How To Study The Bible
Vern Peterman · Apr 7, 2002
How to Study Bible (2001-02), No. 27
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262241515224

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Several things to cover here. This is just to kind of get some things laid out in getting a better understanding of New Testament Greek and what insights that that can provide. There are some English only resources and those are kind of listed in the first part here. And we've been going through the Complete Word Study New Testament, Complete Word Study New Testament Dictionary. There's also the Bible Essentials CD which is Complete Word Study New Testament, the dictionary for both the Old Testament actually and the New Testament all in one CD.

Hello folks! And then Vines is another popular one for being able to get insights on the meanings of particular words. Things you find about some of these, though, like vines and then the next one, strongs, a lot of times they're not context-specific. That is, a word has a meaning in a particular context, right? For example, use the word toad. Now, do you think of this little amphibian with little warty bumps on it? Or do you think of a two-toed sloth? Or do you think of what happens to your car if you leave it in no parking zone? Okay?

So that's our English word toad, right? But you don't know which one I'm using except in context. If I say, oh no, they toad my car, you don't think of a big giant green thing on top of my car, right? You know in the context that, okay, this is what Vern's talking about. Or you don't think of my car having several toes on each front.

Context specifies the meaning. And we use words all the time in which the context helps us know, oh, that's what he means. You know that if I say, you know, I shot the deer with a bow and arrow, that you're not talking about a bow tie. Okay? The word by context gets clarified.

And that's the same thing about some of these. The next one that I use a lot and is good is Weiss' Expanded Translation and Weiss' Word Studies in the New Testament. Those come in a set of four books. My briefcase ran out of room here, so I didn't get them here this morning.

Word Meetings in the New Testament by Earl. I said note Nazarene, because he's got some Nazarene teachings you need to be aware of, but otherwise it's some good insights. Robertson's New Testament Word Pictures. Vincent's New Testament Word Studies, and I would put a caution on Vincent.

That's a really good word study book, but the guy is an annihilationist. That is, he doesn't believe in literal hell. So there's the skew that comes across in his books. Otherwise, it's pretty good stuff. If you run across any other books I haven't listed that you want to share with the class, that's great too. What we're going to be broaching starting This quarter is looking at things that will require a Greek alphabet knowledge. If you don't recognize the letters in the Greek alphabet, you're going to have a tough time. Doug? What about Young's Concordance? Young's Concordance is another good one. And as a matter of fact, it has some analytical capabilities that go beyond Strong's.

Thanks for bringing that up. Yeah, Young's is a good one. There are other ones out there. If I left them off the list, it's not to exclude them. Good morning. So yes, Young's Concordance would be another good option for looking things up. And it's oftentimes a good way to quickly arrive at better insight. Anyway, one of the things we have in the pews and copy in the pastor's study here is a Greek-English interlinear.

And that's handy, even if you don't read Greek. It's handy because then you can say, okay, this word For example, a word that we looked at recently was another. That word is another. Now, even if I don't read Greek in the sense that, OK, I'll just read through it, if I can say, OK, another is the translation of this Greek word, and I can't read it, but I can recognize the letters, then I can take some of the resources that are in here and look up that word. And that's where it becomes valuable because then I can look it up in resources that have things listed by the Greek word using the Greek letters. So I may not even be able to pronounce it. but I can still look it up. Yeah, Tom? Yeah, just to reiterate Tom's point here, that is a good one.

You'll find places that have used books. For example, I found over in Englewood there is a Christian used bookstore. They have all kinds of books listed by category and by author. Good point. You can get different kinds of books sometimes at bargain rates.

When I was still at seminary, there was one fellow who was getting rid of a whole bunch of books. I mean stacks and boxes and boxes. And so they just said, go through it, pick whatever you want. And so it was all free. Well, all kinds of good stuff. I mean, I picked all sorts of good things out of that.

And then book fairs, I even found some good stuff at garage sales. So yeah, you have to use some discernment, of course, because there's also a lot of junk, huh? But there's also some good bargains. And Chris Free is nice, too, right? But yeah, that's a good point.

But anyway, the Greek interlinears that we have here, those are handy tools because you can look at the English word in its context, you can look at the Greek word, you can then use that Greek word to look up in the various resources that are available to find out more specifically what does that mean and other things about the characteristics of that Greek word.

One that's commonly available, is frequently available fairly inexpensively, is Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament. And that one is, because Thayer lived some time ago, that's one that's public domain. I think you've even found it on the internet. So you can get ahold of that pretty easily. The New Analytical Greek Lexicon by Perschbacher.

And that's one we're going to be taking a look at this morning. This one, if you look at it, it's not good bedtime reading. Not good bedtime reading. If you look through it, it's got a bunch of Greek words, and right after it, it has a bunch of abbreviations. You look at it, and you say, boy. Here's what it's good for. You can look up each individual Greek word. If you see it, Right there in the inner linear, you can look it up exactly as it is.

Because one of the things you'll find is that more so than in English, there are different forms of that Greek word. The reason being, remember how we put things up on the screen and we'll see one Greek word for about sometimes three to five English words? It's because all those English words are built into the Greek word. And so they have all kinds of minor variations. in order to build all that meaning into one word. What that means is that there are a lot more Greek words, when you look at all those variations, than we would have in English.

Add to that, they'll have multiple words for where we have one. Like, we say love, and they've got several words for love, and then each one of those has multiple forms. So with all those variations, you're able now with this to look up each individual one and find out specifically Which one is that?

So this is helpful, but again, not good bedtime reading. As you go down the list there, let me switch over here on the overhead. Another one down there, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament by Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich. At seminary they called that BAG, because it was easier than saying Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich every time. So, look it up in your BAG, okay, was the terminology they'd use there.

Pardon? Probably not. I think it was before his time. to my knowledge, knows nothing about New Testament Greek, but it might be a cousin of his. Who knows? Expositor's Greek Testament by Nicole. Nicole wrote some time back, but his books are still available. That's one of them. Alfred's Greek Testament is getting hard to get. Moody was the last one that printed that one out. It's used a lot by a lot of the people at Dallas Theological Seminary and places like that.

There's other printed and internet sources, and I will be distributing some of those to you as we go through this. And so just so you know, I put some of these over here for people to take a look at afterwards so you can browse through them. And just a reminder, today we have postponed the start of the main service by 15 minutes, just to check that out. So it'll give you a little extra time to look through things and whatnot. Now, I have not brought all of them, so I'll bring some others so people have a chance to look at those as well, so you can get an idea of what that looks like.

None of these are such that if you don't read Greek, you're lost. There are some books, and I just won't even bother, where if you don't read Greek, it's just forget it. This is an instance where just recognizing the alphabet is sufficient to be helpful. You can get some insights just by knowing an alpha and a beta and a gamma and a delta.

If anybody is lacking that alphabet handout, I'll see that you get one. Let's shift gears here. We want to go beyond the complete Word Study New Testament. Why do I want to go beyond it? I'm not saying that it's no longer any good because, in fact, I still use it. It's a good tool. There are times, however, when it isn't specific enough, where there's more information that can be gained than what's in that complete Word Study New Testament. Here are some for instances. Verbs have tense, voice, mood, person, and number in the Greek. Person and number is not addressed by the complete Word, Study, and New Testament. They don't address those. Most of the time it may not matter, but sometimes it does. And if it does, you'll like to be able to know where to look it up and how to figure that one out.

It's one of those instances where there's so much built into a Greek verb that it's good to be able to get that information too, because sometimes it does matter. For example, when he talks about this or that, when he's writing, is it plural or single? Did the English translation carry that over properly? Sometimes it will help figure out what he's saying in a passage, and we'll see that in a little bit.

Nouns. In English, we rarely make a differentiation between a noun being masculine, feminine, and neuter. That's pretty well lost in English, isn't it? But most European languages And most of the ancient European languages that were around the Mediterranean had masculine, feminine, and neuter on their nouns.

It's not politically correct. No, it isn't. No, no. It'll probably take centuries for them to catch up with that. But if Heidi and Helmut were here, they could tell us the same thing as true of German. It's got the masculine, feminine, and neuter. Yes. That's correct. Peter and rock, a lot of people say, well, they both mean rock, but excellent point. They're not the same gender. Okay.

And that's an instance where being able to look that up is valuable. And one of the things you'll notice in the Complete Word Study New Testament is it just tells you it's a noun. It doesn't tell you whether it's masculine, neuter, feminine, singular, plural. And the case, and the case is another issue we'll get into sometime later. But the case is, for example, is this to, from, you know, those kinds of We will get into that in more detail at a later time.

Articles that go along with those nouns are also masculine, neuter, feminine, singular, and plural. Like in English, we say the and we use the for everything. In Greek, they would use a different the depending on whether it was masculine, feminine, neuter, singular, or plural. Isn't that amazing? You don't just say the. Which one? And they've got forms for each.

And the article, see the complete Word, Say, New Testament has ART, which tells you there's an article but doesn't tell you which one. They have to match. Because of the fact that all these things match in Greek, you can actually scramble the words and still figure out what it means. Because everything matches.

Here's another way that it comes out in terms of nouns, particularly having to do with case. If I say the boy hit the ball, that doesn't have the same meaning in English as the ball hit the boy. It means a different thing. We know because of word order. In Greek, it isn't the word order, it's the form of the word.

The ball hit the boy and the boy hit the ball would be not as to word order, but as to the form of the word, as to whether it was which one did which to what. The last one, the adjective that they use to describe a noun also matches as is according to masculine, neuter, feminine, singular, plural, and the case. So if I said, the big ball, the and big and ball would all match.

Complicated, isn't it? Got a little much. All right. Okay, Barton. Yes. You said something about being able to scramble the words around in the Greek. In the example you just gave with the big ball, in the Greek, would the three complementary words be There is a typical order, but the truth is that you can move things around and the meaning will still be apparent as long as your sentence isn't too complicated because you're still matching up these things according to masculine, feminine, neuter, singular, plural, and the case. And because of that, it makes Greek a very precise language. Very precise. Whereas English, sometimes you can get a little confused. Greek is an almost mechanically precise language. It nails it down.

It's one of the reasons why I think the Lord had Greek spread throughout the whole Roman Empire and even elsewhere. in order to spread the gospel, because the truths of the New Testament are best put in a language that has that precision, and even precision is to time. So that's one of the reasons for kind of going beyond the complete words say New Testament, and I focused on the things that that complete words say New Testament doesn't tell you, purposely here, but the idea is you can get additional information from some of these other tools about these things. And we're going to take a, for instance, look this morning at, here's an example of how you can use it and why it makes a difference. Okay? Yes.

Yeah, Hebrew and Greek are different kinds of languages. Interestingly, and we covered this some weeks back, the Greek language borrows some from some of the same alphabet. And there is some borrowing and connection between the two, but what we find is that the Hebrew language is more pictorial and is not as specific when it comes to talking about things relative to time. The Greek is very specific and has tenses that communicate things that the Hebrew has a tough time doing without additional words.

Let me give you a for instance. The Greek perfect tense is beautiful for telling us about salvation because the Greek perfect tense talks about salvation was completed, it's permanent, and the results are ongoing into the future. That's marvelous. to be able to tell us that about salvation. That there are things that God has accomplished that are a done deal, and it's not reversible, and it's going to continue on into the future. That one aspect of the Greek language is beautiful.

And Hebrew has a tough time making that kind of precision in time. And I think that's one of the reasons why the Lord said, okay, we're moving into a stage here where to better and in more detail explain what salvation is about, we need a different language. And I think that's one of the reasons why the shift. This is by God's design. Does that answer it?

The reason I ask is because the Old Testament, of course, is basically Hebrew. I guess some in Arabic. Aramaic. The Old Testament is in Hebrew except for portions of Daniel and Ezra in Aramaic. Okay, let me get this up. Here's an instance, a sample passage I'd like for us to take a look at here.

Ephesians 2.8, and this is one that, boy, gets argued back and forth a lot. Let me just read it there just to get it in front of us.

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. Now the questions we run into What is the gift? Is grace the gift of God? Is faith the gift of God? Or is salvation the gift of God? How do you tell? What is that? Why does it matter? Here's how it matters.

Some people, particularly in our era, ended up taking this thing to mean that faith is a gift, and the consequence of that teaching is they have said, you can't just believe and be saved. If God has not given you the gift of faith, you can't believe, and therefore you can't be saved. So there's no sense in just trying to believe. You have to pray that the Lord will give you the gift of faith, and then you can believe, and then you can be saved. See that? So here are some of the questions. Instead of believing to be saved, must one ask for the gift of grace or of faith?

Does faith come by hearing and hearing by the Word of Christ, Romans 7.27, or does one have to wait and or pray for something else to be given first? Are the commandments to believe the wrong thing to ask someone to do? Or should they do something else in order that they might be saved? Will they be able to blame God because God didn't give them the gift of faith? You see the questions that start coming up there? Hmm, this is a head scratcher. Now, there are some helps for us in resolving this or arriving at the conclusion.

Here is what the inner linear, and this has got a little more detail to it than the standard inner linears. This is the English transliteration on top, this is the Greek, and then this is the Strong's number below it, and then by Below that is the English. And one of the things that you notice is some of the word order is shifted around, isn't it, from what we would read in English. But the meanings are there. So you can still do word studies, word by word. And this one here, by grace are you saved. Now, one thing I'm not showing you here is context. The subject of the larger context here is salvation, and that's important in this thing.

In other words, when I start using pronouns, just think of it in English. When we use a pronoun, why do we use a pronoun? We use a pronoun because the person or the thing that I'm talking about is understood from the rest of the context. If I say just flat out, he hit it. you're immediately asking the question, who's he and what's it? If I had been telling you Bill was driving his Chevrolet at 100 miles an hour and there was a brick wall and then I said, he hid it, then you know who he is and you know what it is.

So context tells you what the meanings of those pronouns are. Same thing here, we're looking at one verse. If we look at the larger context, the subject has been salvation. So that's one thing to keep in mind. It helps us answer the questions we've been looking at here. But if we look through here, one of the things, remember, we talked about was nouns. What are our nouns here in this verse?

Grace is one of them. Okay. Alright. And what else? Faith is the next one. You're right. Okay? God is another one. And how about gift? Okay? So those are our nouns that we've got in here. Each one of those has, you know, is it masculine, neuter, or feminine? Okay?

So each one of those has a gender. And what you find is this, this that, also has a gender. And so whatever that is, the gender has to match up with what that is talking about. You see that? That. Okay? In English we don't have that, do we? In English that doesn't match up, and so if I make this statement and read down, which one is he talking about?

Is he talking about grace? Is that the gift? Is he talking about faith? Is that the gift? Or salvation? Is that the gift? Then I start saying, for the complete word study New Testament, although it's helpful in many ways, it doesn't tell me that piece of information. Is this masculine? Is this feminine? Or is it neuter? Because of that, I can't figure that out. However, let's take, here's a for instance.

I can look up, for example, here's Doron, which is a gift or a present. That's the word that shows up there in this verse we just looked at. Notice this isn't giving me fantastic insight on the meaning of that word. I'm going to have to look somewhere else for that. But it does tell me, there's the verse, so this is it. It also tells me this is Nominative, that's the case, and we'll get into that later.

Don't worry about that. It's singular. That's a piece of information we didn't have. So it's a singular noun. It's neuter noun. So now I have a piece of information. Now I know it's neuter. Now, having that piece of information, now I put this together.

Here's Ephesians 2.8, For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. Now, we don't know what that is, right? But we know that that has to match up with the particular noun. We know that This is going to match up with this because that is the gift. Right? Right? That is not of yourself. It is the gift of God.

And incidentally, you notice I put this in italics? It is is not there in the Greek. So the Greek would actually say, and that not of yourselves, the gift of God. The it is is put in there for smoother English, in order for it to be understood in English. So here's what we're matching. It's not it, it's that. And those are both neutered.

If I look those up. Faith is feminine. So I know that that is not referring to faith. So faith is not a gift. See that? If that and the gift, if that is the pronoun that matches up with gift, faith, which could be put into a neuter form. I could put faith in a neuter form. But in this verse, it's not. So what that tells me is faith is not the gift that he's talking about. It doesn't match up. It doesn't line up. Yeah, Tom? So the obvious conclusion is we're talking about some kind of package to deal with.

It's not necessarily restricted to grace, it's not restricted to faith, but there's more to it than it just proves to be. Everything in salvation is God's gift, okay? You can't just say, well, okay, this is faith. Faith is the gift, okay? And nail that down. And then, unfortunately, you'll draw, as some people have, the wrong conclusion. that I can't believe because I have to have the gift of faith first. Instead, salvation is the gift. And as we look through the rest of Scripture, it makes sense. Here's why.

It's because Christ died on the cross. Did God do that or did I do that? God did that, right? That was God's doing. Christ was buried and resurrected. Did God do that or did I do that? God did it. Christ ascended and then was seated. And who did that? It was God's doing. Who put this whole salvation thing together? God did it.

This saved is a verb, right? Salvation could be made in any one of those genders to match up and align it. So it could be made either way. where you read the word salvation and you want to look to see which... That's right. Right. But see, here what it does is it used the verb form, saved. So you couldn't... That would be one thing if he said... Yeah, you could if he had had, you know, for by grace you have salvation, then you could look that up. But the fact is, he uses the verb, and then we don't know. Salvation is an unrestricted free agent.

It's the package that God put together. It is God's accomplishment, and He said, here, I did all this. Here it is. And it says, for by means of grace, that is, it is entirely by grace, there's nothing to earn. And that's where he says, in the next verse, it's not of works, okay? For by means of grace and the enabling factor that allows God to present that to us for us to receive it. The receiving means is faith. That's simply Opening the hand, this says, okay, I received the gift that you gave.

But salvation, as a whole package, is the gift. It's the death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and seeding of Christ, and our identification with Him. And who did the identifying? God did the identifying. So if you look at the whole package as God's accomplishment, and He gives that whole package to us as a matter of grace, And faith is our simple receiving of what has been given to us entirely by grace, the whole package of salvation, what he sums up here with a verb that is in a perfect past tense. Again, it's a completed past action, ongoing result. That's all God's doing and it's permanent and it's done. It's a done deal. God has accomplished it. Isn't that neat? It's all God's doing.

So when we look at this passage here, here is an instance of where now just being able to look up that one thing. What is this pronoun referring to where I've got several nouns? Which one is it? This allows you just looking up that one feature. Again, you're not a Greek scholar, but now I can be discerning. Now I can specify, because in English we lose the meaning of pronouns and where it's connected. So what happens is this, the translators into English don't put the connection into English, do they? If it's a simple sentence it may be clear, but in here where you've got several nouns, the ability to pick out which one it is has been lost in English. but it's maintained in the Greek.

Our ability to just simply look that up. Okay, this pronoun is masculine. This one's masculine. This one's feminine. This one's feminine. Now we can match those up. Now just being able to look up that one feature connects up information that in the English would still be scratching our heads. Now we have an understanding of what the Lord has said. Isn't that neat? We're going to be going through more detail and looking at example verses of what some of these things mean. Then what I'm going to want to have us proceed with is looking at specific passages and taking all the information, all the principles and information and tools we've been learning about as we go on here and getting more into saying, okay, what does this passage mean?

Because there are a great many passages as we look at them. Christians within the whole realm of Christendom have a lot of interpretations. If I see a passage and there's like six interpretations, that's not what God intended. God did not intend to convey six different things. God intended to give us the truth. If Scripture is for correction and reproof and training and righteousness so that you may be perfectly equipped, having six different interpretations is not being perfectly equipped.

It doesn't fly, does it? So it means being able to specify, to narrow in on, this is the truth. This is what God said. That's what we're aiming for. Let me look at one more thing here. These verses kind of zero in on what we're shooting for in the weeks ahead here.

2 Timothy 2.2, The things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. The things which you have heard from me. Those are specific things, right? Not a myriad of things. An analogy we used some weeks back. If I'm aiming to fly to Hawaii, and I'm a couple degrees off. Am I going to arrive in Hawaii?

Yeah. What's that? Blub Blub, yes. One of the things that came out recently, they released a couple movies on this Shackleton Antarctic adventure. They were aiming for a particular island. I'm amazed they used one of those sextants. Here's this little boat with the boat going like this and they're trying to narrow down where am I. missing by just a few degrees, they just would have gone off and gotten lost. But they're able to zero in.

This is where we're headed. And that's the exact same thing we're doing here. When we're looking at God's Word, it's not a matter of, I think it's somewhere like this. It's a matter of narrowing it down. What does it say? Getting specific. It allows us to know what the truth is, and it allows us to discern between truth and error. And when someone comes up with six different interpretations, we're not saying, well, gee, one of those must be nice, you know. Instead, we're going to say, no, that one's it. And therefore be able to specify that the others are off the mark. Here's one of the things.

You notice I didn't start off with Greek here. We went through other biblical principles, okay? So these Greek scholars that you're talking about, they may have very good knowledge of Greek, but it's not the only tool. And frequently what they will do, you can have people that are very knowledgeable in Greek, but come with other understandings and presuppositions, because Greek is only one of the tools that helps us understand the New Testament. I may know the Greek very well, but if I don't understand, for example, some historical and cultural things, that have come about. Or, as those of, say, the covenant and reform background do, they bring in presuppositions that they actually brought out of the Catholic Church, and they locked in on those, and those are things added to Scripture. It boils down to adding to Scripture and taking away from Scripture that causes the problem. And so you may have somebody that's very knowledgeable in Greek, but if they are in some other way skewed, their Greek knowledge is not going to be sufficient to guide them into the specific knowledge of what something is.

If you think about what are the things, it's tradition, it's experience, it's supplemental revelations, Whether that is subjective, like in a lot of the charismatic movement, you know, God told me it means this. Or people play on biblical Ouija board, open up the Bible, put their finger down and read it and say, that must be what I'm supposed to do, right? People do all kinds of things to either abuse or add to or take away from Scripture. And you're right, any one of those things, experience included, will distort the message of the Word of God. Boil that away and say, what did God say in His Word? And leave it at that. Sometimes what we know actually skews what is the truth. And that frequently, that's a good point because it actually distorts the meaning of God's Word. When people come to it and, oh, I think I know.

One of the passages we're going to be looking at here in the near future is John 3, where John 3.16 is.

And frankly, John 3.16 may not say exactly what you thought it said. So anyway, we'll be taking a look at that one. I'm just saying that to get you fired up, right? Yeah.

Frankly, John 3.16 may mean a little different than what you think it did. But that'd be one of the passages we'd take a look at. Yeah, Tom. You know, some of that, you know, I'm not so sure, but we'll get out of here momentarily. We need to call it quits here. Okay. Let's pray. Yeah. Yeah.

Lord, thank you for the tools that we have. Thank you that we needn't be wondering what your word says and lost in a sea of miscellaneous interpretations. But instead, Lord, when you had these things inspired to be written originally, there was a specific intent, a specific meaning. And we thank you for the tools that are made available to us, Lord. and the understandings that will allow us to zero in on precisely what was intended. And we thank you for those. And we just pray that you would continue to teach us as we examine your word. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.