Introduction: How to Study the Bible

What we'll need to do here, since we're starting something new, and it's not just for a week or two or three, this is actually something pretty long. And so we need to kind of give you an overview, kind of looking out with the binoculars ahead and seeing what's happening. So this is kind of what this thing is looking like going over the quarters ahead of us here. Basically, this is the start of a year, a year-long course. And this first quarter will be covering just basic Bible interpretation. And the main text you have there is a book by Bob Smith. Bob Smith was a pastor at Peninsular Bible Church, which was the church that I grew up in for most of my years. And he went home to be with the Lord about 10 years ago, but he left this. The Lord wouldn't let him take it with him. Anyway, he left this, so that's the text that you have before you. Do you have a copy of this binder here?

Okay, alright. At least one per couple is what I'd like to see folks have here. Anyway, This quarter here will be basic Bible interpretation. If at the end of this quarter you say, Vern, I can't take it anymore, and you decide you're going to switch over to something else, because at each quarter people will have a chance to switch electives, you will have something valuable. I think, however, that if you're able to stick it out, you'll continue to gain more valuable things. You'll notice that the binder you have says 1 and 2, and that is because this binder has room for more. Well, that's the next quarter.

It says hermeneutics. That sounds like a highfalutin word. All that means is interpretation. What we'll be doing is proceeding on with learning more about how to interpret the Bible. The next step, third quarter, is introductory Greek. We're going to learn Greek. Now, believe it or not, I think you can do it. If I can do it, certainly you can. Does that mean we need a Bible that has some Greek in it? I will give you some for what we will be doing. What you do beyond that will be kind of up to you in terms of what you want to gather in the way of tools.

How many people in this room have or have some access to a computer? most of the folks here. One of the things that I'll be doing as we go along is giving you CD players, I hope, on most of them, is giving you CDs with massive amounts of information on them. I can give you, for example, Bibles in all kinds of versions, Greek Bibles, all sorts of reference materials. There are huge volumes that are available that are public domain. free to copy. If you have a CD burner, you can copy it for somebody else. So you'll be getting lots of information that you'll be able to use, and that'll be one source that people can draw from. That's one thing about the computer realm. There's a lot of junk on the internet, but there's also a huge amount of really valuable information.

And so I'll be passing that along to you. Once each quarter is, we get the next step. We'll be proceeding one quarter at a time. If at some point in time you say that's enough, that's all I can handle, that's fine. I'll be glad for you to take away whatever you can learn at each stage. And those who persist through all four quarters, I think you'll get a lot out of it. Now, let's ask a question.

When I was in college, there was a professor who used to start off his class, he was one of the science professors. He'd start off his class, first day, first minutes, take his Bible and read from the first part of Genesis. In the beginning, God created... He'd go through that, and he'd take the Bible and he'd toss it in the trash can.

Now, why don't we do that? Why don't we? Why do we do that? Yeah, why don't we? Alright, we respect it. Okay. We believe it. Okay. Why else? Ah, there's more than just Genesis, too. There's a lot more. He just read the first few verses. Good. What else? Okay. We need guidance along the way, don't we? Alright.

There are a number of reasons, and I'm sure if we sat here the rest of our time we could think of a lot more, couldn't we? A lot of different reasons why we don't do like that professor did and just take it and toss it in the trash. He would just teach us evolution stuff. Now, what I'd like us to do is to take a look at Four questions, and what I'm going to do...

What you'll need is one white sheet, one yellow sheet. The yellow sheet I'm giving to you is a divider. Do as you like. My suggestion, you put it either in front or the back just as a divider from what you have in there because I'm going to be handing out things to you in addition to what's in your binder.

This morning we're going to be taking a look at four questions, and those questions, I think, are critical. And they're not just questions that come out of somebody's head. They're questions that the Scriptures directly address. But they are questions where a great many believers today have just lost out. And let me take a look. You'll be getting a copy in front of you if you don't have it. But look up here for a minute.

The first question Is there absolute truth? Do you know that a recent survey by Barna Research, which is a kind of a Christian polling firm, a recent survey showed that slightly over half of all people who claim to be Christians don't believe in absolute truth? Now, somebody look up Proverbs 2220 for us. While we're looking that up, what do we mean by absolute truth? That's it. It is truth that is unchanging, it is truth that is certain. I like to call it truth with a capital T, and that's why you'll notice on these questions I put it with a capital T. Okay, does somebody have Proverbs 2220 for us?

Okay, go for it. Have I not written to you excellent things of counsel and knowledge? But that I may make you know, know the certainty of the words of truth, that you may answer the words of truth to those who send you. Okay. Certainty, okay? This isn't, gee, I sure hope it's true, or I think it's true. But this is certainty. This is most certainly true.

We won't turn to it, but Hebrews 13.8 has a similar message, and it says that Jesus Christ is the same what? Yesterday, today, tomorrow. It's unchanging, because Jesus is the truth. Now, let's go to the next one.

Is that truth singular? And my reason for making that distinction Have you ever had anybody tell you, or heard somebody say, that's true for you, but not for me? You hear that? That is a common thing. These days people have very fractured and splintered concepts of truth. Yes? They're mixing truth with belief. And there's a big difference. Yes.

I might believe that I can jump out of my 5th story balcony onto the concrete below unhurt. But whether I believe that that's true or not doesn't really matter, does it? If I do it, I will most certainly know the truth if I live through it. Truth is singular and not all these multiple truths. It's true for you and true for me.

John 14.6. Somebody read that for us or maybe recite it from memory if you happen to have it in your head.

John 14.6. Jesus said to him, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but to me.

In the Greek, the English reflects it very well. It says, I am the truth. It has the way, the truth, the life. There is an article in front of each one. It's the truth, not a truth. Not some kind of truth. I'm a part of the truth. No. I am the truth. It's singular. Okay? Has the truth been given? Now that's an important question. Maybe there's truth, but nobody gave it to us. Okay? Psalm 119, 160. Somebody read that for us? Okay. Alright. Has the truth been given? Yeah. What form is it in? It's in God's Word, isn't it? Yeah, it's right there.

Now, the truth is, as you go down these questions, there are people that answer no to these. There are people who even claim to be Christians that start answering no. And like I said, according to Barna's survey taken just a few years ago, over half those who claim to be Christians drop out at the first question. Here we are at the third one. Has the truth been given? It's this.

And by the way, that excludes other things. excludes the Koran, excludes the Book of Mormon. Other things drop out if you answer, has it been given, and the answer is, yes, here in the Word of God. Other things drop out as being the truth. I'm not saying there aren't statements of truth in it, in other things, but this is truth with a capital T. You can count on this, where other things are not truth with a capital T. Now, the last question, let me move it up to make sure everybody can read it, and of course you have it in your own copy as well.

Is the absolute, singular, given truth knowable? I have John 8, and in fact that reference seems a little bit obscure. Let's switch to John 31, 32. Excuse me, that can't be right. Something's wrong there. Yeah, I switched the comma and the semicolon. John 8, 31 and 32. Sorry for the confusion.

So is the truth knowable? Yeah. The truth is that John, in a number of his writings, that God spells this out, that the truth indeed can be known. And you see, if we're able to answer yes to each of those questions, if we're able to go down the list, then it basically says, okay, if the truth can be known, that means I should be able to go to God's Word and know what it says.

Think about this for a minute. Now the drawer is hidden, right? There we go. Thank you. Okay. Here's God and He is giving us truth, information, okay? He's telling us the truth with a capital T. And how is He giving that? Through His Word. And that came through about 40 authors. And easy to remember, about 40 generations. That's a lot of generations. 40 authors and 40 generations, then, We're given the truth, wrote the Scriptures, and that is given to us. You and me.

God had the intent to send us specific information. And why did He have to send us the information? Why did He have to lay things out in His Word? What's that? So we know them. Why can't we just figure it out? Ah, okay. We're not God. We don't think like He does. That's right. So what God did is God was essentially asking the question, and I'm sure God didn't sit there and ponder it very long, but He was saying, how can I communicate with these people in a way that they'll understand? That's what He was doing when He was spelling out God's Word. I'll put it down for them in writing so they can read it from one generation to the next, spread it around from one person to the next. So that's what he had them do.

On the front of your binder there's that little square that shows a bunch of capital letters in Greek. That's a section from the last chapter in Revelation from about 340 A.D. This is an ancient copy of the last part of the last chapter, Revelation. And that was one of the ways that it was written.

We have of the New Testament, particularly, thousands of ancient copies. Thousands of ancient copies. And to give you some idea how that compares, most of the ancient documents that we have from about that same period of time, we've got a few copies. three to seven copies, and some of those aren't until a thousand or fourteen hundred years after the original writing, the earliest copy we have. Of the Bible, we have copies going back to the century that it was originally written, and thousands of copies.

I mean, it's almost embarrassing. God intended that we get this message. And that's the only reason the early believers, it was capital offense to have this stuff which you've got in front of you here. And yet, thousands of copies survived. That has to be by God's providence. That has to be by God's intent that we have all those copies.

The point being that as we go into studying here, I think we need to remember this isn't we're just looking at it because it's some neat old book. We're looking at it because we have in front of us the message that God intended for you and me. Isn't that neat? This is the message.

Now, this is the God who at the very beginning created the world. This is the God who put the planets and the stars and the galaxies out there. We have a screensaver on our computer that has a lot of photos from the Hubble spacecraft and you just get absolutely mind-boggling photos from this thing. It's that God who created this massive expanse that says, I want to communicate with these people down here on planet Earth and I want them to understand this message that apart from my revealing it to them, they'd never have it.

So that's why when I look at pursuing this with you, I'm excited about it because I'm not just saying, here's how to read a book or something. I'm saying here is how to understand the message that God intended for us to have, and that by divine and miraculous action, He has made available to us.

And I think one other thing to take a look at, and that is, these days there are a lot of people who will point out, heavens, there's 22,000 different Christian denominations. Did you know that? 22,000 of them. Everybody's got a different interpretation. How on earth am I going to figure out what's the right one? Now, let's ask this question.

If you think that there is absolute truth, if you think the truth is singular, if you think the truth has been given, and if you think it's knowable, let's just start back at the beginning. Do you think God gave it to us with the intent that it would be totally clueless as to what it meant? You see the significance there? God had an intended message and meaning when he wrote us the scriptures.

And in the same way, we went down these truth questions, and people do say no to some of those questions. In the same way, people at some point frequently have said no to one of those questions, or at some other point, and therefore missed the message that God intended. If I can be clear to you on something, can God be clear? Let's give an example.

If I say, hey folks, we'd like to have you all over for dinner tonight at 6 o'clock. This is hypothetical. But if I say, we'd like to have you all over at our house tonight for dinner at 6 o'clock, you don't walk away thinking, What on earth is Vern talking about? I have no idea. At our place, was he talking about over in Nevada? No. You have an understanding of what I said. And not only that, when I said, I want you to come over at 6 o'clock tonight for dinner, I didn't have six meanings in mind, did I?

God is doing the exact same thing. God is not intending to convey to us some confusing message. And I think that when God originally wrote the Scriptures, His intent was that we have that single message and that we be able to figure it out. Now it doesn't mean that figuring out is necessarily just a piece of cake or that anybody can do it, but it's possible. You can do it. You can figure out what God intended.

One of the things that we've gone over in the main service the fact that there's about four main views on the book of Revelation. You know that all those views can't be right. Remember, is the truth singular? Guess what? There's four views. Three of them are wrong. Three of them are wrong.

Bottom line is God had an intent when He laid this out. God had something in mind when He said, in the beginning, When he laid all those words out, every last one of them, he had a message in mind. It was a singular message he intended to convey something, and not five different things. See, there are those who will say, well, the earth and heaven was created in six days, right? Oh, but does that mean one day each? Or does that mean just a long period of time? Or is it just a story that doesn't relate to reality at all? But guess what? Those are mutually irreconcilable. There's only one of them that's right. There is one intended message that God had for us to get, for us to receive.

Let me give you another handout. You're going to be getting a lot of paper. If you fall short, just pass it on to the next one. Yeah, I'm running short myself. Understanding the Bible is three steps, and that's what this single sheet handout is. Obviously we're going to go in more detail on this, but I want to give this to you as an introduction from this standpoint. While there are certainly more principles for us to absorb and learn, it's basically these three things. Observe, interpret, and apply. Now let's look at why we do each one of them.

The first thing we're going to do at any verse, passage that we're looking at, we're going to observe. There was one professor at Dallas Theological Seminary who years ago was famous for doing this. He would have everybody in the class take a look at one verse.

I think he had Acts 1.8. He'd have them take a look at one verse and he would say, write down 20 observations about that verse.

20. Oh yeah, that's a famous story. Yeah. You've heard that one. Yeah. Do you know the professor? Howard Hendricks. Okay, you may have heard the name.

He said, okay, observe 20 things. And so everybody went home and observed 20 things and the student said, you know, they got together and were kind of scratching their heads and wondering, you know, oh boy, what are we going to do here? But they came up with 20 things. And so they showed up at the next class. And he said, did you observe 20 things? And they said, yes, we got 20 things, but boy, we had to dig. He said, good, find 20 more. And at first, I mean, they were mind blown.

What are we going to do? And you know what? They came back the next next class meeting, and they had found 20 more things. And that's what we're going to be learning how to do here. And essentially what you're going to be doing is going to be like one of these detective shows, or you can think of yourself as a scientist, whatever mold happens to fit you, that's fine. But the idea is you're going to be asking questions about the passage. That's really what this is all about. asking questions, and then what's the information.

Okay? Now, the next part is interpretive. Okay, now I've got all the information, what does it mean? One of the problems that they're having right now in dealing with the situation in Afghanistan and trying to intercept things is they have equipment that is capable of intercepting virtually every phone call, every transmission throughout the world.

Now that is a lot of information. The problem is, and it was even a problem in dealing with the September 11th thing, they had on file the information that would have warned them. But they had no way to deal with all the information. They didn't have enough hands-on deck to interpret the observations or the data that they had. So, next step is to interpret. You've got all these observations that you've made. Now you're going to look at it and say, what does it mean? What does it mean? Now, be careful.

A lot of people will just look at a passage and instantly jump to the last step, apply. What does apply mean? Apply means how does that fit in my life, in our lives? And asking that question, now it becomes personal, doesn't it? That's the application, the third step. We don't want to jump to that because we want to make sure that we've understood the verse to begin with. We want to make sure that we've done the observing. We want to make sure that we've done the interpretation. then we'll know what it means.

How many have heard people just kind of quote, you know, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me? Okay. Now you've heard it and now does that mean I can lift 2,000 pounds? Does it mean that if I want to I can walk through this wall? Does it mean that I forgot something at home? No problem, I'll be back in two seconds. Right? No. That's not what it's talking about.

If you look at the context, Paul had just gotten through saying that he can do with material things and without them. So when you hear that verse, that's what it's talking about. We need to be sure that we observe. That's a part of the observation process. We look at what it's really saying. That's the difficulty where people jump at an application. I need to do some phenomenal thing, so I'll grab this verse and make it fit. No. You see, it comes back to this. God had an intended message.

If we do something that arrives at some other message, we've missed it. You may have even caught yourself saying this, but you've certainly heard other people say it. This verse to me means, or to me this verse, or I think that it says, ever heard that? Maybe you've even said it? What's that doing? That's saying just the us part, isn't it? It isn't asking the question, what did God intend? What was God's message from the outset?

See that? So we've got to be careful that we don't jump ahead at some steps. At any verse that you look at, there's going to be those three steps that you have right in front of you. And whether you're just starting off in it, or whether you've been doing this for years, you're going to be doing those three things. To convey it to you one way, it's that simple. You're going to be doing those three steps to arrive at what's there in the passage, that's the observation, what does it mean, and then how does it apply? Now here's one principle, and be sure to make note of this.

There's only one correct interpretation. God only had one intended meaning for any passage. Somebody comes up with five meanings, four of them are wrong. There's one intended message. If I say, come over tonight at six o'clock, I don't mean every night this next week at six o'clock. I mean tonight at six o'clock. There's one intended message, and that's what God intended to convey to us. If I have five different interpretations come up, how can that happen? Can any of you think why could that happen, that I'll have five different interpretations of the same passage? What's that?

The problem would be that you don't know enough yet. You haven't done enough of the research. Okay, first step, right? Haven't done enough observation. So that might be it. I've come across a case recently that's gotten fairly complicated and the bottom line is the fellow who wrote this original commentary, he was just wrong in his facts.

So getting the full information, is important, and also getting the right information. But just make sure your facts. And that's the exact same thing a good detective is going to do. They're going to make sure they're facts. If they get a wrong piece of information, they're going to come to the wrong conclusions. So make sure your facts are true. Make sure you've got lots of observations to work from.

So that's one thing. What's another reason why people might come up with five different interpretations? Personal bias. That's an excellent point. Now, what might be some of those biases? Let's think through that. A cultural bias. Okay. There's a good example. Let's think of one.

This guy comes up to Jesus. And Jesus says, come be my disciple. And what's his response? He says, let me first go bury my father. Alright? Well, doesn't that sound harsh? Because what's Jesus' response? Let the dead bury their dead, their own dead. That sounds like hard-hearted harsh.

Until you understand that what that means in the Jewish culture is one, I want to wait until my father dies so I can get an inheritance. So it might be years. The next thing is in the Jewish culture, when the father first died, you would wrap them up like they did with Jesus on the day of his burial. and you would wait for a year. Once all the connections to the bones and the flesh had decayed, they would take the bones again from the shelf, put them in a box called an ossuary, and have a second funeral. So you're talking years before this guy is able to be a disciple.

So is what Jesus is saying harsh? No. This guy was just saying, forget it. See? That's why Jesus was responding. Let the dead bury their own dead. You've missed out. Because you're wanting to put this thing off and put it off and put it off and put it off. So I think that's a part of what the situation is. We have to understand what the situation was at the time. But you mentioned that idea of bias, and that's an important one.

How many of you have heard of the Jesus seminars? You heard of that? Some of you have heard of it? The Jesus Seminars is a group that is headquartered out of Santa Rosa, California. And what they do is they go around, they're these experts that go around and they'll say, you know, we've boiled the New Testament down and here's just a handful of things that are the things that Jesus actually said and did. And the rest of it's all just myth and garbage.

Okay? Now what do they do? Just exactly like Dave pointed out, they have a bias. And what's the bias? That's right. They don't accept anything supernatural. So, if something supernatural happened, where are they going to conclude? It didn't happen. Their bias is going to throw out the data. So what happened? That first step, observe, they just skewed the data by tossing it out. Now, is that smart? How about a scientist? It seems right to them.

If I fall off the fifth floor balcony onto the concrete below and I notice that 50 different people do the same thing and they all die, and I conclude, well, that can't possibly be because I've got some bias, I'm going to throw that out. The bias makes a person throw out real data. What we're going to do is we're going to say, what did God intend to say? And we're not going to be throwing biases into it that cause us to throw out data. That's the problem that a lot of these folks have that come up with these five different interpretations. They have biases of one kind or another that end up skewing their interpretation because basically they've discounted certain pieces of data. They've tossed it out. What's another bias that they might have? A religious bias. Good. And can you think of an example? Sure, okay. Right.

One of the things we'll be looking at in the main service is, I have a chart that some of you might look at and say, you know, it's mind-blowing, but anyway, I've got this chart and it basically shows from the book of Revelation and Isaiah clearly that Jesus is deity, that Jesus is God. I mean, unequivocally, several times. out of the book of Revelation and Isaiah. I have a copy of the Jehovah's Witness New World Translation. I can open it up, even in their translation, and show the exact same thing.

But their bias is going to kick it out. They won't accept that because of their religious bias. So that's a good point. Now, what I'd like for you to do You got these handouts here. Read through this single sheet that you have in front of you. I'll need to get a listing of who is missing what, because we reproduced one more than the sign-ups. It looks like we're beyond that.

Raise your hand if you don't have a binder. Yeah. Who does not have a binder? OK. So we need at least a couple more binders here. OK. Alright, and so we'll give more binders to people and additional copies of these handouts that we've gotten today too. Anyway, the other thing, aside from that single sheet that I handed out there, I'd like you to read over in detail.

In this Basics of Bible Interpretation in the Binder, There is in the, it's chapter 3, this is the goal of Bible study. Well, you got, you know, yeah, it starts on page 1. It's page 1 of chapter 3, okay. On page 2 there's real Bible study. On page 2, starts in the middle of the page.

I want you to read that through the end of the chapter. As well as this handout that we've got here. Chapter 3, on page 2, there is a middle of the page, real Bible study in bold, all capital letters. I want you to read from there to the end of the chapter as well. It's not long, it's like two and a half pages. Yes. If you want to read up before that, that's fine. But that's the section that I particularly want you to focus on. Just for this next week here. Okay?

Let's pray. Lord, thank you that you have indeed intended a message for us. It's a clear message. It's a singular message. It's a true message, and you have done all that is required to lay it clearly in our hands. And Lord, as we have this awesome, unbelievably valuable truth laid before us, we just pray for hearts with eyes to see and ears to hear all that you have for us. And we just ask, Lord, that you guide and lead us as we continue to look at how to glean all the truths clearly from your word. In Jesus' name, Amen.