00:00 [Music]

00:16 Hi, I'm Chad Byrd, Scholar in Residence at 1517, and welcome to this course on reading and interpreting the Bible.

00:24 I'm happy that you're joining me, and I look forward to a journey through the entirety of the Scriptures.

00:30 question, what is it we're reading? How do we read this? How do we interpret this?

00:34 How do we apply these scriptures to our life as followers of our Lord Jesus Christ?

00:39 I'm glad to have you here. I have been reading and teaching, studying, writing

00:45 about the Bible for, oh I guess, around three decades now. And one of the beautiful

00:51 things about the scriptures is that no matter how much time I spend in the Word

01:00 multiple times, but every single time that I go back to it, I learn something else.

01:04 Because the scriptures are an inexhaustible source of wisdom and truth and, most importantly,

01:12 good news for us about our life and forgiveness and salvation in Jesus Christ.

01:16 Now it doesn't matter where you're at in your knowledge of the scriptures, whether you're

01:20 just beginning to learn the Word of God or whether you've been studying the Word of

01:23 God for years now.

01:30 and insights so that you can continue to expand your knowledge of the Word of God.

01:36 So I'm going to kind of give you a big picture of where we're going in the course.

01:39 For the first three lectures we're going to be talking about basic things like what

01:43 is it we're reading when we study the Scriptures?

01:46 What is the Word of God?

01:47 And how is it different from other books?

01:49 And then we're going to look at how to read small, concentrate on the details of the biblical

01:55 text.

02:00 scriptures. And then we're going to work our way through various parts of the Bible. We'll

02:05 talk about the Old Testament narratives and the Testament law. We'll talk about the prophets

02:09 and the Psalms. And then we'll go into the New Testament and talk about the Gospels and

02:12 Acts as well as the Epistles and Revelation. So by the time that we're done, we will have

02:17 covered all the major parts of the scriptures. And we're not going to have all the answers,

02:22 but we're going to focus upon the right kinds of questions to ask as we're working our

02:30 Genesis all the way to Revelation.

02:33 To get us kind of thinking about what we're going to talk about in this lecture, which

02:36 is what is that you're reading, I want us to think about an incident that occurred in

02:41 the book of Acts.

02:43 This is when Philip encounters the Ethiopian eunuch who's riding along in a chariot, and

02:50 he's reading aloud from the prophet Isaiah.

03:00 And the Ethiopian unit replies with these words.

03:03 He says, \"How can I unless someone guides me?\"

03:09 And so Philip gets in the chariot with the eunuch

03:13 and he's reading from Isaiah 53,

03:16 which as you probably know is one of the key passages

03:19 in the Old Testament about the suffering and the death

03:23 and the resurrection of Jesus, the Messiah.

03:26 And so beginning with that scripture,

03:30 the scriptures and how they point to Christ.

03:35 Now I think there's a number of lessons that we can learn from that narrative, but here's

03:39 two in particular.

03:40 First of all, the eunuch said, \"How can I understand this unless someone guides me?\"

03:47 This is one of the aspects of the biblical message and biblical study that's crucial

03:51 for us.

03:52 None of us know everything about the biblical texts.

03:54 It doesn't matter how long you've been studying, there's always more to learn.

03:58 And so we turn to each other.

04:00 to teachers, we turn to pastors, we turn to our brothers and sisters in Christ so

04:05 that we can learn from them and they from us so that we can guide them and they

04:09 can guide us. There's always more to learn as you work your way through the

04:13 Scriptures. And secondly, notice what Philip does. He doesn't simply explain, okay,

04:19 this is what this particular text means. He uses this as the basis by which to

04:30 in the study of the Scriptures.

04:31 It doesn't matter if we're studying Genesis or Leviticus

04:35 or Jeremiah or Romans or Revelation,

04:38 whatever it is we're studying.

04:41 We are going to use this particular scripture

04:44 to get us to Jesus, to talk about who Christ is

04:48 and what He's done for us.

04:51 So we all need guides.

04:52 I learned from other people.

04:54 You're gonna be learning from me.

04:55 You'll learn from each other.

04:56 We're all going to help each other

05:00 the scriptures as guides to each other.

05:02 And secondly, our goal is not just to kind of learn more.

05:06 The goal of studying the Bible is not just to get smarter,

05:10 to as it were, have a higher spiritual IQ.

05:14 The goal is to understand who we are in relationship

05:19 to Christ, what He's done for us, who He is,

05:22 what the good news is.

05:25 So we can learn from Philip, we can learn from the unit,

05:28 and we'll kind of keep all of that in mind

05:30 way through these lessons to come. Now think about the Scriptures themselves. I have a

05:38 physical copy of the Bible in front of me. Many of you use an app on your phones, but however

05:42 you access the Scriptures. Kind of a basic question is, what is this? So what is this that we're

05:48 reading and studying when we talk about reading and studying the Bible? And you might could

06:00 referred to the Bible not as a book but as a collection of books.

06:05 Sometimes we'll use the metaphor of a library.

06:08 Library has lots of books.

06:09 Well, the Bible is actually a collection of books.

06:12 And that's true.

06:13 There certainly are a lot of books in the Bible,

06:17 but there's also a unity because even though there's multiple authors in the scriptures,

06:22 multiple human authors in the scriptures,

06:24 they're also co-authored by the Holy Spirit.

06:30 The spirit is what produces a unity within these books.

06:35 There's all kinds of different books in the Bible.

06:37 You have history, you have prophecy,

06:40 you have apocalyptic literature, like revelation.

06:43 So there's a lot of diversity,

06:45 a lot of different kinds of writings in here.

06:47 And yet, the unity is there

06:49 because the spirit has inspired these human authors

06:53 to write the words that God wanted them to write.

06:56 So you've got diversity, but you also have unity.

07:00 that are in the Bible were written over a long period of time

07:04 by, as I mentioned, a whole lot of different people.

07:06 So we're looking at books that stretch back to the time of Moses

07:09 and that go all the way to the latter years of the first century AD.

07:14 And yet, this collection of books written by all these different people

07:19 over a vast amount of time,

07:21 also is telling a unified story.

07:25 It's a unified story that you might call the Salvation narrative.

07:30 of Genesis and unfolds over time as we get closer and closer to the final act, what the

07:39 entire narrative has been moving toward.

07:41 And that of course is the birth and the ministry and the death and the resurrection,

07:46 the ascension of Jesus, the Messiah.

07:48 So there's a lot of stories in here, a lot of authors, a lot of different ways in which

07:53 the salvation story is being told as it unfolds.

08:00 it's fulfillment in Jesus the Messiah. The Bible also is written, even though

08:05 we're reading it most of us in translation, the Bible was written in three

08:08 different languages. Mainly the Old Testament is written in Hebrew. There's a

08:11 little bit of Aramaic there. The New Testament is written in Greek and yet this

08:16 collection of books written in these three different languages has been

08:19 translated for us so that we can have access to it. And one of the things about

08:30 is in the original language.

08:31 And that's why we turn to resources

08:34 in order we can better understand some of the nuances

08:37 that are part of the Hebrew or the Aramaic or the Greek.

08:40 And we're talking about some instances of that

08:42 as we go along.

08:45 And just one more kind of unity and diversity

08:47 that we find in the scriptures.

08:48 The scriptures talk about one God,

08:52 and they also talk about many gods, many false gods.

08:57 And that's one of the things we'll discuss

09:00 is that there's always this appeal, this dark appeal to the Israelites to turn to other gods.

09:09 And so there's always a pursuing Baal or Asher, or whoever it might be.

09:13 So there's a diversity of what you might call religious options throughout the Old Testament.

09:18 There's a siren call of idolatry that you see scattered throughout the pages of the Old Testament.

09:23 Of course, this is still part of our lives today.

09:30 is woven throughout the pages of Genesis through Revelation, who is calling us back to himself,

09:36 calling us to turn from false gods and to turn to him in the person of his Son,

09:41 a Lord of Jesus Christ. So that's kind of a unity and diversity way of picturing what the

09:48 Bible is. A whole lot of books and yet one books. A whole lot of authors and yet one divine author.

10:00 And one of the beautiful things about this is that there's such diversity and unity in the scriptures

10:06 that it's fascinating to study because there's always so many more details and nuances that we can discover as we study the scriptures.

10:15 And also there's the beauty of finding all kinds of connections between Genesis and the Psalms, for instance,

10:30 Scriptures, because you're never going to get to the point where you like, well, I guess

10:34 that's all there is to know.

10:36 There's always more to learn.

10:38 There's always more to know.

10:40 And the beauty of this is that what we're learning and what we're beginning to know

10:43 is going to draw us ever more deeply into the life of Christ.

10:50 Now when we're thinking about the Bible and reading it and interpreting it, maybe in the

10:56 back of your mind you might be saying to yourself, okay.

11:00 Can't we just read it without really any necessary discussion of an ever interpretation?

11:06 I mean, don't I just need the Holy Spirit to help me understand what the Scriptures

11:11 are saying?

11:12 Why would I need a class like this or a book or someone else to kind of help me to learn

11:18 how to interpret the Scriptures?

11:19 Well, I think those are our legitimate questions.

11:21 Here's one way to think about it.

11:30 is engaged in the task of interpretation all the time.

11:36 So we begin interpreting already when we're young.

11:40 Little children, when they are watching

11:42 the faces of their parents and listening

11:44 to their parents speak are learning

11:46 what you might call the art of interpretation.

11:49 And what does that tone of voice mean?

11:50 What does that expression mean?

11:52 So we're always asking, what does this mean?

11:54 What are the implications of this?

11:56 And one of the aspects of human existence is we,

12:00 better at interpretation of life in general as we mature, as we have more experiences,

12:08 as we know more people and our knowledge increases. So just like we need to hone the

12:14 craft of interpretation in daily life, so also we need to hone the craft of interpretation

12:21 when we're reading and studying the scriptures. So just think about the various ways in which

12:30 For instance, we're interpreting the way that people speak.

12:34 Maybe they're tone of voice.

12:37 Just take the expression of, oh, is that right?

12:42 Oh, is that right?

12:42 Four simple words.

12:44 But the very way that we speak those

12:46 can be interpreted in lots of different ways.

12:47 So if I'm in a conversation with someone,

12:50 I'm kind of bored by it.

12:52 If I say, oh, is that right?

12:55 Well, then you pick up on that.

12:57 Or maybe you say something to me that I didn't realize.

13:00 Oh, is that right?

13:02 And now I'm excited.

13:03 Same words, but the context in which I say them and the person I speak the words to and

13:10 the the inflection that I give to them.

13:12 These all communicate different things.

13:15 Same words, but the context and the person I'm saying them to, they are going to determine

13:21 how these words are to be interpreted.

13:23 Well, we're going to talk a lot.

13:24 In fact, we're going to begin to talk about it and just admit it about how important context

13:30 interpreting the scriptures. We also interpret things just like, oh, say a text message. You could

13:38 take a simple text message such as, \"I give up.\" Three simple words, \"I give up.\" Now, if my daughter

13:45 texts me and she says, \"I give up,\" she might be talking about an online crossword kind of puzzle

13:53 that we play. She and I every day. She tries to get it. I try to solve it. And sometimes we just give

14:00 different interpretation than if I get that same text message from someone who's been dealing

14:05 with a lot in life and depression and anxiety and lots of things like that and they text me and

14:12 they say I give up same words but the context is different. The person who communicates these to

14:18 me is different as well. So context matters who speaks them. The words themselves are dependent

14:24 upon the context and what they're spoken to properly understand them. And then just one more thing

14:30 Art of interpretation. You and I interpret the books that we read very differently. So I'm not going to read

14:38 a cookbook the same way that I'm going to read political satire.

14:42 I'm not going to read fiction the same way that I read nonfiction.

14:46 I mean if I read the line the witch and the wardrobe,

14:49 I'm going to read that very differently than if I were to read some zoological study of the

15:00 of books, of course, is all different kinds of what are called genres of literature,

15:05 various kinds of ways of communicating truths. There's fiction, there's nonfiction,

15:11 there's satire, there's historical fiction, and you have the same diversity in the

15:16 Scriptures themselves. Take books like Leviticus and 1 Samuel and Isaiah and

15:22 Revelation. They're all in the Bible, but they're all very different. Leviticus

15:30 And Isaiah is a prophetic text that's written in poetry.

15:33 And Revelation is an apocalyptic text.

15:37 So you can't read Leviticus with the same expectations,

15:41 and same kind of rules of engagement and interpretation.

15:44 You can't read Leviticus the same way you read Revelation.

15:47 Because they're written with a different kind of understanding.

15:51 We're going to talk about that a lot more in one or two lectures from now.

15:54 But basically you can think of it this way.

15:56 Just like different sports have different rules.

16:00 different ways of engaging in that sport, different expectations.

16:04 Well, genre's going to like that.

16:06 You don't walk onto the basketball court with a baseball bat in your hand.

16:11 You don't carry a glove onto the football field.

16:14 There's different ways of engaging these sports,

16:17 just like there's different ways of engaging these particular biblical books.

16:22 Now, at this point, I want us to talk about three different ways,

16:30 when reading and interpreting the scriptures.

16:32 Now, this were a regular college level course.

16:36 We spent a lot of time talking about

16:37 kind of the theories and the use of language.

16:39 We spent a lot of time talking about

16:41 the history of interpretation.

16:42 We probably dip our toe into at least

16:46 most of the biblical books.

16:47 And that's not our purpose in this course.

16:49 Our purpose in this course is really to give you

16:51 the big picture of reading and interpreting the scriptures.

16:54 And I think three kind of big picture things

16:58 always to keep in mind.

17:00 apply these throughout the course, but three big things to keep in mind are what I call

17:04 the three C's.

17:06 Let me talk about each of those.

17:09 The first one is to read the scriptures contextually.

17:14 The second is to read the scriptures canonically.

17:17 And the third is to read the scriptures Christologically.

17:20 So first of all, to read them contextually.

17:30 small puzzle piece. Now maybe you and I could look at this together and say, \"Okay, what

17:35 does this puzzle piece mean?\" How are we going to interpret that? Well, maybe we can

17:41 look at the shape of it. Maybe there's a certain color or maybe we can see that maybe

17:47 there's grass or there's sky or something on this one puzzle piece. So we could interpret

17:53 this puzzle piece based upon just the piece itself and get a few details about it. But

18:00 what it means, how to interpret it properly until what happens.

18:04 It's forced until we put it in its context,

18:08 in the bigger piece of the puzzle itself.

18:12 And then our knowledge will be expanded.

18:14 Then we'll understand, oh, it connects with that,

18:17 and then that connects with this.

18:18 We'll see the big picture.

18:21 And I think this is where we so often kind of go astray

18:25 when it comes to reading, interpret the Bibles.

18:27 Because we forget to read contextily.

18:30 a lot more time on this in some future lectures. But let me just give you a couple of examples

18:35 to think about this. Think about a verse that is very well known. Wherever two or three are

18:42 gathered together in my name, there am I in the Midstin. This is from Matthew chapter 18.

18:47 Now on the surface of this, it's absolutely true, where two or three Christians are,

18:52 Christ is there. In fact, where one Christian is, Christ is there. But when you look at that verse

19:00 talking about.

19:01 Well, this whole conversation is about how to deal with someone who has sinned against

19:06 us.

19:07 And if you're familiar with Matthew 18, well, it goes to these various steps.

19:10 If it's between you and individual, you go to the individual, and if they refuse to

19:13 repent, then you take two or three others with you, and then you have a conversation.

19:18 And eventually, this gets to telling the entire church.

19:21 Now, at the very end of Jesus talking about this way of dealing with sinful behavior,

19:30 name, their mind, and the midst of them. The context of this puzzle piece, if you will, of this singular

19:36 verse opens up to where all we see what Jesus is talking about. This verse in context is a

19:43 discussion of how to deal with sin and repentance and forgiveness. Or another one of my favorites

19:52 from the gospel of Matthew. Jesus is talking to his disciples and he says, \"Some of you are

20:00 death until you see the kingdom of God come. Now if you just read that verse in isolation,

20:06 you might be thinking, \"Oh, that's kind of strange because Jesus hasn't returned

20:10 yet.\" And yet those two or three disciples, whoever they were, well, they certainly tasted

20:15 death. They died long ago. But if you look at that in context, you keep reading, and

20:21 the very next narrative is a narrative about the transfiguration. And two or three of those

20:30 And there they saw the kingdom of God revealed in Jesus himself.

20:36 So we have to look at verses in their immediate context and their broader context.

20:43 And speaking of this, we also need to look at them in their canonical context.

20:47 And that's the second C. So contextually and then canonically.

20:51 When I'm talking about the canon, a canon is basically the list of authoritative books.

21:00 the canon of scripture, the books that are in the scriptures.

21:04 So what does it mean to read a biblical book canonically?

21:09 Well basically it means that you don't just look

21:10 at the book in isolation, but you ask yourself,

21:12 okay, where does this book fit into the bigger picture

21:17 of scripture?

21:18 Let me just give you one example.

21:19 So if you were to open up the song of songs and read that

21:24 and let's just kind of pretend you didn't know

21:28 anything about the Bible.

21:30 you a copy of the Song of Songs and said, \"I want you to read this and tell me tell me

21:34 what you think it means.\"

21:35 Well, first of all, it's kind of weird.

21:38 It's weird for us modern people because it's full of, it's love poetry but it's not the

21:42 kind of love poetry you're going to find in a Hallmark card, all kinds of odd descriptions

21:46 of a woman's body, for instance.

21:49 Now, if you were just to read the Song of Songs in isolation, apart from this canonical

21:54 context, you're probably going to explain it to me.

22:00 obviously in love and he says a lot of things about her beauty and she says a lot of things

22:05 about his beauty and there's just all kinds of very poetic, metaphorical language going

22:10 on. But the best I can make out of it is it's some sort of ancient love song. Now if you

22:15 take the song of songs into the canon and you read it as part of the Bible, all of a

22:21 sudden it opens up to much more. Yes, it's a love song between a man and a woman, but it's

22:30 between God and His people, between Yahweh and Israel,

22:34 between Christ and His church.

22:38 So one of the things we always have to keep in mind

22:40 when we're reading the scriptures is,

22:41 where does this biblical book fit into the bigger picture

22:45 of the canon?

22:47 And now the third C, and we'll wrap up with that.

22:49 So contextually, canonically,

22:50 and we must read the scriptures Christologically.

22:54 What I'm saying is basically this.

22:56 Whatever you're studying in the Bible,

23:00 Maybe you're studying about the David Talmud in Leviticus.

23:03 Maybe you're studying the Psalms of David.

23:05 Whatever it is.

23:07 Certainly learn what's going on in that particular context.

23:11 Study in its original setting.

23:13 Learn as much as you can about that.

23:15 Ask all kinds of important questions.

23:18 But the most crucial question that you can ever ask

23:21 of any biblical text is, what is this teaching me about Christ?

23:27 You see, Christ is the fullness and the fulfillment

23:30 the entirety of the Scriptures, not just in the New Testament but the Old Testament as well.

23:33 Jesus himself taught us this. He talked about how the Scriptures testify of Him. He told the

23:40 two of Mayus' disciples that from Moses onward these Scriptures are about Him. He told His disciples

23:48 that the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms were all about Him. So when we're reading

24:00 disclosing to me more and more about the Son of God.

24:05 Not just in the New Testament, but the Old Testament as well.

24:09 So as you're reading through the scriptures,

24:10 you're asking yourself, okay,

24:11 how does this narrative fit into the salvation narrative

24:14 that culminates in Jesus?

24:16 How does this psalm maybe describe the life of David,

24:19 but also describe something about the life of Jesus?

24:22 How do these prophecies in Isaiah or Ezekiel,

24:25 how do they fit into the bigger picture

24:30 of Jesus the Christ.

24:32 So when you read the scriptures,

24:34 you're asking these three fundamental kinds of questions.

24:37 So what about we can act contextually?

24:40 How does this biblical book fit canonically

24:43 within the whole rest of the scriptures?

24:45 And then most importantly,

24:47 what's the Christological question?

24:48 How is this narrative or how is this Psalm,

24:51 or how is this proverb, whatever it is,

24:53 how does it pointing me to our Lord Jesus Christ?

24:58 So that's what we're reading.

25:00 collection of books, all these different stories, all these different authors, but a unified message,

25:06 a message that is leading us to Jesus, who is the source and the embodiment of the good news that

25:13 we are free and forgiven in Him. So that's the way we're going to go about this. This is our

25:21 introduction to kind of thinking through the scriptures. And when we come back for lesson number

25:30 to the details in the biblical books.

25:33 You read small.

25:36 We'll see you for session number two.

Welcome to Reading & Interpreting the Bible!

We’re glad you’re here and excited to walk with you through this course as you grow in confidence, clarity, and joy in reading Holy Scripture.

Before diving into the lessons, we encourage you to download your Free Course Guidebook. Simply click \"Resources\" and then \"Download\" to access your digital copy. This guidebook is designed to accompany each session, helping you follow the course, revisit key ideas, and engage Scripture more thoughtfully as you learn to read the Bible contextually, canonically, and Christologically.

What’s Inside Your Guidebook?

\n
• An outline of the full course and its structure
\n
• Summaries of each lesson and major themes
\n
• Key interpretive tools and concepts to watch for
\n
• Discussion and reflection questions for individuals or groups
\n
• Recommended readings and resources for further study
\n

Ready to begin? Click Next to start with Lesson One and take your first step into learning how the whole of Scripture fits together and how all of it ultimately points us to Jesus Christ.

00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:16 Welcome back to the course.

00:18 Last time, we talked about how to understand what

00:21 the scriptures actually are.

00:22 So what is it that we're reading and studying

00:25 when we look at the scriptures?

00:26 And we talked about some big picture items,

00:30 contextually and canonically and

00:32 Christologically. Now in today's session

00:35 we're going to talk about reading

00:38 small and by that I mean paying

00:40 attention to the details that are in

00:43 the text and to get us to thinking

00:46 along these lines I want to tell you

00:48 about an experiment maybe you've heard

00:49 of this. So the experiment was basically

00:52 this. Each person who was part of this

00:54 experiment was to watch this scene and

00:57 in the scene you had two teams some

01:00 some dressed in black, and basically they were throwing a ball back and forth.

01:06 And the people in the experiment were to count how many times the ball was passed in the white team.

01:12 Seems pretty straightforward.

01:13 So people watched this video of this happening, and most of them, when they were asked,

01:18 \"Okay, how many times was the ball passed back and forth?\"

01:20 Got the aggregate number. It was 15.

01:23 And then the person conducting the experiment would ask a follow-up question.

01:30 you see the gorilla, at which most people looked, what's going on? What are you talking

01:38 about? What gorilla? Almost half of the participants did not see that in the course of this mall

01:44 being passed back and forth, a man dressed in a gorilla suit came right in the center

01:51 of all of these players, kind of beat his chest and then walked out of the scene. Half

02:00 Now, how in the world could you miss something like that?

02:04 Well, you miss something like that, which once you know it, you do see it, but you miss

02:08 something like that.

02:09 The first time, because we all practice what's called selective vision.

02:15 And it makes perfect sense when you simply think about it.

02:18 There's only so many things that we can see and concentrate on at any one given time.

02:25 I know myself.

02:30 town, so we drive back and forth to town. I'm always seeing something I had never seen before.

02:37 I just never looked in that particular direction at that particular moment and saw a house or a farm

02:42 or whatever it might be. I have selective vision, just like all of you have. Now this means,

02:50 this selective vision means that when we're also reading things like the scriptures, there's only

03:00 given time. It's very easy for us to read, for instance, the same narrative or the same parable or

03:06 the same biblical book and the 15th time or the 20th or the 50th time. All of a sudden we see something

03:15 that we never saw there before. Now our eyes had seen it. Maybe our ears had heard this read to us,

03:21 but we never really truly saw it. So one of the things we have to always keep in mind when we're

03:30 is to, first of all, slow down.

03:36 That's probably one of the main impediments to us

03:39 really grasping a particular message of the scriptures.

03:43 We're going too fast.

03:45 You know the way this is.

03:46 We live in a faster and furious world.

03:48 We're always going here and there,

03:49 we're watching this, we're listening to this.

03:51 Oftentimes we listen to things,

03:52 not just in the regular speed,

03:53 we even speed it up so we can listen to it faster.

03:57 Well, when you do that,

03:58 you certainly cover more material,

04:00 also miss things.

04:03 So one of the things that,

04:04 at the keep in mind when you're starting the scriptures

04:06 is the necessity of slowing down.

04:09 And what I like to think of as reading small,

04:14 focusing small.

04:15 You know, they sometimes will say,

04:17 aim small, miss small.

04:19 Well, that applies to the scriptures as well.

04:21 Focus upon what is actually there.

04:26 In fact, one scholar has said

04:27 that that's really what biblical interpretation

04:30 Seeing what is there.

04:34 Not what you think is there, not what you want to be there,

04:37 not what you hope is there,

04:38 but what do the actual words say?

04:42 It's the idea of kind of getting the Bible in front of you

04:45 and reading word for word exactly what's on the page.

04:50 We make a lot of assumptions.

04:51 We think that we know what something means.

04:54 And yet, maybe that's not what it says.

04:56 So slowing down, focusing,

05:00 spending time by looking at exactly what the Scriptures have to tell us. So we're reading

05:08 words and these words are part of sentences and these sentences are part of paragraphs.

05:13 Paragraphs are part of chapters and so on and so forth but you start small with the actual words

05:19 on the page. So we have to, as it were, stand under the Bible to understand it. That is, it has to be

05:30 authority, and we are under that.

05:32 And part of being under this authority is adhering to exactly what the Scriptures are

05:39 teaching to us.

05:41 Now let me start with just a couple examples of some things that I myself thought all my

05:48 years of hearing sermons and being in Bible classes and teaching and writing books about

05:54 the Scriptures.

06:00 down and I didn't see them until a certain moment when all of a sudden my eyes were opened

06:05 and my selective vision narrowed to what was there. One of my favorites of these is from Matthew

06:12 chapter 26. Now this is when Jesus is having a very serious conversation with his disciples

06:17 and he's talking about how the disciples are going to betray him. They're going to fall away.

06:24 And you remember this scene where Peter, Peter's being Peter as he always is, always kind of putting

06:30 his mouth and just saying whatever comes to mind and he says twice, no I'm not going

06:36 to follow. These guys may fall away, I will not fall away. In fact he says even though I

06:41 have to die for you, I will not fall away. And this is when Jesus famously says yeah well

06:48 before the rooster crows you will deny me three times. Now we know that story. I know that story.

06:54 I've heard that story. I don't know how many times and yet I think it was maybe three or four years

07:00 something that was there.

07:02 I saw the gorilla, if you will.

07:04 And it's this, this is from Matthew 26, verse 35.

07:09 After Peter says this, we read,

07:13 and all the disciples said the same thing.

07:18 I had never seen that.

07:20 We concentrate on Peter.

07:22 Peter's the one saying, oh no, not me.

07:24 Even if I have to die, I'm not going to deny.

07:28 You're not going to fall away from you.

07:30 \"All the disciples said the same thing.\"

07:35 You see, it wasn't just Peter

07:37 who had this over-inflated confidence

07:40 in his own ability to withstand temptation

07:43 and to stand in the face of possible fear,

07:46 even death and say, \"No, I'm not going to do my Lord.\"

07:50 Same with James and same with all the other disciples.

07:53 They all said the same thing.

08:00 small focus upon what's there. All of a sudden that entire conversation opens up with greater

08:06 implications. The narrative does focus on Peter, but that phrase, all the disciples said the same

08:13 thing. Well, that teaches us that there's more to be learned from it. Or another favorite example

08:19 of mine. And this you really can only see if you know the original language, Hebrew, in this case.

08:30 or at least some of it by heart.

08:32 The Lord is my shepherd, right?

08:34 And we recite this at church,

08:37 we recite this often at funerals.

08:40 And yet there's one particular word

08:42 that when you read small and focus upon it

08:45 and learn exactly the implications of it,

08:48 all of a sudden this well-known verse opens up

08:52 to an even greater and more beautiful reality

08:55 than we saw before.

08:56 It's this.

08:57 So toward the end of the Psalm,

09:00 surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.\"

09:05 Now I grew up with that solemn memorized.

09:07 I've said that verse.

09:08 I don't know how many times.

09:09 And it wasn't until later when I read small, I focused, and I actually looked at what the

09:16 Hebrew has to say there.

09:18 And we'll talk about how you can use these same kind of tools, even if you don't know

09:21 Greek and Hebrew, that I realized actually that is not a great translation of the Hebrew

09:28 that's there.

09:30 that's translated as follow is \"rod off.\" And yet it doesn't really mean follow. It means chase down.

09:39 It means to pursue. Surely goodness and mercy shall pursue me all the days of my life. Surely

09:46 goodness and mercy shall chase me down all the days of my life. Now that adds a whole different

09:53 color to that verse. No longer are goodness and mercy just kind of trailing behind us,

10:00 They're pursuing us.

10:02 They're hot on our heels.

10:04 Now that kind of detail opens up the soul

10:08 in a beautiful sort of way.

10:11 Just like that detail about all the disciples

10:13 saying the same thing opens up that narrative

10:16 in different ways.

10:17 So here's my advice when it comes to paying attention

10:22 to the details.

10:23 Read slowly.

10:26 Read often and read carefully.

10:30 take your time, focus upon what's actually there. Read often. We'll talk in our

10:37 next session about the necessity of reading entire biblical books and getting

10:42 those in our heads so that as we listen to them over and over we kind of get the

10:47 big picture in our heads but listening often we're going to pick up on these

10:52 details we might miss otherwise. And then of course to read carefully. Read what

11:00 Sometimes what we're going to pick up on are connections between words.

11:05 Now again, this is one where knowing Greek and Hebrew or having tools that help you with

11:10 the Greek and Hebrew can shed light upon connections between biblical passages, Old

11:15 Testament and New Testament in this case.

11:18 So in Genesis 22, the well-known story of Abraham being told to sacrifice Isaac.

11:26 In verse 12 of Genesis 22.

11:30 I'm referring here to the Greek translation of the Hebrew,

11:34 and I'll explain why in just a minute.

11:35 But in that Greek translation of the Hebrew in Genesis 22,

11:39 God says, \"You have not withheld your beloved son from me.\"

11:45 Now that Greek verb behind withheld is \"thedomai.\"

11:51 Now, I don't remember how this came to me,

11:53 but at one point I was doing some studying

11:55 between Genesis and Romans.

12:00 on that particular verb and see if it may be occurred in the book of Romans and it does.

12:05 Now, notice this. This is from Romans 8. And Romans 8, Paul writes that God did not withhold.

12:15 God did not spare his own son. And it's the same Greek verb used there by Paul that she used

12:23 in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, Genesis 22. So just like Abraham did not withhold

12:30 from God, so God the Father did not withhold, did not spare His only Son for us.

12:38 Now when you slow down and you pay attention to what's there and you read small and you

12:43 pick up on these word connections, all of a sudden Genesis 22, the story of Abraham

12:49 sacrificing Isaac, opens up to a story that's actually pointing us to the story of the much

13:00 for us. And in this way, Isaac becomes a foreshadowing of Jesus. Isaac, who was

13:06 almost sacrificed, he points toward the son who was sacrificed on our behalf.

13:13 So sometimes when you slow down, you're going to pick up on these

13:17 connections between words, either in English or for using other biblical

13:22 tools like biblical software. You can see this happening in the original.

13:30 implications of the text when you slow down and you focus on the details.

13:36 And my favorite here is that, so in the story of David in Bathsheba, that story begins with

13:43 David on the roof.

13:44 He's on the roof of his palace.

13:46 He's walking around and that's where he spies Bathsheba, who is bathing.

13:52 And of course the story goes on from there to talk about how he asks who she was.

13:56 And of course you have the whole debacle unfolding from there.

14:00 tell an implication. Later, when David sends for Bathsheba's husband, Uriah, to come home,

14:08 hoping that Uriah will go to his house and he and his wife will be intimate, and Uriah

14:13 will think that the baby who's now been conceived between David and Bathsheba, Uriah will think

14:18 it's actually his child. Now, Uriah doesn't do that. Uriah does not go home. He stays in the very

14:30 Now here's an implication.

14:33 How close is Uriah's house?

14:38 Very close.

14:39 Because where did David see Bathsheba bathing?

14:41 From the roof of his palace.

14:43 Now think about this.

14:45 David is close enough to Uriah and Bathsheba's house where he can see her bathing.

14:51 She's right there.

14:53 And Uriah is right there.

14:55 He's right at the palace.

14:57 Basically all he has to do is walk around the corner and now in the street.

15:00 his house. Some on the other side of Jerusalem or something. And yet he will not budge from

15:05 the palace. He will not go home. Now that's an implication of the text which when you're

15:11 reading slowly and carefully you begin to pick up on things like that. Well how do you

15:16 pick up on things like this? How do you see these things besides reading slowly and often

15:21 and carefully? Well I think crucial here is learning how to ask the right questions. I

15:30 session that we're not going to get all the answers.

15:34 You can't ever get all the answers,

15:36 but you can learn how to ask the right kinds of questions.

15:40 And these are not complicated questions.

15:42 These are your kind of questions

15:43 that you probably unconsciously ask all the time.

15:47 Questions like who or to whom, and what, and where,

15:53 and why.

15:55 These simple kinds of questions that maybe a reporter

16:00 that we can ask of biblical text.

16:04 And when we're again asking these questions,

16:05 all of a sudden lights begin to go off

16:07 and we begin to see some implications and details

16:10 and connections.

16:12 For instance, if we ask of the biblical text,

16:14 who and to whom, we can ask of any of the books

16:19 of the Bible, okay, do we know who wrote this?

16:22 Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't,

16:24 but do we do we know who wrote this?

16:25 Okay, maybe we know that Paul wrote it.

16:28 It's one of his letters.

16:30 He wrote it, it's his gospel, or John wrote it, it's revelation.

16:33 Whatever it is, do we know who wrote it?

16:35 Okay, what do we know about this person?

16:36 What do we know about their circumstances?

16:40 What do we know about the particular way that they write?

16:42 So who wrote it?

16:44 And then to whom did they write it?

16:46 Who were the recipients of this letter, for instance?

16:51 One example here is Hebrews.

16:54 Now Hebrews is kind of a combination.

17:00 epistolary homily, which is a fancy way of saying it's both a letter and a sermon. It's a sermon letter

17:07 because you have characteristics of a letter at the end, but most of Hebrews is not really a letter,

17:14 it's a sermon. Okay, to whom was it written? We don't know who wrote it, I wish we did, but we

17:19 don't know who the author is, but we certainly can pick up on the fact that the people who were

17:30 in the sermon itself.

17:32 We know because of the way the preacher warns them

17:35 about certain things.

17:37 This has implications, implications such as well.

17:40 What were they tempted to?

17:41 Why was he preaching to them the way that he was?

17:44 He was preaching to them, if you're not familiar with Hebrews,

17:46 basically the message is, hey, what has happened in Christ

17:50 is so much better than what happened in the old covenant.

17:53 Christ is the better tabernacle, the better priest,

17:56 the better sacrifice.

17:58 He's given us a better covenant.

18:00 better than as a title for Hebrews.

18:03 All right.

18:04 Well, what can we pick up on with regard to the addresses,

18:08 those who were listening to this sermon?

18:10 Well, they were tempted.

18:12 They were tempted to go back to the old ways,

18:17 the old sacrifices, the old priesthood,

18:20 the old covenant.

18:22 Now, when you begin to understand who they are,

18:26 all of a sudden, the sermon begins to make a whole lot more sense.

18:30 So that's why he kept hammering home time and time again.

18:34 Christ is better than what you had before.

18:37 He is the ultimate fulfillment of everything

18:40 that was okay in the old covenant.

18:42 There was nothing wrong with it per se,

18:44 but it was incomplete.

18:46 It was insufficient.

18:48 Now, when you understand to whom that is addressed,

18:50 all of a sudden begins to open up more and more.

18:54 And then besides the who into whom,

18:56 you can ask yourself, okay,

19:00 In the sense of, okay, what kind of literature is this?

19:04 If I'm reading Revelation, I know that I'm reading a particular kind of literature,

19:09 which we call apocalyptic literature.

19:11 We're going to talk much more about that in a very last session.

19:15 But apocalyptic literature is full of symbols and wild images and numbers that have symbolic value.

19:24 And so when I'm reading that, I'm not going to read that the same way that I read,

19:30 and second kings, which are historical narrative.

19:33 There's different ways the Bible communicates.

19:36 Sometimes that we use narrative.

19:38 We're gonna talk more about narrative

19:39 in a session to come.

19:41 A lot of the Bible's narrative.

19:43 And narrative goes according to kind of the rules

19:46 of narrative.

19:47 There's characters, there's plot, there's conflict,

19:51 there's resolution, it has all of these characteristics.

19:53 So you have narrative, you also have discourse.

20:00 It's more abstract kind of argument. And that's for instance what Romans is. It's this extended theological

20:07 explanation and argument.

20:08 But then besides that you also have poetry and a lot of us are

20:13 we feel kind of out of our depth when it comes to poetry because we don't read a lot of poetry these days.

20:19 But the Bible is packed with poetry and so you have to kind of familiarize yourself with that world.

20:25 So, you know what exactly am I reading?

20:30 progressing, and how might I understand this particular kind of kind of literature?

20:35 Just to give you one example, we'll talk more about this later too, but when you're

20:39 reading proverbs, so what are you reading?

20:43 Well, you might be saying, \"Well, I'm just, I'm reading this whole list of proverbs,

20:48 truisms, reflections on life.\"

20:51 You're not wrong, but one mistake you might make is treating proverbs as if the title

21:00 promises. Proverbs are not promises in the sense that proverbs are not iron clad promises from God

21:10 that if you're like this or this characterizes your life, then this will surely come to pass.

21:18 That's not the way it works. Proverbs, biblical and non-typical proverbs,

21:23 are truisms. They're observations about what characterizes life, good and bad.

21:30 Now, there's exceptions to these truisms.

21:32 There's exceptions to proverbs,

21:34 and that's why they're not promises.

21:37 So, when you're reading the scripture,

21:39 you ask, okay, what am I reading?

21:41 What kind of literature is this?

21:42 How does it communicate ideas?

21:44 How best can I understand this,

21:46 and then apply that to myself?

21:49 You're asking yourself the win question.

21:52 So do I know when this was written?

21:55 A lot of times we do, not always,

21:57 but a lot of times we do know exactly

22:00 were written. Sometimes we can narrow it down, in fact, to the year or the decade. Well, what

22:05 implications might that have? Well, think of this example. So at the very beginning of the

22:12 short biblical book in the Old Testament of Ruth, we read in the days, this is the very beginning,

22:19 in the days when the judges ruled. Hmm. Okay. Well, how does that color our understanding of

22:30 time in the book of Judges. You know that it's a dark book. There's a lot of violence. There's

22:39 a lot of evil that takes place. There's a lot of rebellion. Now, if you know that about the book

22:46 of Judges and you begin reading the book of Ruth, and the opening line says, \"In the days when the

22:52 judges ruled, you're like, 'Oh, no.'\" Here we go again. This is going to be a terrible story about

23:00 and blood shed and foreign powers coming in

23:04 and subjugating the Israelites, but it's not.

23:08 There's a pleasant surprise because when you begin to read

23:12 the Book of Ruth, you realize, \"Oh, this is set within the

23:15 period of the judges.\"

23:16 That's the win, and yet what the book communicates,

23:19 the story that it tells, is not your typical judges'

23:23 kind of story.

23:24 And that reveals to us that we shouldn't understand from

23:27 the Book of Judges that in every single place,

23:30 place with every single person, things were exactly as dark and dismal as we might think

23:37 from the book of Judges. There's light in the darkness. There's people like Boaz and

23:43 Naomi and Ruth are these stars that are shining in the brightness of the night that

23:51 is the book of Judges. So sometimes knowing when a book is written becomes significant

24:00 Where does it take place? So who and to whom and what and when and where?

24:07 Where a biblical book is situated also becomes important for our interpretation of that book.

24:13 Take for instance the book of Esther.

24:16 Well, if you don't know that Esther is happening within Persia or even if you know that,

24:22 but you don't really know anything about Persia or the history as to why

24:30 probably Israelites. Well then, the book itself is not going to make much sense. But

24:34 when you understand, okay, Esther's in Persia because of the Babylonian exile of the Jews

24:40 and then the Babylonians are taken out by the Persians. They're now the dominant power.

24:45 And now here we have Esther, who is a Jew, knowing the situation of the Book of Esther,

24:53 knowing the historical context, where things are taking place and when they're taking

25:00 that's going to illumine the story.

25:03 And another cool thing about that is you begin to connect

25:06 books like Esther, and asking where this happened.

25:10 You begin to connect books like Esther with other stories

25:13 that have a similar where kind of answer.

25:15 Stories like Joseph, which also took place

25:18 outside the promised land in Egypt.

25:21 So Joseph, who is a ruler in Egypt,

25:25 although he's in Israelite, we begin to then compare

25:30 Esther, or Daniel, or any of the other stories where God raises up faithful Israelites to

25:36 be a blessing in these non-Israelite kinds of settings.

25:43 And then finally, we ask ourselves the question, not just of who and whom and what and where

25:48 and all of that, but also just how.

25:51 So how exactly is the author communicating ideas?

26:00 troubles, is it through miracles, how is the author communicating whatever it is they wish

26:05 to communicate to us?

26:08 So for instance, if you go to the book of Ecclesiastes, or also known as Cohalath, you

26:14 realize that one of the ways the author is communicating something here is by the use

26:17 of repetition, because over and over, the word vanity is used.

26:30 book. So one of the ways that the biblical authors will teach us the how of how they

26:35 communicate to us is through repetition. Sometimes it's through contrast. So

26:41 here's a fun exercise for you. Open up book of Joshua sometime and read those

26:46 few opening chapters. And I want you to compare and contrast Rahab with Aiken. Now

26:54 Rahab was a prostitute who lived in the city of Jericho who helped the Israelite

27:00 and she was rescued when the Israelites took Jericho,

27:04 and then she was adopted into the family of Israel.

27:07 In fact, she's in our Lord's family tree.

27:09 As you can read in Matthew chapter 1.

27:11 Now, contrast her connected with Jericho,

27:15 who's rescued, who does a good thing,

27:17 contrast her life with Aiken, who wasn't Israelite,

27:22 an Israelite soldier who engaged in theft.

27:26 He took some of the things that belonged to the Lord,

27:30 Jericho, he himself was executed. It becomes a great way of understanding these two narratives

27:37 by contrasting these two characters. And one more way, with regard to the how, is to

27:45 understand that sometimes a biblical author will, frequently in fact, a biblical author

27:49 will use earlier scriptures. You certainly see this happening in the New Testament where

28:00 Psalms. There's a lot of quotations of the Old Testament and the New Testament.

28:03 Well, one of the things you have to ask yourself is, okay, how is this biblical text being used by

28:10 this New Testament author? You go back to the original and you see what's happening in the

28:15 original that they're quoting from, and then you use that to better understand what is being

28:20 taught in the New Testament. And sometimes Old Testament authors will quote earlier scriptures

28:30 in which they draw this scripture, you're better going to understand what they are communicating

28:36 to you.

28:37 Let me close with just a couple of practical kinds of things.

28:42 So one question that maybe you've been asking, I get asked this a lot, is, okay, when it comes

28:47 to reading small, studying the scriptures, or just reading through the scriptures as a

28:53 totality, what translation do I use?

29:00 of translations are there out there. When we're reading big or reading small or reading into these

29:05 genres, what actually should we be reading? Well I'm not going to give you like the translation

29:12 that you should choose, but let me just kind of give you a general idea as to what you're looking

29:16 at when it comes to Bible translations. You have everything from paraphrases, like the message

29:22 of the living Bible. Paraphrases are not wanting to translate, they're wanting to, as the name

29:30 in the original. You also have some that are called a dynamic equivalence. And this

29:35 is kind of a thought for thought kind of translation. An example of that is the NIV,

29:40 which is a very popular translation that's been used for quite some time. And the goal

29:45 of the NIV is not necessarily to reproduce the original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic word

29:50 for word, but it's more of a thought for thought explanation of what is being communicated

30:00 word for word, sometimes called formal translation.

30:04 And the idea here is for these translations to stick

30:07 with the original wording as much as possible.

30:11 Even if it comes across in English as maybe not

30:14 rhetorically beautiful as some other translations,

30:17 a bit more literal, well, that's what they're striving for.

30:20 And in this category would be, for instance,

30:22 the Bible that I have here, this is the

30:23 New American Standard Bible.

30:25 Another translation like that would be the ESV.

30:27 And those are the two that I generally use.

30:30 standard and an ESV. You know, it's still true. It's often said that this is still true that the best

30:36 translation you can use is the one that you will actually read.

30:39 It's very true. Whatever your translation, if you read it, well that's great.

30:44 That's the goal, right, to actually read the translation. But I would urge you to

30:48 pick a translation. I grab a take toward a new American standard or ESV. You can maybe grab a take toward another one.

30:53 But also look at other translations. You can compare

31:00 Maybe it's a more word for word, compare it with what a thought for thought translation

31:04 has and compare that with a paraphrase.

31:06 Sometimes by comparing these, you'll actually have a better understanding of what is being

31:10 taught in the particular verse that you're looking at.

31:14 You can also do word studies.

31:17 This is another kind of practical way to read small.

31:20 And to do this, there's some great online tools.

31:25 And some of these are free.

31:30 Step Bible is going to allow you to actually look at the individual words and find out what they are in their Greek or their Hebrew or their Aramaic original.

31:41 And it allows you to do word searches. So you can compare, okay, how does this author use this same word elsewhere?

31:48 Or how is this word used elsewhere in the Bible? So you can do these word studies by using tools like Step Bible.

32:00 You can get two translations side by side, you can get a translation in the original,

32:05 and you can do word searches by using blue letter Bible app, and you can see how words are used.

32:09 And there's also dictionaries that give you the full range of definitions of words.

32:15 Or if you want to invest a little bit of money, you can use Logos Bible Software,

32:19 which is what I use on a daily basis.

32:21 And there's tons of tools and tons of resources there that allow you to look at the original

32:30 the Word of God. But whatever tools you're using,

32:34 whether you're just using your English Bible or

32:35 using a Bible program, the important thing is to learn

32:40 how to read slowly, to read carefully, to read often.

32:46 One way you might do that is by simply writing out the verses,

32:50 or maybe praying the verses. But whatever you do,

32:53 focus on what's actually there. Read small.

33:00 have a large blessing as a result, because God is going to use your study of the details

33:07 in the text to open up grand vistas of what He has to teach you about you, about Himself,

33:14 and most importantly, about our Lord Jesus Christ.

33:17 So that ends this session.

33:19 Next session, we're going to talk about the flip side of that reading big and how we approach

33:30 of the word of God. We'll see you next time.

Ready to see how closely you’re reading? Take the quiz to test your ability to notice details, ask good questions, and slow down in your reading of Scripture.

00:00 [MUSIC]

00:16 Welcome to our third lesson in how to read and interpret the Bible.

00:21 So in the last session we talked about really focusing upon the details of the text, reading small.

00:30 Now, as important as that is, there's also another side to this that's just as important,

00:37 and that is reading big.

00:39 So reading small and reading big.

00:42 And it helped us to kind of begin to think this way.

00:44 Let me just kind of tell you a story.

00:47 So let's suppose that we're back in the time of World War II, and there's a soldier who's

01:00 Now this is full of details about her and about what's going on back home and how much she loves him,

01:06 crampacked with things that he of course would love to hear.

01:11 Now do you imagine that the soldier who receives this love letter is going to the first day that he receives the letter, read page one,

01:19 and then he's going to wait a week and he's going to read page two and then he's going to wait a week and he's going to read page three of this letter.

01:24 Well of course not that would be ridiculous right?

01:30 He wants to hear, and so he's probably not just going to read it through once but probably

01:34 multiple times.

01:36 Because that's the way that letters work.

01:38 You take the entire letter in and or that you can understand from the beginning to the

01:43 end what is being communicated.

01:46 Now taking that example, think about the letters that we have in the scriptures.

01:53 Do you imagine that when Paul was pinning his letter to the church in Rome or in Corinth

01:59 or anywhere else?

02:00 imagine that he would have expected those who received his letter the first

02:04 time they were gathered together to read the first section and then to wait a

02:09 week and to read the second section then to wait a week and the third section

02:12 well of course not Paul in fact would have been a flabbergasted if the church

02:17 in Rome didn't read his entire letter in one setting because that way you hear

02:30 with his letter to the Corinthians or the Ephesians or Galatians or whoever it might

02:35 be.

02:36 That's the way that letters rightly communicate everything that they intend to communicate

02:41 to the addressee.

02:43 Now think about not just Paul's letters but think about many of the books of the Bible.

02:48 I would argue that with some exceptions, most of the books of the Bible were intended

03:00 Maybe the Gospels certainly parts the Old Testament as well.

03:05 The goal is to take in the entirety of this particular letter or prophecy or sermon or

03:12 whatever it might be so that you can better capture the flow of the arguments.

03:18 So you can take it all in at once.

03:21 Now you might be saying to yourself, \"Well, it sounds good, but I mean, we only have so

03:27 many hours in the day, right?

03:30 all day, just to be able to make sure I get the entirety of what is being communicated.

03:34 But let me stress that this is extremely doable with most of the parts of the Bible.

03:43 So, look at the Old Testament.

03:45 There are 20 books that are part of the Old Testament that can be read or listened to,

03:52 if you prefer, that way of hearing the Bible, listen to on an app.

04:00 an hour. 20 of those books. In the New Testament, 21 of the books can be read or listened to

04:08 in less than an hour. 20 of the Old Testament, 21 of the New Testament. That means that,

04:13 of course, total of 41 books of the Bible can be either read in their entirety or listened

04:20 in their entirety in less than an hour. And that's around 60% of the Bible that you can

04:30 anywhere close to an hour or even half an hour. You can read them in just a few minutes. So it's

04:37 very doable. It's an easy thing that you can do, especially if you are listening to the Bible,

04:43 when maybe you're on a drive or on a walk or something like that. And just on a practical level,

04:48 I can't emphasize how useful this is in reading and interpreting the scriptures. I think that

05:00 verse, \"idus.\" It's like a sickness where you're just fixated on a particular

05:07 verse. So maybe it's your favorite verse or maybe you have a collection of

05:11 favorite verses or maybe it's the devotional that you use, whatever it might be.

05:13 And there's a focus on one verse and you don't really see the verse in its

05:19 context. The paragraph it's in, the chapter it's in, the entire letter or book

05:30 upon a verse and don't see it in its broader setting, then we can easily misunderstand what

05:37 is being communicated.

05:38 Just give you one example from the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 9.

05:44 So very often I will hear this verse quoted, Ecclesiastes 9, 5, that the dead know nothing.

05:51 And the idea behind this is that, well, when you die, whether you're a believer or

06:00 or a sleep until the resurrection.

06:03 Well, that actually does not fit whatsoever with the context, the bigger context, not just

06:10 of Ecclesiastes 9, but of course with the entirety of Ecclesiastes.

06:15 So you need to read big.

06:17 Well, what's the context here?

06:19 The context is talking about how the living are better than the dead because the living

06:25 know the day of their death, but the dead know nothing.

06:30 being well, at least the living have a chance before they die to repent, to believe, to

06:37 live according to God's will.

06:40 Once you're dead, however, that opportunity has passed.

06:43 That's the focus of that particular section of Ecclesiastes.

06:47 Not to mention, if you're familiar with Ecclesiastes, the theme of the entire book

07:00 or forgetting God or not believing Him, whatever my name, but also a life lived without resurrection.

07:07 How vain that life is without God, without the promise of resurrection. So the entire message

07:14 of Ecclesiastes is that if you are living apart from God, yes, your life is vain.

07:20 If you're living apart from the hope of the resurrection, yes, your life is vain. But if not,

07:30 trusting in Him, then you have the promise of life and you certainly have the promise

07:34 of resurrection.

07:36 Now this is just one particular case of what can happen when we focus too much upon a particular

07:42 verse and we don't read big.

07:45 We don't look at the broader context of what is being communicated.

07:49 So what I want to do is talk about various ways in which you can read big.

08:00 biblical book. Then we'll look at some examples as we work our way along. So first of all, let's

08:05 think about reading big in one particular book. This is the way that one way that you can approach

08:12 this task of taking in more and more of the scriptures so that you can better read and interpret

08:18 these scriptures. So here's some questions you can ask yourself if you're reading big in one

08:23 particular book. First of all, as I've mentioned before and I'll mention again because it's so crucial

08:30 the scriptures, one of the things you have to ask yourself, okay, is what kind of biblical

08:35 book is this?

08:37 So is this book of the Bible that's more apocalyptic in nature, like many parts of Daniel, and

08:43 some parts of Ezekiel, and even parts of Isaiah, but certainly the book we most associate

08:48 with this is Revelation.

08:49 Well, if it is, you're of course not going to read that the same way that you're going

08:53 to read a historical narrative.

09:00 that you would read the newspaper, or the same way

09:03 that you'd read a cookbook and a work of fiction.

09:07 We all approach these different genres

09:09 in different ways with different expectations

09:11 because they operate according to different rules

09:15 of communication.

09:15 So ask yourself, okay, what kind of book am I dealing with

09:20 here?

09:20 What's a genre?

09:21 And that's going to right away clue you in as to what you should

09:25 expect and how you should engage this particular text.

09:30 Ask yourself if there's any indication of a certain structure to the book.

09:36 And here, a simple Bible dictionary or a commentary on a biblical book can be extremely

09:42 helpful.

09:43 And of course, there's many of these resources online as well, where they can give you maybe

09:48 an outline form, a picture of the flow or the structure of the book that you're looking

09:54 at.

10:00 in Hebrew, which are the generations. So that indicates that this is, we're leaving one

10:05 second of Genesis and we're entering into another section of Genesis. It's also indicative of

10:10 the theme of Genesis. It's about generations. It's about family. It's about God's ongoing

10:17 salvation story that's centered around certain groups of people, certain families, especially

10:21 Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, so on and so forth. So that's one way that you can kind of get an idea

10:30 Many people argue that it's structured according to five different sections

10:35 that are structured around the teachings of Jesus. And these five parts of Matthew

10:41 then fit with the or or mimic or mirror the five books of Torah, Genesis

10:48 through Deuteronomy, which makes sense because the Gospel of Matthew was heavily

10:52 focused upon the Old Testament and includes this idea of Jesus being a new

11:00 Moses was a shadow or a paradigm that is then fulfilled by Christ.

11:08 So get some resources that are going to help you with the basic structure of the book so

11:14 that you can follow it as you go along.

11:16 And then ask yourself also, are there any indications in this book I'm studying?

11:21 Maybe it's one of the gospels, maybe it's one of the Paulus of Pissals, maybe it's

11:30 telling me is the goal of his book. Think about it. I mean if I write a book and I

11:36 give it to you and I say okay I wrote this book and and here's why I wrote it.

11:41 This is my purpose in putting in the time and effort to write this book. Well

11:45 knowing that of course is going to give you a heads up right away as to

11:48 what you should expect from this book. Well did the biblical do the biblical

12:00 implicitly. For instance, here's how the gospel of Mark begins. The beginning of the

12:07 gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ,

12:12 the Son of God. Now right away he's telling us what this is going to be all about. It's

12:17 going to be a gospel about Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, the anointing of one of God, the

12:23 Son of God. And that means that if we are taking our reading and interpreting of Mark

12:30 direction that doesn't lead us always to a focus upon who Jesus is, who he is as the

12:38 Christ and that Jesus the Christ, Jesus the Messiah is in fact the son of the living

12:45 God.

12:46 If we take the gospel in a new direction different than that, then we're not staying

12:49 true to the purpose for which Mark wrote the gospel.

12:54 Or take another gospel, John.

12:56 At the end of John, John chapter 20.

13:00 a whole lot of other signs in the presence of his disciples.

13:03 And John didn't include them in this book.

13:06 He goes on to say, the whole world could hold the book

13:09 if all the things were written about Jesus.

13:12 But he says this.

13:14 He says these are written.

13:16 What he included, John says, these are written

13:19 so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ,

13:22 the Son of God, and that by believing

13:24 you may have life in his name.

13:26 Well, John tells you right there.

13:30 so that you might believe, in fact, that Jesus is who he says he is.

13:35 He's the Christ, the Son of the living God, and that by believing you can have life in his name.

13:40 Or one more example, and this one is more implicit.

13:43 But if you read the book of Judges, you'll notice that multiple times it says that

13:49 at that time in Judges, that there was no king in Israel.

14:00 Now, the repetition of that particular line is pointing us to at least one of the reasons

14:08 that the book of Judges was written.

14:10 I mentioned before that it's a very dark book full of violence and a lot of evil activities.

14:16 Well, one of the reasons all of these are recorded is to show what happens when there's

14:23 no king in Israel and everybody's doing what they think is right.

14:30 But they're doing what's right according to their opinion, according to their eyes, the

14:34 way they look at things.

14:36 So in that way, the book of Judges is telling us, okay, that's what this book is about.

14:42 And if you're studying one book, another thing that you can do is begin to notice recurrent

14:48 themes in the book.

14:50 So if there's a particular aspect of the author's work that he wants you to really focus

15:00 One example of that is in the book of Genesis where you see the choice made by God of favoring

15:08 or choosing or blessing not the firstborn son but the secondborn son.

15:14 This happens over and over in the narratives of Genesis.

15:17 And so after a while, when you get to the end of Genesis, for instance, you're no longer

15:22 surprised when God favors or blesses not the firstborn but the secondborn because this

15:30 the book of Genesis. So that's one way that you can read big. You can choose a

15:35 book, maybe it's a book that you don't know very well. And you really want to get

15:40 to know it. Maybe you've you know kind of read certain parts of Ezekiel but you

15:44 don't really feel like you know Ezekiel well. Well fine. Pick Ezekiel as your book

15:50 for this year and read it and read it again and read it again. And what's just

15:56 what's going to happen is you read big in this one book as you're going to begin

16:00 see the structure and the flow. You're going to really get to know that genre.

16:04 You're going to pick up on certain recurrent themes. You're going to kind of get to know

16:08 how the book is communicating God's Word to you. Another thing that you can do, as

16:14 far as reading big, is to read big in one particular author. Of course, some books,

16:21 some authors in the Bible wrote more than one book. So by doing this, you can kind

16:30 communicate. I did this one year. We had a conference of

16:34 1517 coming up the next year, and it was going to be

16:37 centered upon the work of C.S. Lewis. So beginning a year

16:42 before that conference, I started reading, or in some

16:45 cases, rereading books by C.S. Lewis. And I read almost

16:49 everything that he had published. And by the time I was

16:53 done, I not only felt like I really had gotten to know him as

17:00 the way that he liked to communicate things. You almost get a feel for the

17:04 author's personality. And I've done the same thing with multiple other authors

17:09 as well. When you do that you really kind of get into the shoes of this

17:15 particular writer. You get into their head. You learn how they like to

17:19 communicate, what kinds of images and examples they like to use. Their cadence,

17:24 their the flow of argumentation. So by reading one particular author you're

17:30 get to know that author really well. And you can certainly do this with the Bible as well. For

17:34 instance, you can take the Torah of which Moses was the author, Genesis through Deuteronomy. And you

17:41 can begin to read all of these books over a period of time. And the same thing is going to happen

17:46 that happens when you read one particular book. You're going to really get to know the flow of the

17:50 argument. You're going to get into the certain themes that arise. And you're going to better understand

18:00 time in this particular author. For instance, if you're reading the Torah, if you're reading

18:05 these books by Moses, you're going to see how he focuses upon this promise of a seed that is to come.

18:14 The seed is talked about already in Genesis 3 verse 15, and then it's talked about in the story

18:20 of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and then all the way throughout the Torah. Well, what's a seed

18:30 actually another name for the Messiah, the one who is to come, who's going to

18:35 crush the head of the serpent as it was talked about in Genesis 3. So by reading

18:41 the Torah, Genesis is the Deuteronomy, reading big in the Torah and in noticing

18:46 these themes you're going to also see how this this trajectory that begins in

18:51 the Torah is going to be picked up in the rest of the scriptures. Now let's say

19:00 and judges, and especially 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and 2nd Kings, which trace the history of the

19:05 monarchy. Well, as you do that, you're really going to get to know the kings of Israel, because

19:13 once you get to Samuel and you meet Saul and then David and then Solomon, a lot of the focus is

19:19 upon these kings. And one thing that's going to emerge as you get to know these books is how

19:30 they're judged. The judgment basically is how faithful were they in the worship of the one true

19:38 God because over and over what happens is the kings are led away from the one true God by the

19:45 worship of Baal or Asherah or some other some of the false God or maybe they do so so in maintaining

19:52 the worship of the one true God but they let the high places remain or whatever it might be but

20:00 faithful were these kings and keeping their focus and the focus of the people of God upon

20:05 the worship of Yahweh, the one true God.

20:08 And so you see this thing beginning to emerge as you focus upon the historical authors.

20:14 And you of course could do the same thing in the New Testament.

20:17 Luke wrote not just the gospel of Luke, but he also wrote the companion volume to that.

20:22 He wrote the book of Acts.

20:24 So you can read the gospel of Luke and then you can keep going into Acts.

20:30 And we're going to talk about this also in our later lecture.

20:33 One of the things you begin to see is there's a focus upon this growth of the kingdom of

20:38 God, this expansion of the kingdom of God.

20:41 Where in the beginning it's a smaller focus.

20:44 It's upon Jesus and his disciples and what's going on in Jerusalem and in Judea.

20:50 But then when you get to the book of Acts you're going to see this enlargement of the

20:55 kingdom as the message of Christ begins to expand.

21:00 big in Luke that is reading his two volume set, Luke and Acts, you'll see how this theme begins to

21:08 emerge and to grow. So you can read big in one book, you can read big in one author, you can also

21:14 read big in one Testament, which is another way of saying reading contextually, right? So don't

21:22 just ask yourself, okay, what is being taught in this one book of Old and New Testament, but how does

21:30 Testament, either Old Testament or New Testament.

21:33 And you can compare books, for instance.

21:34 One fun thing to do is to take the Book of Acts and to follow Paul's missionary trips.

21:42 Okay, where did he go?

21:44 And when he got there, what happened?

21:48 What good thing happened?

21:50 What persecution happened?

21:52 What happened to that church that he started in this particular city?

21:56 So you can trace all of that in the Book of Acts.

22:00 compare that with some of Paul's epistles.

22:03 So what happened when Paul started this church in Ephesus?

22:07 Alright, what does the book of Acts tell us about that?

22:09 And then what does Paul talk about when he writes to the church at Ephesus in Ephesus?

22:14 So that's one way you can go across the Testament and compare different books.

22:20 And by reading big in that way, get a better idea exactly how these books fit together.

22:30 last component of reading big, which is probably the most important.

22:35 And that is reading big in the entire Bible.

22:39 I can't stress how important this is.

22:42 Yes, it's important to focus upon the details in a particular verse.

22:47 Look at those words as we talked about in our last session to read some of them.

22:51 And yes, it's important to see how that verse fits into the book that it's found in.

23:00 old or new, but there is absolutely no substitute for seeing how the entire biblical story looks

23:09 all the way from Genesis to Revelation. And of course, one way you can do this is by following

23:16 a Bible in one year program, which many people do, which I've been doing for several years, where

23:22 either you read from Genesis all the way straight through to Revelation, or you maybe you read a

23:30 logical reading. How are you doing? There's lots of different plans out there. The more

23:36 you do it, the more you take in the entire scriptures, at least once a year, then the

23:43 better you're going to see how everything fits together. I like to picture the scriptures

23:50 as kind of a big interconnected web. I know not everyone likes spiders. I don't like

24:00 And the Holy Spirit has caused this web to be all interconnected.

24:05 You know the way spider webs work.

24:06 If you touch one little part of the web, what happens?

24:09 Well, the whole thing reverberates.

24:12 Touch it over here.

24:13 The whole thing reverberates.

24:15 Well, the scriptures are like that.

24:17 If you touch a verse in Revelation, it's going to be felt all the way back in Genesis.

24:23 If you touch something in the Book of Psalms, it's going to be felt all the way in Romans.

24:30 of the Scriptures are interconnected because, as we've talked about before, they're all

24:36 co-authored by the Holy Spirit who inspired these words to be written.

24:41 So as you're reading big in the Bible, you're going to come up with all kinds of connections

24:46 between the various parts of Scripture.

24:49 So as you do that, you're going to realize right away, first of all, there's no monotony

24:53 to the Scriptures, even though they have the same co-author of the Spirit.

24:57 There's anything but monotony.

25:00 of voices. Reading Isaiah is nothing like reading Jonah. Reading Ezekiel is nothing like reading Daniel.

25:09 Reading the Psalms is certainly nothing like reading Leviticus, just like a choir has all these

25:13 different kinds of voices which harmoniously blend together. So the scriptures have all of these

25:19 voices which harmoniously blend together to communicate the same kinds of messages. And also

25:30 But right away, God tells his people everything there is to know.

25:34 There is a progression of revelation as you work your way through the Scriptures so that

25:40 God reveals more and more of what he wants people to know about himself, what he wants

25:46 people to know about his son, what he wants people to know about the plan of salvation.

25:50 So one of the fun things about reading through the Scriptures is you get to walk along this

26:00 what you see about what God is revealing to his people about what kind of God is and

26:06 what he expects of them and who the Messiah is going to be.

26:10 You see this unfold as you work your way through the Old Testament.

26:15 And I talked about themes that arise from particular books or particular authors.

26:19 Well you certainly see all kinds of themes arising as you work your way through the scriptures.

26:30 of a servant. Now, if I say servant of the Lord, many of you might think of Isaiah,

26:36 because Isaiah prophesies the Messiah being a servant. You have the servant songs, which

26:41 are famous in Isaiah's writings. But it doesn't start there. Abraham is called a servant,

26:47 and Moses is called a servant. So one fun thing that you can do when you're working

26:52 your way through the entirety of the Scriptures is begin to focus upon themes like servant.

26:55 Okay, who's called a servant and why are they a servant of the God? And how does God

27:00 servant and then you get to Isaiah, well this is these servant of God. What does God say about him?

27:06 And then you can trace this all the way into the New Testament as well. You can also see

27:13 how God speaks of the defeat of the enemy in certain sorts of almost predictable sorts of ways.

27:20 So I mentioned Genesis 3.15 earlier where you have the promise of this seed. What's he going to do

27:30 head is going to crush the head of the enemy. Well, there's what you might call a gospel

27:35 of head crushing that emerges multiple times in the Old Testament where the big foe of

27:42 the people of God, a person like Goliath, the Philistine, is killed when his head is crushed.

27:49 And that's just one occurrence. There are multiple occurrences where this arch enemy

27:53 of the people of God is defeated by a blow to the head. What's going on here is these

28:00 These narrative details are included in the big picture of Scripture so that as you read through it,

28:04 you'll begin to receive all of these hints and clues in narrative form of how ultimately Christ

28:11 is going to crush the head of the arch enemy of his people, of us.

28:16 You also begin to see how God likes to act in certain sorts of ways to save his people.

28:22 He'll use geography to save his people, geographical features of the world like water.

28:30 things through water. He brings his people through the Red Sea. Earlier he rescued in

28:35 the book of Genesis he rescued no one in his family by the art which was lifted up

28:39 by the water. He brought Israel across the Jordan River. He gave them water to drink

28:44 in the desert. Water becomes a dominant theme. More mountains. How many times in the scriptures

28:50 does God like to appear to his people on mountains or use mountains as part of his salvation

29:00 themes that begin to emerge as you work your way through the entirety of the Bible.

29:06 So as you're reading big in the Scriptures, you want to read big in a particular book.

29:13 Get to know that book really well.

29:15 Choose a book, maybe one, two or three books this year, that you really want to get to know

29:19 well.

29:20 If they're shorter books, you can probably read or listen to them once a week.

29:24 And by doing that, you're going to get to really know that particular book.

29:27 And then you can move on to other books as years go by.

29:30 And so an author really wrote.

29:31 Read big in this particular author.

29:33 Maybe it's Luke, maybe it's John, maybe it's Moses,

29:36 maybe it's David Psalms, whatever it is.

29:38 Really get to know that author.

29:40 And then also keep the big picture in mind.

29:42 Read big in the Old Testament.

29:44 Read big in the New Testament.

29:46 And then read big in the scriptures themselves.

29:50 Find a way that you can cover the Bible

29:52 in one year.

29:53 Follow that plan.

29:54 And as you do, what's gonna happen is it's kind of like,

30:00 And you've watched that movie multiple times.

30:03 I mean, you know the characters, you know the plot.

30:06 It never gets old because the more that you watch it,

30:09 the more you get to know the dialogue,

30:11 the more you get to know the characters,

30:13 you get to know how everything fits together.

30:16 Well, if you think of the scriptures as a movie,

30:19 then the more you watch this movie,

30:21 then the better you're going to understand the beginning

30:24 from the end, the better you're going to understand

30:26 the end from the beginning,

30:28 the better you're going to get to know the characters,

30:30 how everything fits together.

30:33 So as we talked about the last session,

30:36 certainly read small.

30:38 Focus on those details in the text.

30:40 At the same time, read big.

30:42 Take in big portions of Scripture.

30:44 Take in the entire Bible in order that you can see

30:47 the whole story from beginning to end,

30:49 and as you see the whole story from beginning to end,

30:51 also then focus upon these details.

30:54 Because there's richness everywhere in the Word of God,

31:00 minding these riches, the more we're going to have in front of us the grace

31:05 and the favor of God and Jesus Christ. The more we're going to hear the gospel

31:09 from these pages. Alright that is that, that is it for this session. Now in the

31:16 next one we're going to switch gears. We spent three sessions talking about kind

31:20 of big picture things. In the fourth lesson we're going to shift to a focus

31:26 upon particular parts of the Bible. So when we come back we're going to tell

31:30 talking about Old Testament narrative and Old Testament law and how we read and interpret

31:36 these parts of the Scriptures.

31:38 We'll see you then.

Think you’ve got the big picture? Take the quiz to see how well you understand reading Scripture in context, across books, themes, and the whole biblical story.

I hope you're enjoying the course so far! Welcome to this session on Old Testament Narratives and Law. Here, we’ll explore how stories and laws function within the larger salvation story and why they should not be read as simple moral lessons. You’ll learn to recognize key themes, historical movements, and patterns that ultimately point us to Christ and the gospel.

00:00 [Music]

00:16 Welcome back. We're in session number four of this walk through how to read and

00:22 how to interpret the Bible. Now in our first three sessions together we talked

00:30 What are we actually reading when we study the scriptures?

00:32 What kind of book is this?

00:34 We talked about focusing on details, reading small.

00:37 And then we talked about reading big,

00:39 taking in whole books, whole authors, works,

00:43 whole testaments, the entire Bible.

00:46 And now in this session and the next ones,

00:49 we're going to look at various parts of the Bible.

00:52 So today we're gonna look at the two different parts

00:56 of the Old Testament, the Old Testament narrative

01:00 And then we're going to spend one more session on the Old Testament and then two on the New Testament.

01:05 So I mentioned multiple times how important it is to ask what kind of book we're looking at.

01:11 What's the genre? What's the kind of literature?

01:14 So we're going to be looking at two of these today, narrative and law.

01:18 These are two different genres, two different ways that God has chosen to communicate to us.

01:30 with and most familiar with because that's our lives.

01:34 We're storied people.

01:36 You and I love listening to stories.

01:39 We love telling stories.

01:40 Our entire life is one big narrative.

01:44 So you might say that we live in narrative.

01:47 I mean, that's the way that humanity works.

01:50 We're telling stories.

01:51 We're living stories.

01:52 We're listening to stories.

01:54 And that's also one of the appeals of the Bible itself

02:00 full of highs and lows and these incredible situations where God steps in and saves his people,

02:08 and these terrible situations where sinners do awful things, it's a story. It's a narrative.

02:14 And narratives draw us in in order that we might better understand God's narrative in our place in

02:30 significant way that God has told his story in the Old Testament.

02:35 Now, you have to make a distinction here because the narratives of the Old

02:39 Testament certainly they're telling a story but there is another component to

02:43 this that we have to keep in mind.

02:45 The not only God telling us a story, telling us a narrative, but it's a

02:50 narrative going somewhere.

02:52 It's the salvation narrative begins right in Eden where God confronts Adam

03:00 rebelled against him. That's where the story starts. You might even say it starts before that

03:04 with creation. The narrative of our salvation begins right where humanity blows it. They rebelled

03:11 against God. And this narrative then flows from there all the way into the pages of the New Testament

03:19 where our Redeemer finally comes. So it's a story that's going somewhere, and a story that's

03:30 He is stepping in to shepherd history toward the goal that he has in mind, the goal that

03:39 culminates in the birth of his son, our Savior, the incarnation.

03:44 God becoming one of us and the effects of that incarnation in the ministry of Jesus,

03:50 ministry of salvation for us.

03:53 So we're going to be talking about the Old Testament narrative.

03:56 There's narrative in the New Testament as well, but our focus in this lesson is going

04:00 narratives. Now I do have to say that sometimes sometimes we have to unlearn

04:07 things before we can learn things rightly. We've all experienced this.

04:11 You know, you're mistaken about something, so you have to correct that mistake so

04:15 you can do it right the next time. Sometimes you have to unlearn before you

04:19 can learn. And I think one of the ways we have to unlearn Old Testament narrative

04:30 to understand them in what you might call a moralistic sort of way, where you're reading the story of

04:38 Daniel, for instance. You're reading the story of David or whoever it might be. And the questions

04:44 that you're asking of yourself are moral kinds of questions. So is this character, in this particular

05:00 to hate him or her.

05:02 Now certainly there's a place for those kinds of questions.

05:05 I mean, there certainly are models for us in the scriptures

05:08 of how we should be, how God wants us to be.

05:12 But the problem is oftentimes that's all that we ask.

05:16 I know that my own experience when I was a child

05:18 was that in Sunday school, I was taught to read

05:21 these ultimate, Old Testament narratives moralistically

05:24 and just basically look for heroes that I could imitate

05:30 brave David going out to face Goliath, or I could be like praying Daniel, or brave Moses, or whoever

05:37 it might be that was held up in front of me as a role model for me. And like I say, there's a place

05:43 for that, but definitely a minor place. The main purpose of the Old Testament narratives

05:51 is to tell us what God is doing for us because we can't do it for ourselves. In fact, if you look

06:00 narratives, most of what you see is people failing over and over and over.

06:05 Even if they start out well, they don't always end well.

06:08 They make mistakes.

06:09 They commit huge sins that have impact upon a whole lot of people.

06:15 And so you're not going to be asking yourself, okay,

06:17 what does this old testament narrative teach me about what I'm supposed to do

06:22 or who I'm supposed to be or who I'm not supposed to be?

06:25 That's the wrong question.

06:27 That's not the main question.

06:28 That's not the main point of these narratives.

06:30 narratives is to draw you into this gripping salvation story that God is telling you.

06:38 That's full of sinners who need saving, one of which is us.

06:43 We are part of the salvation story because we are the ones in need of the salvation that

06:48 finally comes when Christ is born and acquires that salvation for us.

06:53 So let's first of all, we're talking about Old Testament narrative.

07:00 We talked about reading big.

07:02 Okay, so how might you quickly summarize the salvation story of the Old Testament?

07:09 Well, it really falls into five different parts.

07:13 The first of these is basically the story from creation to the patriarchs, and that comprises

07:19 really the book of Genesis.

07:21 That's the first stage in that salvation story.

07:24 The second is the Exodus and the wilderness wonderings.

07:30 of Exodus all the way through the end of Deuteronomy. So you have creation in the

07:36 patriarchs and then you have the Exodus and the wilderness wonderings and the

07:40 third part of this is the conquest and the judges and that's going to be Joshua

07:44 and then the book of Judges. That's the third part. Fourth part are Kings and

07:49 Decline. First King Saul second David third Solomon and then there's a division

08:00 after that are demonstrating a kingdom and decline because over and over and over

08:05 these kings engage in idolatry and encourage their people to do the same.

08:11 And then finally the fifth part is exile and return. So after God, exile is

08:16 people the Babylon in 586 BC. About 70 years later they come back. They're

08:21 allowed to come back. And then you have books like Ezra and Nehemiah where the

08:30 return and that takes us really to the end of the Old Testament. And those are the five

08:35 major movements, you might say, of the salvation story in the Old Testament. So when you're reading

08:41 any part of the Old Testament, one question that you need to ask yourself is, okay, where

08:46 am I in the history? If I'm reading Isaiah, where does Isaiah fall in this history? Or

08:53 if I'm reading 2 Samuel, or if I'm reading Ezra, if I'm reading one of the minor prophets

09:00 \"Where exactly do I need to situate myself historically

09:04 so that I can understand what this book

09:07 is communicating to me?\"

09:09 That's a kind of a fundamental question

09:11 to ask yourself of whatever biblical book you're reading.

09:14 And you can usually find this information

09:17 in many Bibles.

09:18 We'll have a short introduction to the biblical book.

09:20 So if you choose, for instance, to read Hosea this year,

09:24 you're going to get to really know the book of Hosea.

09:27 That's great.

09:28 Well, read a short introduction to the book

09:30 I doubt when he is situated and where he's at

09:34 in order that you can better understand exactly

09:36 where he falls in the salvation story.

09:40 So that's the first thing.

09:41 Get the big picture and then figure out exactly

09:43 where this part of the Old Testament fits

09:46 into that picture.

09:48 And then you can begin to ask more kind of smaller,

09:51 more pointed questions as you're working your way

09:54 through the narrative.

09:55 Ask yourself, for instance, okay,

09:57 what's the setting of this book?

10:00 Where are we?

10:01 Are we in the promised land?

10:04 Are we in the wilderness?

10:05 Are we in Babylon?

10:07 Or are we in Egypt?

10:08 Where exactly is this book situated?

10:11 Because that's going to be part of reading and interpreting

10:15 exactly what's going on.

10:17 I mentioned in earlier lectures important to understand

10:19 where Esther's at.

10:20 Esther's not in the promised land, nor is Daniel.

10:24 Nor is Ezekiel.

10:25 They are all outside the promised land.

10:30 the promise ends going to affect how you read this particular part of the Old

10:35 Testament. So ask yourself what the setting is and what the geography is. So

10:40 where are we and then also when are we. And then as with all narratives, ask

10:47 yourself who the characters are. Make a list of the characters. Either a real list

10:51 or at least a mental list as you're working your way through this story. Okay

10:55 who are the major characters? Who are the minor characters? Of course if you

11:00 read novels as I do, we have characters all over the place but you realize right early on okay

11:06 she's going to be a major character and he's going to be a minor character. You need to know the

11:11 major characters much better than the minor characters. Minor characters are not unimportant

11:16 but they're not as central to the narrative as the major ones are and the bible is no different

11:20 than that. You have a lot of minor characters. Some of these are barely mentioned. Maybe a verse,

11:30 entire story is told about them. One of my favorite major characters is Jacob.

11:35 I wrote my book \"Lipping with God\" about Jacob because Jacob takes up, his story

11:40 takes up half of the book of Genesis. You meet him in Genesis 25 and you follow

11:44 his story all the way through the end of Genesis. So you get to know a lot about

11:50 Jacob because he's a major character. And speaking of him, just to give one

11:55 example of how important it is to get to know the characters and their place in

12:00 wanted Jacob's wives, not his favorite wife, Rachel, the one he really fell in love with

12:05 and wanted to marry, but his, her sister, Leia, his Jacob's second wife, really the first

12:12 one that he was tricked into, tricked into Mary.

12:15 So you read, let's say you're reading through the book of Genesis and you're getting into

12:18 the narrative and you're wanting to read and interpret it rightly and you realize, okay,

12:24 Leia is going to be part of this story.

12:30 not just of Jacob and not just of Genesis but how does Lea fit into the

12:35 bigger picture of the entire Old Testament narrative. Well it's kind of

12:40 cool to see how she does because she's not the loved wife, she's not the one that

12:44 Jacob wanted, but she is the first one who starts to have children with Jacob.

12:49 She has one, two, three sons with him and then she has a fourth son and she gives

13:00 Hebrew word for praise. Now as the story begins to go on from the birth of these

13:06 children what happens is it's not the first, second, or third son of Leia and

13:12 Jacob that is dominant and that rises to the leadership of the other ones. It's

13:16 actually Judah. It's the fourthborn son of Leia until the ultimately at the end

13:23 of the book of Genesis. It is Judah that Jacob gives the blessing to over the

13:30 verse three. And it's from Judah and his tribe, the tribe of Judah, that eventually David will

13:37 come. And it's to David that God makes a promise that one of David's sons will sit

13:42 upon the throne. So it's the Messiah who comes from the tribe of Judah, the son of Leah

13:52 and Jacob. So one of the beautiful things about tracing a theme like that, a character

14:00 As you see how God works in these unexpected sorts of ways.

14:04 It's not through the loved wife, who was Rachel in this case.

14:08 And it's not through Rachel's son, Joseph,

14:10 but it's through the unloved wife.

14:13 And it's through her fourthborn son, Judah,

14:15 that the promise of the Messiah comes.

14:18 And that's just one example of many,

14:20 of how you can take a character and you begin to kind of trace

14:24 them through the salvation store and see how it ebbs and flows

14:30 the end. So you're looking at characters, you're looking at themes, and as you do

14:36 that, you want to keep in mind kind of what you might call the the meta theme,

14:41 the big overarching theme that we see. Well it's happening already in in Genesis

14:47 and from Genesis onward, it emerges as this clear penetrating biblical theme

14:55 from the beginning all the way to the end. And this has been summarized in lots

15:00 ways. One scholar refers to it as dominion and dynasty. I like to think of it of this theme,

15:06 this kind of two-full theme, as people and place. Specifically, God has a people,

15:16 and God's people have a place, and God's people that have a place are royalty. They're kings and

15:30 And the place where God's people are,

15:33 that is a holy place.

15:35 It's the kingdom.

15:37 They're kings and queens, they're God's people,

15:39 and they have a particular place.

15:41 Now, just very briefly, let's show

15:45 in the Old Testament narrative how this works.

15:47 Well, who are the first people of God

15:49 who have a place from God?

15:52 Of course, they're Adam and Eve.

15:54 And the place they have is the garden,

15:56 which is in Eden.

16:00 put his people who are created in his image and likeness,

16:04 which in the ancient Near East was one way of indicating royalty.

16:08 So Adam and Eve are royalty, a king and a queen,

16:11 and they have their particular place.

16:13 Now this theme, this twofold theme of people in place

16:18 then goes from there, goes forward to where, for instance, in Genesis chapter 12,

16:24 you once again have a man and woman, a new Adam and Eve, if you will,

16:30 You have Abram and Sarai, whose name is the later changed, to Abraham and Sarah.

16:35 So now this is the core of those who are going to be God's people.

16:39 Well, they have to have a place, where's their place?

16:41 Well, it's the Promised Land.

16:43 So now we have God's people, God's place, once more.

16:47 And then Abraham and Sarah, they begin to expand because they have Isaac.

16:53 And then Isaac has Jacob.

16:55 And then Jacob has twelve sons.

17:00 God beginning to expand. Now if you go to the beginning of the book of Exodus, we're

17:06 told that God's people who are now in Egypt, they were fruitful, they multiplied, they

17:12 in fact they grew so much in the land of Egypt that the Egyptians were afraid that

17:16 if a foreign army invaded that the Israelites would join up with the foreigners and so they

17:21 were a threat and so they began to persecute them. And this of course then leads finally

17:30 takes his people and he brings them back to their place.

17:35 He brings them back to the promised land.

17:38 But the story doesn't end there.

17:40 The story is just getting going.

17:42 You have God's people, God's place, now it's Israel,

17:45 it's in the promised land.

17:46 But this was never the ultimate goal

17:50 of the Old Testament narrative of salvation.

17:55 Early on in Genesis chapter 12, when God called Abram,

18:00 He said, \"I'm going to make you Abram.

18:03 I'm going to make you a blessing so that in you,

18:07 all the families of the earth will be blessed.\"

18:10 God's goal was never just for the

18:13 physical descendants of Abraham to be blessed,

18:15 and to have a place.

18:17 God's goal is through Abraham, in particular,

18:20 through the seed, that descendant,

18:23 that Messiah who's going to come from Abraham's line,

18:30 that all the families of the earth will be blessed.

18:34 Well, as you follow the salvation story,

18:37 people in place to the rest of the Old Testament,

18:40 it finally comes of course to the birth of Jesus,

18:42 who's born in the Promised Land,

18:44 he's born in Bethlehem, and through his ministry,

18:47 he gathers together 12 disciples,

18:51 just like they were 12 sons of Jacob.

18:54 And then after Christ's death resurrection

18:57 and right before his ascension,

19:00 He says, \"I want you to go from here all the way into all the world, and I want you to make disciples of all these nations by baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.\"

19:30 so that the people of God are expanded.

19:33 So that more and more people are brought into the people of God.

19:39 That's exactly what's happening with mission work and evangelism.

19:42 Is people are added sinners who are outside the kingdom,

19:46 are brought into the kingdom.

19:48 They're given the gift of faith.

19:49 They're baptized.

19:51 They become members of the people of God.

19:52 So the people of the God begins to expand worldwide.

19:55 And what about place?

19:57 Does God is God worried about place anymore?

20:00 is. But the place he's worried about is the kingdom which he has established. So the

20:05 wherever the people of God are, there's the kingdom of God. So this theme that we see

20:11 already in the opening chapter is a Genesis. God's people in God's place. That is a trajectory,

20:18 a narrative trajectory that you can trace to the entire salvation story and it culminates

20:30 finish that thought out. This is what culminates finally in Revelation, where you have Christ

20:36 coming again, the resurrection of the dead, and God's people, the church, all believers,

20:42 have a new place, a new heavens and a new earth which Christ will make when he comes

20:48 again. That becomes the twofold dominant theme that you can trace from Genesis all

21:00 and then shouted from the last chapters of Revelation.

21:04 Now as you're tracing this salvation story,

21:07 as you're working your way through it,

21:09 you're going to begin to see how history doesn't repeat itself,

21:12 but it certainly does rhyme.

21:14 There's a rhythm to this history

21:16 as you're working your way through these narratives.

21:18 You'll see a rhythm of characters, for instance.

21:20 Sometime, compare Adam to Noah.

21:23 And you realize, oh, there's a lot of rhythm.

21:26 There's a lot of reflection back and forth

21:30 between Noah because they're both as a word the head of humanity, Adam, obviously the head

21:36 of humanity, but also Noah because he emerges as the father figure who's over this little

21:42 nucleus of a new humanity after the flood.

21:45 Some of the same commands are given to Adam that are given to Noah.

21:49 Or you have character rhythm between, for instance, Melchizedek and Christ.

22:00 the book of Hebrews. And you'll see a lot of this kind of rhythmic work in the

22:06 telling of the Old Testament narrative. Sometimes it's focused on geography,

22:10 sometimes it's focused upon offices like the priesthood or or the king,

22:15 sometimes it's focused upon individuals. So you see a lot of this rhythm, these

22:20 correspondences that happen as you're working away through the narrative. This

22:25 is often referred to as typology, where one event or one person or one

22:30 This is prefiguring another person or event or office later, either in the Old Testament

22:37 or in the work of Christ.

22:39 You'll also see all kinds of themes emerging that unite the Old Testament and the New Testament.

22:45 As you read big and you read this narrative that is taking us into the New Testament.

22:53 So those are the thoughts about how you read, how you approach Old Testament narrative.

23:00 to spend the next few minutes wrapping up this session by talking about Old

23:05 Testament law. So if you're, let's say you're doing Bible them one year and you've read

23:14 the book of Genesis and that was a full narrative and it was pretty easy to read

23:19 for most of you and it's gripping it draws you in so you didn't have any

23:24 trouble reading Genesis and Exodus starts out that way too and you're doing

23:30 and the crossing of the Red Sea, and God bringing his people through and taking them to Mount Sinai.

23:36 A lot of times what happens is people get to that point in Exodus and then they really get into

23:43 Leviticus in sections of Numbers in Deuteronomy.

23:47 I don't know what to do with this because there's a lot of laws.

23:51 There's a lot of legal material here.

23:54 So how do I read this?

23:56 How do I interpret this?

24:00 does this not apply to me or is part of this apply to me and other parts of this not apply to me?\"

24:05 So in a very brief sort of way, I just want to talk for a minute about the purpose of Old

24:10 Testament law and whether it does or whether it does not apply to us and what we can what we can

24:16 learn from it. So think of it this way. First of all, the Old Testament laws were given, most of

24:24 them in were given, especially beginning from the book of Exodus onward. They were given to the

24:30 So that's why when you get halfway through Exodus and certainly into Leviticus, you're

24:34 seeing all kinds of laws that are spoken to the people of Israel under the old covenant

24:42 that God made with Israel.

24:45 God cut a covenant, which is the biblical way of saying He made a covenant with the people

24:49 of Israel and Mount Sinai.

24:51 And part of that covenant was all of these particular laws that governed their behavior

25:00 as a nation in order that they might reflect being a unique people of God.

25:06 So when you're reading through these laws, you'll see laws about what they are to eat

25:10 and not to eat, but today we refer to as kosher or non-coachure, or what they can

25:16 wear or what fabrics they should or shouldn't mix together in.

25:21 All kinds of details about their sexual lives and their relationships and their financial

25:30 All of these particular laws are governing the behavior of the Israelites.

25:33 And the goal of many of these is for them to instantiate within their own lives the

25:42 fact that they're the unique people of God, to be constantly reminded from everything

25:48 that they eat, that they wear, that they do, that they don't do, to have all these reminders

25:53 that God has set them apart.

26:00 people. And so in their very detailed kinds of actions, what they do, what they don't do,

26:08 this is God's way of keeping them in constant remembrance of who they are,

26:13 the evil they are to avoid, and really God's choice of them as his beloved chosen set apart

26:22 people. Now you might be saying to yourself, \"Okay, but do these laws apply to me anymore?\"

26:30 Here's the way I like to think about it.

26:33 Let's say that you are a US citizen.

26:37 OK.

26:38 And of course, as a US citizen, you're

26:40 under the laws of the United States.

26:43 And you decide that you're going to move to Canada.

26:48 And you're going to now have citizenship in Canada.

26:51 You no longer be a US citizen.

26:53 Well, when you do that, now you are a Canadian citizen.

26:57 And you are under Canadian laws.

27:00 Now, that means that if you break a law in your new home where you're now a new citizen,

27:08 you don't break an American law.

27:10 You break a Canadian law because you're a Canadian citizen.

27:13 You have switched your citizenship, and so the laws have switched as well.

27:18 Now, are there plenty of parallels between Canadian laws and American laws?

27:23 Well, of course there are, but they're not the same thing.

27:30 that particular country where you're a citizen.

27:33 So it's kind of like that with the covenants.

27:35 So if you are under the,

27:37 if you're a citizen of the old covenant,

27:39 then you're under the laws of that covenant.

27:42 They govern your behavior.

27:43 You're part of the people of Israel.

27:45 You're under the old covenant.

27:46 You're a citizen of that covenant.

27:48 Those laws apply to you.

27:50 Now as Christians, with the coming of Christ,

27:53 we are no longer under the old covenant.

27:56 And therefore the particular laws of the old covenant

28:00 Are there parallels between some of the laws of the old covenant that are now in the new covenant?

28:07 Well, of course there are.

28:08 And most of these fall under the rubric of moral laws.

28:12 So the Israelites were not to murder.

28:14 Are Christians not to murder?

28:16 Well, of course we're not to murder.

28:17 The Israelites were not to steal.

28:19 Are we not to steal?

28:20 Yes.

28:21 So we're under a different covenant.

28:23 But some of the laws that were part of the old covenant are still part of the

28:30 the new covenant. We switched our citizenship. We're citizens under a new covenant, but some

28:36 of the laws, the moral laws of the old covenant, those are also part of the new covenant.

28:43 But there's plenty of laws that were particular to the old covenant that are no longer applicable

28:49 to us as Christians. Things such as clean and unclean foods. It was part of the old

28:54 covenant, part of the things they were to do or not to do. That's so long applicable

29:00 under the Old Covenant as citizens of that whole covenant. They were to keep the Sabbath.

29:06 They were to observe the entire worship or liturgical year of Israel. They were to offer

29:11 animal sacrifices. There's a lot of behaviors of the Old Testament people under that covenant

29:17 that are no longer part of the New Covenant because Christ has fulfilled those laws. He's the

29:30 Those particular laws were unique to the Old Covenant and no longer apply to us.

29:36 Now, maybe you're asking yourself, \"Well, then why would he even care?\"

29:41 If those laws are no longer applicable to us, why even study them?

29:45 Well, because two reasons.

29:47 Number one, they do teach us certain things about God, and they also make clear certain

29:53 things in the New Testament, which would be hard to understand if we didn't know the Old

30:00 So in the Old Testament, there were laws with regard to sacred space, what you could

30:06 and you couldn't do or where you could and you couldn't go with regard to sacred space.

30:10 In particular, the tabernacle and the temple.

30:13 You see, God's presence was in the holy of holies.

30:16 That was the most sacred place on earth because God was there.

30:21 And then rippling out from there, you had lower degrees of sanctification,

30:30 holiness and anything close to Him was holy by virtue of being close to Him.

30:35 And you had certain laws with regard to how close you could or couldn't come to the Holy

30:39 of Holies.

30:41 What this does is it teaches us that holiness, being holy for us to be holy is all about

30:49 proximity to the Holy One of God, to Christ Himself.

30:56 So how do we get holy?

31:00 You get holy.

31:01 You get holy by being brought closer and closer and closer to the Holy One of God.

31:07 We might say the Holy of Holies in the flesh who is Jesus the Christ.

31:11 And so my understanding that Old Testament law with regard to holiness were instructed

31:16 about who Christ is.

31:18 Or certain narratives in the gospels are made so much clearer when you realize that what's

31:22 going on here has to do with Old Testament laws.

31:30 for 12 years comes up and she touches the fringe of Jesus' cloak.

31:37 What's going on there?

31:39 Why was she so worried about touching him?

31:42 And what's the big deal about her bodily ailment?

31:45 Well, if you know your old testament law, you realize it's a big deal

31:48 because when a woman was either on her period or when she was bleeding,

31:52 like this woman was, for a long period of time, during that entire period,

31:56 she is what's called richly unclean.

32:00 today to use today's parlance, she couldn't go to church.

32:03 She couldn't appear at the tabernacle or temple because she was in a state of ritual uncleanness.

32:08 So for 12 years she had been enduring this.

32:11 And so when she comes up behind Jesus and just touches the French of his cloak, she

32:16 realizes she's unclean, but she also realizes that Jesus is the one who can heal her.

32:22 And so understanding that Old Testament background of ritual uncleanness helps to us to better

32:30 Testament or narratives about Jesus touching a dead body as he did in the

32:35 case of the widow's son at nane. A dead body was considered to be richly

32:40 impure. All of that is enlightened for us when we are cognizant of Old

32:47 Testament law. So that's why we continue to study them. So they can tell us

32:50 about the character of God and so that they can illumine what's happening in the

33:00 As we're reading, and we're interpreting these two parts of the scriptures, we're reading small,

33:06 we're reading big, we're tracing themes, we're seeing how the Old Testament is helping us to understand the New Testament.

33:13 And as we do all of this, we're always asking the big question, the biggest question,

33:18 how are we learning about Christ from this Old Testament narrative, or how does this Old Testament law lead us to a better understanding

33:25 of who Christ is and what He's done for us.

33:30 come back, we're going to talk about a couple different parts of the Old Testament. We're

33:34 going to talk about the Old Testament prophets, and we're going to talk about wisdom, and

33:39 we're going to talk a little bit about the Psalms. So we will see you then.