How To Study The Bible

How many of you have heard of Promise Keepers? Most of you. If you're any familiar with it, one of the things that they tend to do is they kind of put doctrine on a very low profile in order to get everybody united. They say, let's get everybody united under Christ, and a lot of the doctrinal issues they shove to the side. As a matter of fact, they make the speakers sign a statement saying that they won't bring up, and they have a list of issues. You won't talk about this and this and this and this and this and this, because it might divide. But we're going to take a look this morning at several scriptures that put a whole different light on the direction that God intends us to go.

And the first one there is 1 Corinthians 1.10. And what I'd suggest is, while I have it printed out here, you might want to look in your Bibles as well, because that kind of gives you some context. What's happening, and just to kind of summarize the context, what's happening is Paul is told that the church there at Corinth is divided up under different groups. And as happens now, what you see is they're divided up according to what? Different personalities. One is of Peter. Another one is of Apollos. And we do that now.

We've got churches named after people. Whole church denominations named after people. And sometimes what will happen is they'll even subdivide under that. The Methodist group, that's all under the Wesleys. And there's over a hundred Methodist denominations. That's only including the major ones. There's also the Lutherans, named after Martin Luther. And there's a whole bunch of those. I don't know exactly how many of those there are, but there's a whole bunch of those. Mennonites, named after a guy by the name of Menno. So all these different groups named after people. Same thing going on in Corinth. I'm after this guy. I follow this one. I'm with this guy.

So what he tells them in verse 10, and I put it down here in the King James, because I think the King James reflects the message of the original language better than a lot of the other translations. It says, Now I beseech you, brethren, I'm exhorting you. I'm telling you." When you have that kind of a preface, He's saying, listen, I'm really talking to you here. I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing.

That you all speak the same thing, that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. Now, the first phrase to take a look at there, that ye all speak the same thing. You see that phrase? One of the reasons I like the King James Version there better than some of the others, some of the others say that you all agree, but the underlying word is a single word in Greek. It's homo logeo, one message. the same thing, that you're all saying the same thing, that you're all conveying the same message.

And so, here's some groups that will tell you, let's kind of put doctrine aside so that we'll be united. What's he saying here? The exact opposite, isn't he? He says, I want you to all have the same message and as a result of standing under the same doctrine, then you'll be united. See the difference? There's a real big distinction. It basically says, I want you to be united under the same doctrine and not put doctrine aside so that you'll be united. See the difference there?

Now, Paul doesn't leave it there. He reiterates the same thing twice. Again, so he's actually telling you three times. He says that you all speak the same thing and that there be no divisions among you. And one translator even put it to make it even clearer, that there be no doctrinal divisions among you.

How about that? I mean, real clear. but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind, okay, you have the same thinking and the same perspective, and in the same judgment. That is, when you look at something, because that's what Scripture allows us to do, right? When you look at something, you're all using the same yardstick. You're all making the same comparison.

And so, let's look at the message. What's this telling us? It's saying that there is a singular message that we're to have, not a whole bunch of them. When you look at the 22,000 different denominations that are under Christendom now, is that saying the same thing? Not exactly. As a matter of fact, they're all over the place when it comes to different kinds of teachings. So this verse here runs entirely counter to the idea that we should have four, five, six different ideas about what the Bible means.

And actually there's hundreds of different ideas. But you get the gist of what Paul's urging us to here? He's saying that you need to have one understanding of what God's Word is telling you. And it's under that that you will be united. One person put it this way, I would rather be divided by right doctrine than united under wrong doctrine.

Now, let's go to the next one, Hebrews 13.9. As you notice, there's a semicolon there, so the verse kind of continues on. But it has a thought that is exactly kind of a contrast to the previous verse we were just looking at. And again, it's good if you look at context there.

So, Hebrews 13.9, Do not be carried away by varied and strange teachings. A couple of phrases to take a look at.

What does carried away mean? When you see that, what's that telling you? Okay, you're kind of getting hauled off, aren't you? Basically, if you get carried away, it means you're kind of going off in a different direction, isn't it? Bunny trails, yes, that's a good way to put it. Yes, exactly. If you've been in a situation where water or wind or something like that is determining your direction, you'll get the sense of it. It is possible for us to kind of get blown about and so carried away by, and then look at the words that he uses, varied and strange. Do not be carried away by varied and strange teachings.

Okay, that word varied, the Greek word under that is poloikas. It's where we get our word polka, like in polka dots. And what do you see when you see polka dots? You see them scattered. You see some large, some small, sometimes even different colours. There's a variety in there.

So what he's saying is, don't be carried away by teachings that have variety. How about that? Don't be carried away by teachings that are all over the place. What that conveys to us is the intent is that there is a biblical teaching and it isn't all over the place. That variety is not God's intent. One of the messages that we have being thrust at us these days is there is strength in diversity, but diversity in biblical teaching is not strength. It's unbiblical is what it is.

There's another word, varied, and then strange. The Greek word behind that is Xenos. Have you ever heard of xenophobia? Xenophobia is basically a fear of things that are unfamiliar. So, varied is going to mean variety. Strange is anything other than what you've been taught. Anything other than this is what God's word says. So the idea that we can have a whole bunch of teachings about a passage and that's okay, that's not right. The idea that you can have teachings that kind of veer off the path, the strange teachings, that's not okay either. So just don't be carried away by them. Don't get hauled off in different directions by them. Or as Tom put it, don't go chasing bunny trails.

Yeah, Carol? Yes, and let's think about that a minute, because that's a good observation. What are the reasons why teachings get strayed off? Can you think of some of them? I'm sure you can give some thought to it if you can. Emotions is one of them. What are some different reasons why teachings kind of get strayed? In other words, I might have a human viewpoint that has nothing to do with Scripture, and I say, okay, I read Scripture, therefore I've got to kind of warp the Scripture to fit some human viewpoint. Yeah, that could be one.

What's another one? Right. They'll come up with, there is no hell, they'll soften it, you know, hell isn't that bad. Or another one is annihilationism, the idea that you just, you know, after you die, you know, if you're not going to heaven, that's it. You just kind of get snuffed out.

Yeah, there are a lot of things that it would be nicer if the scripture didn't say. Isn't that true? There'd be a lot of things that if the scripture didn't say something, it would make life a lot easier. Well, it would remove your responsibility for believing. Ah, okay. Yes.

Okay, good point. What are some other reasons why teachings kind of go varied and get strange? Somebody got... Well, Billy got the chaff when they were trying to deal with a fellow Christian and he decided, okay, I'm not going to put up with this anymore. Yeah. They'll go off and a lot of people will just dump their supposedly Christian faith, or they'll come up with some variation based on a reaction.

And that leads to another one. Yeah? What's that? Right now, what happened in New York, How can there be a God? He wouldn't have allowed this. Yes. It's amazing. You'll have extremes like that. One extreme is, how can there be a God to allow this to happen? And the other extreme is it draws other people closer to the Lord. How about taking things out of context, like how so, reading somebody else's mail?

Yeah. I look at one particular verse and forget what the rest of it says. I like that phrase and I'll just grab it. and people can just do that. It's a quick easy, isn't it? It's a quick easy. I'll just grab it, because I like what that says apart from anything else, and you've got to be careful about that. Kind of the classic case is Judas went out and hung himself, goes out and do likewise.

I think that that is sometimes a problem when people think they have to choose a life verse. They're taking this verse by itself and really focusing on just the Word for themselves and they're missing all these nuances from all around the rest of the Bible and the immediate neighborhood and so on. Yeah. People kind of zero in on one thing at the exclusion of other things and you can end up getting not the whole picture that way.

Another area that just frequently is a problem, and I mentioned it earlier, and that's just following behind personalities. If you ever talk to people who've been through a church split, maybe you've been through some on your own, a lot of times it's personality-led. We're following this guy, and we're following that one. And that's exactly what the Corinthians were doing. It's the exact same thing. There is a tendency for people to orient behind personalities. And then what happens when those personalities end up going in different directions, then the people end up going in the schism. Really sad. Really bad.

And a part of what he's saying is don't get carried away by all this variety, by these things that are strange. There is a teaching of the faith that is solid and dependable, and as we looked at last week, it's knowable. Therefore, don't get hauled off by it. Don't get carried away by it.

I remember At one point in time I was with a friend going down a river. It was in a kayak. This kayak was one of those homemade jobs with wooden spines going down it and canvas on the outside. We got ourselves crossways under a log that was embedded in the river and kind of headed up diagonally. We got crossways in this thing. And so the current was doing this. It was starting to turn the kayak, okay?

And so anyway, I'm in the back, my friend's in the front of me, and I pull one leg out, get it on the bottom of the riverbed, and I'm holding us. And I'm thinking, if I don't hold us, we're done for, because this thing is going to pull us down. And so I said, okay, Bob, we're yanking out of this thing, I'm going to yank on you because he had no way to get out. I'm going to yank on you and let her go." So I yanked on him, pulled him out, the kayak went tumbling under and snapped in two and went down the river. And see, that's the problem is currents can end up yanking us to ruin. And a teaching can be that way as well. Nancy and I have some friends in Carson City who have some friends who are in a church where they get the prosperity teaching.

Now, it turns out, you find out, absolutely none of the apostles ended up prosperous. So where they get this is a little hard to follow. Jesus says, I don't have a place to lay my head. Basically, I don't own a house. And so where they get that is hard to fathom from Scripture, but they keep cooking it up and they keep talking about it all the time, and they give people all these formulas. That's one of these strange and varied teachings. You'll have that, and then at the other end is the aesthetic stuff. where you're going off in directions where you're not supposed to own anything. That's all Christianity?

Come on! Give me a break! Alright, let's take a look at Jude 3 here. Jude is a short book. He has just a singular matter. There's one chapter. It's one of a couple of books in the Bible. There's just one chapter. So when I say Jude 3, it's just that's in the one and only chapter in the book.

Beloved, while I was making every effort to write to you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. Now there's some real potent words in here that I want us to focus on. Let's start at the point, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly.

This contend is a word that they would use in those days in the Olympic events. Contend, this is an Olympic event. He's asking us, I want you to join in an Olympic event. That's the word that he's using. And then where it says it's translated earnestly, the reason is there's a prefix there before that word that means above that. So he's saying, I want you to contend at a level above an Olympic event level of effort. I want you to contend at that level for the faith. Now when it says THE faith, something I want you to take note of That phrase, the faith, appears repeatedly throughout the New Testament. Again, and again, and again, and again. And why would it show up repeatedly, including that Jude 3 verse we just looked at?

They didn't say a faith. They didn't say something generally around it. there was a specific set of doctrines and teachings they called the faith. And the believers at that time, having been taught by the apostles, knew what that was. Notice that Jude did not have to go into an explanation of what the faith was. It was clear. He didn't have to explain it because everybody knew it. The apostles had taught it.

It was consistent. It was a body of belief that was coherent and everybody understood it. And so here's all these places in the New Testament where they would repeatedly use that phrase, the faith, the faith, the faith, the faith, because it was one singular body of teachings. Okay, and like a lot of... there are a lot of places where you see the imperative It sounds like work, and when you say it sounds like work, what do you mean? Why the exhortation? There are various places in Scripture where it will say, don't do this, or make sure you do that. How do we understand that in terms of the other exhortation of resting in the Lord being under law. How do those work together?

If we look at the word contention and use it in that sense, then yeah, it just sounds like argument. What he is talking about here is contending for the faith may come in other forms that are not necessarily argument. Even here this morning we are doing what? We're contending for the faith, but it's not some massive argument. Essentially what we're saying is we are working in a direction that stands on the faith. And like the various imperatives in Scripture, because you will find a number of them, the various imperatives in Scripture, what that is saying is is independent upon the Lord, my life will look this way.

That's what it's telling us. He's saying, I'm urging you to contend for the faith. He's not saying the old man needs to work hard. But what he's saying is the new nature looks like this. In the new nature, we can contend in the faith and yet it's at the same time resting in the Lord. But that's a good question because we run into those kinds of issues.

Now, for the faith, and here's the next thing, which was once for all. That phrase, once for all, is actually one word. The Greek word means once given, perpetually valid. Once given, perpetually valid. So somebody says, hey, I've got another Testament of Jesus Christ. I've got a second revelation. I've got some new stuff that kind of changes what the Bible teaches. What do you say? Uh-uh. This is once given perpetually valid. I was talking with a couple of Mormons one time and I showed them that. I said, this is once given perpetually valid. Why should I bring on anything else? They had no answer. They had no answer.

Yeah. Sure. Yes. Do you think of this issue of contending? It doesn't mean going there and beating people up, but what it means is there needs to be a directed effort at standing on what is true and making sure that that is conveyed to other people, whether it's in a very friendly context like this, or you see examples in the book of Acts where Paul got crossways with people Even the book of Galatians.

Paul just gets through saying hi, and then what does he say? He says, even if we or an angel from heaven gives you a different gospel, may they be condemned. Let me say it again. He repeats it. What is he doing? He's contending for the faith. In some situations, it may be confrontive. In other situations, like what we're doing now, we're essentially saying, we want to see what God's Word says so we can avoid trouble. We don't want to get off track. We want to know exactly what God's Word says and center in on that. See, Paul is urging a singularity of doctrine.

The Hebrews passage is warning about the variation and the straying off that doctrine. Jude 3 is asking us to contend for that which was already given. It's once given, perpetually valid. From then on out, it's valid. It's not varied. It's not strange.

So between these three verses, we've got a real good fix on what are we shooting for? And that's why the top, interpreting Scripture, what do we aim for? And let's look at, remember last week I passed out that sheet that's got three steps on how we interpret Scripture. What's the first one?

You've got observation. The next thing is interpretation. And the third thing is what? Application. So let's take a look here. I need to yank this thing out to get my chalk. for the sake of brevity. We've got observation, interpretation, and application. When we look at observations, do we want to look at just one thing or how many things? Lots of things, right? So when we have observations, we want to look for many. Everything that is in there. But we want to look for many, many observations. And the truth is, how many observations is enough? The reality is you can continue to observe a lot of different things about a passage, can't you? You can keep digging. A couple examples.

There was one Bible student over in England that had been studying the book of Ephesians only in his personal time for two years. And somebody says, man, you must really know that book backwards and forwards. And the guy's response was, I've just begun to scratch the surface. Another instance that I had, a friend of mine, we were going through just one part of the book of Ephesians, and I was showing him, just like we're doing here, okay, here's how we start studying the Bible. And once we got into it, I sent him off. I said, okay, start looking at different things. And after weeks and weeks and weeks, he says, Vern, when do I stop? I said, I can't tell you.

Once he learned how to begin looking for things, there was no end. He could just keep looking and looking and looking and digging more stuff out of it. People who have just focused on studying the Word have said, man, this thing is just infinitely deep. God's Word is infinitely deep because it is God's inspired Word. It is giving us insight into basically what God is telling us. There is immense depth in the Word.

So, how many? I can't tell you, but the reality is you can keep on looking and looking and finding more and more things. I've been through the book of Ephesians several times in Bible studies, and the reason is I'll go through it, and then after a while I'll say, boy, there's other stuff I missed the first time through. And so then I'll go into it a little bit more, and I'll go through it again, and then a little while later I'll say, there's some more, and you can just keep going through deeper and deeper and deeper. So, many observations, and we'll be taking a look at what are those kinds of observations, because there's different categories, and it helps to fix those in your mind. Now, interpretations. How many interpretations do we want to shoot for? One. How about that? Many observations, one interpretation, because the interpretation is that is the understanding of what it means.

This science of interpreting, the big word is hermeneutics, and by the way that's not just a biblical or theological term. Lawyers use it because they have a science of how do I interpret legal documents. So lawyers use this in order to look at a document and say, okay, here's the science of how we interpret documents. So it's a science. It's not just something that Bible believers or theologians have grabbed and devised. Even other people that get involved in various kinds of literature will use principles of hermeneutics.

So it is a developed science, and we want to stick to that. There's one interpretation, and that's basically Three verses we looked at this morning. That's the message, isn't it? There is one interpretation of a passage, not five. Dave brought up a really good point after last week. Remember I said if there's five interpretations of a passage, four of them are wrong? Guess what? He brought up a good point.

Five of them may be wrong. Five of them may be wrong. Because it's possible that people have looked at it and come up with five different ideas and none of them is right. You have to keep that in mind. It's possible that that's the case. That some other conclusion needs to be reached. But one interpretation. Now, how many applications? Oh, that goes back to the many. Ah, there we go.

Because what happens, I look at a passage and I've said, okay, that passage means one thing. But the many is because there's lots of different ways that that fits in my life. lots of different ways that it impacts my life in different areas and other people's lives. If I look, let's take the snag point, Romans 7. There's lots of different ways that that impacts my life. I can look at it and find a number of different aspects of my life or the lives of others that that fits. But the reality is there's one interpretation, one understanding, but how does it impact my life? Where does the rubber meet the road on that? Could be lots of them. A great many.

Now what happens, you ever been in a group and somebody just says, okay, here's a passage, what does that mean to you? Frequently what's happening is people are just jumping down to the application, aren't they? If you're not careful, you can apply a scripture before you know what it means. And that's frequently when you get in groups, sometimes people will call it Bible study, but it really isn't.

They'll just kind of ask, what does that mean to you? They'll read it and just kind of... And you get kind of a subjective, gushy impression of it. And it's really unfortunate because what's happened... Look, have they done the observation? Typically very little, right? Have they even come to the point of saying, this is what it means? This is what the author intended. No. Yeah? Yeah. Yes. Yes.

And here's something else a lot of people will look at. Well, the Holy Spirit is going to lead me into all truth. And frequently what they'll do is they'll use that as an excuse for not doing the observation and interpretation. And so what they'll do is they'll just look at Scripture and just say, well, the Holy Spirit's going to make it somehow stick. And the reality is they haven't figured out what it means yet. They haven't asked the question, what did the author intend to say? So they end up with applications that may have no relationship to what God intended to convey with the verse. See the differences there? Okay. Any questions? I want to see the last line up there that you turned off. Oh, maybe two lines.

Yeah. By the way, as I go through, I'll ask any questions a lot and the reason is I don't want to leave anybody. The reality is this is not horrifically complex. The only reason why there is difficulty is because the Church, and I'm speaking of the Church at large, the Church has gotten so confused on how do I understand Scripture that that explains why we've got these thousands and thousands of denominations. Yeah?

Right. How do we come up with something different? That's exactly what we're going to proceed with. In your binders here, Chapter 4 starts with Interpretive Principles. Go ahead and read through chapter four because that is going to be pivotal in everything else we do here. So go ahead and read through that entire chapter. Chapter four.

The thing that is neat is it's like having the right tool. If you go in the kitchen and you don't have the things you need, it's real tough to cook. If you go in the garage and you don't have the right tools, it is exasperating. What this is really coming to is you have to have the right tools. If you have the right tools, you can do it.

So that's what we'll be looking at here in detail. So take a close look at Chapter 4, because this is really the turning point. If I can get those down, Look at those principles. I'll be well down the road in understanding how do I properly interpret Scripture. So we'll take a look at that. So next week, having read that, we'll kind of start diving into it and digesting slowly each of those principles. Make sure we've got them all down.

Again, at any point, I'm going to ask probably one or two times a session, any questions, and be sure to ask them. The only bad question is the one you don't ask. Alright, so let's pray. Lord, we do just give you thanks that you have not left your word foggy, mysterious, and indistinct. But instead, you had a specific message to convey to us. And we just thank you for that truth. We just pray in the days and weeks ahead as we continue to take a look at this that you would clarify in our minds this approach here that we might better and increasingly understand your word and the valuable and precious truths that you've laid out there for us. And we just pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.