How To Study The Bible

Okay, we'll get to it. Meanwhile, I guess one of the things, kind of looking at the perspective here, next week will be our last time here in this one-year-long class and you'll have to decide what you're going to do next, I suppose. Anyway, next week will be our last.

There'll be some things I'll want to kind of review because we've been sort of looking at little small bits and pieces and it's, I think, viable to kind of step back again and This is how to study the Bible. What does the whole process look like? We'll step into that. Meanwhile, if you have any questions, feel free to ask them now or ask me later. We'll try to address them next week when I have a chance to catch up on some. We'll address that, do a summary, and then we'll be done, having gone through this for a year now. We'll be completed. Also, we will have finished a year of these electives, so that will be something.

We will have finished 13 of them, 13 quarter classes. That's kind of a neat deal, huh? Any questions right now before we dive into this? Anything coming up? Okay. Feel free to ask them later, too. What I want to take a look at this morning is Let's take a look at outlines and context. Think about it.

You've got a Bible, and you open it up, and it's got these chapter breaks, right? And it's got these verses in it. And do you ever notice when you look at New Testament quotes of the Old Testament, it'll say something like, somewhere it says, or it is written, and things like that. And why does it say that? Why does it put it that way? Why doesn't it say Genesis chapter 3 verse 1? Yeah, they didn't have that.

That whole idea of referencing things by chapter and verse is in the context of all church history pretty recent. And it was around the year 1200 when they came up with chapter breaks. And it wasn't until about the middle 1500s, 1557 I believe it was, when they came up with verse breaks. And the guy who came up with the verse breaks was not necessarily any master theologian or anything like that. He was a printer. So he broke it just kind of where he thought it should be.

It was really quite a task. There's some 18,000 verses in the Bible. So I mean, that's a lot of work. Yeah, Tom? At that time, they still, even though they were getting familiar with every new culture, Yeah, some things have changed in terms of how they wrote things and their standards of notation and things of that sort. One of the things we'll be looking at this morning is when you look at those chapter and verse breaks, they are convenient, aren't they? In other words, instead of saying, turn somewhere where it says this, I can tell you, look at this book, this chapter, this verse. So it's very convenient and much more efficient, so that helps. The flip side of it is because that was done not necessarily with a great deal of intensive study about, here's a good place to break it, or that kind of thing, at times the chapter and verse break will interrupt the real flow of thought.

When Paul was writing, for example, he would start writing and he didn't say, here's a good place to put verse one, and then go on, and here's chapter two. He didn't do that, did he? He just wrote. The book itself, whatever he wrote, has a natural flow based on what he was writing. One of the things Nancy did for the Colossians class downstairs is to produce a copy of Colossians without any chapter and verse breaks. So then you get to read it just in more of the natural flow that the Apostle Paul had when he wrote it.

How many of you have Bibles that have some kind of titles in the middle of it, either in the middle of a chapter or at the top. Do you have that, Tom? A lot of people will have those, and what's interesting is that from one Bible version and publication to the next, they're not uniform, are they? One has one, one has another.

Are those a good thing or a bad thing? Let's look at it. How are they good? Well, sometimes they bring into the subject matter where you are. Okay, so you kind of get an idea what's the subject matter that I'm starting into, and that could be helpful. How else might it be good?

Tom? They may give key passages that you have to go through to the trouble of going to the con report. Right, so it's a matter of locating. what you're looking for. In other words, you say, I think it's about in here somewhere and you can find a title and there it is. So that helps. It's good for location. It's good for getting a sense of what's next. So that's the good part of it.

What might be a disadvantage of having those titles, especially the ones that kind of break up your chapters? What would be a disadvantage? It breaks it up. When those were originally written, those titles weren't there. So there is a natural flow that is somehow disrupted. So that's a disadvantage. Tom, what else? Okay, good point.

In other words, you may look at the title and say, well, it's about this. But in fact, since that little kind of subject title is not really inspired, it's possible, as Tom says, that they missed the point. Maybe it's really, you know, that's a kind of a minor emphasis and the real issue is something else. So there can be some disadvantages too. I wouldn't suggest you go and, you know, black those out of your Bible or clip them out or anything like that. But I think the point is just to kind of keep an objective stance about what those are. And possibly you may want to mentally block that out and just read through a passage and see what it is really saying.

Because frequently it will disrupt the flow of thought that the original author had in mind. What I want to hand out here is an outline of Ephesians. One page, two sides. This outline wasn't one I generated. the Biblical Studies Foundation, and I got it off their website. So in fact, if you were to do something like this, you may end up breaking it up a little differently.

Now, how is an outline possibly helpful? How is it possibly helpful? How could it help you study a book? Tom? We've taken six chapters and we've reduced it to two sides of a piece of paper and not that dense as it is. It can help you kind of back off a little bit. What's the natural flow of things? What else can an outline help you do? You're laughing, Bertha. I was just thinking that nobody knows nothing. You mean an outline helps nobody to know nothing?

Kind of in a similar advantage, these kind of headings that you find in your Bible. Here's where it is. An outline is you kind of glance down the outline and say, oh, that's what I want to zero in on right now. It'll help me quickly find what's there. Something else, an outline, one of the things we do is we do the Roman numeral thing where you've got one, two, three, four, and then you go under that with A, B, C. What's that? Titles and sub-tiles. Titles and sub-tiles and you kind of break down into the, okay, now here's the sub-sub heading. The first one, the Roman numerals, you look at that, there's two on the front page. There's two on the back, so you've got four. So basically what it says is if you were to back off from this thing, Paul's got four subjects in the big picture. There's four subjects that he's addressing.

What else would an outline help you do? Study more. It helps you study. In this case, I've handed you an outline. Suppose we put the shoe on the other foot and I said, okay, next week come with an outline for Ephesians. What would you do? Panic. There would be this tension in your neck and a cold sweat.

What it helps you do is to say what's important, what jumps out, what are the big things he's talking about. And so when you start looking at a book, you say, what are the big subjects he is hitting here? And so going through and trying to do an outline will help you do that. Or conversely, having an outline, even though you may have to say, well, then I am trusting what they are doing instead of looking at it myself, that does help you at least see what somebody else is seeing is important.

Let me take a for instance about how it is helpful. Suppose I came to you and I said, you know, here's the keys to a car. It's yours. Have at it. That's great if you know what a car is. Suppose you come to somebody that just came out of the jungle and you give them the keys to the car and you say, there you go, there's a car.

What are they going to do? They're not going to have the foggiest idea. See, part of the problem is When you first come to it, you don't know what's important. So what an outline is going to help you do is to look at something and say, this is the big picture. This is what's really important. This is what counts. One of the reasons why that's valuable is that frequently people will look at little tiny passages in the Bible and grab something out of the middle of it and have no idea what the big picture is. Does that fit at all?

How many of you have walked into a situation that you've kind of walked into out of context, and it's either seemed funny or strange, or, boy, that was weird, or, you know? Same kind of thing. If we step into a Bible passage or a Bible verse completely out of context, then we can end up getting a very strange understanding of what it's saying. You ever see people grab verses just kind of at random and string them together? Judas went out and hung himself, go thou and do likewise? If you're not careful you can read some passage and end up with a conclusion. The most important thing in my life is to go out and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. You could read the book of Haggai and come away with, well I better get this thing done. You get the point? In other words, the idea there is that this helps us get the big picture. It helps us see what's important.

And then it breaks down to what the details are. Now, what I'd like for us to do this morning is we've got this outline of Ephesians. And here's an example of where verses and chapter breaks don't seem to fit at all with what the message for that text is. And this is, let me get it up here, there we go. See that okay? Alright, here's Ephesians 5. I'm going to take a particular text because it's one that gets really chopped up. And that's my reason for picking this sample. Here's Ephesians 5, 21 through 6, 9.

By chapter and verse break, you wouldn't know that that's all about the same subject. So verse 21, it says, and be subject to one another in the fear of Christ. Now, why did I start there, right in the middle of what looks like the middle of the sentence? 21 indicates a new verse, and notice it starts with a lowercase and.

Now one thing that you'll note is that the Apostle Paul, when he writes, frequently strings things together. One of the points we've made previously is Ephesians chapter 1, the 3rd verse through the 14th verse in the Greek is all one sentence. Yeah, German just kind of bunches everything. And the Apostle Paul frequently writes that way, not only with his sentences, lots of run-on type sentences, but also lots of compound words. He will put prefixes and suffixes together until there are sometimes three or four ideas all bunched into one word.

Seated together with Christ, Ephesians 2.6. Seated together with is all one word. So here's an instance where Paul has given them an idea that really started a few verses earlier.

And what he has here as an and is really a separate idea that he's just turning a corner with. And he is starting a heading that goes on into 6.9. Here's what I'm talking about. and be subject to one another in the fear of Christ. He's turning a corner because prior to that he wasn't talking about being subject to one another. He was talking about relationships within the church body, but he wasn't talking about being subject to one another. Here, he all of a sudden starts talking about being subject to one another, and from that one verse I have heard it taught, therefore husbands ought to be subject to their wives. Right? Because it says be subject to one another. Right? Tom? Right. This is not a discontinuous idea, but it's kind of his final point. But he doesn't touch on it briefly, he's actually just introducing a series of subjects.

Let's take a look at this, and be subject to one another in the fear of Christ, If I take that verse by itself and have no other context, I might conclude that everybody in the church body is supposed to be subject to everybody else. Could you conclude that? In isolation, does that appear to be a reasonable conclusion? Yeah. It might appear to be.

So what are we going to do? We're going to look at the context. We're going to read the rest of what he's saying. And as Tom brought up, even looking beforehand, what's he talking about? Previously. Be subject to one another in the fear of Christ. And then notice what happens.

It has a verse break and then most of your Bibles, and check me on this, mine had marriage like Christ in the church as a break in their English Bible. Do most of yours have something like that? Yours does, Winnie? Does anybody else have anything different? No break there? Does it talk about marriage? Okay, and where does it break? Where does that start? Really? Okay. See, so here's an example of where the editors of the Bible decide where they insert the title there.

A great many of them that I've run across put the break here between 21 and 22. Now, I think you've got these neat little interlinears. Grab one if you've got it in front of you here. And this little blue book. Here, let me pass it around here. Yeah, she's got one. Everybody have a copy of these? You got one? There we go. There's another. These interlinears.

Here's one of the things that is important to take a look at What was originally written versus how does our Bible break it up? Ephesians 5 verses 21 and 22 What do you notice when you look at the inner linear on that? What do you see? Okay, that's one thing, is our break there, like wives be subject to your own husbands, in the Greek is not the start of a new sentence.

See that? Yes, there's a comma there. So that's one important point. What else do you notice? Where are you seeing the comma? Oh, I see. You're talking about the end of 22? Well, between 20 and 21 is the time I have to bother. Okay. Okay. Now, what else do you notice about the words there in 20, 21, and 22? Okay, let me get real explicit. Verse 22, does it say, be subject? Here is the flow and my point in bringing this up.

In the Greek, it doesn't say separately, wives be subject to your own husbands as to the Lord. Now before you hang me as a heretic, hear me out here. And be subject to one another in the fear of Christ, wives to your own husbands as to the Lord. That's the way the Greek comes.

The be subject is inserted there in most of our English Bibles in order to make a clean sentence out of verse 23. But the truth is in the Greek it's just simply a follow-on to the initial statement in verse 21. And be subject to one another in the fear of Christ, wives to your own husbands. He starts into that subject of husbands and wives with a smooth flow basing it on what he said in what we call verse 21. See that?

Now, here's a question. So what is wrong with the person who says verse 21 just says everybody in the church body is supposed to be subject to everybody else? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? What's wrong with it? If I take verse 21, it looks right.

That's right. Now, let's take a little further look. Here's this subject. You've got the start here of verse 22. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. Now, so what is that telling us? That there is an order here. It isn't just mayhem where everybody is subject to everybody. That there is an order here. So his rationale in explaining what that means right off starts into, this is the order that I have in mind.

Sure, and he talks about what it means to be the head, which is actually a sacrificial position. So it's not hound the head honcho and you're under my heel. But in fact, he is setting in place who's in charge here. Who is the head? And he lays that out first off. And then qualifies that. What does headship mean? So he doesn't just leave it at that. He does qualify it.

What I want us to take a look at though, here's this section on marriage. And he goes on into verse 33 and we'll backtrack there a little bit. Here's chapter 6 and here's another instance where here's a chapter break and in a lot of Bibles a title break. But you know what? He's continuing on with the same subject, isn't he? This is a subject to kind of issue.

So what's happened is in verse 21 he says be subject to one another and then from then on up until 6, 9 he's telling you specifically Here are the instances where that needs to take place. See that? So now here they talk about children obey your parents and Lord for this is right. Now, again I go back to I've actually heard it taught that you know husbands are supposed to be subject to their wives from verse 21. Let's test that. Are parents supposed to be subject to their kids? Okay. You start testing this and you say, whoa, wait a minute.

So what he has done in verse 21 is to lead off with a subject and now he's going to explain the specifics. And he goes from verse 22 to verse 33 of chapter 5 explaining here's how that works in the husband-wife relationship. And now in chapter 6, and here again is where the chapter break has really broken up a thought. So use the chapters and verses for convenience, but just remember the chapter break may disrupt the flow and you'll miss the point that he's trying to make.

He's still explaining what the be subject to one another means. You see that? Now, so he goes here, children obey your parents and the Lord for this is right. Honor your father and mother which is the first commandment with a promise so that it may be well with you and that you may live long in the earth. Then he talks about fathers do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. So then in verses one through three of chapter six, he has talked about what does this submitting look like with the children and the parents and explicitly a command for the fathers. When you carry out this headship father, okay, here's what it needs to look like. So he doesn't just throw at them, you be the boss of this one, you be the boss of that.

He explains, what does that look like? What does that look like? So that it doesn't get lost on us. But he's not done, is he? And here's one, how many of you have verse 5, another break? Does anybody have that? Between four and five, does anybody have a break in their Bible? You have one? What does it say there? Okay, alright. And what happens there, he's shifting again to another subject under this submitting issue. Okay? He's shifting to another subject under submitting. In this case, let me move it down where I think it's a little bit more bright and visible. If it'll let me.

This subject here, he's shifting to the master-slave relationship, and he goes through five through nine on that subject. Between those who were owned as slaves and those who were hired as slaves, the Roman Empire, at the time this was written, had roughly half the population in a slave position. That's amazing. This was not a minor issue.

And so what's Paul doing is he is continuing on with this submit to one another subject. And he's given the husband-wife relationship, he's given the parent-child relationship, and now he's shifting on to the third subject, which is the master-slave relationship. So he's continuing on with this subject, and that's where, again, I think looking at an outline helps, because then you see what's the big picture?

Again, use the chapters and verses for convenience and location, but don't let those break up the flow in a way that actually confounds your understanding of Scripture. You can imagine, like I said, I've actually heard it taught where in verse 521, everybody is subject to everybody, and that's actually taught. What kind of confusion does that create in the Church? When in fact, when I look at the big picture, that is exactly the opposite of what he's talking about.

He's setting an order. Here's what I mean specifically by that. That's what he's laying out and he explains it in each case. He lays it out. The proper thing to do is for me to use those headings that are conveniently in there as we talked about. Use it for the advantage that it is. Here's about where the subject is.

But when we're studying, When we're studying, for a moment, set that aside. Take the heading and put it aside. Take the verse and put it aside. Take the chapter and put it aside once we've found it. That's what it's really good for, isn't it? Finding where things are. But when we're studying, set those aside for a minute and look at, what's he saying here? What's the flow? What's the content? Because when we're looking at studying, all those different breaks suddenly can become a disadvantage if we don't learn to look past them. This is case in point here.

Make sense? Yes. Well, I think even in an inner linear, if I'm understanding you correctly, after verse, in chapter 5 verse 20, giving thanks to God the Father, even the Father, comma, being subject to one another in the fear of Christ, period. It seems like the comma should come after verse 21, being subject to one another in the fear of Christ, comma, the wives to their own husbands.

Even the punctuation can be confused. Yes. The truth is that in the original Greek they didn't have a lot of this punctuation that's been inserted. We have these in the pews and some folks, especially those who come here to visit for the first time, are a little puzzled. Why do we have this? Even if you're not a Greek scholar, just being able to read that is valuable because then it gives you a sense of what's really there.

In this case, this B subject is put there for the sake of making a smooth English sentence, but it can easily isolate the thought that he's actually trying to make. He's continuing on with this initial statement and starting right into spelling out what this means. Something else to notice as we dig into this, he doesn't just say, be a subject to one another, wives to the husbands, children to the parents, slaves to the masters, and then move on. Notice he doesn't do that. Why? Why doesn't he just say that and move on? Because he puts a lot of extra verses in there, a lot of extra material. Why the extra material? Why does it matter? It's not very loving. Ah, okay.

He has used a word that was translated to Mith, it's called Hupotasso, and it's a word that was used in the military. And the people who are under an officer would hupotasso to that officer. They would submit to, and it means to under attach. They would submit to the officer.

So he uses that word, but in every case he qualifies it and describes what it is. And here in this passage, it's real interesting. He starts off with the subject of being subject to one another. Verse 22, wise be subject to your own husbands as to the Lord. Except for the last verse in there, the bulk of this passage in chapter 5 from 23 to 33 is addressed to the husbands.

How come? Because one, they are the head. That's right. They are the head. Somebody must make the decision. When he doesn't just throw at them, be subject, and then move on, he clearly lays out, here are the relationships where that being in subject is important, and here is how that has to take place. It's very critical how it takes place.

And what he does is he lays out several characteristics of Christ's headship as the example for the husband. So he says, okay husbands, yes, your wife is to be subject to you, but But, and he lays out, your headship is to be sacrificial. Your headship is to be one of giving. Your headship is to be one of actually cleansing.

So rather than have them just adopt a military mode, he isn't setting up a Christian army here. Instead of pulling into a military mode, he's spelling out real clearly here's what headship looks like, and in that context, then submission makes sense. This is not an officer-private kind of relationship he's setting up here. Yeah? Which one? No, it's hupotasso, and it means to under-attach. of those under military command. They were to hupotaso with respect to their officers. They were under-attached.

So there is that aspect to it, but he qualifies it in every one of those three relationships that we see here. He qualifies what that looks like. He says, you husbands, okay, here's what headship looks like. You're going to sacrifice yourself. He goes to the father And he says, OK, I've just told the kids to obey their parents. Father, don't you exasperate your kids. He goes to the master-slave relationship and he tells the slaves, don't be just seeing what you can get away with with this master. But he tells the master, don't go abusing your slave either.

So in each case, he doesn't just lay it on, OK, here's this thing you submit, now let's move on to the next subject. He's spelling out what that looks like. laying it out in each case. Yeah, Donna? It's like a spiritual context, isn't it? It's also a spiritual context rather than being the world. Yes, yeah. Let's think of it.

How do these things get abused in the world? How do they get abused, this idea of submitting? How does the world abuse that idea? Tom? It's not in terms of an absolute power over, it's more like being charged with being Yeah. Pretty simplistic. Yeah, Donna? Ah, okay. Yeah, it's looked at as weakness. And what else? Yes, being a doormat.

Nancy was telling me about an instance where a husband and wife relationship that, you know, somebody, you know, way off in some other state that she had heard about, where the husband gave the wife $50 a month, her personal spending money, if he was happy with what she did. So he ended up setting almost a parent-child relationship with her instead of being a partner. Something else to take note of here, and I think this is really important. The cultural context that Paul is addressing here is one where they frankly would not naturally fall into the patterns that he's describing. Here's what I mean. The example he is giving between husband and wife is one of the head and the other submits.

In the Greek culture, in Ephesus, In the Greek culture, the wife was to have the kids and just kind of take care of the home. The husband had no obligation for faithfulness to his wife. It was expected that he wouldn't be. He may even have another woman or two or three within the home with which he was having sexual relations. Further, a husband was free to have all kinds of external just be so externally involved, for him to be involved personally with and care about his wife was the exception.

And for the father to really care for and love the kids in order to really spend time with them and care for them was also the exception. It was legal according to Roman law Until the father, and it was not the mother's decision, it was the father's. Until the father legally accepted those children, it was permitted to take those children out into the mountains or into the woods and just let them die of exposure.

That was legally permitted. Doesn't matter if they're 10, whatever. They could take a little infant out if they didn't want them and just leave them out in the woods. And that was perfectly legal. It was not considered murder, child neglect, or anything else.

So here's this instance where the father's not only told, you know, don't take your kid out and let them die of exposure, don't even exasperate them. Master-slave relationship. The slave basically had no rights if it was a purchased slave, not a hired slave, but a purchased slave. And the master could do anything they want. And yet here's the situation where Paul's saying, don't abuse them.

Every one of the descriptions that Paul gives as a caveat here, as a further explanation, is contrary to what was at least allowable, if not normal, in the culture. Christianity stood in stark contrast to what was the norm in the culture. It stood out as, boy, that's different. In the beginning, let me jump up a little bit, beginning of chapter 5, it says, the followers, or actually the word is mimitis, where we get our word mimic, the imitators of God, as it says in a lot of your translations, as dear children. That word dear is agapitas, sound like agape, a word for love. Just think about this in the Greek culture.

If it was permissible for the father to decide, hey, you're just going to be left out in the woods to die of exposure, and that was just fine. If the father had no particular obligation to even spend any time with his kids. For a kid to be not only accepted legally, but here it says, that word agapitas means dearly loved.

Dearly loved. That was a very special thing. So in the culture, reading that, they would just be awestruck. Oh, you mean a father that really, really loves me? A father that cares? Oh yes, I'll gladly follow that. I'll gladly imitate that. See that? So what he's saying here is, he's using the word, okay, go ahead and submit.

He uses that word, you know, be subject to one another. But the explanations that he gives in here are just shocking. startling to them. They've almost never heard of such a thing. It's so rare. It's amazing in the context of the culture to see that.

So, coming back to this thing here, when we look at a passage we need to back off once we've found it. Finding the chapters and versions are sure helpful. Once we've found it, we need to back off, set those little titles aside, set the chapters aside, set the verses aside. This is an instance where the titles, the verses, and the chapters break up a subject that in fact he explains very thoroughly and he's just putting a heading onto this being subject and giving three examples and giving detailed explanations as to what that looks like. And notice in each case there is a caution, in some cases with the husband, lots of detail. a caution, a preventative teaching, if you will, to keep that headship from turning into an abuse.

So that submitting in that context is a reasonable thing to do. It's a good thing. And not, as Helmut pointed out, a tendency for there to be sort of this doormat type mentality. That's not what God has in mind. But looking at the context and looking at the smooth flow of the scriptural text, that'll give us the full sense of what it's talking about. So we can read through a passage and see what's it talking about and not just grab for something.

You've all heard, you know, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. And people use it for all sorts of things. The context was, Paul had just said, I've learned to do with and I've learned to do without. Then he says, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. It has to do with dealing with plenty of provision and lack of provision. Then I can do all things.

Not some sort of verse that says, I can lift 2,000 pounds. Lord, we do give you thanks. Thank you for your word. In fact, you have laid out such marvelous truths for us. that explain not only our position with You, but how that gets spelled out in everyday life. And we just give You thanks, we give You praise, and we just look to You to guide and lead us in the truths of Your Word. In Jesus' name, Amen.