How to Study the Bible III - 1 Corinthians 13:8-13 – the details & the context

This morning we are going to talk spiritual gifts, some portion thereof, and we're going to be talking about them on a time horizon. And what we're going to discover in the process, this is not a course on spiritual gifts, this is a course on how to study the Bible. So we'll look at, oh, how did we derive that insight here or there as we go through it, And what sort of steps can you guys take to tease some of this out yourselves?

So if you look at the last page, it looks like this sucker up here. And we're just going to zoom in on that upper left-hand corner. And we get to this. And so we've got a set of gifts that are apostolic-era gifts. They ended a long ago. Then we've got some church-age gifts, and these carry on. And so one interesting question. We've got all these different gifts. Are these all the spiritual gifts? This is a definitive list? No, not that we... We have no way of knowing. It could be a definitive list or it may not. Scripture doesn't say. So there could certainly be more of them.

One thing that is commonly taught, and if we have time for it today, I'll take you guys on a principle of Bible study that I call Chase the Rabbit. There was a rabbit chasing that I did last week while Vern was teaching about pastors and elders and what might happen there. And one of the things that came out in my game of Chase the Rabbit was these church-age gifts. You get teachers and helps and administration and all of these different ones. Quite often that's taught that, you know, you get one and you get to go and figure out what your one is.

Is there a reason to believe that everybody gets exactly one? No. Is there a reason to believe that some people guaranteed have at least two? Yes. So, confident yes, and How? Where? Elders and teachers. Conjointly. And it's in one person. And I believe that's in, now that I'm saying that, Timothy? Okay. So that's on the game of Chase the Rabbit.

If we don't get there today, we'll get there, when I teach again, sort of mid-November. Elders are not mentioned as a gift. Elders are not given as a gift to the church. Teachers are. Evangelists are. So if you look at Ephesians 4.11, elders are missing, which is interesting. But then you sort of look at it a different direction. We look in Acts and find out, well, the whole reason why we've got deacons is because the elders wanted to be able to focus on teaching. And so serving the body was taking up too much of their time.

So elders are absolutely teachers. So definitely have that spiritual gift. And we see in a different passage, and again, we'll cover this either at the end or next time I teach, that elders are told specifically, you must shepherd. And so we've got elders who are both shepherds and teachers. So it is possible for folks to have more than one of these. So maybe we shouldn't focus in on, well, I've got administrative gifts, and therefore I can't help anybody. Or I'm an evangelist. I'm able to share the word super well, so I probably shouldn't be teaching people. It doesn't necessarily make sense.

All right, so back to the front page, zooming in on the top two slides. We'll come back to these repeatedly, so it'll be good to always keep those around. These are put side by side in a poetic form because it helps to understand as we go through how they go together with one another. Some observations. In Bible study, we start with observe. Let's go and make a bunch of observations, because there are, in fact, a bunch to be had. First off, we've got the love never falls off. Not love never falls off. The love never falls off.

That doesn't get carried over into the English. But whether there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away. Whether there are gifts of tongues, they will cease. Whether there is a gift of knowledge, it will be done away. For we know in part, prophecy in part, but when completion and maturity comes, that which is in part will be done away. So you can see that we've got this will be done away, will be done away, will be done away. But it's different. Another observation is that done away goes with prophecy and knowledge. Tongues gets a different one. Tongues gets cease.

And when we start teasing out some of the language elements of this, we're going to see that Paul was very specific about his word choice, no surprise, and that they mean different things. And and notice that we've got all of these in part in part in part all of these things that happen in part Okay Look at those fingers, okay So then looking at the next one we've got Child child child child childish things we get that in part in as well. So when I was a child, so past tense, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child. And we're going to see that we can take that and fold it perfectly into the verse that sits before and start to understand why some of these have to be done away with.

Okay, so this passage is all about how long things last and what has value. So all of these things, knowledge is great, prophecy is fantastic, but it serves a specific function at a point in time. And so what out of all of these wonderful things has lasting value? What extends on to eternity?

That's something that comes up in here. So when we talk about faith, hope, and love, It turns out one of those is greatest. The reason why it's greatest is because it extends longer than the others. Kind of crazy to think, right? Faith and hope, those are going to go away.

They are. Here and on the next slide, we'll be able to dive into time elements, just so you can see the time. So number one, you get love never falls off. It's never going to happen. And the word, therefore, falls off in the Greek is interesting. We'll have opportunity to look at a parallel there.

Start looking at the individual time so you get when I was a child, when I became a man, now we see in the mirror dimly, then we will see face to face, now I know in part, then I will know fully, now faith, hope, love. So we've got when, just talking about points in time, either past or future, now is now, then is looking forward, ahead. So this passage, we can see it's all about time. So it's about how long certain things last.

And by the way, that's a simple observation. I want to keep coming back to this point. This is a fascinating passage, but I don't want us to focus entirely on the spiritual gifts and miss the underlying Bible study principles that we're seeing. It's pretty easy to look at a passage and notice when, when, now, then, now. Looking for the repeated patterns as we go through scripture is very helpful, because it shows us what's being emphasized by the author. So that's how we get to.

It's all about how long certain things last, what's of value. And it turns out the folks in Corinth were valuing a lot of temporally located things and not looking on to eternity. So this is why he's focused on it. In the middle of the passage, Paul talks about a number of these things ceasing.

Patterns of verbs, voice, and nouns is remarkable. When you look at it in the English, it's less profoundly exciting. But what clearly comes out in the final message is that love lasts forever, and that's why it's the greatest one. So of course, passage has a number of patterns in it. I want to push pause on slideshow, pop over into a vital study tool where we can make some observations. Then we'll pop back in. So off we go. We are, what do I need to do? Somebody is on vacation from my team tomorrow. OK. So that's what that was all about.

And I want to show you how we've got tools available to us where, even if we don't understand Greek and we don't know these crazy symbols, we don't have to. If we've got some underlying knowledge of how the language is constructed, That's why we covered at the beginning of the course the basic principles of Greek, just being able to know the difference between middle voice and passive voice. I'm worried if you know how to conjugate the endings of the verbs. We didn't have enough time for that. But knowing the difference between middle, so the subject is very actively involved in in the action and passive, the action is happening to the subject, not necessarily through their involvement.

It's important. And being able to tease some of these things out is useful. And so as we look at this passage, With something like an interlinear Greek text, we can start to dig into the basic principles without having to know what the funny symbols actually mean. So, an observation.

When it's talking about, they will pass away. If they're gifts of prophecy, they will be done away. If there are tongues, they will cease. OK, that sounds like a different word. If there's knowledge, it will be done away. Oh, OK, so we've got done away and done away. What does that look like? And look, I can actually see this word sure looks a whole lot like this word, which is they will pass away. Am I supposed to be seeing that? You're totally supposed to be seeing that. OK. So. Thank you. Yeah, so I'm probably going to have to hear. Are we better? Yeah, we're better. Thank you for speaking up. I thought it was being shown up there. That's too funny. All right.

So with an inner linear, I get some basic elements here. So I've got the Greek text up here, which I'll make the joke probably just looks like Greek to you. But then I get the English translation, so I don't actually have to know what the funny symbols look like or how to pronounce them. And I get a Strong's number. And so with the Strong's number, I can actually look the word up and find out some more about it. I can also drill in.

So what I was trying to point out before. The Strong's number is this G0026, for example. You see that? Yeah. So that's a strong's number. And you can see that we've got this word. It sure looks a lot like that word. Those are probably pretty close to one another. Maybe not all those symbols look quite the same. But you can sort of match up and say, oh, look, the strong's numbers are the same. So this is actually the same. So this gifts of prophecy and knowledge, those are done away with in the same manner. So what does that manner look like? Well, we can actually then just look up what the word means, and it says to render entirely idle Abolish. Cease. I like this to render useless.

I like that one a lot. And I can go off and I can look up this word in dozens of different dictionaries and get a sense, OK, I've read it here, I've read it there, I've read it there. OK, now I've really got a sense of what the word means. It's interesting that knowledge, and prophecy are going to become useless. That's a little bit more specific than done away. I didn't have to know Greek, I just had to know how to click on things.

It's fascinating to ponder that here the Holy Spirit would deliberately give these gifts at one point, and as the Holy Spirit's doing, and this came from God, And yet there'll be a point where it's just useless. It has no place. It's rather amazing. It is amazing.

So I have multiple dictionaries and this one's the complete word study. It actually says to put to an end. Like it's very, very specific. I mean, there's a whole lot more of all of what you said, but then as you continue reading, there's an idea of just put to an end. All done. And what Crystal's pointing out is that the Complete Word Study Bible makes the point that this means that it's going to come to an end. It's just going to be done.

When I look at this particular verse and I'm looking at tongues, this word with its funny symbols looks absolutely nothing like that word with its funny symbols. It's probably a different word, and if somebody chose a different word, they may have done so for a reason. And so when I dig in, I find out this is just to stop. to desist. It's not something that's going to be done anymore.

It's different than totally useless. Another observation that I can make here. So at the beginning of the year, we talked about parse codes. And so if you've got a verb, you want to know what tense it is, and what mood it is, and what voice it is, I don't actually have to know all the rules for all of that stuff.

All I've got to do is click on the word and find out that this is future, passive, indicative. So at some point in the future, This making to stop is going to be done to prophecy. So prophecy isn't doing this, it's just something or someone is just going to make it such that that's useless now. But when I look at the one for tongues, I get it's future, it's metal. So tongues will, of their own accord, cease. That's when it's going to stop. So that's interesting. And here, we're not drawing any conclusions.

I'm making an observation. I may note it on a piece of paper. I would type it into a notepad. And now I've got that down and I'm just going to keep making more and more observations as I go through the passage. Back to when you look up the word, something that I have found useful for myself is that if I don't quite understand the real shades of the meaning of the word, I'll look through all the synonyms as well.

Because some of the Greek language doesn't have a direct crossover to an English word that I'm familiar with. And so I go down, what do you call the rabbit? Yeah, you play chase the rabbit. I play chase the rabbit until I get sort of a sense of how the people in the culture may have understood it by looking at the synonyms, looking at all the various uses, and that sort of thing.

Because sometimes the New Testament Greek doesn't have a direct correlation to our English language. It was a different time, a different culture. Sure. Makes sense. It's not at all useful if it's not tosset. Can you guys in the back here, Crystal? I don't want to. OK. So her point is sometimes there's not a direct word-for-word translation from the Greek into the English.

That makes sense, that different time, different culture. And so something that she'll do when she's trying to figure out what exactly was meant is to look at all of the different synonyms for that word just to get a sense of its full meaning. I'll show you something else that we can do to understand some of the shades of a word. We can go ahead and look it up, and I like to look such things up in Vines, because Vines will quite often give me other places in scripture where that word is used, and so now I can play chase the rabbit there.

So, Vines says this is to stop, to make an end, It's used chiefly in the middle voice. Well, that's great. It's used in the middle voice here, right? Signifying to come to an end, to take one's rest, a willing sensation. And I can look through here and see, oh, well, it's also in Luke. And so I can just take a quick look at Luke and find out when he'd finished speaking, he said to Simon, do this. Oh, that's interesting. So ceasing can be just finishing something. It doesn't have to be a dramatic thing that involves explosions and, OK, done. So that's useful.

And playing chase the rabbit with that and looking at all of those different meanings, we're going to find something interesting. So keep in mind, this is how we're teasing apart this particular passage as we plop back into slides. And I will look up here to make sure survey says yes. So we've gone, we've made a bunch of observations, and now we can come back and start to see how some of this goes together.

What we can see from the passage is that love never falls off. There's not a finishing of that. Faith and hope They actually do have an end point. We've seen that. Same thing about prophecy and knowledge. Those are also going to have an end point. And that end point's a little different. That end point is they're going to be made completely useless. We might still have the capability of faith, but there's no point. And tongues goes away as well. We've already seen that Paul has used different words for falling off, ceasing, end. We saw that he used a different voice. So that was part of the observations that we made, just looking at some simple tools.

We start the passage with love, we end the passage with love. But, let's flop over there again. Something that we can observe. You've got love never fails in the English up here. When I look at the Greek, I get love, but there's this thing in front of it. Exactly. The thing it's got in front of it is pronounced, ha. Not, huh. So the ha that sits in front of it, you know what that is? That's a duh. So when we see that, oh, now we've got a definite article in front of love. So we're not talking about general warm feelings that might exist between a couple junior high school age kids, right? This is very specific. We're talking about the love.

I wonder if that's true, actually, when we get to the end, when we're talking about, but now faith, hope, love, abide these three. We could make an observation, couldn't we? So I'm curious. So let's scroll down and see what's going on with 13. And I'm looking for love. And I've got love here. Do you see something that looks like ha in front of love? No. So the concept of love, the principle of love, is what is greatest. Yeah, but if you cut down, in the Greek, there is a definite art of what happened.

Where are we propping down? 13, end of 13. Okay. Tauton, right after that. Where? Keep going. De, Tauton. Ah, yes, you're right. Agathe. Faith, hope, love, general principles abide these three. But the greatest of these is, Crystal's absolutely right. Here's our definite article. Here's our determiner. The greatest of all of these is the love. So it starts with the love, ends with the love. Good observation. Using tools. We didn't have to know things. Thank goodness. Okay, so survey says yes. So you've got the love, very specific love. Okay, so when we read this in the English, we've got love never fails. It's like, okay, what's the opposite of failure? Success! So love succeeds every time instead of failing? It's kind of weird. So let's talk about love never fails.

Remember when I said we were going to look at that falling? If we look, let's do it. Let's pop back over. Hopefully I'm not making people Disoriented and dizzy with all of the flopping back and forth, but I think it's helpful to see It is not by magic that this Knowledge was made available to us. It's through a set of observations So we're down at the bottom and we get oh No we are looking at This guy again, they will cease. So this is what happens with Toms.

And we can flop over to Vines. And let me try to find the punchline really quick. And hop down into Axe. And we actually don't have the reference over here. That's surprising. Let me show you a reference then. Our little playing with observations failed me today. Nothing like real live Bible study. Okay, so this bluff never fails. Oh, that's where we went wrong. Let's plop over. So we've got We start out with love never fails. This fail here is pichte, which is end. So we can see, what can we learn more about end? We can look it up in Binds and see how it's used elsewhere. So pipto, it means to fall, not to fail.

It's interesting. As we scroll down we can see all sorts of different uses. For example, but it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for the stroke of the letter of the law to fall. That's useful. However, we can see some other uses in this. Look at Hebrews. See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God. That coming short, that's this same word. Falling short, come short of God. Love never comes short. That's interesting. That's a little bit more understanding about it. And the one that I would absolutely love to find there, but I'm just having no luck, is this one.

Which is, when Paul is teaching and some kid's hanging out in the window and just falls asleep, because he's been listening to Paul apparently plenty long, And he falls out of the window and Paul ends up having to miraculously heal him. That falling out of the third story window is the exact same word. So love never fails, love never falls. Same exact word. somebody just falling. It's very different than the notion of something becoming absolutely useless or not becoming useless. It is always going to stand. It is never going to come short. It is always going to fulfill what it needs to fulfill.

The Acts 29 reference is in the Complete Word Study Bible Dictionary. So if we wanted to pop over into complete word study Bible, we'd find that. That's where it's found, yeah. And that's actually a great point. When you become dependent upon exactly one tool, then you develop blind spots. We need to use multiple tools for this. I just needed to mention the ESV and the HDSV also translate that as ends, love never ends. Yes. Those are word for word translations. Yeah, and that's a pretty good translation.

Because that's what happens is love never falls off, love never ends, it just keeps on going, which is why we've got this blue arrow that just doesn't have an end to it. And faith and hope, those are both going to fall off, right? And by fall off, I mean those are going to become absolutely useless. Why are they going to become useless?

Big smile over there. So I hope to see the Lord. When I see the Lord, am I still going to be Hoping? No, not at all. Vern gave a great analogy when he taught this that I'll adapt slightly. When I was going to propose to Crystal, I really hoped that she was going to say yes. And so I was hoping, I was looking forward to this marriage that was going to happen. Now that we're married, am I hoping that she's going to be married to me? She is. It's already happened. So same thing for faith. Once we are face to face with the Lord, there's no longer any of this things not seen. And so there's no need for that. But right now, we need all three. We take comfort in all three.

And some other passages you can go and look at to see this. When playing Chase the Rabbit, always do your homework. So when you want to answer a question, you'll want to look at all of the verses that relate to that question. They're all going to confirm one another, so they'll be confirming the hypothesis that you're going in with. Or one of them's going to throw you a curveball, and now you need to adjust your hypothesis. A lot of very bad doctrine comes from looking at one passage, drawing a conclusion, and then not checking the other ones that are relevant.

So spiritual gifts of prophecy and knowledge are going to be done away with. We've already reasoned about why this is the case. And they're also both listed out as being in part. Prophecy and knowledge. So in what way were they in part when Paul was reading this? So maybe back up, what's the point of prophecy?

Verification. Validation. Making sure what was being spoken and taught was actually what the Lord wanted spoken and taught. So it validates what's spoken and taught. What about revealing things that just aren't intuitive to people? Okay, so prophecy is simply speaking truth that is revealed from God.

It's new. People haven't seen this before. So at the time that Paul was writing this, did we have a complete New Testament? No. Okay, so we're missing large swaths of truth. How is that going to come to people? Well, first through the apostles. I mean, the Holy Spirit.

I was going to say, so does that relate to mystery? revealing something that's never been revealed before? Is that what you're saying? So prophecy and mystery are kind of connected? Prophecy and mystery are absolutely connected, so those things which have not previously been revealed need to be revealed somehow.

What people have at this point is the Old Testament and portions of the New Testament. How are they going to derive the truths that are in the rest of the New Testament and how are they going to know that those truths are actually true? Has to be revealed. That's the prophecy part. It has to be apprehended as true. That's the knowledge part.

If God doesn't tell us things like Well, we'll go through this in mid-November. If God doesn't tell us about things like there is a triune God, how in the world are we going to derive that from our experience? So does that have an article on that truth? I'm just curious. Is it the truth or is he talking about truth in general or specific? Where is truth?

First Corinthians chapter 14 and Acts 11 28. So you want to see, let's go make an observation. 14 what? So where do you want to look? First Corinthians 14. The reference here is First Corinthians 14. The entire chapter? That's what's got it all. I'm looking on this chart. Okay.

So 14 dives deeper into Prophecy? It also says Acts 11, verse 28. So let's go look? Yeah, chapter 14 starts with pursue love yet desire earnestly spiritual gifts especially that you may prophesy and then Paul dives deep into that. Sorry, Acts what? Acts chapter 11, verse 28. I think this is a useful rabbit trail because we have a question. Where are we going to find the answer to the question? Truth is in the Bible, so let's go there.

One of them named Agabus stood up and began to indicate by the spirit that there would certainly be a great famine all over the world and this took place in the brain of Claudius. And so this is something that is revealed. The revealing is a foretelling. The foretelling is to give a sign, to signify, to indicate, to make known. So this is an application of prophecy that goes straight to what Crystal was talking about. where prophecy was used to give credibility, to validate that what was being said was in fact true.

I don't know if that answered your question, but that's what we can derive from that passage in Acts. I think it would also be helpful to understand fully and holistically what prophecy is, because there are times when prophecy in the Old Testament was from God through a man that said, these events are going to happen. And then there's also prophecy, which is still from God to man.

In the New Testament, that is a validation of what the apostles were given to do, which is here is this whole new thing that we didn't know about called the body of Christ, the church, which is not up until that point, until the death of Christ and the resurrection, it wasn't a thing. And so at the beginning, there had to be some form for the brand new church to know, okay, we really are going the way that God wants us to go. And that would have, I believe, been through the apostles, elders, and teachers, and people who had this gift, like conjointly. So not one person probably was standing up and saying, here's the singular thing that nobody else had heard of.

So I think it would be a good thing to study holistically, OK, what first is prophecy before kind of nailing it down in each passage. Does that make sense? I think that makes tons of sense. Summing that all up in very few words, Crystal thinks it would be a good idea to research prophecy and what it means. Do you guys feel like that would be useful going into something where we're talking about prophecy falling off? Yeah. Would that be an entire study in and of itself? Yes. Okay, how would we go about that?

We would find, first we can look at the Greek word and understanding the original intent of the word used. Okay, so we can first go and we can look at the word prophecy. And we can figure out what that looks like in the Greek and then try to pin it to things. Once we've got a Greek word, how's that going to help us with the Old Testament? Old Testament was written in Hebrew, so... We can then look up the Hebrew word. and compare and contrast. We can also look up the Hebrew word, compare and contrast. We also have the Septuagint, which is a Greek text. In English, I know how to look up the word prophecy. I'm going to look it up.

In fact, we don't have to. It's right here in this particular passage. From there, we can jump off to, OK, I want to see every word that that word is used in the New Testament. And I can. I just look at it through the Greek. Then if I wanted to chase the rabbit more, which probably makes sense. We've got this whole body of Old Testament. I've got two choices.

I can either start in the English in Old Testament and then go from that to get the Hebrew word, then look up the Hebrew word and all of its corresponding references. I already know the Greek word. I've got a Septuagint, so I can go straight over and look at where that word is used in the Greek Old Testament, and go from there to the Hebrew word.

So a lot of different paths, but it all comes down to there's a ton of stuff that's written about prophecy and the Word of God. And for us to figure out exactly what prophecy is, It would be a really great idea to go and make observations from all of those different passages.

I was also going to say that a big change for the church age, obviously, which everybody knows, is that the Holy Spirit has been given. So that's very transformative as far as what's happening in the church age. Prior to the church age, when you had the apostles and they were stumbling along, trying to deal with all these truths and knowledge and the change as far as the law and grace. God had to give them something that they could deal with this miraculous change that was taking place. They didn't understand this at all and they didn't have the Holy Spirit to guide them, right? So God gave them gifts so that they could deal with these changes that were taking place and transformative as far as God's plan for the future. That's right. So the big change here, when the church starts, the Holy Spirit is given. So now you don't really need all these gifts, but the Holy Spirit can work with each person individually.

Is this correct or wrong, or am I on the right track? You're on the right track. I would make one small correction in that If you are in 65 AD, are you going to be able to derive all the truths of Revelations? No. Not whatsoever. That stuff is crazy. Right? You're not going to dream that up in your head. That has to be revealed. And that has to come from God.

Looking at prophecy simply as God reveals truth to someone, they reveal that truth to the rest of us. We had to have that at least through 95 AD or we would have been missing things that God wanted us to know. The question is, you get to 95 AD Do you still have the need for prophecy and for knowledge, the ability to discern whether the prophecy is actually correct or not? Well, you've got the Holy Spirit, so the Holy Spirit is able to know what is of God, so that knowledge becomes less critical, and just sort of jumping ahead there's a passage in yeah here we go so in June we find out if I testify to everyone who hears the word of the prophecy of this book, if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book. That was the Revelations passage. That's saying what about more truth revealed from God to people to share with the rest of us?

It's done. Done. That's not happening again. Do we need prophecy after Revelations is written? We don't. We don't have any need for it at all. So let me point out another. So those first two slides, this is just another observation. We start out with, So knowledge, tongues, prophecy, these things are going away. That's not going to go on into the internet.

And then Paul seems to completely shift gears and just says, when I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child. Did he have a traumatic childhood? He's writing. to the church. He's talking about prophecy. He's talking about knowledge. And then he just has a flashback. And he's like, man, when I was a kid, things were rough.

Probably they go together, right? Probably one relates to the other. What happens if we lay them on top of one another? Can we make an interesting observation there? And the answer is, in fact, we can. which I'll show up there momentarily. Speaking lines up with tongues. Thinking lines up with knowledge. Reason lines up with prophecy.

And so these are all childish things. These are things that once grown up the church doesn't actually need. Right? When I became a man I did away with the childish things. It's already signaling. When the church is in its infancy, it needs this. It needs tongues for a sign. It needs knowledge to be able to discern what's true. It needs prophecy to be able to reveal what's true. But once we have the full body of the New Testament, once we have the Holy Spirit, Why do we need these things?

The answer is we don't. And so the church by 95 AD was growing up. Apparently it was a man. And so did away with the childish things of youth. Does that make sense? So it turns out that scripture references scripture and being able to line it up side by side. you can draw correlations. Paul's not talking about a traumatic childhood because he's got PTSD. He switches to childhood because it's an excellent analogy for what he's trying to show.

And I think I can say that it's hard to have an aha moment spiritually unless you have the written word and you have the Holy Spirit to help you interpret it. Yes. what God has chosen to reveal, we're not going to have much luck figuring out what's true. And without the Holy Spirit of God, it's just complete and total nonsense to us. It's foolishness.

Let me just take a quick look and see if there's anything critical that we missed. Maybe we'll stop there. I think the point is made. So as we go through scripture, we can make a lot of observations. There are lots of tools that are available to us to make those observations. We can start cross-referencing to get a deeper understanding of the word, of the language that's being used. And we can look at scripture as a coherent whole.

So if we've got two things that are mentioned back-to-back that seem unrelated Tilt your head and see do those things actually fit together and we can start to tease out more of what's going on underneath And they make sense awesome father Thank you so much for giving us your word, because we're not smart, and you have to tell us things, and we're just incredibly grateful for that. Thank you also for your Holy Spirit, without which we still wouldn't understand it. You're amazing. It's in Jesus' name. Amen.