speech was the same. Exod. xx. 4, in the second precept of the decalogue, we are commanded to “make no graven image, nor likeness of any thing;” and, to put us completely in possession of the drift of this law, a lucid exposition is added in the way of commentary. Deut. vii. 3, the Israelites are forbidden to unite themselves with the Canaanites by affinity. This might be plain enough by itself, but is rendered still more clear and definite by what follows in the same place, “Thou shalt not give thy daughter to the son of any of them, neither shalt thou take the son of any of them for thy daughter:” and the reason of the law, subjoined immediately in a large exposition, makes the meaning of the law still more evident. Isaiah i. 2, “I have brought up children, and they have rebelled against me,” saith the Lord; and then immediately shews that this declaration concerns the Israelites: “Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.” Isaiah liii. 1, “To whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?”—the meaning of this is plain from the preceding clause, “Who hath believed our report?”—so as to make it evident, that the gospel is denoted by the arm of the Lord. In the sixth of John Christ is described as having discoursed at large of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and having given grievous offence by that discourse not only to the Capernaites, but also to his own disciples. Wherefore, to prevent that offence from sinking too deep or dwelling too long in pious minds, Christ himself at the last explains himself, saying, that the time should come when they should see the Son of man ascending up; that it is the Spirit that quickens, while the flesh profits nothing; and still more plainly, that those words which he had spoken were Spirit and life. So plainly, so carefully, so largely does Christ remove that stumbling-block from his discourse, and teach us that he spoke of a spiritual, not a carnal and bodily, sort of eating and drinking. Paul says, 1 Cor. v. 9, “I wrote unto you in an epistle not to keep company with fornicators:” but what sort of fornicators he meant, he presently indicates; not those who were strangers to the christian name and profession, but those who, professing to be Christ’s adherents, abstained not from fornication and such-like similar enormities; with such he hath forbidden us to have any familiarity, and hath clearly explained his mind upon that subject. So, in the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Ephesians, speaking of marriage, he drops these words, “This is a great mystery:” where, foreseeing that some would hence infer that marriage was a sacrament, he subjoined what absolutely removes the ground of such a surmise, “But I speak concerning Christ and the church;” in which words he protests that it is not matrimony, but the union of Christ and the church, that is styled by him a mystery. Such examples are innumerable, wherein it is apparent that the Holy Spirit hath been careful that what he might seem at first to have expressed with some obscurity, should afterwards be clearly explained, so as to free the reader from all difficulty. —William Whitaker, Disputations on the Holy Scriptures (Soli Deo Gloria, 2005), 488–490.
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