How to Study the Bible. How are we doing this?
Bradley W. Maston · Oct 14, 2007
How to Study Bible (2007), No. 02
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926041476553

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

Last week, oh, and then if you don't have a handout, there's handouts back there, as well as if you weren't here last week, Vern and Nancy also set up extra binders so you can get fully equipped right here and now. As exciting as that is. And actually, we'll probably start off, I just, I got to tell you, I'm so excited about this. I'm so excited about this class that it was here. I was, I very much wanted to be involved with it.

I just, this is the most important topic outside of just studying the Bible that I can imagine. I lead a Bible study on Thursday nights, and it's almost like a joke. I've got a Calvinist, charismatic, myself, and a fellow who was always passively involved with his faith, and passively involved with Bible reading.

So we're all sitting around, and we would fight about what the Bible meant. We'll fight about theology. We'll fight about this. We'll fight about that. Finally, we said, okay, that's enough. We sat down with this type of material, sat down and all agreed about our hermeneutics. And all said, okay, is this true?

Is this the way God communicates? Can we know it? Is God's message knowable? And if we follow these processes, these steps, Do you think we can come and see eye to eye about these passages, about the things that we disagree about? And we all kind of, well, they skeptically accepted it from me and we've looked at it ever since then. We still kind of deal with things and still have to hash things out, but it's amazing that once you just look at this, And once you just have established the reasonable way to look at it and let go of some of our presuppositions and some of the silly things that get pounded into us either by the culture or by the church or by some other source, it all falls in line to line. After we've talked about this material, every single week we sit around and talk about why are there different denominations? Why are there separations in the church?

This is so simple if you just Look at it. I mean, it's definitely deep and complex and powerful and it doesn't come without, it doesn't yield itself without a little work. But at the same time, it's not like it's this huge, complicated, no one can tell, you know, you think it means this, I think it means this, and what are we all feeling about it? No, it's really not that hard. So that's why I'm so passionate. I'm sure you probably all covered a bit of that or all of that last week. Anyway, let's review this chart here on the first page real quick. So, I love this, this is such a cool one.

God's message through Scripture and the Holy Spirit, God inspired it. I don't know, I didn't actually get to listen to the class last week. What does inspired mean, that God inspired it? Does anyone have an idea? Breathe, yeah. And in fact, the Greek word, I mean, inspire is kind of to breathe in.

But in 2 Timothy 3.16, it says God expired it. He breathed it out. Yeah, it's His very breath. So, it's God's very breath. So, the Holy Spirit inspired it. What does it mean that the Holy Spirit preserved it? Still here? And it really is miraculous. As you look through the history of the Bible, the way that the Holy Spirit has preserved it through persecutions, through countless times of, hey, find all those books and burn them, and kill the people who have them.

If you find out how many manuscripts we have copied of this book, and how accurate it is in this book, it's just amazing. It's only a miracle of the Holy Spirit, that's the only explanation. We really only have a couple good manuscripts of the Odyssey, just only a few of the Iliad and things like that, and most of them are 5th-6th century. And that's hundreds and hundreds of years after it was actually written. We are so much closer to the original text, the original autographs, with the Scriptures.

It is a miracle of the Holy Spirit that it's been preserved that way. Okay, and then guided in the recognition of it as Scripture. What does that insinuate to us? Who is guided, do you think? We are, absolutely. If we look back at our church history course, which is available on the internet, there are a bunch of church councils. You can look back and find the Meritorian Canon.

People were recognizing these writings, especially the New Testament writings, as scripture almost immediately after they were written, or actually immediately as they were received. We have these canons of things that were called Scripture, and there were also other Christian writings that were not called Scripture. There's the Didache or some other New Testament writing, 1 and 2 Clement for example. They didn't think of these things as Scripture, they thought of them as good Christian writing.

Maybe it's like the Max Lucado of that day or something like that, but really they knew by the Holy Spirit that what we have now in this book was Scripture. And there were some things that were like, oh, is that Scripture? Let's pray about this. Let's talk about this.

But it's nowhere near the drama that that you see portrayed in maybe the Da Vinci Code or something like that, it was so much more unanimous than that. And as you look through the ancient lists of what should be in the canon and what shouldn't, they're fairly unanimous. Just a little blip here or there about maybe Hebrews, and there's different reasons for that. So it's not as if all those Gnostic Gospels should be in here. That's not a fair assessment or assumption based on the actual historical evidence, so you can just throw your Dan Brown book right out the window. It really won't hurt my feelings. That's a great question.

Scripture itself just means writing. When we see the word Scripture in Scripture, it's the Greek word graphe, which just means writing, a writing. So, in our case, Holy Scripture, or God-breathed Scripture, differs itself from all other human writing, right?

This is the only book that is living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword. This is the only book that can penetrate to our hearts between soul and spirit. This is the only book that can be called a living book. There's other works that are inspiring.

You can go to the Christian bookstore and read tons of things that'll bring a tear to your eye, that'll bring a feeling of victory, emotion, positive feelings. Whatever it is, you can go anywhere and read inspiring writing. And you can even go out and read inspired writings, like read the classics. Read Dickens. I love Dickens.

When you start, when you really get into the picture that he's painting, you can't put it down. It's inspired in that way. He was inspired as he was writing. He was incredibly talented and meticulous and wrote beautifully, but it is nothing compared to this. Because this is absolutely 100% origin from God. It's unique, completely unique.

So that's what I think here at Holly Hills we mean when we say scripture. specifically this. We could talk about the scriptures of the Muslims or the scriptures of the Mormons, but we don't mean that they're on par with this in any way, right? Can I answer your question, Marilyn? Okay, sweet. All right, so we have scripture in Hebrew in the Old Testament and Greek in the New Testament.

That conveys that God's message precisely as he intended for us to read. Just a brief exercise. Who invented language? Language evolved from us starting out with grunts and squeaks and hand motions and then eventually evolved into people talking to each other, right? Raise your hand if you believe in me. Okay, good. I'm pleased.

God invented language, right? God gave Adam language to communicate with him. God invented it. Then you go all the way up to Babel, God broke language, for lack of a better term, into a million pieces. and gave everybody else a language that he'd already figured out. Have they changed? Have they morphed, if you will? I mean, just as we see in our generation, words kind of totally lose their meaning. Cool, bad means good. I mean, it's just madness. So, for sure, those things are constantly happening. But at the same time, God is the inventor of language. Language is God's tool to communicate to mankind. Now, here's the question. If God makes a tool, language, to communicate to man's kind a message, can he do it? Is he capable of that?

Because I've got to tell you, I come from a more mystical Christian background, and essentially you end every theological argument with, well, if we can ever really know, it's all so unclear, you know, just keep it fuzzy and we'll all be friends. No! Absolutely not! That's an insult to God! It's an insult to what God has done and what God can do and what God continues to do with this book. It is clear. God can communicate something to us.

And yeah, there are points where we're not going to get it. There are points where we're going to have to just say, well, you know, the evidence isn't sufficient yet. It will be, though. Right? Someday, we're all going to see Him face-to-face, and there's going to be no more, well, I think you're wrong about that whole predestination issue. It's going to be gone.

And we're looking forward to that time, and God wants to conform us to that more and more as we get there. So, this is, like I say, this is powerful and exciting stuff to me. Objective observations regarding the written text, including language, history, and culture. This gets into our subject matter for today, which we're slowly, slowly taking time away from. It's a good thing there's only nine pages. So we're going to actually address this again, but essentially we're going to move from observation, which includes language, history, and culture, to interpretation that is based on a complete and objective set of observations regarding the written text, and then from that we're going to move into application, which is how the word applies to our hearts, our lives, our worldviews, our churches, and so forth. That's the way that we're moving. That's our system. That's our template. That's where we're going to start. That's how we're going to look at everything in scripture, is through that system.

And don't think that systems are cold. I mean, please don't think that systems are cold. Everybody has a system. You might not know your system, or you might not know someone else's system, or the system may be erratic, but there's always a system of thought. It's always going to be there. So don't think that just because the system's written down that all of a sudden our Bible reading is cold and unemotional. No, it's not it at all. It's absolutely not it.

But at the same time, what we're doing here is saying these are the principles we've derived from Scripture and from the way we understand language, and we're going to apply that to understanding this book so that it comes out consistent and literal. Moving on to our handout for today. Wow, pretty specific instructions. Good thing we did it. Oh wait, we're supposed to look at overview sheets two. Neat. Alright, so overview sheet two.

As we move through, what is the role of the Holy Spirit in your Bible reading? Teacher! How so? How does the Holy Spirit teach? Has anybody heard of this word, illumination? What does it mean to illuminate? Make clear. Make clear! Illuminate literally means bring light, right? The Holy Spirit is talked about in Scripture as illuminating our hearts as we read. So, can you come to this book without the Holy Spirit and come to any real understanding of it? No. Because the fleshly man cannot understand what's spiritually divine, what's spiritually given.

Period. So, when we go to this book, how much will it profit us to just go, whatever, and I'm going to read it, and then I'm going to make an application out of my flesh, and then just go? Every time we come to this book, You need to come humbly, prayerfully, saying, Holy Spirit, please enlighten me, enlighten my heart.

You give me the light to see this. This is an amazing concept, an amazing spiritual, I'm just going to use the word miracle because I can't think of a better one, that happens every time that you sit down and honestly read this word. Here you've got this book that God has given, breathed through men in history. And he's preserved it, as we talked about, miraculously through time. The Holy Spirit has brought this book to you, to the point where you can go to the supermarket and pick up a copy for less than five bucks. He's brought this book to you. And at the same time, the Holy Spirit's in your heart, illuminating you and giving you the ability and the resource to go to it and understand it. The Holy Spirit's coming at this thing from both sides, and it is miraculous. You're taking part, whenever you read the Bible, in one of the great miracles of history.

It's really fantastic, and to think that we as believers go, I don't really have time for that, is just a little sad. That this is the tool that God chose to conform us to His Son's image. And we get too busy. But the Holy Spirit's on all sides of this, and we need to humbly ask the Holy Spirit. I believe. We need to humbly be requesting that the Holy Spirit be illumining us. Say, Lord, I don't know it all. My theology's not correct, but guess what? Yours is. And I want you to teach me. I don't want to tell you what this says. I want you to tell me what this says.

2 Corinthians 3.18 says, But we all with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image of glory from glory to glory, just as from the Lord with the Spirit. Yeah. And then also realizing that God's word is useful for individual growth.

Obviously, 1 Peter 2.2 talks about it as milk.

Baby doesn't get too far without milk, whether it comes from mom or from the bottle. The baby needs milk. And a baby that doesn't need milk falls under what category of humanity? Oh, I know it's really embarrassing to talk about dead babies. Dead, right? A baby that doesn't need milk is dead.

And this is it. I want to talk about growth. You want to go to a spiritual growth seminar? You want to go to read your spiritual formation handbook? No, this is it. This is your milk. This is your meat. This is the chisel that will pound away at you, constantly making the sculpture. This is the testing pot, where God will test to see with a view of approval, to approval your life. This is it. This book. This book is that goal.

But it's not just individual. In fact, it's also the whole churchwide. The church body as a whole also benefits from that. He gave some to be apostles, some to be prophets, some to be evangelists, some as pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of service to the building up of the body of Christ until we attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God to a mature man, to measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ. So, once again, this book is the The milk and the meat for us individually, it's also the milk and the meat for us corporately.

A lot of my friends, actually that same group of friends, the Charismatic, the Calvinist, myself, and the fellow who's just now getting really involved, they always ask me, hey, so when do you leave a church then? My church believes in these five things, and we just talked about how that's not in here. When do I leave this church? I think you leave this church when they stop moving towards attaining the unity of faith.

Here at Holly Hills, I can tell you the elders are working towards us. Hopefully we're all working towards the unity of the faith. One spirit, one baptism, one teaching. Moving on to the clear understanding of the word. If you think that you've found something that's wildly wrong, biblically speaking, with Holly Hills, bring it up.

This is one place in the world that I know, and I'm sure there are many, many others, but where I know, where we find out, and I've seen it happen, the elders find out that we're doing something unbiblical, it changes. It actually changes. It's not, well, this is the way we've already done it, so we'll just set the Bible aside. No. So that's when I'd say you leave a church, not because you found out something's wildly unbiblical about it, but because you found out that they're not willing to change and become biblical. So in any event, because otherwise your church is not going to grow, not grow in numbers, but will not grow spiritually, will not grow to maturity, and it'll be a waste of everyone's time, truthfully. Okay, and we're going to go into observation, interpretation, application. The added piece on here is appropriation. What does appropriation mean?

Apply. So you've got application, which can be a little bit, I can write it down in my journal, write it down on a notebook, paper, whatever, and then close that notebook and promptly forget it all. But appropriation is the step of actually going out and doing it. Actually living out your application. So often, I think, in hermeneutics textbooks, they leave that appropriation as a sort of implied. Well, of course, you've made your application. you're going to apply it.

But I think, at least in my life, I can't say that that's a safe assumption. I can't obviously speak for you. All right, so, now that we've reviewed everything, and thank you for staying awake, we've got exactly half the class left to finish this. So, fasten your pew belts.

All right, so, in order to arrive at the meaning that God intended, we need to start with the same set of consistent, biblically-based approach to the Bible. We're going to aim towards saying the same thing, which is the unity of the faith, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. If you can't stack hands on these three things, please raise your hand and let's talk about it, because this is important. We're going to take the view that God, through the Holy Spirit, is the author of the whole Bible. so that the Bible has a message consistent with God's revealed, eternal, and infinite character.

For the sake of the tape, the references there were 2 Timothy 3.16.17, 2 Peter 1.20.21, and John 17.17.

And finally, we're going to approach the Bible by interpreting it literally, according to the aspects of language, history, and culture fitting to the authors and to the intended readers. All right, so what's the definition for the word literally, just very briefly? What's the opposite of literally or literal? Figuratively.

You notice we kind of hear this word literally a lot. I was in traffic literally 24 hours, literally three hours. Did you think I was going to think that you were figuratively in traffic for three hours? What is that? So, we definitely hear the word a lot, and I don't think it's a misapplication, but it's just a stupid way to use it. But anyway, literal is the opposite of figurative. And you're going to meet a lot of people.

I mean, it didn't start as the ink was drying on Revelation. People started to figuratively interpret this. It was already going on with the Old Testament, when the New Testament was written. So, we are going to assume that God, being God, is smart enough to say what He means. I know it's kind of a big jump, but we're going to assume that God is smart enough to say what he means.

When you read the newspaper in the morning, you don't like, you don't read, okay, so-and-so was in a fire. There was a fire at 33rd street and you don't think, I wonder if it was a spiritual fire. I wonder if the Spirit of God... No! It was a fire! The building burned down, right? You read it literally. That's just the way it works.

Well, why would we take different rules with this? Why would we change everything with this? And we'll talk more about what literal interpretation means, I should say, in this class over the next few weeks. Well, Brad, one other thing you have to take into consideration there.

Maybe you think of the Bible as symbolic. Absolutely. I figured it. have a symbol. We need to learn what the symbol is. What the Bible is teaching us through that symbol. Revelation is much more symbolic. And where can we find the meaning to the symbols? In the Bible.

That's right. It's amazing. It's amazing. Everyone looks at Revelation like it's this huge mystery. I really would encourage you. I believe we have CDs in the lobby. and it should be online as well. There's a ton of resources. Just for Vern's study on Revelation, it was about a two-year study.

And all these symbols and all these things, and you can read it parallel with maybe a Reformed commentary, a commentary that chooses to take all it figuratively as opposed to just as symbols, that are revealed in Scripture, and you'll be amazed. You'll just be blown away, or I was blown away. to find out that it's not airy and uncertain and confusing.

But in fact, you know, revelation is, oh, and I'm going to forget the figure, a great percentage of revelation, the greatest percentage, greater percentage of revelation is from the Old Testament. So one of the reasons why we've misinterpreted revelation throughout the ages is because we don't have the Old Testament.

Actually, the millennium is in the Old Testament. Revelation 20 is the only one in the New Testament that has much to do with Millennium. All in the Old Testament. It shows the continuity of the whole Bible. Exactly. So without that literal interpretation, you essentially cut off the New from the Old Testament. Cut off the continuity of the Bible.

It's amazing. Alright, in the name of time, we'll hurry forward. Yeah, please forgive me. I'm speaking mostly in generalities at this point because I know what the curriculum is over the next weeks and you're gonna hash this out because we haven't talked about poetic language, you know. What is it?

David would say in Psalms, Lebanon skips like a calf. How awkward. to have a whole land skipping across. Where does it skip to? Where does it skip from? It's obviously not talking about literally skipping like a calf. We're not talking about wooden-headed literalism. We're talking about taking things and saying, well, that was a symbol. That was using poetic language. Lebanon skips like a calf. Well, a calf skips when it's happy and healthy. Therefore, in the millennial kingdom, we could presume what he's talking about is that the earth will be so happy and healthy that you'll think if it were a calf, it would skip. So it's not irresponsibly ignoring poetic language or ignoring the other pieces of literal understanding that we know that we're talking about.

Because once again, when the Bible uses a symbol, it's talking about a literal thing. What's the literal thing? When the Bible uses figurative language, which it uses quite a bit of, when the Bible uses a euphemism, a common one you see is, going to sleep. When you read in the New Testament, a believer goes to sleep, what does it mean?

He died. Now there's a great reason for that euphemism. Because just like sleep is not permanent, so the believer's physical death is not permanent. You're going to wake up. And yet at the same time, if you didn't take that into consideration, you'd think that the believers were just really sleepy or that comatose was a big problem in the early church. But it wasn't. It's a euphemism for death. So there you go.

So as we observe what's in the Bible and the background of its authors, we should look at the aspects of language, history, and culture. If you want to do your three fingers, language, history, and culture, okay? These are three things. Language, if you get a good commentary, you'll see a lot of language. History, see a little bit more so in culture. Oftentimes, and even some of the best commentaries gets missed entirely. But does culture have an impact on understanding of A social situation? Absolutely. So we'll definitely talk about that.

But let's start with language. What are the elements of language? Universal to any language? The grammar. Grammar. What does grammar tell us? I would use bad grammar while talking about grammar. What does grammar tell us? I'm so sorry. Okay. So, grammar, what does grammar do for us though? What is grammar?

Grammar tells us how the words kind of function together, right? If it's a subject, if it's in, you know, we talk about Greek grammar, the word itself contains all the information, like the DNA evidence of where it should be, of what its function in the sentence is. In English, we use sentence structure and syntax. Syntax is another part of grammar, right, that talks about the relation of words within a sentence.

So we use word placement, right? We use, you know, what I eat, what I see is different than I see what I eat. Quote Lewis Carroll. Two different things, right? Just by changing the word order, you don't have that in Greek. You don't have that in a great many languages, actually, because they're delineated. The word itself will reflect what its purpose or what its cause is in the sentence. So there's a big one. A huge one is grammar.

Literary type. What else? I'm not quite ready to talk about literary type yet. What else is there? There's words. Do same words mean the same thing all the time? No. Exactly, definitely not in English, and certainly in any language. I mean, our language has something on the order of 16,000 words. And even with 16,000 words, we use a lot of them for 2, 3, 5, 10, 15 meanings. What's wrong with us? I don't know.

They have the same thing in Greek, though. It's just the reality that the context of what you're speaking in will set. the meaning of the word, or determine the meaning of the word. You're not very often sitting around, unless you're just fond of puns, which I am, you're not very often going to be sitting around in a conversation and saying, you know, you confused sail the verb with sail the thing, or any number of such things. So context often really clearly lies it down and hammers that out, but words have meaning, meaning in a culture. It's different.

I mean, a great example is in Korean, if you were to literally translate it, someone would walk up to you and say, oh, you look so earish. You look so like an ear. I look like I listen well? Like, what is that? It's just cute. But they think an ear, you know, your ear is cute, so you look like an ear. You're just cute as an ear. But they don't say cute as an ear. They just say you look earish. And yet if you were just taking every word across, you couldn't make sense of anything, could you then?

It's the same thing in Greek. I think the example that Vern has given from the front a couple of times is that in German they might say that you're carrying me on your arm. You're fooling me. But we'd say, Are we like walking arm in arm? Are we trying to figure out what that means? It'd be quite a trip. Yeah, another great example. We worked in Korea for a couple of years and said a couple of times back, you're pulling my leg. And they looked at us and said, no, no, I'm not. No, no, I mean, you're joking. You're teasing me, right?

But that's just the way language works. We get into these little cultural idioms. And that's the kind of thing that we have to look at. And praise the Lord, there are great resources out there. And as we'll talk about actually near the end, I'm kind of questioning whether or not we'll get there, but there's all these great tools that can help you find some of those idioms, find some of those language issues. So, there's language. So, wow, we just jumped, oh no, that was language, good.

Let's talk about history for a moment. History's important for several reasons. Revelation of God's truth, in the Bible is progressive, being given over centuries of time. In the biblical view, time is linear, involving process, decline, progress, pivotal evidence, cause and effect, and God's sovereignty over his creation during a span of time. The message of the Bible is rooted in history, even to the point of the eternal future of believers turned on events that took place in history, e.g. the identification truce, something that happened in a specific time, in a specific place. So the history of a place tells us how they're going to speak oftentimes.

I mean, I don't know if there's any Texans in here. I know I'm not. But the words, remember the Alamo, mean something in Texas. Well, and then as a result, maybe the surrounding states get it. But outside of the United States, it doesn't really mean anything. Remember the Alamo. I don't even know what the Alamo is, right?

So these are things that get burned into a culture. burned into our language, burned into our history is written on ourselves. So when we sit down to a new book here at Holly Hills or when you sit down to study a new book, look at the history of the city that you're looking at. Oftentimes you'll find that there's a reason why the writer says some of the things they say and it's rooted in the history. It's rooted in the history of the place. You can't cut a people away from their history.

At all. It's there, it's in it. In Korea, it's a nation that has been occupied, captured, overrun, and beaten up for the last, I don't know how many years. As a result, it affects the way they do business. It affects the way they interact with each other. It affects the way that they talk and think and are. And if you don't understand that, you're not going to understand what it is to live in Korea right now. It makes a huge difference. And it makes a huge difference here. For lack of pulling out a bunch of examples, we'll continue to see that that's a powerful thing. Brad? Yes. That's important, I think, when we look at the New Testament.

The Pauline epistles. The history of Thessalonica. History of Corinth. Helps you understand what he is writing when he writes to these people. History. Very important. Like the illustration right there? Yeah. Ephesus. What was going on in Ephesus? Yeah, Philippi was a Roman colony, right? We know for a fact there were a bunch of retired military Roman citizens hanging around there.

What happens when Paul tends to use a lot of military imagery? Weird. When Paul's writing to a less Romanized city, Thessalonica was also a heavily Romanized colony at that time, and a major city at the time. He uses more Roman terms. Paul was incredibly versed in Roman culture, Greek culture, and obviously Hebrew culture.

So it can't be overdone, or it can't be overemphasized how important that history is, and it'll take some helps to get into this, but it's not impossible. I mean, I honestly owned a study Bible for 15 years before I figured out that there was more than just the Bible in the study Bible. You've got at least a sizeable chunk of all that history. And I always blow over and I thought, oh, well that's interesting trivia. Who cares? No, it's really important and that's why they put it in there. Because it's really important to understanding it out.

So here now, today, we're blessed to have tools to where we can pick up a Bible that we can take somewhere else and open it up and say, wow, I've got all this background, all this history, all this culture. And then a lot of them will even have a little bar along the middle that's filled with cross-references. So we can compare it to scripture. They've done all the work for you. It's fantastic. So definitely don't ignore that.

Now cultural background is the piece that I'd say gets probably most ignored in classical great commentaries of the past. The cultural background is is something that is amazing and exciting to look at, but also kind of hard to find. You have to pick it out of a lot of secular books. There's not necessarily a whole wide breadth of Christian literature, which means that you also have to sift through some of the secular presuppositions, like Scripture's not actually this or that.

We use the Bible as a kind of a guide to history, but really we trust what we dig up or whatever. But the reality is that all that stuff is definitely out there and there are people doing that work in great numbers. And once again, when we get to our tools section, we'll discuss some of the ways to get on those.

Those aspects of culture, though, that stand behind a particular Bible passage might include substantial cultural significance of words and phrases, the use of culturally specific poetry patterns, culturally framed symbols, and the like. The observing elements of culture, it is necessary to match the right cultural background to the passage. One place where we saw this, if you were with us in the Sermon on the Mount elective, we saw it constantly. Jesus, throughout the Sermon on the Mount, is speaking rabbi-ese. He's speaking this kind of technical rabbi language that they had used and developed. Now, outside of that, you wouldn't know exactly what it is.

But a great example is, I have come to fulfill the law. I do not think I've come to abolish the law, but I've come to fulfill it. Well, the words abolish the law and fulfill the law in the current time meant, if a rabbi, we have records of other rabbis saying, I've come to abolish the law, I've come to fulfill the law. Well, they didn't mean fulfill it in the way that we think of Christ fulfilling the law, perfectly fulfilling it and dying on a cross, but rather to fulfill the law meant simply to teach it accurately and well and truly, and to abolish it meant to not do that, to teach it inaccurately. So that's what he was saying to them. He wasn't perplexing them or confusing them. So all he's doing is he's claiming that his doctrine is biblical. He's claiming that what he's teaching is Old Testament true. But once again, we get that out of the culture and it all, I don't want to say it all falls apart, but it all can morph and change in its meaning completely.

Who has a 1611 King James Version on them? Yeah? It's a little bit different. Some of the spellings are different. Was it a mystery to them at the time when it was written? Sometimes the way it's written, I think, yes. But probably not. It was probably written in a way that they can understand it best. Right? So just in our language, reading Shakespeare for young students can be a really taxing endeavor because the language has changed. Meanings of words have changed. Like the classic example, wherefore art thou Romeo? People continually think that would mean, or students who read it for the first time continually think, means, where are you, Romeo? Where are you at? No. Why must your name, why are you Romeo?

Why must you be a Cap, or a Oldford Crane out loud? Which one was he? Oh, I can't remember. The two families. Why are you part of the other side, as it were? Oh, that's so shameful. The Capulets. The Capulets, the Capulets and the, You're so good. See, I've shamed myself. All right, so these three things, language, history, and culture, you can't just, obviously you can't just go home right now and go, oh, I know it.

You got, there's some study, there's some reading, there's great resources provided for you here. There's great resources provided for you on the internet. The internet's an amazing thing. For all the awful stuff that's been involved in the past, there are definitely some people out there redeeming certain sites on the internet that are just incredible, free information. I think, honestly, you can get a whole seminary education without paying a dime because there are so many well-meaning people out there who just love the Lord and want to see His Word taught, that they spend hours and hours and hours teaching and writing these things, and they just throw them out there. The best hermeneutics texts I've found are free, online, It's amazing. Some of the best commentaries, free, online. So anyway, don't overlook that resource, I guess.

All right. Interpretation. Interpretation is done through a full set of observations about the passage and follows logically from those observations. The one correct interpretation, the intended meaning of the author, will be consistent with the guidance given in where do we start section above. Imagine our three steps. You're sitting down, you're looking at a passage, and you observe, observe, observe, observe, observe, until there's nothing left to observe.

And you can do this with your English Bible. It's not that hard. Once again, you always have to allow for the fact that there could be more information out there that would change your interpretation. But it doesn't mean you can't interpret the Bible just looking at your English translation. You can. So you look at it, and you look at the subjects.

What are the nouns? Who's involved? Who's speaking? Who's listening? Who else might be listening? Is the speaker or the author talking only to that audience or is he talking to everyone in the world? What tense are the verbs in? Is he speaking in past tense? Obviously in Greek there's a much more complicated system of tenses, but ultimately it can be brought into English. Is it past tense? Is it something that's already happened? Is it present tense? Is it something that's happening now? Is it future tense? Is it something that's going to happen?

Is it something that happened before and needs to happen consistently? Or is it something that happened before and never has to happen again? How many more times does Jesus have to be crucified before the end of the world? Zero more times, right? It's done. It's done once. It's always valid. We don't need to crucify Jesus again when we stub our toe and utter a swear word. We don't! Once was enough, covered all those sins. So those are the kind of language things you can look at without even bothering to go into a language resource.

It's available to you. This is an amazing thing. Yeah, so who's speaking? Who's listening? What's going on? Context, context, context. I'm sure you'll spend a lot of time talking about context. You have to look at it in light of the the passage that surrounds the verse, the chapter that surrounds the passage, the chapters that surround that chapter, the book in which it's in, the testament in which that book is in, and the Bible as a whole.

You have to look at all those things or you're never going to get there. How many times does the Bible contradict itself? Zero times. Zero times. So if you've found an interpretation, if you interpret this passage in such a way that it seems to contradict that passage, you've obviously interpreted something wrong. Go back and look at the steps. Start over again. It's the great joy of our faith. We have all this time that the Lord's given us and we always wonder, why isn't He coming back today? Why not five minutes from now? Why not now? At least it gives us more time to look at this. And behold His Son through His Word.

The observation can be as long a process as you make it. You could sit down to Ephesians chapter 5 and say, all I'm going to do with the rest of my life is make observations about Ephesians chapter 5 and at the end of years and years and years I have no doubt in my mind that you can come up with one more observation.

Oh yeah. It's just the reality. So observe, observe, observe, observe. Be heavy on observation as you read the Bible. Just look at it. Just look at what the text says. All right. And then you can move on to interpretation. Observations are many, which lead us to this interpretation, which is singular. Have you ever heard, maybe been to a Bible study where you sit around in a circle and you all read the passages and you say, what's your interpretation? What's your interpretation? What's your interpretation? Well, that's great.

Let's all go home. Obviously, once again, what I think honestly is happening there is that they've goofed up the difference between interpretation and application. Because interpretation is singular, application is manifold. There can be as many applications as you have situations in life. The interpretation is that God is absolutely sovereign. The application, who can find the end to the applications to God's sovereignty? I'm not going to worry when... I'm not going to be concerned at work. I'm not going to... I'm going to trust God's sovereignty. I mean, the application... So I think that that's what happens in that situation.

What we're really saying is, what's your application for life? What does this mean when you apply it to your life? But even still, it's goofing up the language, which can be devastating for sure. So interpretation is singular. We all go home and we all do our homework on John 15 or whatever it is, and we all read and we observe, observe, observe, say we all make 45 observations each about it, and then we all sit down and say, okay, what does John 15, chapter 1 mean? I'm the true vine and my father's the gardener. We should be able to all come to one singular interpretation for what that means.

How many times when you speak, do you speak in double entendre, or do you speak with two meanings? Very rarely, and when you do it, you really want people to know, because what's the point of being witty if no one notices, right? Same thing with the biblical world. Very rarely were they speaking in double entendre and trying to have two meanings to one sentence. More often than not, it meant that one thing. It's really not as complicated as we try to make it, as amazing as that is, that we try to overcomplicate things.

All right, so I'm sure there'll be a lot of practice as we keep going, and I hope that there's a lot of practice for you as you continue to do that. We talked a little bit about application. Application is manifold. In the future, I'm sure they'll talk about direct versus indirect application. Not every word of scripture is written to you. Correct? Written to me.

God says to Ezekiel, if you don't go share the word with them, then I'll count their blood on your hands. Do I take that and directly apply it to me? I hope not. Because that'd be a big plane ticket and I don't even speak the language to wherever he was sending Ezekiel. Okay, so we'll allegorize some of it. It really means that God is sending me to the people at my work and their blood is on my hands if I don't go and hit them over the head with the Bible tomorrow, right? Wrong. When God spoke to Ezekiel giving Ezekiel a specific command, I can't take that. Can I draw an indirect application?

God cares desperately for the unsaved. Yeah. Absolutely. God cares desperately for the lost. Enough so to send someone with great earnest, with great passion, with some gusto. Can I take that indirect application? Oh, absolutely. Can I directly apply that to my life? No. I'd be a mess. I'll be a mess in the Christian life. All right.

And then appropriation. We talked about it a little bit. Appropriation of the truths of Scripture requires that we receive the true meaning of the original author of Scripture, who is the Holy Spirit. Just as our last little bit, and I think we're going to get about a quarter of the way through it. We've all got an English Bible translation. We're not going to raise our hand on who has what.

But essentially, translations move and this is just helpful as you're picking out a Bible, from word-for-word translations, and they go to paraphrase translations. Obviously, the advantage of word-for-word translations is that it's the most literal, word-for-word thing, but it's often hard to understand. The best thing about a paraphrase, or the thing about a paraphrase is it's easy to understand, it's quick to read, and we really do have to close. But there, I believe, are situations where both can be productive tools. Productive tools.

If you're going through a one, like read through the Bible in a year and you're reading six chapters of the Bible a day, That word-for-word translation, reading your inner linear, you wouldn't be done at the end of the day, unless you really knew Greek. And yet, if you're really, really trying to dig into the word, you don't want to pick up the message. It's not literal word-for-word. So we'll go to the Lord in prayer.

Here's this list of great, great, great, great tools. And it would be a great thing to do a class on how to use those tools someday. All right, let's pray. Holy Father, thank you so much for the gift of this day and our time together. Lord, thank you that you have given us this amazing message. Thank you that you have given us language that we can know your message. And thank you that you have given us, Lord, the minds to understand it. Thank you that you have loved us enough to speak to us and you have patience enough to wait for us to listen and understand what you've given us. In Jesus' name, Amen.