A four-part series on Bible study by Andrew Williamson
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Read transcript of Looking at the Book: 1. Observation
Transcript produced automatically and lightly edited; it may contain errors.
The problem is sometimes when you say Bible study, it’s almost people have a bit of a mind blank. And they think it’s a way up here and it’s completely ungraspable. But actually, the essence of Bible study is Bible reading properly. So if we can kind of take the worry out of that expression Bible study, I don’t mind using it. But if we can’t, we’ll just call it Bible reading.
So we’re going to look at, looking at the book is what I’ve entitled it. And we’re looking at study one today. I’ll give a wee bit of an introduction to all four of the studies today as well. But if you could turn with me please to Psalm 119. I think that’s appropriate today. Psalm 119.
And we’ll read from verse number nine. It’s up on the screen as well.
How can a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to your word. With my whole heart I have sought you. Oh, let me not wander from your commandments. Your word I have hidden in my heart that I might not sin against you. Blessed are you, Lord.
Lord, teach me your statutes. With my lips I have declared all the judgments of your mouth. I have rejoiced in the way of your testimonies, as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts and contemplate your ways. I will delight myself in your statutes. I will not forget your word.
Deal bountifully with your servant that I may live and keep your word. Open my eyes that I may see wondrous things from your law. I’m a stranger in the earth. Do not hide your commandments from me. We know the Lord blesses the reading of his word to us. Now, Eric has said about different people that have come to him and spoken and asked him about Bible study.
And I’m in exactly the same position. People have come to me and have said, how do you go about studying the Bible? So this has kind of become a wee bit of an exercise of mine. So hopefully over the next four sessions, with a conference break in the middle, we’ll look at how to study the scriptures, how to read the scriptures more accurately. So first of all, we have to understand really what the Bible is and how it is worth the study that we put into it. Just think of it for a minute.
2 Timothy chapter 3 is often quoted at this time. But let’s stop and contemplate it just for a few seconds. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, or as God breathed. So in other words, this is the very word of God. You’ll remember the Lord Jesus speaking about the Old Testament scriptures. He says that not one jot or tittle of the law would fall to the ground without it all being fulfilled.
So he uses the very smallest parts of the Hebrew alphabet and he says the original Hebrew manuscript of the Old Testament, everything about it was completely inspired.
We can take the words of Christ about himself as his own words. He says, heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall not pass away. The Lord Jesus himself not only speaks of the inspiration of the Old Testament and the inspiration of his own words, he speaks of the inspiration of the apostles. He says that the Holy Spirit would come and would lead them into all truth.
And that they would communicate that. and so that’s why when you come to the Acts it’s the apostles doctrine that is being advanced the teachings of the apostles they were authoritative
and so then you find out if you look a little bit further not only do we have the inspiration of the words of Christ but we also have the inspiration of the gospels themselves You see, of the gospel writers, two of them, as we know, were apostles. So Matthew and John were apostles. They were authoritative right away. And then we have Mark, who is clearly linked to Peter. So he is writing under the influence of Peter, under the auspice of Peter. And then we have Luke, who accompanied Paul.
And so we find that it all works together as to the inspiration of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Now then you come into, if you like, the letters. And some people might say, okay, I can accept that the apostles are inspired, but Paul’s a bit different. He wasn’t one of the twelve. And so Peter backs up the inspiration of Paul by saying that he is inspired.
He puts it like this. He says, Paul has written letters unto you. He says there are some things in them that are hard to be understood as with the other scriptures. And he shows that Paul’s letters were inscripturated as well. And so we can go through the New Testament and see that the whole of the Bible as we know it today is marked by the inspiration or the God breathed. It’s the God-breathed word.
So this is one of the major reasons why we should realise it’s worthy of study. It’s worthy of reading. Of course, we must move on. It’s also welcoming of reading and study. What I mean by that, it can stand up to the scrutiny of men. Whatever microscope that man wants to put up against the word of God, it can stand up to that scrutiny.
Luke points out that when he was writing his gospel that he says I gather together the witnesses
and of course you go across to Luke’s other writing the Acts and he says by many infallible proofs the Lord has been shown to be raised from the dead and if you know anything about archaeological history, William Ramsay from the 1800s, the famous archaeologist, one of the greatest in his field, he took the Acts of the Apostles and his intention was to ridicule and undermine the veracity of the history behind the Acts of the Apostles and he was stunned at its accuracy. In fact, so much so that it was him that was turned inside out, not the Acts. So when we come to the Word of God, it stands up to scrutiny. When we say it’s inspired, it’s not just a kind of airy-fairy thing that you just have to believe, but reality is different. That’s kind of like the way the Mormons work. They’ll tell you about a complete alternate history of North America, which is different from anything that you find in archaeology.
And it’s different from all those disciplines as well. So we’ve got to be careful when we say it’s inspired, it’s God-breathed. It is also welcoming of scrutiny. We go further. It’s wonderful to read and study. Psalm 119.
You think of all those verses. And I think there’s only two verses that don’t mention or don’t refer to the word of God. We’ve read some of these verses. Psalm 119 in a sense is placed very centrally in the Bible. and here we have an unfolding of the importance of the word let’s think of it just for a second or two what we read
how can a young man cleanse his way by taking heed according to your word my whole heart I’ve sought you let me not wander from again your commandments your word have I hidden in my heart that I might not sin against you I have declared all the judgments of your Again and again he’s emphasising how wonderful this word really is. And he comes down of course to verse number 18 or something like that. Open my eyes that I may see wondrous things from your law. So we can see very clearly that it’s wonderful to study as well. And it’s worthwhile to study. Psalm 19 verse 7 to 9.
The law of the Lord is perfect. Why is it worthwhile to study? study converting the soul. The testimony of the Lord of right, why? Rejoicing the heart. And so on. You can go through that little section. I don’t want to spend too much time
on it because you know me, we’ll end up getting out late. It’s worthwhile to read and study. Remember that 2 Timothy passage I already referred to. All scripture is given by inspiration And then it goes on.
So it might be that you’re saying, well that’s okay if you’re, I don’t know, a preacher or a teacher or something like that. I can understand why you need to study, but I’m just a help. I come along to some believers. I’m just a giver. I help out in different ways. Why is it so
important to me? Well, it is because it says in this verse, unto every good work. And every gift is enhanced and developed by the depth of our understanding of the word of God. So whether you’re in the home looking after some children, or whether you are in the workplace, or wherever you are, wherever the Lord has placed you, understanding the word of God is going to help you. That is exactly what the scripture says. Now, I put out this warning when we spoke a little bit on this subject a month or two ago. Let’s not be Google Bible students.
What I mean is information, it’s just like there’s Google hanging over our heads now. We can just draw down any information we want and it just seems so simple. Well, there are big dangers with that because, as we know, you can’t become a Google doctor like that. If you tried to, it would be pretty bad for your patients. You can’t do that with the Word of God either. There is one way of truly understanding it and appreciating it, and it involves digging.
It involves coming to the text of the Scriptures. It involves looking at what the Scriptures actually say rather than just finding a million opinions on what it says. So we come to it. I mentioned again before on one occasion, we read it on our face. that’s what I mean by that is we read it worshipfully so you come to the word of God to understand about God the eternal lover of our souls we come to appreciate something of the greatness of our God so we read the scriptures in that sense on our face, we read it on our knees
what I mean by that is we read it prayerfully — not only worshipfully but prayerfully and we we take the scriptures and and we try to understand them in the presence of God and we we pray about what we understand and how we apply them in our lives so so we read it on our face on our knees on our chair you say what do you mean but I mean meditatively sitting back with the word of God in our hands comparing and contrasting in in our minds. We’re reading it as we meditate and think about it and turn it over in that more, you might say, more relaxed way. But then we read it at our desk. That’s studiously. That’s where a lot of us fall down, isn’t it? That we’re going to have to actually put work into it.
We’re going to have to actually try to understand it, have to get to our desk. And, you know, if it it was for a new job or a bigger career or whatever, we’d be so quick to get to our desk. But when it’s to get the riches of the word of God, we’re slow, aren’t we? There’s something inside us, the flesh, that stops us from getting to our desk or at our desk. So we have to be studious about it. I remember an occasion many years ago.
The girl in question, she was Oxbridge. She was a very intelligent girl. I think she got a first at Oxford or Cambridge.
we were in a bible reading, Christian girl afterwards she came out and said, I just can’t understand it and I mean we weren’t that complicated but the point is that she hadn’t even, if she had just taken 1% of her intellectual ability and taken that effort that she put into her studies, into the Bible, she would have understood perfectly what we were saying. So we’ve got to be very careful. You know, how much time are we giving to this book? How much time are we understanding? The Bible says that it’s like gold. It’s more wealthy than gold. You just think of it like,
imagine there was an announcement that went out in the Press and Journal that down in Donald’s field that found a gold mine and it was open to the public and anybody that brought a pick and shovel they could come down. The place would be full of people because it would be so desperate for the gold and yet as Christians as Christians we’re told yes we’ll have to work a little bit for it. But there’s something more than gold in this book. And yet we’re so reluctant aren’t we at times from getting at it. So just when we come to this whole idea of reading, enjoying, studying, whatever, applying the Bible in our lives, let’s remember that it’s well worth it. And the Bible will stand up to any scrutiny that we give it.
So introducing the studies, let me say, yeah, we’re going to focus on these four subjects. Now, if you want to get really technical, this is called biblical hermeneutics. But I’m only telling you that for the sake of telling you. It doesn’t really matter if we know those words or anything about them. But we do need to know about the subject matters that they contain. So we’re going to look at it under four headings.
Observation. And if I just want to break that down into a simple question, what do I see? When I come to the scriptures, what do I see? Interpretation. What does it mean? Application.
How does it apply? And how does it apply to me? and then we’ll think of another one which is maybe correlation how does it relate to other scripture? How does it relate to external facts? How does it relate to different disciplines of knowledge? And so that’s the whole thought of correlation how you relate the scripture and the truth you find to all these different disciplines.
We must remember how we approach scripture. This is the last point I’ll make in the introduction and we’ll get into observation. We must remember that we come to listen, not to speak. We come to draw from, not to impose on. And there’s two Greek words that have been coined quite recently, sort of in the last few hundred years. And one is exegesis. You might have heard somebody
saying that. Sounded very clever, didn’t it? Well, what it meant was the ex is just this thought of ek out of. It’s the Greek word for out of. And to lead. Or to draw. And what it’s saying is people are coming to the
text to draw out from the text what’s in the text. That’s the true way of studying the Bible. Because we’re giving God his place. It’s God who’s speaking. We’re trying to find out what he is saying from his text. So that’s exegesis. Drawing out of.
Not eisegesis. which is putting into or leading into. It’s this thought of the opposite of exegesis. It’s me coming with all my baggage and saying, oh, that confirms what I believe about the Bible. That wee verse, I don’t know anything about the other verses around it, but you see that wee clause right in the centre there? That confirms everything that I always thought.
That’s not… Imagine coming to a random…
Say a letter from someone that you were friendly with. And lifting a little clause and saying, see that, that tells me everything that I’ve always believed. Without even looking at the context. Without even understanding. Without even setting things aside. The baggage that we hold and the thoughts that we have.
And coming submissively, as we should, to the word of God. We’ve got to make sure that we’re doing exegesis, not eisegesis. We’re drawing out and not putting in. That’s enough of the sort of introduction.
Now the problems to avoid. Now there’s basic mistakes that I’ve come across an awful lot at different times. I’ll not mention any that have happened in Culloden.
I was at a Bible reading a number of years ago and they were speaking about this lovely passage in Hebrews chapter 2, verse 9 and 10. And you’ll see it speaks about the Lord Jesus being made a little lower More than the angels for the suffering and death and so on. And we were thinking about the Lord. And it was an enjoyable time as you know. Doing that. And then.
The brother came on to the next verse. For it was fitting for him. And he just started to speak. Of how it was fitting for the Lord to come. Now. There’s a basic problem there.
And I think it stems from two issues. One is that he didn’t finish the sentence. Because if you finish the sentence. and she realized that the him being spoken about is God, not the Lord Jesus. Okay, so if he’d looked closely and looked at the end of the sentence, he would have seen that the Lord, it was God who was making the captain of their salvation perfect through suffering. Who’s the captain of their salvation? The Lord Jesus.
So he was emphasizing and reemphasizing and saying it was fitting. This is what this means. It was fitting that the Lord Jesus would come. it was fitting for him and it was a lovely thought but it wasn’t there and so we’ve been really careful with just reading the whole paragraph never just read a verse in isolation make sure you read the paragraph that it’s set in the basic building block that we will use mostly is the one subject, the paragraph if you like and so at least read the paragraph if you’re going to make a major point about it just to check that you’re not making a big issue. I’m just saying that this is a very obvious problem.
But it’s not so obvious if you’re just focusing on the two or three words. You have to make sure you know what the whole paragraph is saying. So that’s just one of the wee problems they avoid. The other is a kind of…
There’s a kind of spiritual snobbery. That’s maybe a bit harsh. There’s a kind of thing that says, oh no, we don’t need, we don’t need any helps. We don’t need any of these, these big degrees. Isn’t that what the Lord said? Isn’t that what the Bible said
in first Corinthians chapter one and two? Is that not all worldly wisdom? Now, if we took that to its logical conclusion, we wouldn’t even have our Bibles in our hands today. William Tyndale was a great scholar of the New and Old Testament. He understood the languages. He translated it so that That the very boy with the ploughshare could read the Bible.
And not only would we not have the Bible. We wouldn’t even if we had it. We wouldn’t be able to read it. Because there was a time when you sat on your mummy’s knee. And you learned to read. That was education.
And the better you know how to read. The better you can understand some of the words of the Bible. It’s very basic. The Lord doesn’t in any way disparage true proper education and wisdom. worldly wisdom is when the honour and glory is not being brought back to God it’s pride and being puffed up and it says at the end of chapter 2 of 1 Corinthians let him who boasts boast in the Lord it’s about putting God out of his own universe and saying he doesn’t matter and then careering on in your own wisdom now that’s not saying there’s anything wrong with understanding and scholarship and trying to come to the scriptures using your intellect because the scriptures is very clear that we are to love the Lord our God with all our mind as well as with all our heart. So we’ve got to use our intellect as Fanny, not Fanny Crosby, as one of our other esteemed sisters once said, take my intellect and use every power as thou dost choose.
okay so we’ve got to think this is methodical yes but we’re coming to the word of God and we’re going to give it our best both intellectually and we’re going to of course completely be dependent on the Holy Spirit it cannot be done without the Holy Spirit as we know we cannot even see without God giving us sight in our eyes and so when it comes to spiritual things doubly that is so So we need the Spirit of God as 1 Corinthians 2 says. So just as we read the verse, open my eyes that we may understand wondrous things out of your law. That’s the prayer that we should have as we come to the Word of God. Now, here’s a puzzle. Some people will look at this puzzle, 4 by 4 square, and they’ll say there’s 17 squares, but they’re not right. Sure they’re not. And some will say, well, there’s 21,
and they’re not right. And some will maybe even say there’s 25, but they’re not right either. In fact, there’s 30. I did want a pointer.
I’ll use it.
So we’ve got the 16 on the inside, 1 on the outside, 17, 18, 19, this isn’t going to work very well, 20, 21, I’ll tell you the rest later on. No time. There’s definitely 30 there. But the point I’m making is a good point, and the point is this. Often you have to revisit and revisit and reread and reread the Word of God to see exactly what it’s saying. First glances will not do, and then turning to the commentary.
You need to give the time for this whole idea of observing the Scriptures. So let’s go on further here. Let’s give a few pictures to illustrate this.
back in the day, before text messages and emails and the rest, if someone liked someone else, they would send a love letter. Isn’t that sweet? And you imagine receiving this, and you know, every word is worthy of consideration. And you read it, and you reread it, and maybe what she meant was this, or what he meant was this. That’s the way we’re to look at the Scriptures. scriptures. The Lord, you know, we’re to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and
strength and we have received from him a revelation so we should have that same way of coming to the scriptures. Not three minutes before we fall asleep because we think it’s our duty.
Why should we offer that up to the Lord and pretend that we love him?
It’s so easy to get into those habits, isn’t it?
every word is worthy of consideration every meaning should be teased out a detective he hunts down every clue and there’s the other point that I was making earlier
I think it’s in American law actually that jurors are specifically requested to leave their baggage in the hallway there’s a purpose in that when you’re going into the jury box you leave your baggage behind. Mentally and all that. So when we come to the scriptures, we might have all these ideas about what this text already says, but we’re going to need to strip them down and leave them behind and come to it fresh if we’re to understand it properly. Sherlock Holmes, there’s a wee quote for you. You see but you do not observe.
We’ve got to learn to read tirelessly.
tirelessly repeatedly
now that’s an interesting one I think it was G. Campbell Morgan the great preacher from I think he was English originally he said very specifically that he read the Bible 40 or 50 times before he even started studying a passage he read the passage in question 40 or 50 times before he started studying in preparation for his sermons. 40 or 50 times. How many books of the Bible have I read 40 or 50 times? I wouldn’t want the number to be put up there, to be honest. We’ve got to have that tireless, repeated diligence in our reading.
Reading it purposefully, trying to see the purpose in it all. Also, I’ll just, for the sake of time, mention this one and move on. read it imaginatively now if you’re like me there’s a sense in which as I say their familiarity can breed ignorance, you come to a passage and you’ve already highlighted three or four verses and your mind lazily drops to those verses and you rethink the thoughts you had last time maybe you’re better taking another version where it’s not just so familiar, and reading it. Or maybe you should put it in the audio Bible.
Because you have to be purposeful and imaginative. You’re trying to understand what God is saying from his word. It is hard for us. I’ve mentioned there nobody probably after 1930 has had it easy learning to read. Because everything has been bullet points and broken down to the smallest degree. And then in the last 30 years it’s got even worse because it’s all streamed in their eyes.
We don’t actually need to think very much at all. And so it’s second-hand stuff coming out of our mouth because it’s been not even processed by our eyes and our brains. And it’s a problem because then you come to a book which is 1,000 pages long and you’re saying, oh, goodness me, I can hardly read the newspaper. paper. You see, that means you have to learn to read. I’m not being, Michael mentioned it on the way in, he didn’t know whether I should take the magazine, he wasn’t sure whether I could read it or not. But there might be an element of truth to it, I was thinking.
You know, I’m a child of the age and I’m in too as well, and people have had to relearn and rethink and develop in their reading. You think it’s like riding a bike, once you you do it, you can do it. Some people can write them very well and some people are just about hanging on.
So we need to really think to ourselves, do I need to develop my reading abilities here? Leave that for there. Statistics suggest that we remember 10% of what we hear. I don’t know, I haven’t checked the statistics to be fair, but it came from a book, this bit. 50% of what we see and hear and 90% of what what we see, hear and do. So after finishing a passage, after understanding a little bit more what it says, why not rewrite it in our own words?
Why not say, well, I’m going to draw a picture or a diagram that illustrates it? Because that will fix it in our mind better than just maybe the basics will do. Let’s come on quickly. The particulars to observe, right? about thoughtfulness, about being thoughtful about terms. Now, the word terms, it’s words, but it’s not words.
What I mean is, I mean, light is a word, but you have to put it in its context to find out what term it, the term is. So, for instance, if I was saying, the light in the study no longer works, box, it would mean something different than if I was lifting up a box and saying that box is light. Same word, two different terms. A given word in a given context. And that brings us to the whole thought of context. You come to words like this, you know, if you were reading your, to come back to the love letter, if you were reading it and a word was used you didn’t understand, you’d be scrabbling for the dictionary. It’s not
not a bad thing to do sometimes. The meaning of words, we’ll not deal with that in a lot of detail today. Time beats us. Looking carefully, focusing on the non-routine over the routine. What I mean is, every word is important in the scriptures, but if there’s 25 this in the sentence, I mean, you can kind of get what that means. You maybe want to focus on the word redemption if you don’t understand that properly or something like that.
So there has to be a focus on it as you’re reading through and saying I’m not going to allow this verse to go past with me not knowing what it’s meaning. Not understanding it. I’m just casually allowing my eyes to go on to something else. But there is an importance about putting the terms into their given context. So particularly as he observes. Searching for structure.
this is putting the words into what we might term frames so you’re reading down a chapter or something like that recently I was up in Shetland and we were looking at 1 Corinthians 11
you’re just reading down that chapter and you say to yourself is there some way that this chapter easily divides easily breaks down
there is a very easy way, you come to verse number 2 and it says, I praise you in what you’re doing. And then you come to verse number 17, but there’s this thing that I don’t praise you about. So you know fine rightly that at least from verse 2 to verse 34, there’s two main sections. That’s true. And then you start to look at it a little bit more and look for any connectives. So you look at the words, like the first word in a sentence, even in a verse, although a verse isn’t a good unit because it’s just imposed. You know, for
it tells you that you have to look back. What’s he saying for? Therefore you have to look back. Moreover, but a contrast. So you have to start to think down the passage. Learn to think down the passage logically. A logical progression down the
passage. You can take the paragraph itself and start to break it down Down into its clauses and phrases and all that. I don’t have time to deal with that at the minute. There’s key terms that come up. Like when you’re thinking of 1 Corinthians 11. Just again on that for a second.
You look down that verse 2 to verse 16. And it speaks about Christ. But it mentions him as the head.
Christ is the head of every man. The head of every man is Christ. And then you come down into the next section. where it’s speaking about the Lord’s Supper and it doesn’t speak of Christ as a head it speaks of him as the Lord. And six, seven times you read the word Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord. So you’re starting to see that these two sections are very different and then you ask yourself the question why but that’s a little bridge into next week, the next time we’re here.
That’s interpretive after that. So we’re just observing at this time. You come into Romans and you see again and again this thought of righteousness. Righteousness, righteousness. So you find out that the book has a big theme in it. It’s the theme of righteousness.
You notice, if you’re reading through it for the 40th time, hopefully, that in chapter 1, it says that Paul is separated unto the gospel of God. And then you come to chapter 16, and again, what according to my gospel? You see, there’s a gospel in chapter 1 and 16. He seems to be bookending the whole book with the thought of the gospel. I wonder what the main theme of Romans is. It’s the gospel.
So this is just simple observation and note making and underlining. You can do all that. But if you’re coming to a passage fresh, I suggest you don’t come with a Bible that’s already underlined. And already has notes everywhere. Because you’re wanting to try and take out everything else to look at what the text is actually saying itself. So that’s searching for structure.
We could say more. Yes, actually we will say one or two wee things. In fact, I’ll leave that for your consideration. I’ll just mention one or two. You can look and you can see that there are things that are obviously emphasised when you’re reading. So if, for instance, you come to Exodus and you find out that from chapter 25 to 40 it speaks about the tabernacle and its construction and all that, you start to realize that this is an important subject.
So redemption at the start and then God dwelling with his people. And we’re starting a wee bridge into interpretation there. Because you realize that this is a big issue with God. 15 chapters of Exodus dedicated to the tabernacle. Repeated themes. You think about it verily, verily.
How many times, 20 times or something like that in John’s Gospel? emphasizing the truthfulness of the Lord Jesus but bringing attention to the particular point he’s making at that time so let’s take one minute and look at Luke chapter 15 in our minds you’ll remember the lost coin the lost sheep and the lost son when you say well there you go you have repetition. It’s all related to the start when the Lord Jesus was challenged as to why he was eating and drinking with publicans and sinners. And you say, well, the big theme here, the big emphasis is on an answer to that question. Why is the Lord Jesus eating and drinking with publicans and sinners? And then you look and say, well, it’s being repeated, but they’re not all alike. There’s
a difference in the last one. So it says twice about the fact when he finds that which is lost, he rejoices. And then you come to the last one, it doesn’t say that about the son. Why? Because the son had a responsibility. He wasn’t a piece of silver. He wasn’t a sheep.
He was a son he needed to return. He needed to turn around and come back. It wasn’t just that God was sovereignly going going to lift him and bring him back. It’s the other side of the coin. So you can see that just from a simple looking at searching the structure and so on. Finding the literary form, and I’m only, if you can give me three minutes, five minutes, no more after that.
Finding the literary form, the Bible’s good literature, so you’ve got to think to yourself, what kind of literature am I reading here? You know, there’s history and there’s poetry and there’s wisdom and there’s apocalyptic and there’s logical and there’s, you know, letters and there’s prose and, you know, these are all various types of literature. So just looking at the passage you’re in. So if you’re in Proverbs, how you read it is slightly different than how you would read a letter. So when the Proverbs say something like this, a soft answer turns away wrath. And you say to yourself, that’s a contradiction in the Bible.
Because when you go to Matthew’s account of the crucifixion, it’ll speak about the Lord Jesus giving soft answers and yet the judgment’s still game. Not at all. You’ve got to understand what a proverb is. A proverb is a general statement that is generally true. That’s the purpose of a proverb. It’s not speaking about those things that break the law.
is saying that normally, in the normal circumstances, if you’re wise enough and you give a soft answer, what’s going to happen is you’re going to avert the anger of the other person. So you’ve got to understand the type of literature you’re looking at as well.
You’ve got to appreciate the atmosphere.
You see, you come to Galatians. You say to yourself, well, I’m just going to read through Galatians. And then all of a sudden, you look at it a wee bit more and you realise that he doesn’t say anything complimentary about them at all at the start. Which is not like Paul. And then you look at it again and you say, I marvel that you be so soon removed from him who has called you into the grace of Christ onto another gospel.
He starts so abruptly and intensely and there’s this thought of crisis and he’ll go on and he’ll say, I’m afraid for you, my brothers. I travelled in birth over you and I’m afraid you’re moving away from the gospel. you see you’ve got to get that atmosphere of crisis if you’re the understander and we could look at the other examples there you know you think of the comfort of John 14 let not your heart be troubled and so on and but what you’re trying to do in all these things is you’re trying to understand all the texts so that you can build this bridge into the whole thought of interpretation that’s where you’re going you’re going into interpretation but they’re separate things. You need to come and observe what the text says first. You’ve got to understand what the Bible is saying. And it is a two-way bridge. When you understand it better, when you
understand the text better and then you understand what it’s saying, what it means, then you’ll come back and look at it again and say, oh, I didn’t notice that little bit. That happened to me the other day, but I’ll leave it for now. So what you can do at the end of it, in your mind, not necessarily, but you can paint a picture of that passage. And you can have the background, you can have that atmosphere, if you like, in the background. The crisis atmosphere if you’re in Galatians. You can see the main focus.
If there’s different players in it, you can have them in their position around, you can give the colour to the scene. And I’m going to put up a very famous painting here for a second. Don’t worry about it, I’m not going Catholic. like. But just look at it for a second with me. You’ll see what they’re doing here. In
the centre you have the lamb standing. And if you look very carefully there, the lamb has been wounded, obviously. And behind you have the cross empty. You’ll see that. And you’ve all these adoring multitudes around. And these all represent different types of people. You know you have the scholars
and you have the martyrs over here and all these different groups of people around the angels and their attention, their focus is drawn to the Lamb. And what the painter is trying to do with all his inadequacies and as I say, saying that he got everything right here, I’m just pointing what he’s doing is he’s trying to focus us on On the cross, on Christ, on the risen lamb. And so really in our mind it’s not a bad thing if you think that way. It’s after you’ve done a passage to in your mind think of a picture that illustrates it. Because if you do that it’ll stick in your head better. Some other people they work better with charts or they work better with a table or whatever.
But whatever you do, what you’re trying to do is not only observe but retain. what you’ve observed. So I must finish. In conclusion, let the Bible speak to you. Work at observing the particulars before you make your judgment. Okay?
Work in an inductive basis. Induction. Okay? The particulars before you make your conclusion. Pray over it. Don’t get distracted into any secondary sources.
You notice I’ve not mentioned the commentary yet. and I like them, in case you didn’t know but you have to understand what the text is saying and then you can find your own method, tweak it, whatever that incorporates what we have learned and enjoy mining that’s a couple of references I have at the end if you want to look into it in more detail I would recommend the Hendricks one, which is the top one this one is Robert Traina a wee bit more detailed, a bit more heavy reading Hannah got a hold of this one and she decided that when it said eat the book she would take it literally so I wouldn’t do that and that other one is recommended as to how to read believe it or not and I’m going to read that next myself shall we pray
our father we thank thee for this time we can spend looking into how to look at thy word we pray that thou wouldst give us that desire and that help to fervently desire the pure milk of the word that we may grow thereby. We leave ourselves in thy presence and pray thy blessing on us in the Saviour’s name. Amen.
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Read transcript of Looking at the Book: 2. Interpretation
Transcript produced automatically and lightly edited; it may contain errors.
We’re just going to turn again to Psalm 119. You noticed I kind of referenced that once or twice in the readings and from the letters and so on. But we’re dealing with the subject of looking at the book, how to go about Bible reading, Bible study. And we’ve come to the subject of interpretation, which is the second main subject after observation. So we’re going to read Psalm 119 again, verse 33 to 35. Psalm 119, 33 to 35.
Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes, and I will keep it to the end. Give me understanding, and I shall keep your law. Indeed, I shall observe it with my whole heart. Make me walk in the path of your commandments, for I delight in it. We turn over to Ezra, back a little bit in the Bible to Ezra.
Ezra chapter 7.
Ezra 7 and verse number 6: this Ezra came up from Babylon and he was a skilled scribe of the law of Moses which the Lord God of Israel had given. The king granted him all his requests according to the hand of the Lord his God upon him. Verse number 10: For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord and to do it and to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel. We know the Lord blesses the reading of his word to us.
So we’ve started this whole subject of how to read, enjoy, study the Bible and we’ve spoken about Bible reading and Bible study close together because sometimes people get a little bit afraid when you speak about Bible study. But we spoke last week on how the Bible was worthy of study. We mentioned the fact that it was God-breathed, inspired of God, and it was worthwhile and wealth-giving, as we can find from Psalm 19 itself in verse number 10. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold. We looked at some of the dangers of how we look at the word, the importance of properly observing how we should read it. Our attitude should be checked and in the right place.
We should read it on our face in that sense, worshipfully. On our knees, prayerfully. On our chair, meditatively. At our desk, studiously, hard work involved. On our feet, attentively, ready to act on what we see. So that’s kind of just background on what we were dealing with.
We were dealing with observation, what do I see? And the importance of reading properly, of really reading repeatedly as well. We’re going to deal today with the whole subject of interpretation. That’s not the question, what do I see? But the question, what does it mean? So I read something, what really does it mean?
You see, we’re going to find out that there are certain barriers that might hinder us from understanding the original meaning of the scripture. And we can take those barriers out of the way and it helps us a lot to understand really what the meaning is. Then, of course, we’ll go on and look at application. How does it apply to me? And then eventually, in the last week, we’ll try to draw things together and we’ll be dealing with correlation. How does it relate to other scripture?
How does it relate to other disciplines of knowledge? How does the word of God fit into all that big gamut of information? But firstly, we’ll deal with this whole idea of interpretation. And I have seven M’s and I’ve got about 33 minutes. So I’ll try, I’ll try.
First of all, we want to deal with the meaning of interpretation. Interpretation. What does it mean? Now, it’s a kind of funny thing because, of course, it means to explain the meaning. That would be a very basic dictionary definition of interpretation. If you want to get a bit more closer, more specific to Scripture, to discover the original intent behind the words of the author.
You will notice I put a small A and a large A there. I mean, if you’re dealing with the epistles, Paul had an intent when he was writing to Corinth. He had a particular message that he wanted to bring to the Corinthians. But of course, below that and above that and deeper than that was the message that the Holy Spirit was communicating, not only to that initial assembly, but to all that call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, as we read in chapter 1 and verse number 1. So really what we’re trying to do is to discover the original intent behind the words of the author, i.e. God, the Holy Spirit.
That’s the whole meaning of interpretation.
Secondly, we have to ask ourselves, what is the motive behind our wanting to understand what the Bible means? In fact, we maybe should take a step back and ask ourselves, do we really want to understand? I mean, that’s something we have to — there’s a lot of questions here we have to ask and they’re a wee bit uncomfortable. I mean it is hard work at times to understand what a passage is meaning. Am I prepared to put in the effort? Do I really want to know?
Do I view it as the goal we were speaking about the other week? It’s possibly uncomfortable. It’s not an easy thing to find out that maybe you’ve been basing your life or your assumptions on something that’s not really what the Bible is saying. It’s just what you thought it was saying. It’s not really very easy to come to scripture and unpack and put your bags in the hallway as we spoke about the other time and leave aside all our pre-ideas and come just to listen to God from his word and try to gain what he is saying, what he is meaning by what he says. So do we really want to understand? That’s the first question we should ask ourselves. Or are we comfortable with just reading our chapter or reading our few verses and taking out of it what we want to take out of it? So that’s a good question to ask. And why do we really want to understand? If it is the case we do want to understand, is it merely just so that we can discuss it or debate it, or perhaps just out of idle curiosity that we want to know what God is saying? Because if we’re going to get to the real truth of a scripture passage, we have to do it, a, by the help of the Holy Spirit, and we have to do it, b, with an honest heart. To this man will I look, says the scriptures — the person who, what, what does the Lord say? The person who trembles at my word, the person who’s willing to rank himself under the word of God and take it for what it is really meaning.
Ezra is a great example of this. That’s why we brought up this passage from Ezra. He’s a great example of how we should approach the word of God.
It says that he was a skilled scribe, a ready scribe. In other words, he had the word of God at his fingertips.
It said that the hand of the Lord his God was upon him. In fact, if you read further down that passage in Ezra chapter 7, it actually tells us that he was given a wisdom. He had a God-given wisdom.
And you ask yourself, how is it that this has come about? Verse number 10 is key to it all. For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord and to do it. So in other words, to seek not just the law, but the law of the Lord. In other words, he was wanting to find the Lord in his word. We were talking about the love letter last week, somebody that you really are attracted to, and all of a sudden you receive a letter from them and you pour over every line and that kind of thing because you want to understand the person behind the letter. And so when we come to the scriptures and the interpretation that we want to get from the scripture, it’s because we want to know the Lord, we want to understand the Lord better. And we want to also do what he says.
So that’s the right motive if we’re to understand and interpret the scripture properly. So the meaning, the motive, the message of interpretation. Now this is important. We’ll maybe come back to it in different — we’ll certainly come back to it in some measure in the next study. But there is one interpretation. There are many applications.
You’ve probably heard that statement. But that one interpretation might have several different depths. So for instance, I could go to Isaiah chapter 6. You remember that scene where Isaiah looks upon the Lord high and lifted up the year that King Uzziah died? And you think about it and say, well, it’s emphasising the sovereignty of God. You know, kings come and kings go.
Here’s the Lord still high and lifted up on his throne in the temple. And that is one of the major lessons. But it’s not the whole lesson. There’s more to that interpretation. So you might find out when you look a little bit more, it’s in the year that King Uzziah died, the king that was in affront of the holiness of God by going into the presence of God when God had specifically forbidden him to do so and leprosy rose up on his forehead. And in that temple, that place where he had gone in, as it were, and he had broken the rules, we see high and lifted up the one who is the true king priest.
And so you’re finding out that there’s a deeper level of interpretation. They’re not contradictory. They’re both interpretive of the passage. One’s emphasising his sovereignty. Another emphasising his holiness. You see there is one interpretation.
But there are different depths of interpretation. Different angles if you like. But there is one interpretation. I’ll tell you why that’s important. The same passage can’t mean two opposite things. It can’t mean black and white, and I can’t come to the passage, say to me it means black and to you it might mean white and that’s fine. It doesn’t. There is one interpretation. So we’re moving towards that one interpretation. That’s why we do Bible study together as a community, as an assembly. That’s why we do Bible study on our own. And that’s why we bring it to each other, because we should be moving towards that ultimate goal of finding the true interpretation, of understanding the Lord better. And so there is one interpretation, many applications.
So you’re going to be able to take that subject of Isaiah 6 and the holiness of the Lord, and you’ll be able to apply it in your life in a particular way. And I’ll be able to apply it to my life in a particular way because I’ve learned something about the character of the God of the Word. So this message of interpretation is really important. What about the must of interpretation? Now, all Christians do interpret the scriptures.
If you read your Bible at all and try to apply it at all, there’s some way in which you’re doing biblical exegesis. Oh, well, you hope it’s exegesis. You hope you’re taking it from the passage. Biblical hermeneutics, interpretation, to use the big terms that people use in seminaries and things like that. But basically what you’re doing is you’re finding the meaning of the passage and trying to apply it in your life. But there are barriers to understanding that we must know about, because if I take a passage and I wrench it out of its context and so on, I can actually make it mean something it doesn’t mean.
So take a text from its context. It’s a pretext. It’s not what people say. It’s a pretext for whatever you want it to mean. And so that’s not good. It’s not good hermeneutically.
It’s not good practically in your Christian life. You see, the barriers to understanding are things like time. So we’ve passed 40 centuries since parts of the Word of God are written. It was a different time, a different place, geographic barriers. History barriers. You imagine how much more important, how much more essential it was to understand how in Exodus 15, when they’re singing their song of redemption as they come across the Red Sea, is to remember that the most important dictator in the world was at the bottom of the Red Sea,
and that Egypt, the great empire of the time, the superpower of its time, had been crushed by the Lord and God had brought them out with a strong arm, it says in Scripture, doesn’t it? And they’re singing the song of redemption. You think of the freedom from slavery. Well, that might mean something to us now, but it meant something really specific and vivid to them then. So we have to understand that there are time and history barriers that we must get over if we’re really to interpret it properly. There are cultural barriers. It’s hard to understand
this whole idea of meats offered to idols in 1 Corinthians chapter 8 unless we know something about Corinth and the idols temple and the marketplace and the fact that there was all that abundance of meat that was then put into the marketplace, and the Christians and anybody, if they wanted meat they would go along to the market to buy meat, and very often that meat was offered to idols. You see that helps you to understand exactly what Paul’s saying and why he’s saying it. So there are these barriers that we have to kind of overcome, push out of the way, if we’re to get to the original interpretation of this passage. And God has given us the keys and the ability and the education that we can do that more easily very often than even other generations could do it. And it’s good to remember that we stand at a very interesting point in history that way and we should be very thankful for it. Now none of this is taking away the fact that we need the Holy Spirit to understand the passage. There is no doubt about it. We sang “open thy word of truth that I might see thy message written clear and plain for me,” but just the way in the gospel we need the Holy Spirit to be saved, we also need to hear the message of salvation, we also need to understand it, we also need to believe. So there’s the divine side and there is the human responsibility side, and sometimes we don’t emphasise the human responsibility side enough. And so here we have — there are issues, there are things that we can do to remove these barriers if we are going to interpret the scripture correctly. There are communication barriers. You think about it like this. The Old Testament is written in Hebrew, mainly. A bit of Aramaic splashed in there. And the New Testament is written in Greek. Now there’s not too many Greek and Hebrew experts among us.
And I don’t claim to be one at all. Some of us know a smattering of a few words. But none of us could hold conversation in ancient Hebrew or ancient Greek very easily. And so here we’ve got to remember that here we have a translation from the original Greek and Hebrew, and so there’s language communication issues here as well, and all these can be got over in some measure. And of course then there’s misinterpretation barriers, we’ll think of that in a minute or so. There’s the whole thing that actually
somebody’s come to this passage before you, and sometimes filled your mind with what they’ve already thought. And so you come to a passage and you’re already saying, yep, yep, that fits, yep, yep. So there’s that issue of trying to clear away the debris so that we really get to what the truth of the passage is saying. What about mistakes in interpretation? I’m going to just take a minute or two in this and then we’ll move on. Mistakes in interpretation.
The first mistake that’s elementary and it’s really unforgivable, and I made this mistake a while ago, so I’m not saying that it doesn’t happen to me, is misreading the text.
Misreading the text. You see, if you go back to the beginning and you remember Eve in the garden, you’ll remember what happened. The first thing that happened was that Eve, when she quoted the words of God, she misquoted them. I don’t think it was a purposeful thing or a malicious thing by Eve at that point. God said thou shalt surely die, and she said
you’ll die.
God said thou shalt not eat of it, she said thou shalt not eat of it or touch it lest you die. You say, well it doesn’t matter very much. Well it does. It was the Lord God that spoke to her. She said God. Not the Lord God. You say what’s that emphasis to everyone? Well the Lord God was the one who cared for them.
The covenant keeping, the caring God. The God of personal relationship to man. And she said God — that’s the distant God. The God of creation and so on. So there’s just these little subtle — and the devil is quick to seize upon those differences.
So there’s misreading. We’ve got to be careful when we’re reading the Bible that we’re reading exactly what it’s saying. For instance, classic example that you hear all the time, money is the root of all evil. Of course it’s not. That’s a misunderstanding of that text completely. It says the love of money is the root of all evil.
See the difference? It’s speaking about greed. Greed after money. It’s not speaking about the money as itself. So the love of money. And then if you look a little bit more closely
at it, you’ll find out the “the” isn’t really there either. So what it’s saying is the love of money is a root or one of many roots into evil in that sense. And then you look a little bit more closely and then you find out it says the love of money is the root of all evil. What does it mean? It probably means every kind of evil, the whole gamut of evil can come out of a greedy heart. That’s really what it’s saying.
So you can see how just misreading the text is a problem. It’s a problem that we all can have and we all can do. Distorting of the text. You get a JW knocking on your door and saying, John chapter 1, it’s saying that the Lord Jesus, not that he is God, but that he is a god. And of course that’s a distortion. It’s the only version you’ll ever find that says that, because it’s a complete distortion of the Greek language. And of course it’s just to make a point that they’re trying to make about the Lord Jesus. So people come and they distort the word of God as well. And then of course there’s a contradicting. Sometimes it comes to a stage where they just plainly contradict. They make God a liar. 1 John chapter 1.
If you say you’ve not sinned, you’re making God a liar. God’s word says you’ve sinned. And some people just jettison parts of the Bible and say what they want to say. And so that’s a contradicting of scripture. And that’s in all these first three — I think you can see in Genesis chapter 3 because the devil eventually says you shall not surely die. God said you shall surely die. The devil
said you shall not surely die. There’s a contradiction of the devil in that. A contradicting. And we’ve got to be very careful that we’re not doing that when we come to Bible study. There’s a subjectivism that sometimes we have. We live in a culture that it’s all me centred.
Egocentric is not the word. It’s all about me. And so I come to the Bible, and this verse that has nothing directly to do with me other than telling me something about God’s character. Say, for instance, he that honours me, I will honour. Well, we know we can take the principle out of that and see that if I honour the Lord in my life, God will honour me.
Maybe not in this life, but eventually. So we can bring the principle out of the scripture. We can interpret it and apply it to our circumstances. But sometimes we can use the Bible — and we’ll talk about this a little bit more in the next study, number three — as a kind of magic box, and we’re taking things out of context and we’re using the scripture in a way that we don’t have any authority to do from scripture. We’ve got to be really careful about that. That’s what we might term subjectivism. We’ll come back to that next week, God willing. And then there’s a relativism that sometimes creeps in. You know, the Lord Jesus said I am the way, the truth and the life, and people will say, well yeah, I agree with that. Yes, he’s one of the ways. That’s not what it says. We live in a culture that
is very relativistic and everybody’s opinion has to be given equal weight. Otherwise you’re looked upon as intolerant. And yet we’re not dealing with people, because we are to tolerate people. We’re dealing with views that don’t have equal weight. And we’re dealing with the whole subject of truth. Eternal essential truth.
And so relativism is a problem. It can affect us. And even in our interpretation. We better keep going. There is a kind of metaphor I’ll use for interpretation here.
Just for a moment.
Observation gives us the foundation. So we’ve observed the text. We’ve maybe read a couple of translations. We’ve come to it. Honestly. And tried to understand.
What do I see? What are the words that are here? What is the paragraph that’s before me? What you’re doing, it’s giving you the kind of foundation. And then your interpretation is built upon top of that. So you’re building a superstructure upon a solid foundation.
Now, if you don’t know what the words are saying, and you haven’t looked at the text properly, then your foundation is faulty, and you’re liable to build a superstructure that falls on you eventually. So that’s the importance of a sound foundation through observation, as we’re going to see. They’re very close together, but what happens is, if I’m looking at the text and I’m asking questions of the text, I’m interrogating the text, if you like to use that expression, what I find is I’m moving from observation to interpretation very quickly. You’re bringing a bridge from one to the other and it’s through questions. So the old — wasn’t it
Rudyard Kipling — I’ll not remember the poem but he spoke about the six honest serving men, what was it, why and where and how and what and when and so on and wherefore. You see you’re asking those questions of the text. When you ask those questions of the text you’re starting to say to yourself, what does this mean? You’re moving from observation to interpretation. And when you understand what the passage is meaning, very often you have to go back to observation. Because you’ll find something else in it. And you’ll move between observation and interpretation. But they are separate things and have to be seen as such.
Let’s look at methods of interpretation, just for the last ten minutes or so. Method of interpretation. Repetition. The first five C’s — I’m going to give you five C’s. One of them kind of is a small C, the rest are bigger.
Content. This is down to the whole idea that we’ve spoken about. Of good observation will have helped you. Because you know what the scriptures are now. You have understood what they are. And perhaps understood at a basic level what they’re saying.
So you might have used several versions of the Bible. I’ve got a handout, I’ll put it at the back afterwards, of maybe just helping people understand what types of versions there are of the Bible. And also secondary helps as well, but we’ll speak about that in a minute. So you might have looked at several versions. You might, if you’re studying a bit more deeply, you might be using an interlinear as well, something like that. And you’ve understood what the content is.
You might even have taken a Bible dictionary like Vine’s off the shelf and you might look at a word and try and understand it a little bit better. But it’s the content first of all. That’s the first thing. And then having got the content, assuring yourself what you’re reading is as close and accurate as you can make it to the text. Then you move on to the context. The context.
Now the context, you’ll see here, there’s a literary context, a historical, a geographical, cultural, and there’s a theological context. You say, how are you going to get all through those in a few minutes? Well, let’s try it just for a minute. When we’re speaking about literary context, this was a thing I did in the Home Bible study years ago, maybe this helps a wee bit. You’ll notice the middle, the problem passage, that’s the passage you’re trying to understand.
And then there’s the context of the paragraph in which it’s set. What is the flow of thought in that particular paragraph? And then you have to set that inside the book context. What is the general character of the book in which it’s written? For instance, if it’s written to the Corinthians and it’s dealing with local church issues, there’s a good chance it’s something to do with a local church. And then there’s the overall context.
Of the Bible — if it’s saying something like to do evil is a good thing, well you know you’ve got the whole Bible against that so you must be misinterpreting what that verse is saying. So you’re putting it into a literary context. And of course you bring in the genre of the literature as well at that point. But we’ll come back to that in a minute. There, you didn’t think you would see that.
Coming back here, historical. Historical. So what I mean by this is a bit what I’ve already said about — you have to set it inside the historical parameters in which it’s written. So if it’s written about Egypt and a pharaoh, or it’s written about Corinth as I mentioned and it’s, you know, the nature of the city of Corinth and its immorality and so on, you have to set things in that cultural and historical setting. If there’s big events of history happening around about it, make sure you get them there. There’s geographical — sometimes you don’t understand the Bible because you haven’t taken a map and seen exactly what’s happening. You’ll be tracing the journeys of the Lord, etc., etc. There’s ways in which maps can be very useful and helpful at this point as well, just setting things in context. And then of course there’s theological. I’ll mention that briefly. There’s a word here I’ve used, progressive revelation. It’s really, really important both through the Old Testament and through the New Testament. Genesis as we know is the seed plot of the Old Testament, of the whole Bible, and you’ll see of course the capstone is Revelation, the answer to Genesis in many ways.
Of course if you’re Job and you read a passage and you say something like — Job said, he spoke about there being no daysman, there’s been nobody in between to arbitrate between him and God and this lawsuit that’s ongoing, and he speaks about needing an advocate, needing a daysman, needing a mediator. You can’t start screaming at Job and saying Job, of course there is, there’s the Lord Jesus. You understand why? Because the Lord hadn’t come, that wasn’t revealed. So you have to set it into the theological content of what you already have, knowledge that he had at the time. It’s not that he was saying something wrong. He was saying it
was something that was incomplete. The answer is found later in the scriptures. And so we’ve got to be careful with that, how we understand the context in which we fit it, the amount of the knowledge of God and the revelation of God that’s been given at that particular time. So that’s helpful when we come to things like Genesis 22 just springs to mind. You say it says in the Bible child sacrifice is wrong. And you’re right.
And the Lord abhors it. And you’re right. But it says it way after Genesis 22. So Abraham didn’t know that. It hadn’t been revealed to him. So that helps us if we’re dealing with someone who’s saying,
but surely child sacrifice. Well you can say, well that’s fine, but it wasn’t revealed at this point. And God was going to overrule that situation, as we know. So we’ve got to be careful with our context. You can take Luke chapter 2 as an example, just for two seconds.
I’ve said that before in my time. Just for two seconds, take Luke chapter 2. You’ll remember the birth of the Lord Jesus and the angels on the hilltop and they’re singing, they’re speaking to the shepherds and they’re saying glory to God in the highest, and they’re saying unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And you set it in its literary context and you find out this. That there at the start of the passage is Caesar Augustus. And the whole world
is focused on Caesar and what he’s doing. And then you find out a number of verses further down that the whole of heaven couldn’t be farther focused from Caesar. It’s focused on a baby in a manger. You see the literary context just helps you to see that. Just reading the passage helps you to understand the meaning that comes out. The historical setting.
You find out if you look a little bit into history that Caesar Augustus was the first one to take the name of saviour and lord to himself officially. Now it was given to Caesars before that but he was the first one to take it officially to himself. So we have a guy who more or less says to himself, I am a saviour, Caesar the Lord, at the start of the passage. God says, no, no, no. The saviour is Christ the Lord. You see those two words.
And you say, well, you’re just developing from your understanding of the passage and the context historically. You understand a little bit more about the passage itself. We could continue. You can then compare it. We’re going on to the whole subject of comparison. Content, context, comparison.
The greatest interpreter of scripture is scripture. So you take a parallel passage. You look at the birth of the Lord Jesus in Matthew 2. And also in Luke 2 and also in Matthew 1. And you find out when you look at that. Well isn’t it wonderful because Luke 2,
it all has about it from
Mary’s standpoint. Luke 1 and 2. And then you go over to Matthew and it’s all from Joseph’s standpoint. Isn’t that wonderful? And then you think to yourself, well maybe that’ll help me in the genealogies, and of course it does because the genealogy in Luke is probably
Mary’s genealogy through her grandparent. The genealogy in Matthew is clearly Joseph’s genealogy. And that helps when there’s seeming discrepancies between the two. But anyway, comparing Scripture with Scripture is extremely important. This is where a concordance comes in helpful.
The use of the same word. You say to yourself, well, what does this word mean? You might look at a Bible dictionary like Vine’s and say well that’s helping me a bit, but what about the other times it’s used in this book or in the New Testament, and you lift down Strong’s Concordance and you see all the references to that same word in the Bible and you start to look at them and all of a sudden there’s a pattern develops and you start to understand what the word means.
Character studies again, using your concordance. How many times has Abraham referred to in the New Testament? Well let’s find out, let’s find out how he’s used and what it’s talking about and so on. So you can see that comparing scripture with scripture in this way helps us to understand what the scripture is saying. Culture I’ve already mentioned, so I’ll not really go back over that. I will just mention da Vinci’s masterpiece, and it’s been up there and it’ll be intriguing for us all to look at this. Of course, it’s kind of very faulty. I mean, it has its limitations.
I don’t think it’s trying to be too theologically correct, as you can imagine. But there are some things that, you know, when we apply and forget about culture, we apply our culture to the setting. And that’s exactly what he’s done. And he has set them all at a table on chairs. And that wasn’t the way, they were reclined. Okay, so that’s the first thing.
He set them all along one side of the table. Now that’s not the way it would have happened either. And of course it’s light outside. And we know it was night. And then you look at the roof and you find out it’s 15th century. So it’s about 1,500 years out.
I’m not trying to be funny. I’m just trying to make the point that he was looking at it through his eyes. And what we need to try and do with scripture is look at it through the eyes of the people that were there. Then the culture in which the statements are made. Finally, consultation. Secondary sources. They’re called that and called that for a reason. Now Ephesians 3 makes it very
clear that we have to use the gifts that come to us. Bible teachers, whether it’s oral ministry or written ministry, there is no problem. In fact it’s necessary for the building up of the body of Christ until we all come unto the perfect man. So it is part of the whole idea of community study. As Christians, using other sources is good. God has gifted men who are teachers. Of course, what we need to do is put a few little parameters in there. We have to be like the Bereans and make sure you search the scriptures to see what they say is true. And also, the way I’ve put it here is, do your homework before school.
I used to get a conscience if I was lifting down a commentary and I hadn’t done the work on the text, first of all. Because you see, once you do the work on the text, and you know what the text is saying, it puts you on a level playing field with this person that you’re going to kind of discuss in your mind what this verse is meaning. If you don’t know what the text is saying, they could be bamboozling you with science. But if you know what the text is saying, it kind of helps. So that’s important. Do your homework before school.
A commentator, I’ve put it like this, a commentator is like an experienced mountaineer. Now, he might have spent his lifetime in that text, so don’t minimise it. But what I would say is this. If you read a few books by experienced mountaineers, it’s not the same as going up the mountains. And they would tell you that as well. You know, you can’t lift a few books about going up Everest and think it’s the same as actually going up Everest.
Now I’m sure if you’re going to go up Everest or you’ve been up Everest, you’d want to read more about it. And it might help you avoid pitfalls and so on. But climbing the mountains, the real thing, the real joy, you know, filling your lungs with that air and seeing the sights for yourself — that’s where really Bible study is wonderful. I was speaking to a Christian girl not that long ago, and a few years ago I encouraged her to study the scriptures and she studied at that time Ephesians chapter 1, and she said to me — this was her words not that long ago — she said to me, I’ve never enjoyed anything quite like when I studied Ephesians 1. You see, she reads the Bible. She’s a good Christian girl and so on.
But she was understanding that she was going up the mountain herself. This is why it’s important, Bible study. And I recommend it to you. Getting on a hobby horse here. Better stop. Anyway, just, I’ve put these on a handout
and you can take them and look at them. They’ll maybe help you if you’re going into a Bible bookshop to know what things are for and how they’re to be used. I’ve put them in a handout anyway. So that’s secondary sources. This is a worked example that I’m going to do some other time with you on Matthew chapter 1 verse 1 and 2. Finally, in conclusion, we must become good interpreters of scripture.
It’s essential because it means we don’t make mistakes. You see, if we make mistakes — if we come to the scriptures and understand what the scriptures are saying, by the help of God, of course we can still make mistakes, don’t get me wrong. But with less excuse for it. Because we know what the passages really are saying. We’ve looked at the interpretation, how to go about — maybe this is just my way that I’ve brought out to try and bring home to you how to go about it. The thing I would really emphasise is the fact, understand the text first.
Try to interpret it yourself before going to secondary sources for help. Now, only half the job is done. You see, God’s word must be applied. I’ve quoted Jim Elliot there. I did it from memory so it might be slightly different than that. I remember reading Jim Elliot’s diary, I think it was, his journals: God help me to apply myself to the word — that’s the first part, that’s observation and interpretation — and apply the word to myself — that’s application and correlation, as we’re going to look at in the next few days. We’ll just conclude there. I trust it will be a help. And I’ll put the handouts down at the back afterwards.
We’ll just commend ourselves to the Lord in prayer.
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Read transcript of Looking at the Book: 3. Application
Transcript produced automatically and lightly edited; it may contain errors.
Psalm 119 verse number 35.
Make me walk in the path of your commandments, for I delight in it. We know the Lord will bless the reading of his word to us all. So, we’ve been looking at, so far, the whole idea of looking at the book. We started with observation. How should we look at the scriptures?
What do we see when we look at the scriptures? We moved on to the whole thought of interpretation. What does it actually mean? And now, today, we’re going to look at application. How does this apply to me? And then next week, God willing, we’ll look at correlation, which is really how we take the Word of God and fit it into a bigger scheme of things.
How does it relate to other disciplines of knowledge? How does it relate to different things like that in a wider sense? How does it affect our worldview, how we look at things in life? So last week I was saying, and speaking to a few different people during the week, what I’m going to do just before I do anything else is just recap slightly at the end of what we finished on last week and it will maybe help us to go into this week together. I mentioned a statement that was made by Jim Elliot which was, God make me, or help me, to apply myself to the word and the word to myself. So we’ve done the first two. We’ve applied ourselves to the word, observation and interpretation. Now we’re going to have to try and apply it to ourselves. This is an uncomfortable process. You get a cut or something like that. And it used to be anyway when I was younger, you’d get some TCP and you’d just rub it in the cut or whatever and you knew you were going to feel it. And the thing about it is, when it comes to applying the word of God to our lives, that’s exactly the way it can affect us. There was a wee man at home, he used to say, TCP is truth clearly presented. I don’t know. But anyway, so we’re going to have to try and apply it, and it won’t be easy. It won’t be easy for me in many ways, and it won’t be easy listening at times, I’m sure, for you.
So let’s look first of all at this whole idea of recapping. I mentioned at the end of the last one about methods of interpretation. I really brought out the fact that first of all, everything that we interpret, it comes from the content, the words that are there, how they’re placed in scripture. They’re in words, they’re in sentences, and they’re in paragraphs, etc. So we must draw what we get from the text itself. We spoke about exegesis, the thought of drawing out from the text the meaning of what it is.
Then we looked at context. We thought of the wider literary context of the book in which it was placed, of the paragraph in which it sat. We thought about historical context. We thought about theological context. How far along in the whole progress of revelation are we when we’re looking at this particular scripture we have in mind? Then we looked at comparison.
We brought out the fact that what you do then is you compare it with other scriptures. Scripture with scripture. Scripture is a great interpreter of itself. And then we mentioned culture because we’ve got an awful habit of reading the 21st century Western culture back into what we’re reading from at least sort of 20 centuries previous. So we have to make sure that we’re not doing that when we come to the Word of God, if we’re trying to find out what it actually means, what it actually says. And then we mentioned at the end of that, we mentioned the whole idea of consultation, consulting with secondary sources, secondary helps.
You know, God has raised up people who are teachers, Ephesians 4:11, and they can help each one of us to understand the scriptures a little bit better.
So that’s true, but we’ve got to make sure that there’s no substitute for actually the word of God itself and the time we spend in the word. You know, it’s not the same, I think I put it, it’s not the same reading the notes of someone who’s climbed up Everest as actually going climbing up it yourself. You know, you don’t get the same views when you’re reading the notes. There’s something about doing it yourself. You might get a lot of benefit from it. If you were heading up, you’d better take a guide with you.
If you’re heading up any mountain, especially if you were me, you would better take a guide with you and all that. And there’s use in having commentaries and all those kind of things. But let’s remember we have to get to the text ourselves and enjoy the text ourselves. That was the five C’s. Now I’m going to make it seven C’s just for the sake of completeness. The two further C’s I want to mention are up on the screen.
Follow clarity and follow Christ. Just for a minute, follow clarity. Somebody has put it like this: if the plain sense makes perfect sense, seek no other sense.
That’s pretty logical. It’s actually not only logical, it’s biblical, because if you look at the two references I give there in Matthew 16, what was happening was the Lord was speaking about the leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and the disciples were a bit put out because they’d forgotten to bring bread and they thought to themselves, he’s speaking to us kind of about bread. They just heard the word leaven and thought he’s speaking about bread, and their conscience were stirred, and they were like, what’s the Lord saying here? And the Lord had to make clear to them he was not talking about the bread whatsoever and he said, now listen, I’m speaking about the teachings of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. So if the plain sense makes perfect sense, seek no other sense. Don’t be trying to lift out of the word what is not in the word. There’s another reference there you can do in your own time. Follow clarity, follow Christ. If the interpretation is glorifying to Christ, if it is glorifying to God, if it reveals something about his character in a purer and more wonderful way, if it honours his word, we know we’re on the right lines.
Because if something is dishonouring or derogatory to Christ, as you can find from the rest of scripture, and we find that that’s obviously against the whole tenor of scripture as a whole, so your interpretation must be a bit faulty there. Okay, so that’s just a few wee things to keep in mind about interpretation. Now somebody came to me and they say, I don’t know whether I can really study the way you’re speaking about, Andrew. You know, it’s very, I think the word was, it was very advanced and what I was speaking about, which is fair enough, you know, not everybody has hours a day that they can dedicate to it and so on. I appreciate that. But what I’ve done is I’ve made up a table, which is like that, and it’s at the back. And there probably won’t be enough for absolutely everybody. But don’t worry. If you don’t get one, come see me if you need one.
And it’s just, I put on the top, improving our understanding of the Bible. On one side, we have observation, interpretation, application, correlation. That’s the four sessions. On one side is how we can use it to improve our Bible reading, our normal daily Bible reading. So maybe add another 10 minutes into it or so and you can apply these principles. On the other side is if we want to improve our Bible study.
Some points that we can develop in relation to that. So this is really a continuum, Bible reading to Bible study. I’ll put it up there. Bible reading to Bible study. And we kind of like to separate them and think Bible studies are way up there. I’ll never get there.
It’s really reading maxed, if you want to put it that way. So don’t be thinking it’s impossible. But even just apply some of the principles to your normal reading. Give yourself a little bit more time. And I think you’ll find it beneficial and helpful. So I’ve said enough by way of background.
Application today. How to apply the word to our lives. First of all we ask the question, why should we apply the word? Then, with what attitude should we apply it? Then, how should we apply it? That’s an interesting question. What should we apply? Does all the word of God have the same equal weight? I mean, am I meant for instance to go out and start slaughtering animals because it says in the Old Testament that’s how they came with their sin offering? Does it all have the same equal weight in how we apply it to ourselves? When and where do we apply a particular truth, how do we work out what scenario fits, if you like? Then, who do we apply? That’s very obvious. And is there a way in scripture given to us in scripture as to how to apply the word of God? And we’ll keep that as a secret, but there is. Okay, so when we get there, hopefully if we get there, we’ll find it out. If we don’t get there it’ll remain a secret. Okay, let’s look at this in a little bit more detail. Why should we apply the word? Well, there’s one obvious reason why we should apply the word. All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable. You read through this verse from 2 Timothy and chapter 3 of course, and it goes on, it’s profitable for reproof, correction, instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. So if as a Christian I’m wanting to live the way God would have me to live, if I’m wanting to exercise the gift that God has given me, it is important that we should take what we see from the word and try to apply it in our lives. It is profitable. It is also personal.
You’re bought with a price. Paul brings that out twice in 1 Corinthians. You are bought with a price. And I was thinking of Frances Ridley Havergal. She went along one time and she saw a famous painting about the Lord and the cross. And at the bottom of that painting was this inscription, My life was given for thee, what hast thou given for me?
And she went round in her head so much that she sat down and wrote the beautiful hymn that we don’t sing as much in Scotland as we used to in Northern Ireland. My life was given for thee, my precious blood was shed, that thou might ransom me and quicken from the dead. My life was given for thee, for thee, what hast thou given for me? Of course we have to apply the word. It comes to us from the one who died for us. And so we really should apply the word of God.
Secondly, with what attitude should we apply it? You know, sometimes the problem isn’t the mechanics. I’ve been speaking a lot about how you take something from scripture, you make sure you observe it properly, you make sure you analyse and interpret it correctly and then you apply it in your life. But there’s a lot of statements in scripture that are very easy to apply, easy to understand at one level and easy to apply. I mean, when the Lord Jesus said, you know, love one another, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon to understand what it means. It means love one another.
So, okay, you can look at it, analyse it, look at the word love and find out a little bit more about it and all those kind of things. I’m not saying you can’t do that. But the problem very often for us is not the mechanics behind it. The problem is what I’ve put here, the morals of application. We sometimes don’t want to apply it to our lives, but yet we come to Isaiah 66 and we read these words, but on this one will I look, him who is of a poor and contrite spirit and who trembles at my word. So we should have the right attitude when we come to apply the word of God to ourselves. Let’s look at the third question. How should we apply it? I’m rattling through because some of these are very big and others are quite small.
You see, just the way there was barriers and issues that hindered interpretation, I spoke about language barriers, culture barriers and historical barriers and those kind of things. Just the way those barriers were there for interpretation. There was a way that we could remove those barriers. So there are barriers and problems that stop me from applying the word of God properly in my life. I mean we could speak of the enemies of the Christian of course, the flesh, the world, the devil and all those kind of things. But I just want to look at it in a very specific way now.
I want to think first of all of the problem of applying the non-interpreted word. This is a problem that a lot of people, well, when I was just young as a Christian I failed in this a lot. What I was doing was using the word as a kind of jukebox to find out just some wee thing, and it didn’t matter about the context in which it was sitting, it didn’t matter what it meant when it was written, it just mattered what it meant to me right now. And we’ve got to be very careful with that because the devil misapplies scripture. We know that. We know that for a fact. We know that from Genesis chapter 3. We know it from the temptation of the Lord in the wilderness. That the devil quotes scripture and he quotes it at times wrongly. And he does it by taking it out of context and so on.
So we need to be very careful with the whole thing. Oh, this is hitting me. I have a warm fuzzy feeling about it. So this must be meant for me right now. Now, it might be in a certain sense, as long as it’s in line with the scriptures itself, what it’s actually teaching. I’m not saying the Lord can’t apply something to your life in a dramatic way, but we just need to be very careful with it.
Because this is what we might term the problem of applying the non-interpreted word. You’ll have heard the story of Judas. The people tell, it’s not of Judas really, but the guy who was trying to find out what he should do, and he opened his Bible and he put his finger down on a verse and it says that Judas went out and hanged himself. And he looked at it again and he was like, close the Bible. And he opened it again and it said, go and do thou likewise.
And he said, Lord, this can’t be for me. And he opened the Bible again and he put his finger down. What thou doest, do quickly. Well, that’s not the way we’re meant to interpret the Bible. The Bible stands up as any other document of history, as any other document, you have to come to it in an appropriate manner and develop it and understand it in a proper way. The problem of applying the non-interpreted word, I would call that.
Secondly, we have the problem of not applying the interpreted word. What I mean by that is, you find out what it means. You’ve done the first two stages. You have observed and analysed and understood. And then there’s the issue of, how am I going to apply it in my life? And the way we’re meant to apply it, I’ve just put it down like this.
There’s meant to be a volitional response to the word, which brings us to a place of greater conformity to Christ. What I mean by volitional is it’s willing. It’s from the heart. It’s based on your will. You know, the internal workings of people, it involves their will, their emotion, and their intellect. Okay?
Well, the will is the base of it all. The reason why people don’t come to Christ is because they’re not willing to, they’re not willing to bow their will. The Lord himself said, you will not come to me that you might have life. You’re not willing, unwilling sinners in that sense. But here as Christians there’s a danger that we are unwilling to really apply the word to us. Something comes to us, it hits us, and what we do is we substitute for a true response. Now this is really something I want to bring home, we substitute for a true response. So what we do is, instead of having a volitional change that we say, my direction is changing, no matter what, this has affected my will, I’m going to make a change in my life, what we do is, firstly, we can have a verbal substitution. We walk out of the hall and we say, that ministry affected me. See that Bible teaching, that was meant for me. You see that Bible teaching and loving my neighbour? I’m going to go home and I’m going to do something about this. And on the journey home, now you probably feel a bit better because you’ve been honest with yourself. And you’re patting yourself on the back for being honest. But you know, the problem with this whole thing is that you might be honest, but the Lord’s not looking at your words. He’s looking at your heart.
And there’s a real danger that we stop there. I’ve done it. And you know, it evaporates. Your enthusiasm evaporates on the journey home. And it hasn’t really made much of a change. It just has been a verbal response.
It’s verbal instead of volitional. So we’ve substituted the verbal for the volitional. There’s another thing we do. We substitute the emotional for the volitional. You know, I’ve got a great burden about this now. I want to reach out to my neighbours.
And you put it in your prayer diary. And it lasts two days before it drops off that prayer diary. And it never actually actions in anything. And this is what I’m saying. This is a wee bit tough, like, because it hurts me as well. This has happened to me too much.
And you almost feel good because you have a burden. You feel good about feeling bad.
You know what I mean? So there’s a danger. That’s how we apply the word to our lives. But the Lord says, no, no, no. To this man will I look, it’s the one that responds to the word from my heart and with the will. There’s a rational response, you know, this is the one where I’m just going to apply the word to all the bits of life that I’m comfortable with. So if it’s something like somebody’s teaching in Romans chapter 13 and it says there about paying taxes to who they’re due and owing no man anything, those kind of things, of not holding debts with the idea of never paying them back.
And maybe you have this idea in your head, and, oh, well, I do. I’m a good citizen. I do this and that. And yet you know fine and rightly, you know, half your business, you’re not declaring the taxes on.
Well, you say, but, you know, that’s just the way we, that’s the way everybody works in this business. They’re all doing that. I’m no different than anyone else. But the thing is, we should be different than other people. You see, what we’re doing is you’re rationalising. I mean, there was a situation in one of the books I was reading where the man was speaking about this.
He was in someone’s home and the guy was almost boasting about the fact he hadn’t paid his taxes. He then said, I gave it to the Lord’s work. Really? Is that the way forward? Is that honouring to God?
You see, there’s a danger we rationalise the word. We’ve all fallen into some of these traps, so I’m not hitting at other people here. I’ve probably fallen into most of them. What about the cheap imitation substitution? That’s the Ananias and Sapphira job. That’s when actually what you do is, you know fine rightly you’re not doing what’s right but you put a front on it and so you look like you’re dead spiritual but you know fine rightly you’re living a double life. So there’s this whole idea of how should we apply the word, there’s a problem, the problem is very often we don’t apply it properly in the first place. Think of this, this is what James chapter 1 and verse 22 to 25 says: be doers of the word, not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. If anyone is a hearer of the word, that’s someone who hears, they observe, they analyse, they interpret, they know what it’s saying, and not a doer, he’s like a man observing his natural face in the mirror, for he observes himself and he goes away and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work. This one will be blessed in what he does.
Thirdly, and this is the last one I’ll mention on this, the problem of misapplying the interpreted word. What I mean by that is not applying it to yourself, applying it to other people. That happens too, you know. Others, not me scenario. So we come to James chapter 3 where it says, don’t be many teachers because they’ll receive the bigger condemnation. In other words, if you’re going to teach the word of God, you need to try and practise the word of God.
And that hits me.
Acts chapter 1, the perfect teacher himself, the Lord Jesus, all that Jesus began to teach, no, no, all that Jesus began to do and to teach.
Let’s try not to sit in meetings and we’re applying all this stuff to someone else in our head. That’s a problem with misapplying the interpreted word. You may know what it means but you put it in the wrong direction. What about how should we apply? Does it all have the same equal weight? This is another point we want to really emphasise.
What I mean by that is that all of it’s important. It’s very clearly all important. It’s all the word of God, all scripture. We’ve mentioned that already. So it all has importance. It all can be used for the purpose of God’s blessing in our lives.
But we must remember a principle that the Lord enunciates. Let’s turn please to Matthew 23:23.
Just one verse and I’m lifting it out of this section when the Lord is speaking of the hypocrites, the Pharisees and the scribes, those who were religious hypocrites etc etc. Woe unto you, he says, the Lord says, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, for you pay tithe of mint and anise and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy and faith. These you ought to have done without leaving the others undone. Now what is the Lord saying here? He’s saying that what they’re doing is they’re looking scrupulously into the law and they’re finding little things, and they’re making sure that they tithe those very small things. They give their little portion to the Lord from those. Okay? Now the Lord’s not saying they’re wrong in doing that. He very clearly says at the end of the verse, you should do that. But there’s other bigger things that you’re completely forgetting about, you’re cross-eyed about other things, he says. There are weightier matters in the law, there are the big principles if you like, that’s the term I’m using, the Lord uses a better term I’m sure when he uses this idea of weightier matters, things that are really more important to put in place first, the other things can fall in around them.
You know when you’re putting stones into a jar. You put the big stones in first, the little stones will fall in around them afterwards. You put priority in where you put the big stones. That’s an illustration I’ve just plucked off the top of my head. I don’t know whether it’s good or not. But here we have justice, mercy and faith. That’s what the Lord says, the three in this context. Now I’m sure there are others. What he’s speaking about, he’s speaking about things that are linked to the character of God. Justice, righteousness. God is a God of righteousness. God is a God of mercy. God is a faithful God and he expects faith in his people. He’s a God of loyalty and he expects loyalty in return, etc. etc. So these are the big principles that must be adhered to and other things will fall in around them. The small matters will fall in around them. So when we’re applying the scriptures, let’s remember the big things of scripture as we think of the small things as well. Now this is a suggestion of some of the things that are the big things for us as believers in the New Testament. Those things that are directly and obviously revealing the character of God.
That’s what I’ve already mentioned. Secondly, those things that directly and obviously are written to us as New Testament believers. So the epistles, the direct commands in the epistles. They were written to not only the first generation Christians, but to every generation to where we are now of Christians. In the age of grace. There’s the obvious major moral features of a passage, especially though, say if you’re reading the Old Testament where there’s a New Testament agreement or equivalent.
So you bring something from the Old Testament, just make sure you have a New Testament equivalent that applies to us today, definitely. And then the other thing that is major, there’s those things that are not subsequently overturned by further understanding of God in this progressive revelation. What I mean by that is, Job, let’s take Job. We mentioned him the other day. Job, he was looking around. He says, there’s no daysman. There’s no one in between.
There’s no one who’s an advocate for me. You know, here’s God and he’s righteous and here’s me and I’m not righteous. And there’s just nobody there.
Now, we can’t say that. You see, since Job, we’ve had the whole Bible. And we found out of one who came. And one who is an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ. And one who is a mediator between God and men. The Lord Jesus.
So what I’m saying is that God’s word is progressive revelation as you go through it. So his view was not wrong. It was incomplete. It was incomplete because of where he was. And as he looked on it, in his circumstance, he couldn’t see the answer. Okay?
So we’ve got to understand how do you apply things like that, further back in the Old Testament. And then there are things that are given and expiated by the Lord. So the sacrificial system of the Old Testament was to be until Christ. The dietary laws, the Sabbath-keeping laws, the rules and the laws of Deuteronomy, all 600 of them, they were specifically until Christ. They led up to Christ, they pictured Christ in some way, and so therefore they don’t have the same weight as how we apply them as those other things do, as we will see as we go on.
So understanding the dispensations, we’re going back to a few studies ago, is really helpful on how we apply the word to our lives.
Now, we really should prayerfully ask the Lord for the true lessons from a passage for application in our lives. This is where it becomes very practical and prayerful. So you come to that passage, you understand, observation, you do your analysis, you do your interpretation and then you say, Lord, what’s for me in this? How do you apply these truths I’ve learned about you in your holy word? So preferably ask God for the true lessons. What kind of questions should we ask? And with this I’ll leave this and move on.
What are the big lessons? What are the other particulars, the smaller particulars if it were, that are also important. How is this to make me more like the Lord Jesus? If I’m studying the Old Testament, is there a New Testament verse written to me which reveals this principle is still extant?
Is there a universal truth here? Or does this application have an expiry date? Etc. So what should we apply? Does it all have equal weight? When and where should we apply?
Now this is an important question. This is where careful interpretation and God-given wisdom come in. This is where you need to ask wisdom of God, James chapter 1. Because what I mean is this. A passage has an ancient setting in which the initial teaching is given. Say, for example, Romans 14.
Where you have the Jews and they don’t eat meats because in the Old Testament they wouldn’t have eaten meats. And now they’re in the new dispensation and the truth of the scripture is that all food has been given of God, and that’s developed because some of those things of the Old Testament have reached their expiry date. So here you’ve got a particular setting, Jews who are saved and Gentile Christians as well, and there are some issues about the conscience of the Jewish Christian. So that’s the setting. Now when you’re interpreting the passage you draw the timeless universal truth out of it. So what is the truth of the passage? You go to Romans 15 and verse 7 [or 7] and you’ll come across this verse that we are to receive others as Christ received us, and it’s the thought of receiving to yourself, and he says on one occasion, not to doubtful disputation, in other words don’t just receive them so that you can tell them how wrong they are. Okay? But then you say, well, how do you apply that today? Would it be applicable? We’re now bringing it into a contemporary setting. The contemporary setting must conform in some degree with the ancient setting. What I mean is this, like, somebody comes to you and they don’t believe in the deity of Christ, just say they’re a JW, they don’t believe in the deity of Christ, they don’t believe in the substitutionary atonement of Christ, they don’t believe in the salvational aspects of the death of Christ that we speak of and see in scripture. And they come to you and say,
I’m a Christian. You’re to receive me as Christ received you to the glory of God. Now is that an appropriate application of the verse? Well you would know from Galatians that it’s not. You would know that what has happened here. It’s not a conscience issue anymore.
It’s to do with a salvational issue. It’s a fundamental truth that they’re denying, and they cannot be saved and so on. So you need wisdom given by God as to how you apply scriptures. And this is why prayer and godly advice, if you’re not sure how to apply something, go to someone who is an older believer who understands. You can get godly counsel from them on some of these issues.
They’re quite difficult and have to be teased out.
Who do you apply? I? Well, that’s the Lord Jesus, of course.
That’s really where we’re aiming at, isn’t it? It says the truth is in Jesus. That’s Ephesians chapter 4, isn’t it? And it says in Romans chapter 13, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, make no provision for the flesh. So really, who you’re wanting to apply, how you’re meant to come out of a passage is more like the Lord Jesus. That’s the aim of it.
But what about a way to apply? With this, I’m closing up. Turn with me, please, to Romans chapter 6. Romans chapter 6.
Now, here I think we get a key to how we should apply Scripture to our lives. In Romans chapter 6, and I’m just going to breeze down these verses, and I’ll highlight a couple of words just because we’re not dealing with the actual context in a terrible lot of detail. Knowing this, verse number 6, speaking to Christians, that our old man was crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed or done away with, that we should no longer be slaves of sin. For he who has died has been freed from sin. Now, if we died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, dies no more; death has no longer dominion over him. Notice in that section, verse number 6, knowing.
Verse number 9, knowing. Now they’re slightly different words, and so if we were looking at it in detail, we would try to analyse that difference. But just keep in mind that idea of knowing. Let’s move down. Verse number 10. For the death that he died, he died to sin once for all.
But the life that he lives, he lives to God. Likewise, you also, another word, reckon. Reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And then he goes on, he says more, not only knowing, or know and reckon, he uses another word, therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts, and do not present or yield your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present or yield yourself to God as being alive from the dead. And so on. That’s all I want to read.
You see what he has done here. He has followed a path from your head through your heart to your hands and feet. What he has done is actually, he said first of all you know it. You have to understand the doctrine here. You have to understand the teaching.
That’s interpretation. That’s where we got to. You know it. It’s got into here. But then you’ve got to reckon it. That’s the accounting term, that’s putting it on your account, that’s saying I realise that this is true for me. So it’s one thing to know that justification is by faith alone in Christ alone as a result of his blood and his sacrifice in Romans chapter 3 etc, Romans chapter 5, it’s another thing for that to be true in my case and me to understand it to be true in my case. So that’s reckoning it to be so. And as Christians we have to do this. We have to take not only the truth of all our blessings, we’ve got to apply those blessings to ourselves prayerfully. And then on top of that, having done that, having understood that, we’re changed, we’re different because of it. He goes on and he says yield or present. He says in verse number 11,
reckon yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus, and on that therefore, you see the logical step, do not let sin reign in your mortal bodies, and do not present your members as instruments, but present yourself or yield yourself to God as being alive from the dead. So he’s moving from head knowledge through an understanding that this is true for me, and when I fully understand that it will make me want to do things different by the power of the Spirit of God as we know from other scriptures. So there is a way in scriptures as to how we apply scripture to ourselves. I can’t do any other illustrations at the moment.
Frances Ridley Havergal. I’ll just tell you a little bit about this and then I’ll be finished.
She wrote that hymn and we mentioned her at the start as well, one of my favourite hymn writers. She really dealt with the whole thought of application, that was really her sphere. She was an exhorter and she wrote this hymn, take my life and let it be consecrated Lord, and she really applied it in her life as we know, if you’ve read her works and her biography. Now one time she was singing her hymn at a prayer meeting and she went home and these verses really struck her. Take my silver and my gold, not a mite would I withhold.
And she was getting troubled in her conscience because she realised that there were certain heirlooms that she’d been given. She thought to herself, I could really, I could give them to missionaries or something like that. I could use the funds from that for the glory of God. And there they are sitting, gathering dust in my attic or whatever. And she had a battle inside her, as to what she should do.
And eventually she took it and she sold it and whatever. The point I’m making is this.
Our life as Christians involves taking the word of God. It’s tough to apply it. It’s not easy. There are battles that we face and there are battles that we lose in applying it as well. So we have to come back and honestly before God be prayerful and try to say, Lord, teach me. Lord, as we have said at the start and used the quotation here, Lord make me to walk in the path. So we need the Lord’s help in all this. We trust it is for the glory of God. Shall we pray.
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Read transcript of Looking at the Book: 4. Correlation
Transcript produced automatically and lightly edited; it may contain errors.
Psalm 119, we’ve taken all our readings, main readings anyway from Psalm 119 as we’ve been going through. Psalm 119 again.
And we’ll just look at verse number 66 and then we’ll cross over to the New Testament for a verse. Verse number 66.
Teach me good judgment and knowledge, for I believe your commandments. Teach me good judgment and knowledge, for I believe your commandments. Go over to 1 Corinthians chapter 2. 1 Corinthians chapter 2, just for two verses.
Verse number 14 and 15. But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he who is spiritual judges all things, but he himself is judged by no one. We know the Lord will bless the reading of his word to us as we think again of this subject today. Now we’ve been covering the whole thought of looking at the book. This is the sort of concluding message so there will be a few bits of loose ends to tie up and I’ll probably be slightly shorter today. I shouldn’t say that. If you know me I’ll not say anything. I’ll just omit that last sentence I say. So we’ve looked at observation. The importance of what does it say? Then we’ve looked at interpretation.
What does it mean? And then we looked at application. How does it apply to me? And finally now we’re going to look at this whole subject of correlation. How do I relate it to other parts of scripture and how do I relate it to truth outwith scripture? Truth such as you get truth around you in the natural world. How does the truth that I’ve understood in Scripture relate to that? So we’re going to see from correlation, there’s a few different things we’ll notice about it, but really the whole idea in correlation is you’re creating links. You’re setting the truth that you now have understood into a surrounding. And that surrounding is the rest of truth with a capital T. For all truth in a sense we know is God’s truth and so we can set the truth of scripture very clearly into the whole realm of truth.
Scripture speaks authoritatively on things that are outwith scripture so we’ll think of what I mean by that and we’ll also see how it all ties in together hopefully today. Now I realise it’s been quite, I don’t know, it’s probably been quite heavy in certain times when I’ve been going through these things and you maybe say to yourself is it really that important? Will you imagine going into war, going into a battle as a soldier and you leave your rifle behind or your sword if you were about in ancient times. You see, the sword of the Spirit is the Word of God, the spoken Word of God, the Word of God for the occasion, the Word of God properly interpreted and applied. And so if I don’t know how to interpret and apply the Word of God properly, I’m at a severe disadvantage in any spiritual battle I face, especially since my enemy, the adversary of my soul, the devil, is well able to use the word in the wrong way.
So this is why it’s so important that we actually take this on board. You know, it used to be back in the army, in the First World War and all that, people would have had their uniforms and they might have been muddied from the trenches, but their sergeant major made sure their guns were clean. You see their life depended on their weapons and so when we come to how we understand the Bible, how we interpret it, how we apply it in our lives it’s absolutely essential that we do it in a correct way because it helps us to win the spiritual battles that are out there. Of course it’s important for other reasons but that’s maybe one just very general reason why we should try to take on board some of these things we’ve been thinking about. I want to think, first of all, that’s the different ones we’ve looked at so far, about the different handouts I give out, just by way of remembrance. First of all, you remember, I did the handout there, it’s not come out very clearly. Understanding Your Bible Bookstore, which was the second week I think I gave that handout out. The different types of Bibles there are.
Literal, word-by-word, word-for-word translations, expanded translations, dynamic equivalence translations, all these different ones. Just so that when you go into that situation, you know what you’re looking for. So there’s a little bit of information on each there, some of the pros and cons of them. And that was the first one I handed out. Last week, because I’d heard from a few people, they say, oh I don’t think I can really study in that depth and that’s fine, but what I’ve done in the second handout I gave out was on one side I’ve taken the principles and how we could use them to improve our normal Bible reading in the evening time and when we sit down, give yourself an extra 10-15 minutes and you can use these principles of observation, interpretation, application and so on to improve your normal Bible reading and then on the other side I’ve put down how to improve your Bible study if you want to look at it in more depth because you see it’s really a continuum some people think Bible study up here Bible reading down here but it’s a continuum it’s all in the one kind of area we’re looking into the scriptures to try and understand them that’s what we’re doing whether we’re studying the Bible or just looking at it and just reading down a portion perhaps in the evening time. So that was a second handout.
Now I did promise another handout, and that’s on the left-hand side here. I’ve got a few of them up here. That’s understanding the pros and cons of Bible software programs such as e-Sword, etc. Now that won’t be for everybody. Not everybody will want it. It was a three-page one anyway.
So what I’ve done is for anybody that really wants one of those, I’ve got them up here, and if you can come and see me afterwards. The other side is an important, well, it’s important for me. What I did was I took what we’ve been studying and teaching on, and I applied those principles to the Lord’s teaching, or I tried to see did the Lord use these interpretive principles in his teaching that I announced to you, because at the end of the day, if it’s from the Lord, it’s authoritative. If it’s from Andrew, it’s not very. Okay, so but what I did was and you’ll see a list of references down the side and that handout is at the back and how the Lord uses the same biblical interpretive principles as I’ve been using. You see some people have come to me and said, just one or two anyway, I’ll say no, everybody has their own way of studying the Bible and I’m in agreement in the sense that you don’t need to follow exactly the way I’m going through this here at all. But the basic unchanging principles have to remain unchanging. So you have your own system. I have my system that works for me. But we need to incorporate observation. What does the text really say? We need to incorporate the principles of interpretation that are seen in scripture as scripture interprets scripture. We need to apply it in our lives because otherwise we just become merely students of the word without it actually affecting our hearts and our lives and finally correlation. So all those principles I think you’ll be able to find, go away and be a Berean, about being a Berean go away and take this and look at the principles as it’s seen in the Lord’s teaching, so that’s probably enough to say about the background we’ll just get looking at this whole idea of correlation.
Correlation.
A mutual relationship or connection between two or more things, says the Oxford American Dictionary. Or a process of establishing a relation or connection between two or more measures. Now you say, what really does that mean? Well, core is the word together and relation. So what we’re dealing with here is when you throughout your Bible study take something in the Bible and relate it to something else and try to see whether there are links so for instance we did it the other day when we were looking at interpretation we took Luke chapter 1 and 2 Mary’s standpoint in the birth of Christ and we related it to Matthew chapter 1 Joseph’s standpoint and we saw links and we saw that they were looking at it from slightly different angles and so on and so we do this throughout Bible study we correlate scripture we bring it together after interpreting it another way of putting this is you have analysis followed by synthesis now don’t worry this isn’t going to be for long I’m not going to get into any more sophisticated words. But what I used to do when I was a little boy, my mum tells me, I used to be really interested in pens. And I used to unscrew them and take them all apart and set them all out.
But my mum tells me I never put them together again. You see, what I did was analysis. I unloosed them. I set them all out. I tried to find out about them. But then I lost interest.
And we’re in danger sometimes with Bible study. That’s what we do. We work out what the words mean. We work out all these kind of things. And we take them and we analyze the scripture. But there has to be synthesis.
There has to be a bringing back together again. We need to take synthesis. One of the ways we use it, we use it chemically, of course. But we also use it in this way, the combination of ideas to form a theory or a system. So you take what you know from this passage. We’re going to look at a passage in a moment, so this will help us a wee bit and we bring it back together with other scriptures to see what it really means so that we have a holistic view of scripture so that we’re not just taking one little thing and making it the only thing that scripture is saying in this issue that’s what the cults do they’ll take some random verse that’s maybe difficult to interpret and they’ll put their slant in the verse and every other verse it doesn’t matter where it is in scripture has no relevance to them. They have their proof text. And so we don’t do that. We come to scripture. There’s a wonderful safety check we’re going to see in scripture. That we can actually check scripture against scripture.
And correlate it together to understand what we have a little bit more. So having observed, interpreted and applied. We must really internalize the scripture. Your word have I hidden in my heart. We know that from Psalm 119. Now we can do that in a number of ways.
We can do it through meditating on the word. That’s not like Eastern meditation or mindfulness or any of these other things that are out there in vogue at the minute. It’s not yoga. When we’re speaking about meditation, we’re talking about filling our minds with the word of God. And sitting back in the armchair, as it were, and allowing our mind to compare and contrast. We’re correlating scriptures and trying to understand them better. We might memorise. A wonderful thing to do. Somebody else pointed that out to me. How much memorisation has helped them. Memorising scripture.
We should discuss it. They that fear the Lord speak often one to another. That’s where Bible readings are so good. In correlation as well. Somebody will come up with another passage that we haven’t looked at, we haven’t thought about. And they’ll say, listen, how does this apply here? And what we’re doing is we’re trying to bring together the word of God.
William MacDonald mentions teaching. He says what he recommends people should do when they’ve studied and analysed a passage and interpreted and applied it in their life, they should go and explain it to someone simply. Because in the process of teaching something, you are learning it yourself in a deeper way. So that’s kind of where we’re going. Let’s look at the safety of scripture when it comes to correlation. No prophecy is of private interpretation.
That’s what it says in 2 Peter chapter 1. See, it’s all consistent because it all comes from God. That’s what he’s going to say in the next verse. It all comes from God and therefore it’s consistent with each other. So we don’t let one obscure text overturn many clear texts. We mentioned that in relation to the cults.
So other scriptures, when you’ve looked at a passage, other scriptures can limit the extent of how you apply that. I’ll try to explain what I mean by that in one second. It might modify how we view it, or even develop our understanding of a particular word. Let’s think about that for a minute. Matthew chapter 6, please. Matthew chapter 6 and verse number 5.
I realize some of this material would maybe suit a workshop better. But we’ll just go through it and see how we get on. Matthew chapter 6 and verse number 5. This is the Lord Jesus teaching on prayer. And this is what he says. When you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues on the corner of the streets, that they may be seen by men.
Assuredly, I say unto you, they have their reward. But when you pray, go into your room, your closet, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place. And your Father who sees in the secret will reward you openly. Okay, what is he saying here? What is the Lord saying?
Now, imagine a young believer has just read that passage. And they decide to come here on a Thursday night. And they sit at the back. And he comes out at the end, and he’s shaking his head, and he’s going,
you’re disobeying the scripture. And you say, well, how am I disobeying the scripture? You were praying publicly in there. And it says in the verse that I read in Matthew chapter 6, that you shouldn’t pray public. You should go into your own room. You should pray privately.
So you in that place you’re disobeying the word of God now you can see why if that was the only passage on prayer in the New Testament that is why he would reach that conclusion now you might take him aside and say well actually you’ve got to understand something that’s dealing with personal prayer it’s not dealing with assembly prayer and you might take him to 1 Corinthians chapter 14 you might take him to 1 Timothy chapter 2 and say actually there’s realms of public prayer.
And in those realms of public prayer the men are to lift up holy hands without wrath and doubting and so on. So basically what you’ve done is you’ve correlated two scriptures there. And in doing that you have limited the extent how you apply the first one. You understand where I’m going here? You see, that modifies a little bit how we view the first passage. It’s not that the first passage isn’t valid and it’s not that it isn’t accurate.
It is both those things. It came from the Lord. But it’s not complete. It’s not the complete teaching of the New Testament on the issue of prayer. Now he may come to you in a few days time and say, Okay, I’ve got what you say there, but I’ve looked at that word for closet room. And I notice you don’t have a special room that you dedicate in your house to prayer.
In fact I’ve looked at this word in detail and it means a private place and you don’t have that you tell me that you pray in your car you pray when you go out for your walk I think you’re disobeying the word of God you say no no no you’re misunderstanding the passage again how do you do that? Well, you take him to the Lord’s life. And you say, well, the Lord Jesus very often didn’t have a room to go to. What did he do? He went to the mountainside. He went to the desert. He got away.
He got alone with the Lord privately. And that’s how he would have us interpret that principle. You could even say that actually the Lord used public prayer as well because he prayed in front of 5,000 people so you know what you’re doing there you’re synthesizing you’re correlating you’re bringing together different scriptures that apply to the situation now when I was just a young Christian I struggled with some of these things I’m sure there’s others like me but I’d come across a passage that says something like You’re to hate your father and mother. If you don’t hate your father and mother more than me, you’re not worthy of me or something like that. I’m probably misquoting it there, but you know what I mean. I looked at that and it troubled me terribly.
And I’d maybe go along to my dad and say, listen, what does this mean? He’d say, well, you’ve got to apply other scriptures as well. There’s a time and a place. If as a result of you following the Lord, your parents disown you and you are seen as disobeying them. That might come to that stage, as that passage is saying. But there are other passages which say that you have to honour your parents.
And there are other passages which actually tell you that you have to look after your parents if they’re needing.
Now, I would have probably said when I was just young,
having tunnel vision on this passage, I would have said oh that’s just minimizing what the scripture is saying. But that’s not. That’s just taking the whole wealth of scripture. And getting a holistic view. Now there’s times when that scripture will cut right in. And be exactly what you need.
There are times if your parents say to you. Listen you can’t follow the Lord. You can’t get baptized. You can’t honor the Lord in your life. We don’t want it. If they’re not saved.
That you might need to disobey them. In that sense. So there are times when that verse very definitely applies but you can see what I’m doing I’m correlating scripture, I’m bringing it all together this is where topical studies are useful what I mean by that is
we’ve been thinking about prayer so let’s take prayer in the Bible you get down your concordance or get it up on the screen, whatever way you work and you trace the idea of prayer the whole way through the Bible or maybe through the New Testament or you’re maybe saying to yourself, I just want to look at how Paul references prayer in his letters or prayer in Luke’s Gospel or whatever. And what you’re doing is you’re taking a topic. Now you need to make sure that when you take each passage, you take it in its context. So I’ve mentioned systematic theology there. That’s really what systematic theology is. Basically what people have done is they’ve drawn together the truths about Christ from the scriptures and they’ve said this is Christology.
Or they’ve drawn together the truths about the Holy Spirit and they’ve called it pneumatology or whatever. And you can keep going. They’ve done it for different things. The study of man and anthropology, biblical anthropology. So now what I would say about systematic theology, just one caution on it.
God has given us the book the way it is. So there’s a danger where when we systematize something, that not everything fits into our little box, and we decide to try and cram it in there anyway. And we decide to actually maybe violate the context in which a verse is written, so that we might just make it sort of fit with our ideas. Now we’d be careful with, we mentioned exegesis, that you’re taking from the text still. But apart from that, topical studies are wonderful things. Very often, they’re very useful and they help us to understand the whole view of scriptures and things like prayer.
So this is where correlation is really important. You’ve noticed I’ve put it at the end. You see, ideally, when you do it throughout your Bible study, ideally, the best thing to, the best scripture to correlate are ones that you’ve already interpreted in their own context. You’ve already understood what they mean, where they are in the Bible, and then you can bring them together in a more correct fashion. So that’s the safety of Scripture in topical studies. Let’s think for a minute or two about what I would term knowledge correlation.
You see, Scripture properly interpreted speaks with authority outside the realm of scripture and theology. It isn’t a textbook. Now, that’s important to understand. For instance, the Bible is not a biology textbook. It’s not meant to be. It’s not meant to be a textbook on economics.
But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t speak to those topics. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t tell us things that are relevant in those topics. Because it comes from God and it is all truth, it relates to reality. It relates to our everyday life and helps us to understand whatever we face in life and in whatever sphere we face it. So it has the answers to the big questions of philosophy. Why am I here? Where am I going? Why do I exist at all? It has those answers. But it is written, and I think I originally came across this little expression in one of John Blanchard’s books, but a very helpful book. It is written on a need-to-know, not a want-to-know basis. So in other words, when we come to the special revelation of God in Scripture,
it’s not written to be absolutely exhaustive and any topic that you might think about. It never was meant as that, and we need to keep that in mind. There are secret things that belong to the Lord, and there are things that are revealed through natural theology. There are things that are revealed through the creation around us that we can delve into, cell structures, etc., etc. But it is interesting because there are rediscoveries by various disciplines, which were already explicit or implicit in the Bible. What I mean is that actually, the Lord has actually left for us little clues as to the authority of the Bible.
I’m going to read a little section out of a book I’m sure Paul McCaulay won’t mind and I’m just going to read two or three things out here. If you were to go back a hundred years ago for instance, scientists say that the world was in a kind of, or the universe was in a steady state, that matter was eternal. And then what happened was, and Paul doesn’t actually mention this in particular detail, but then what happened was Einstein came along with his theory of relativity. And Einstein had a problem. Because if he incorporated the idea of a steady state universe, his equations were out. But once he put in a factor for the fact the universe had a beginning, an absolute beginning, all of a sudden, bingo! E equals MC squared made sense and worked. You see, what is happening is that science, when it’s being honest with itself, is actually supporting what we already know to be true. That there was an absolute beginning. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. What about the expansion of the universe?
People have understood through the red shift, etc. for a number of years now that the universe is expanding. They’ve only understood it in the last 50, 60, 100 years. But of course repeatedly in scripture this is hinted at in Job 9, Psalm 104, Isaiah 40 the God who stretches out the heavens.
We come again to scripture we know from scripture that there are innumerable stars now I can’t remember off the top of my head but Paul mentions here that only 3000 to 5000 stars are actually visible to the naked eye so when God spoke to Abraham and he says your seed is going to be like the sand in the seashore and the stars in heaven by multitude people might have scratched their head and gone well there’s actually not that many stars I mean, parts of the world you maybe only have a thousand or so visible and they would have said, really? Is that what you mean, Lord? But of course now we understand that there are more stars than there are grains of sand.
You see, Scripture is able to be correlated through science in that sense. The earth hangs in nothing we know. The water cycle, Ecclesiastes 1 of course, you’ll remember that one. Solomon mentions the water cycle 3,000 odd years before in 15. A.D. Bernard Palissy mentions and understands the water cycle. So the scriptures stand on their own two feet. It’s good for us to understand that. It is not, the Bible is not anti-knowledge. In fact, it was those from a Judeo-Christian worldview from a background that believed in a God of order and a background that believed in a God of reason that people started to say well if God is a God of order then we can look for order in creation. And they found it. That’s why you had all the great discoveries of the 17 and 1800s. So you can take what you know then from scripture and apply it to your life and form what we term a worldview or a life view from it. You take your glasses that you have been using for your Bible study and put them on and look at any element of the world. And the wonderful thing is that there’s correlation to be found in that as well. Now I’m almost out of time. I mentioned Christ’s attestation to the principles of interpretation. You get the wee handout at the back. I’ll leave that for now.
Now, we’ll just mention for a couple of minutes a worked example that I did here on how to apply these four principles to scripture. I’m kind of short on time, I realise, so I’ll just rush through this very quickly. So what I did was, if you turn with me please to Matthew chapter 1.
Matthew chapter 1 and verse number 1.
The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham begot Isaac. Now if you were reading that and you weren’t particularly paying attention, you might say, oh it’s speaking about Jesus. That might be the limit to what you got out of that verse. Now that verse is extremely important and pivotal in many ways. So what you do, you start off with the observation.
You start off asking questions of the text. And you come up with, first of all, being thoughtful about terms. That’s the expression I used. You look at it and say, why does it say the book of the generations of Jesus Christ? Why does it say the book? So you’re asking questions of the text.
You think to yourself, is he speaking about just this first bit or is he speaking about the whole of Matthew’s Gospel?
Then you look at it again and say, what does generation mean if you’re using the authorised version. Generation, what does it mean in this context? And then you maybe look at one of the other versions that I mentioned, use another version, solid version, read it and that, and you might have your problem solved. They use the word genealogy. So we’re dealing with a genealogy. Now, you might have already known that, but it’s good to have it reaffirmed.
So the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ. Why Jesus Christ? Christ now a basic understanding of Christ is Messiah it’s the Greek term for Messiah so you’re immediately seeing the anointed so he’s writing to these if you’ve done your homework on the background of the book he’s writing to Jews and he’s speaking to them of Jesus as the Messiah Jesus Christ and then he says more he mentions these two Old Testament prime figures of David and Abraham. Then you might ask yourself the question again, why does he mention in the first verse, when he’s going to be mentioning it further down, why does he mention David and Abraham right at the top, almost in the title of this book of Matthew? Why is this important? You see, you’re asking questions of the text.
You’re observing what the text actually says. And why does it put David and Abraham in that order? That would be another point that you would come up with. Because we know that Abraham came before David. And so we go down to verse number 2. Abraham begot Isaac.
And then in the middle it says, David the king was begotten. And so on. So why does it change the order in the first verse? Why does it seem to put them, and I put seem in there importantly. Why does it seem to put them in the wrong order with David who came far later first? You see what you’re doing is you’re just observing what is already there.
You might then search for structure you might look at it and you’ll see that this title the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ seems to cover the first 17 verses because you come down to verse number 18 before you read another expression and it’s not the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, it’s the birth of Jesus Christ was as follows so he seems to be splitting the chapter into two just from an initial reading you can underline the wee bit at the top that says is genealogy of Jesus Christ and then birth of Jesus Christ. And in between there’s no mentions of Jesus the Christ together. And then you look a little bit further and you say, what’s the form? What’s the genre of the literature? It’s narrative, it’s the gospel, and yet it seems to be a bit of a legal document that we have here at the start, which is incredibly important. So as he’s coming to the Jews and he’s presenting Jesus as the Christ, he has this legal document that he wants them to see.
And that’s important too. And then I mentioned the whole thing of appreciating the atmosphere. We’re still on the observation stage. I realise I’ve done a little bit of interpretation there, but they’re very closely linked as we mentioned. So, appreciating the atmosphere. This is momentous.
There hasn’t been anything written for 400 years and then all of a sudden, bang! The book of the generations of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. This is, you know, we’ve got to get into the thrill of what’s happening here and that’s where you’re appreciating the atmosphere. Then we move on to interpretation.
So we’ve got this whole let me see, I seem to have lost a couple there
so having looked at the words you might want to look at the words a little bit more, I’ve lost a slide there actually you might want to look at these words a little bit more and what you would find I’ll make sure I put it in for the handout when I give it out. You’ll find the word book is very interesting because it’s only used five or six times in the Bible. So you take down this word and you say, what does that word mean? You remember we asked that question. You find out that it only comes five or six other times in the New Testament or in the whole Bible, well, in the New Testament in particular. It mentions the book of Moses.
That’s interesting. It mentions the book of the Psalms. mentions the book of Isaiah, it mentions the book of the prophets and it mentions the book of life at the other end in Revelation.
And the only other reference is the book of the generations of Jesus Christ. And you have this wonderful panorama of the whole Bible in a sense. Starting with those early books, the book of Moses and they’re all pointing forward to Psalms, the prophets are all pointing forward to this time when this book would be unveiled. The book of the generations of Jesus Christ. Then you come to the word generation. You know what you find out there.
You find out it’s the word Genesis. And you’ve heard that before. Genesis. And your mind links immediately. A little bit of correlation at this time. Your mind links the first book in the Bible to the first book of the New Testament.
And you find out there’s 11 genealogies in Genesis. It’s all about genealogies. It’s a book full of genealogies. And yet in the New Testament, there’s only one genealogy that matters. The genealogy of Jesus Christ. And so you’re making all these links, and you’ve only looked at three or four of the words of the New Testament.
You’re starting to interpret it. And you say to yourself, well, why is there an emphasis, it seems, on David first? And you look down, read down the text, and you’re reading through what it says. and you come down to David when he’s mentioned in the middle here and he’s called David. Now he’s not just called David, he’s called David the king. And you say that’s interesting because we’re going to read about the Lord Jesus and he’s going to be presented as a king to the nation and so it speaks about David the king.
And interestingly this whole idea of 14 links to David’s name as well but that’s for another time. And then you read a little bit more and you find out that the whole of Matthew’s gospel can be divided into three around two statements that are made from this time and when you divide it into three the first section is Jesus Christ Jesus the Christ it’s the personal section the next section is the national section it’s his son of David he’s the rejected king from chapter 4 to 16. And the last section from chapter 17 to the end of the book is Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham. It’s him moving out to the Gentiles. You see Abraham, the whole idea of the two covenants. There’s David. He’s for the nation. He’s for the throne.
There’s Abraham and he’s for the nations. For the world. And so we see that there’s a great reason why it’s divided Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham. It divides the whole book. So you’re interpreting because you’re understanding what it’s saying. You’re comparing bit with bit.
You can think of the culture, the idea of every woman in Israel longing to be the one who brings into this world a prophet or even the Messiah. And you think of all the cultural background and so on. And Matthew writing about this. and he’s setting out very clearly that he has a genealogy and so on. And then you want to consult, having done your own interpretation, you want to consult other secondary sources if you want to. I mentioned something that William MacDonald points out there, we’ll not stop with it.
And then, of course, I mentioned the final two things, following clarity and following Christ. So it’s good if the real sense, as someone will say, makes perfect sense, seek no other sense. Now what do I mean by the real sense? If it’s in a literal book, where it’s historical data that’s being spoken about, the real sense is the literal sense. It’s the sense that obviously…
Now if it’s a symbolic book, there might be a wee bit more tact, a wee bit more finesse needed to understand exactly what is meant. But you follow clarity as best as you can and you follow Christ. Is this honouring to Christ how you’re interpreting it? That’s important as well. Well, then the application. And with this, I’m going to complete.
This is my last slide. You’ll be glad to know. Ever.
Application. A deeper appreciation of Christ himself. Imagine appreciating something of this one who is the answer to all the promises to Abraham, all the promises to David, all the promises that the nation needs, all the promises that all the nations need. And so when we’re sometimes the application is just primarily so that we worship and here we have it here I think very definitely our evangelism of course should reflect this that’s what Matthew’s doing he’s sitting down and writing to the Jews about the good news he says listen I’m going to start in the very first part by telling you exactly who this person is our evangelism shouldn’t stray far away from Christ himself so you’re applying it to your own circumstances. Correlation. What you maybe want to do at this point is say to yourself, I don’t know much about David’s promises and Abraham’s promises.
I don’t know much about the Abrahamic covenant and the Davidic covenant. I’m going to go away and look at them. And then what you’re doing is you’re correlating scripture together. So I hope that’s been helpful. That’s me finished. And we do trust that whatever we’ve said will be for the glory of the Lord.
Shall we pray?
Thank you.