Goal of Bible Study: Author’s Intent Explained

Speaker: Krisan Marotta, welcoming you to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. Today, David Dunn Morata will be speaking on the goal of Bible study. This talk was originally given at the Center for Christian Study. There is a brief gap in the audio, which is the result of the original consent tape switching signs. If you'd like to follow along with the lecture notes, you can find them at wednesdayintheword.com slash Bible Study Goal. That's wednesdayintheword.com slash Bible Study Goal. Thanks for joining us. Speaker 4: The whole process of Bible study was to me probably the one most important thing in determining what I thought as a Christian. In terms of Christian thinking, Bible study provides the foundation for everything that we believe. And so everyone in this room might agree what is scripture? That is, the 66 books we have in our Bible is the body of inspired literature. And we might even all agree that scripture is inerrant, that it is without error in faith and practice and history and science and everything else. We might agree on all of that, but if we can't determine what it means, we could still disagree. And we can't learn anything about God's perspective without knowing what it means. And so what I found is that most of the time the differences between believers when they have some kind of a disagreement doesn't necessarily rest on foundations like what the Bible is, although cults it often does, or even what um what script, whether scripture is inerrant or not, but it often has to do with what they're trying to do when they come to the Bible, what they're trying to do to understand it. And so what we're going to talk about today is what is the goal of Bible study? What are we trying to accomplish? And how does God expect us to accomplish that? And if we can decide on that, I think it makes a radical difference not only in the way you study the Bible for yourself, but in the way you listen to other people when they teach you this is what the Bible means. And all too often we will sit back and we will listen to teaching on scripture, and we will assume, well, he says that's what it means, that's what it must mean, but we don't have a methodology for judging whether or not that's true. We don't have a methodology for judging um. So what we're going to talk about is how do we determine what the Bible means in a way that we can be guaranteed of knowing that we have uncovered God's perspective. And it will make all the difference in sitting back and listening. I've been to some churches, for example, that you sit back on Sunday morning and you hear someone teach one week, and the next week you hear someone different teach, and they teach something that is actually contradicting what the person the week before taught. And the congregation either doesn't seem to notice or doesn't seem to care. To me, it's very disturbing if I hear something like that. It makes me wonder what kind of a church I'm in and what's going on, and how am I supposed to take the two that are contradictory and reconcile them? And, you know, how do I handle that? We ought to be trying to filter everything that we hear based upon a few principles. Is this truly understanding the Bible as it was meant to be understood? And if it is, then yes, we should accept that. And if it's not, then we shouldn't. But what we have to have is the grid. What do we filter it through? How do we determine whether or not this is what the passage means? Okay. So how can we determine what a passage of scripture means? 2 Timothy 3.16 says that all scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be adequate for every good work. Well, 2 Timothy 3.16 seems to be saying that it's profitable for teaching and for reproof. If it's profitable for teaching, we can uncover things that we wouldn't have known before. It can teach us things that we didn't know. And if it's profitable for reproof, then it's a method for when you and I disagree as believers, we've got something that we can go to to determine whether one of us is wrong or both of us are wrong. And it can be an objective judgment between us as to what God's perspective truly is. So the Bible provides that if we can understand what it means. So we're trying to figure out what is the goal of uncovering how do you uncover the meaning? What is the goal that you're working for? Okay. At this point, there's a number of things that I could go through. What I'd like to do is take you through what I think is the correct methodology, and then try to contrast that with all the non-correct methodologies. So I'd like to show you what I think is the correct way of understanding the Bible, and then we'll go through and look at all the things that somehow violate that, that people have suggested be used. So on the white sheet, I almost hesitated to pass this out. This was meant to look simple. And when I got done with it, I thought, boy, that looks confusing. But but let's take a look at it, because it's really not that difficult. Everything starts in the upper left-hand corner with the mind of God. And the way in which God has worked seems to be that God inspires people's understanding. That he inspires the understanding, for example, of Paul, he inspires the prophets' understanding, he reveals to them something that is from his perspective. And they go, aha, I understand now. Like Peter with his dream about the animals, arise and eat, and realizing that the Gentiles were not unclean. So there's a number of ways that God uses to inspire people's understanding. Sometimes he just speaks directly to them and says, look, this is the way it is. But God inspires the understanding of the original authors of the scriptures, and then the original authors of the scriptures write. And I think that they write out of their inspired understanding, but the process of writing is the normal process that you and I use to write. So when Paul sits down to write a letter, there's nothing magical or supernatural going on at that point. The supernatural part was when God hit the mind of Paul and said, This is the way things are, and Paul's understanding was enlightened. Paul had his eyes open and he realized things from God's perspective. But when he sits down to write, he seems to be using a common Greek. He seems to be writing a letter the way most people write letters. What's important is that he's writing it out of his inspired understanding. So the process of writing is a natural process of writing, but the process of God inspiring the authors is the part where God has intervened in history. The original authors write, and they're writing to an original audience. So Paul writes his letter to a Corinthian church. And Paul is using the normal process of human language, the normal process of a letter. When the prophets speak, they're using the normal process of communication, and they're expecting their audience to understand them in the normal way that you are listening to me and you can understand me. It's not as though you can't understand me. I'm speaking and I'm using the normal conventions of English. You're listening and you're picking up on all the clues, both the words I'm choosing, the intonation of my voice, the hand motions, everything works together to try to communicate. And I think that I'm being successful in the communication. Communication is not impossible. If it were impossible, you wouldn't be able to understand me. So there's some people who are skeptical about ever being able to uncover an original author's meaning, and that's ridiculous because everyone who writes down it's impossible to understand the original author's meaning, when they write it down and they submit it into a journal, they expect someone to read that and understand it. Well, if it's impossible, I mean just it's obvious that we communicate and the communication does happen. And so I'm using the normal language, the original authors have seemed to use normal language. Now, the biblical text then is the written communication between the original authors and their original audience. That text has then been copied and copied and copied, and the the Old Testament was copied and the New Testament was copied, and we have thousands and thousands of copies, and sometimes there were some scribal errors. So we have a whole bunch of copies today in the modern world, and with that we can try to make sure that we have the correct text. So if 99 copies have read one way and one copy reads another way, well, that's probably a scribal error, and you go with the 99. And there's a whole process in science to trying to determine the original, what the original text is when you have textual variants. But I've looked at that and it's no big deal. The text that we have is very clean for the most part. The few places where there are questions, they're not particularly important, and in fact, it wouldn't bother me. Most of them if it went either way. So even in the few cases where there is a problem, it's not a particular problem. And uncovering the original text is not hard. In fact, it's easier with the Bible, the Old Testament, the New Testament. It's easier than that than it is with any other piece of ancient literature. Caesar, Cicero, all of that has much, much harder textual problems with it. So we have copies of the original biblical text. We try to determine what the original was, and then what we try to do is we try to interpret that text. And in our interpretation, I'm going to argue tonight that the goal of our interpretation is uncovering the meaning of the text, and the meaning of the text is what the author originally intended it to mean. So I will argue that the meaning of the text is determined by the author's intention. The understanding the author had when he wrote. If you think about it, it makes sense. If what God inspired was the author's understanding, what are we trying to get back to from the text? The author's God-inspired understanding. So uncovering the author's original intention is what we're trying to do, recreating the author's understanding. Now, to do that, we have to do a number of things. First, as I mentioned, we have to work through textual variants. For the most part, those are pretty simple. Then we also have to understand context and grammar and word studies, because they wrote in the normal human language, and so we have to work through normal human language in the same way that you're trying to work through the grammar and the words and the meanings of the words that I'm saying as I speak. And since they wrote to an original audience, the original audience had certain things that were part of their culture that they would have understood. So you need to understand the culture and the background and the history that was in the mind of the original author and was in the mind of the original audience that the author assumed that the audience would know when the author wrote. So there's certain things that the author and the audience shared, and so it's not in the text, but it's part of helping to understand the meaning of the text. And so now you can kind of get a picture for why we're doing the five weeks that we're doing. Why are we doing something like word studies? Why are we looking at something like context? Why are we looking at something like the coherence and the cultural background of a body of word? So that's all part of trying to understand and recreate the author's original meaning. The author's original understanding. Having done that, then we've successfully recreated the original author's understanding, which was inspired by God, then what we have to do is we have to derive doctrine. And deriving doctrine involves taking those specifics and generalizing the principles behind them. So extrapolating the universal truths and principles. We'll talk about that when we talk about application. I mean a simple example. The Old Testament says put a roof around your roof, or put a fence around your roof. Why? Well, because they had parties up there, people were up there, and the fence was for safe. It was basically meant when people are over at your house, you need to be sure that there's that there's it's it's a safe environment, that that's part of hospitality. Well, we shouldn't put fences around our roofs because we don't hold parties on our roofs. That's just not part of our culture. But the principle and the truth behind it is something that you can generalize and you can extrapolate. And so the whole process of deriving doctrine at that point is trying to look at these specific instances, and the instances, the specifics, will change as the situation might change, but the principles behind them won't. And so you're trying to extrapolate the principles behind them that are the universal truths. Then what you need to do back on the other side in application is adopt God's perspectives and attitudes in our own lives. If you believe that it is inspired, then that only makes sense. And then there's another process that comes up from the bottom right. In the bottom right-hand corner, I have culture and nature today. And one of the things that we are constantly doing is observing and synthesizing our own culture and the nature around us and the world around us to try to determine what are the cultural principles and natural principles. And then taking cultural principles and taking God's perspectives and taking our culture and God's perspectives and applying, figuring out how to apply the two together, how to apply God's perspectives given our cultural situation in our lives today is part of application. It's one of the things, for example, that's um that Oz Guinness and Francis Schaefer were so good at analyzing our culture to the point they had the biblical principles and then integrating the two together and figuring out how biblical principles get applied in our culture. And so, you know, to be a um part of the body of Christ and its gifts are having people who are good at analyzing culture and being able to figure out from our culture what is the right thing to do given biblical principles. So, yeah, finished product. Yeah, the finished product is applying God's values in our everyday lives. That's the that's the final goal that we're working toward. And the whole process is going to be kind of outlined in the next few weeks. Now, if I'm right in this, and you may say, well, that seems obvious now that you've pointed it out, now that you've laid it out, I mean, what other choices are there? That's part of what I want to go through today, is what other choices there are. Because there are other choices, both suggested by people today, but more importantly, practiced by people today. Christians, teachers, whatever. Okay. So back on the uh on the pink sheet, is the context of the Bible communicated through the language of the scripture text alone, or by the language of the text along with some other process? And this is basically the question is there is there something is there something magical about the process, or is it just normal human language when we look at the Bible? Is there something else other than the text that we need to be using? Or is it just the normal process? And my argument is going to be basically that it is just the normal human process of communication. Let me give you some uh some possibilities. I'm gonna jump around a little bit. One possibility is that an interpretation is not that an interpretation is not based on just the text, but it's based upon the authority of the interpreter. This is, for example, I think, a very Catholic doctrine. When the Catholic Church says that the Pope is the final authority on what the scripture means, then that is appealing to the authority of the interpreter. I think you find that in churches, there's just kind of a natural assumption that if someone is up in front in teaching, then somehow their interpretation carries more weight. And there's a sense in which hopefully you get good people up in front, and the good people have gone through this process carefully, and so their interpretations are more likely to be correct. But I think it's clear to us that the whole reformation, at least, stands upon the principle that it is not the authority of the interpreter, but just the text alone. It also makes sense, just from the process of common sense, if the original author wrote to an original audience, the original author expected the original audience to understand. And there's never even a hint anywhere in any of the books of the Bible that the original author expected the original audience to understand, but only through the help of some uh authoritative interpreter. It would be very strange for uh someone to have written one of the minor prophets, but there's no one who's gonna understand it until we get a Pope later on. Or someone to have written the minor prophets and been preaching out in the street, but what's the sense in disseminating this minor prophet? What's the sense in anyone reading this? Because they're not going to be able to understand it without some help. So the fact that the original author had in mind an original audience that they expected to understand it, it seems to me, means that the original, however, the original audience understood it, we can go through the same principles of understanding. So it seems to be just straight human language. Now, that doesn't mean that modern teachers and interpreters aren't necessary. And the reason why they're necessary is because it was written in a culture that is an ancient culture, in an ancient language with some ancient idioms, and the context is often not easy to understand. And so it is the same process by which with which you understand me, but it is more difficult because it's a language you're not familiar with, it's idioms that you're not familiar with, it's culture that you're not familiar with, and that all is a process that requires some education. Now, if you've, for most of you, if you've sat around enough Christian teaching, you've got a good background in that. Because you've got the entire Old Testament history, which is important for understanding a lot of the stuff that's in the Bible, and you've had enough of the culture and background and worldview and thinking that the original authors were enmeshed in, having sat under Christian teaching for a while, you become enmeshed in that as well. It's one reason why non-Christians who haven't had any biblical teaching, you throw them into really good teaching on the Bible, and they're a little bit lost. And part of that is because their mindset is basically modern 20th century agnosticism, and they don't have the background that assumes a sovereign God who's in control of history and the background of Judaism and God's working in the world, and so that provides it a much a much more difficult background for them to work themselves in. Okay. Let me just give you some examples that point out some things that about the text that mean it's not just um that it is normal human communication, that there's nothing special about it. One principle on page three is, page two actually, is that the Bible should not always be interpreted literally. I don't believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. Now, most of the time when you say that, red flags go up. And the reason is because people have used the literal interpretation of the Bible to mean something different. A lot of people, when they use, when they say they believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible, what they mean. Is that they believe in the historical truth of the Bible. And I'll argue there's a difference between the two. I believe in the historical truth of the Bible. So I believe that when it says that Jesus rose from the dead, I believe in a literal resurrection from the dead. There's no question about that. But on the other hand, I don't believe in taking every passage literally. I'll just give you an example. In 1 Corinthians 15, 14, Paul states that, okay, if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain. Your faith also is in vain. It seems to me that Paul is arguing there for a literal resurrection. And since that's the author's original intention, that should be our interpretation of that passage. However, Paul also says in Philippians 3, 2, beware of the dogs. Now, I don't take that literally. He obviously does not mean to beware of canine mongrels prowling the streets. It's just very clear. In fact, it's clear the way Paul says it: beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of the false circumcision. Two of those are metaphorical, and one of them is literal. So where the author intended to be understood metaphorically, you should understand them metaphorically. And where the author intended to be understood literally, you should understand them literally. And it's the process of interpretation is trying to decide between the two. What's important is the author's intention. And so you will find, for example, even great exegetes like Martin Luther arguing with Zwingli, and Martin Luther saying, it says, this is my body, therefore this is my body, and Martin Luther arguing that the bread in communion is literally Christ's body. Well, Martin Luther was wrong. And Zwingli was right. That's a metaphorical use, not a literal use. And that's perfectly legitimate. You're not bending human language the way it wasn't intended to be bended. The reason is because human language is incredibly flexible. You can use English all different ways and still communicate. And you'll find that the authors of the Bible have used language all different ways and still communicated. One exception can prove the rule. Let me give you an example. If I had three apples in my hand and I said, I have a couple of apples, would you like one? And you said, no, you don't. You have three, I would be offended at you because a couple of apples in English doesn't have to mean two. It can just mean a few. And the valid range of a couple includes three, four. It usually means more than one. It's like saying I have a pair of cards. That often means two, but what's a pair of pants mean? It means one. And you just language is so flexible that way that often a word that means one thing is used for the exact opposite. And you'll find that when you look at the way definitions have changed in English, you'll find all the time that something that used to mean good will mean bad, or the exact opposite. I mean, you even have slang today. Boy, that's bad. When you really mean it's good. It's crazy, but language is very fluid. If I said that I was studying a passage and I was literally pulling my hair out, you wouldn't think I was going bald. Now that's that's one of the most fascinating uses to me. The word literally means figuratively. In almost 90% of the way people use it in common speech today. So when I say I believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible, you don't know what I meant anymore. Did I mean literal or figurative? Because the word literal is even used figuratively. I'm literally pulling my hair out. I was literally dying over the test. Well, you think about that image, you can't take that literally. It's got to be figurative. So you can see just from normal human communication that language is very fluid and that and that you can be very you have to be very careful about taking words literally. For example, in the Bible, I have seen people make very great distinctions between the various words for love. You have, I mean, I don't know how many times, in how many different contexts, I've heard people talk about you have agape, and you have storgi, and you have uh Eros and you have phileo, and they talk about the various forms of love. And how Eros is sexual love, and agape is is this uh is totally separate from Eros, and it's this uh this uh love of the will of wanting the right for someone else. Now, I agree with those two interpretations, but what it leads you to believe is that if you have one, it does not include the other. One of the studies that I've been doing recently is a study in the Song of Songs. And in the Song of Songs, uh it's it's a uh description of sexual love, and there is a word in Hebrew that's the equivalent, I think, mostly of eros. It means sexual love. And the word is dog, do d would be the transliteration. So this is the equivalent of eros, and it's very clear throughout the Song of Songs that this is talking about erotic sexual love. There's no question about it. But when it came time in the Septuagint to translate it into Greek, what word do you think they picked most of the time to translate dod into Greek? It was not eros, it was agape. Which is really fascinating when you think about it. Because it's very clear the word in Hebrew means sexual love, but it's also very clear from the context that it's talking about sexual love that has as its goal the best of the marital partner. And so they picked agape. Well, agape now suddenly isn't that rigid love of the will. It's still a love of the will, but it's a love of the will that can encompass all the other loves. It's a love of the will that can be expressed through friendship, through storgi, and through file and friendship, and through storgi and familiarity, and through eros and sexual love. It suddenly is very different. Agape is not distinct and void of all of those. It is an overriding principle that works on top of all of those. Do you see the difference? So language is very fluid. And sometimes understanding how fluid it is, you can find some fascinating things in the Bible. So one of the things I've been trying to do is take a look at all the Old Testament words for love and all the New Testament words for love and see how many times each one is used to translate each one, just to try to get a feel for that. Because I was really surprised in the Song of Songs when it came time to translate it, that they didn't pick arrows most of the time. Okay. So that's some example about the importance of understanding the flexibility that goes on in language. Let me give you one more example. Um people are understanding or trying to interpret the uh the biblical text, if there are two words used that are similar but different, interpreters will try to make a big deal that there are two different words used. And they will try to make distinct and clean categories between the three. So, for example, you should love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength, and they try to make all those categories and make them clean so that they don't overlap very much. When in fact, I mean the whole point of that passage is everything overlapping whichever way they do. Well, that becomes very difficult when you look at something like um, I've been teaching the songs recently and looking at Hebrew poetry. And in Hebrew poetry they rhyme ideas. And so you'll have um he established it upon the waters and he set it upon the rivers. And the words are in parallel and meant to be synonyms. They're meant to overlap 95% and be slightly different, perhaps. So they're meant to mean the same thing. And in fact, sometimes the whole meaning of the verse is in realizing they mean the same thing. That to do one is to do the other. And that's part of the whole teaching of the song. And so that was another eye-opener to realize that because there are different words used does not mean that they always mean different things. Sometimes you can just say, well, he used this word, and you'll get commentators saying he used word A. He didn't use word B, and they make a big deal about the point he didn't use word B. Well, it's possible to say he could have used word A or word B, and it wouldn't have made any difference. And he just happened to pick A. And that's okay, because sometimes language works that way. Now, sometimes it doesn't, but sometimes it does. And so a lot of the teaching that I was normally familiar with about making big distinctions on words, is a little bit fuzzier than that. You just have to think about it in terms of human language. It doesn't always have to be a distinction. Now, sometimes it it is and it matters. But trying to understand that is the same process that you're using to try to understand when I pick various words. Speaker 6: Yeah. Um, I want to say this because I think you you want questions in the words that they come up right. So that's general knowledge for everybody here. But um you assume, I think, from that that uh that the author selects the word. The items are understanding, yes, but not mechanically correct. Precise words. You want to comment on that? Yeah. Speaker 4: Um when when I am when I am going through the process of trying to decide what to say or what to write, I'm using my normal human language and process, but it's coming out of my understanding to communicate. So I am I am carefully picking the words that I'm picking. So in that sense, the words that the author is picking is the only clue we have to the understanding. It's the only way of getting back to it. Sometimes those selections are crucial to what I understand, and sometimes they're not crucial. Sometimes they are drastically important, and sometimes it doesn't matter. So, for example, if just as I'm talking here, I said they're crucial or they're not crucial, and I said they're important or it doesn't matter. And if I had only said one or the other of those two statements, it wouldn't have mattered. It wouldn't have been crucial. So there is a point with that. Now the question arises are the words themselves, is every word in the Bible inspired, which is what is known as the plenary inspiration of the Bible? So if you ever hear the term plenary inspiration, plenary just means all, all the words of the Bible being inspired. That's slightly different than a dictation theory. You can believe in the plenary inspiration of the Bible without believing in a dictation theory. Dictation theory would say the scribe took out his pen and he said, Okay, God, what? And wrote down. And that God chose the words and it didn't pass through the understanding of the original author. I would argue that that is not the case, that it did pass through the original understanding of the author, and he wrote it down based out of his understanding. Having said that, then the question is, do I believe in the plenary inspiration of the Bible? And I think the answer to that is yes. I'd hate to say no because that would put me in the category of heresy, but I'm not always sure what they mean by it. So that's where I'm a little fuzzy. The reason why I would say yes is because every single word in the Bible was chosen based upon an inspired understanding by God. And every single word is important to understanding the text. In the same way that if you're reading any book, the words are important to understand. The actual selection of words is important to understanding the author's attention. Having said that, it doesn't always mean that if you took one word out and put another word in, it would change the meaning. It would change the text, and that's not the way the original author wrote it, but it doesn't have to change the meaning. And if it doesn't change the meaning, then that's a point at which the choice of words was not essential to the argument. It was a matter of the style of the particular author who wrote. Speaker 5: Does that make sense? Okay. Well, it does give us more insight to the author. I mean, if it's there's insight to you if you say crucial versus important are important versus crucial. Yes. Speaker 4: $25 word that we need to say. That's exactly right. Every word is important to understanding the author's intention. But it's not, but we should not make distinctions where the author didn't draw it. That's the important fine line that you need to go through. Speaker 5: Well, the tricky part for me then comes in, is in deciding when is it important, when is it not important. Isn't there a place where Jesus talks to Peter and he says terribly important? Do you love my sheep? No, do you love me feed my sheep? Right. Speaker 4: And he takes it down much. And I've even heard I've even heard teaching. That's the passage where Jesus keeps using the word agape, and Peter keeps using the word phleho. And that that's a passage I've even heard teaching on that where they didn't even mention the fact the two words were different. You know, and that that's crucial. The author picked two different words for the whole reason that they're different. And that Jesus was saying one thing, and Peter was basically saying, I can't do that, I can only do this other. And yeah, I'm not trying to suggest that the different words for love are not important. Throughout the entire scripture, they're important. What struck me is that they're not clean categories like I thought they were. But the fact that agape can include having the others best intersexually for a marital part. Speaker 5: No, you're also raising interesting things in, I think, as well. There's a sense in which the Hebrew mindset is more of that holistic mindset that would say, love the Lord, Lord your God, or everything. Right. Whereas we can put things a little compartments and say, this, this, this, and this. But also, when you talk about the translation of the uh uh into the Septuagint, that wasn't uh you know an inspired translation, but those those people sure had a much stronger grasp of the original scriptures as well as the culture and everything that we did. So their translation is a little important for those. Speaker 4: It was interesting, I actually heard that the term agape was not in very wide use until the Septuagint. And the it appears as though the translators of the Septuagint were trying to pick a word that they could use in Greek that would have this concept of selfless love. Um, and none of the Greek words would, all the Greek words for love had overtones that that was not selfless, that were self-centered in some regard. And so they just kind of picked this obscure word and put it to the forefront and said, we're going to use this word when we're talking about the kind of love that God wants. And and that's interesting. Then that that provides a little more insight into the word. It's not that it's distinct from all the other categories, it has that quality of selflessness, which all we've all been taught and know, but it's a little bit different than it being a distinct category. Yeah. Speaker 1: Um, I was just gonna ask if um the Hebrew languages have the nuances in it that the Greek does. Because my understanding is just that the Greek has so much nuance that in cases where it is written in Greek or being translated into Greek, that's where you've got to be more careful. Speaker 4: Yeah. But the Hebrew does have a number of words for love. I don't think it has four. I think it has three, and dod is only sexual love. So it was interesting that what what I would have said, this is eros, this is the meaning of eros, and this is the meaning of dod, and it would have been a straight one-to-one translation for the most part, they didn't view it that way. And I think the reason was because in the Hebrew, in the context of the Song of Solomon, the word is used for a selfless sexual love. And the word eros didn't fit that in the Greek mindset, that would not have been seen as selfless sexual love, that would have been seen as passion or sexual passion or sexual desire. And so they needed another word, and they said, well, we're gonna have to make agape do. Agape is gonna have to do for this because it fits better than Eros does. Yeah. Speaker 2: So then are you would you be saying that the Greeks who were translating it have also been inspired by God? No, no. But would you say, well, the meaning of this passage originally is Eros, so that's what it's talking about. And where do you draw a line when you're saying, oh, well, agape means Eros. Speaker 4: What I would here's the way I would I would say it. Since we are not talking about inspiration, but we're talking about the process that the author of the Song of Songs was using to communicate to his audience. Okay? That that process, he was trying to pick the accurate words that would communicate his meaning. And he picked the word. Now, how do we know what the word means? Well, the only way we know is by looking at the way it's used and all the different ways it can be used. So you look at other places dot is used, and you begin to realize that dod means sexual love, and then you look at the ways people who use the word in that culture translated it into Greek and Syriac, and what were the words that they picked, and then you can get a little bit of a clue. If if dod can be translated eros, then you see it has some of the it overlaps the meaning of eros a little bit. Eric can overlap, and if dod can be translated agape, then it must overlap that as well. Because the people within that culture did it. They don't have to be inspired at all. They don't even have to be you follow me? Because it's the normal process of human language. So you can use extra-biblical works to try to figure out what a word means. And so when you look at words in the New Testament, if you can find classical uses where they mean something, that sheds some light on the on the range of possible meanings for that word. None of the word studies will narrow it down. And Drew will talk about that, I'm sure, that word studies are not magical. As though you can do a word study and then put your finger down on a meaning. You can do a word study and get a whole range of meanings, and then you still have to decide what it means based on all of the factors involved in trying to understand communication. Okay, in the same way, you don't even have to understand what a word means necessarily to um to understand the meaning of a passage. If I use a new word that you've never heard of before, sometimes just from the context, you can pick up what I'm talking about and what it means. And that's how we pick up new vocabulary all the time. We hear some fancy word used in a talk a couple of times, and then we begin to figure it out. Maybe it's got a technical meaning in some specific discipline, or maybe it's just a word that's not very common and we haven't heard it before. And so we pick up language that way quite regularly. Okay, if a passage means what the author intended it to mean, then you could ask the questions: are there dual authors and therefore dual meanings? So, can a passage have double meaning because the original author intended it to mean one thing, but God, as the author of all scripture, intended it to mean something else. And this has been proposed quite a lot. And y'all find this concept being taught quite a lot. I would argue that no, that is not the right way of understanding it. That it's not right to understand someone as having written better than they knew. Part of the difference is the difference in between the concept of what a text means and its significance. Let me give you an example. Um If there's something wrong with my car, and I call up, I take it to a mechanic, and the mechanic says, What's wrong with your car? And I say, Well, when I step on the gas, it sounds like marbles being ground up in a garbage disposal. What was my intention? My intention was to describe to him the sound it makes when I put my foot on a gas pedal. From that description, he could probably say something like, Oh, your timing's off. I'll give you a tune up and that's all it'll take. Now, was it my intention to say that I needed a time up? No. A tune up? Am I timing? Off? No, not at all. The meaning of what I said was to describe the sound. But the significance of what I said was understood by someone who had more knowledge than I did. So there's a difference between meaning and significance. For example, if if I said a car with license play such and such has its lights on, you know, one of you would probably understand the significance of that, as you're going to have a dead battery unless you run out and do something about it. So the significance, or if I said, I just heard on the radio that a the house at such and such a place burned to the ground and you live there, you would understand the significance much better than I would. I was just communicating something I'd heard on the radio or some car I saw with its lights on. So there's a difference between meaning and significance. Now when you bring that to the biblical text, you get something like in the passage in Genesis 3, after the fall, where the passage talks about God's promise that the seed of the woman will crush the head of the seed of Satan. What was trying to be communicated there? Well, what's trying to be communicated there is fairly limited. The meaning of that text is fairly limited. It doesn't explain a whole lot. We, from our vantage point, understand the significance of that tremendously. We understand the significance of how the seed of Satan will bruise the heel of the seed of the woman. And we understand that to be the cross. And we understand how the seed of the woman is going to crush the head of the seed of Satan, as to be the victory over sin paying for all of our iniquities. The significance of that is all unfolded to us. But the meaning is still fairly limited. You follow that? So there's a difference between meaning and significance. You find a really good example of that in the end of Daniel, where God, and this is another principle from the whole thing. There's a special case of textual quotations. In Daniel 12, 8 through 9. It reads, As for me, I heard but could not understand. So I said, This is Daniel, so I said, My Lord, what will be the outcome of these events? And he said, Go your way, Daniel, for these words are concealed and sealed up until the end of time. So this is a special case of textual quotations. Daniel, in writing the book of Daniel, wanted to communicate, I said such and such, and God said such and such. That was Daniel's meaning. So when we interpret the text, the first thing we should ask is what was Daniel trying to communicate. Daniel was trying to communicate this conversation that went on between him and God. Having said that, Daniel is describing a conversation. Daniel is describing another act of communication. Other than his act of writing, Daniel's talking about God's act of saying something to him. And it is legitimate to talk about when God, as the author of that conversation, as the author of his words, said to Daniel, Go your way, Daniel, for these words are concealed and sealed up into the end of the time. And before that, when God said all these things, and Daniel said, I don't understand what this means. And God said, Don't worry about it. It's not written for you. You just write it down. Well, God was communicating to something. And it wasn't to Daniel at that point. And you can ask the question, what was God trying to say? Because we are in the end of time. And so we are in the position that God said you will now have the information necessary to try to go to go and understand it. And so that's a case where there's sort of two levels of meaning, but only because there are two acts of communication. God says, and then Daniel writes. However, there are some cases where people will interpret several levels of meaning. For example, with David and Goliath. I've heard a lot of teaching on David and Goliath, and the first is the literal text that there was this person David and this person Goliath, and Goliath was taunting, and David twirled his sling and beat him, trusting that God would not allow someone like this to taunt, and that God's promises they would overcome the people in the land were true. Having said that, then there's another interpretation that they often use on the Old Testament, which they call, well, what does it mean for uh for the era of Christ in the church? Well, in Christ and the church, um, Daniel is like, or David is like us, and Goliath is like sin, and this is the principle of how we should overcome sin. And then having done that, then there's an eschatological layer. What does it mean for the end times? And this is a picture of how Jesus will overcome Satan in the end times. And so you get these multiple levels of interpretation on the Old Testament. Well, I would not be tempted to take the Bible that way in any of its manifestations in the Old Testament. Having said, I would not interpret it that way, that is not the meaning of the text. However, the significance of the text may very well be that we can overcome sin in the same way. I mean, certainly, the whole principle when you go to derived doctrine is that Daniel trusted God's message that he would overcome, and he stepped out on that as an act of faith. And so when we are faced with adversity, I would be more apt to apply it not to sin, but when there's adversity around us, that God's in control of that situation, even when it looks like it's overwhelming. And that you can step out on faith, knowing that God is a God who has promised certain things, and that God is a God who will not uh forsake us, and that God knows the situation you're in, and He's sovereign over it. So when things look bad, that's okay. That's not an overwhelming uh possibility. So the application of that from deriving doctrine and then applying it back in our lives may land in the same situation. But to say that that's what the text means, and that's the only, it's sort of like that's the only application. I mean, it's unfortunate in a little bit because to make Goliath sin and is not to apply it to other situations that it's equally applicable in. Like when there's um people and you're being persecuted. That's different, that's not sin, but it seems to me that's even more applicable. Question? Speaker 6: I was going to say you just said there may only be one interpretation, but there's many applications. Speaker 4: That's exactly right. And that's why when you ask someone what does this mean to you, I kind of get all quivery. What you're really asking is if you've understood the meaning, what's the significance in your life? How do you apply it? And that will be very different. Y'all have a different application on this on this chart for every bit of culture and and and uh background and situation that you find yourself in. And so the application for you in this stage of your life is going to be very different than the application, the same passage as meaning, will be applied differently when you're at a different stage of life. You know, I mean, you just think about people who are in authority over you persecuting you. When you're in school, it's often teachers. When you start working, it's often bosses. And, you know, I mean, it's just there's different situations. So someone who's in authority over you and is um making life hard for you, the principle may be the same, but the situations may be very different. Okay. Here's some examples just in modern communication to talk about textual quotations. Um tell my wife, your friend asks, that my dogs died again, she will understand. Well, that's a case where you can go up and say, Your husband says your dogs died again, and he said that you understand. And probably she will. What it means, well, who knows? You're correctly communicated the meaning of what you the meaning of what you were trying to say is this is what your husband said. The significance of it is gonna be totally lost on you. And the wife in that case will have to ask the question not only has she understood your meaning in communication, what exactly what did he say? But then she's gonna go on to say, oh, I know what that means, because she's gonna look at the other communication. Okay. Let me just give a couple of other backgrounds. Um interpretation is really the same as understanding a conversation. When you think about um idioms and background and culture that's required to understand someone, if I said um Susan has a mind like a computer, then you'd consider that to be a compliment because computers are very, very fast at calculations and and and you know she's just able to do all kinds of math and storage and of vast amounts of information in her head. But if I said John has a mind like a robot, well, that may not be a compliment. In fact, that may be very derogatory that he's kind of an automaton that can't think for himself, but he just kind of goes through the motions of doing something. Well, if you think about it in terms of today's culture, um robots today involve a lot more processing power than most computers. So the idiom doesn't really fit necessarily, but it's an idiom that makes sense, that has been used in today's circles, and that's the way that's what the idiom means. One is complimentary and one is not. So you have to go back and understand, first of all, the culture that things were in, and second of all, um second of all, then try to understand what the idiom means. Here's one biblical example. It's uh Proverbs 25, 21, and 22, which is quoted in Romans 12, 20. But if your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him a drink, for in doing so you will heap burning coals upon his head. Oh good. What does that mean? And I have heard two different interpretations of this, and I'm not here to tell you which one is right, but I find it fascinating because they mean exact opposite things. One suggestion has been that to heap burning coals upon someone's head is basically to shame them. And that the whole idea of heaping burning coals upon their head is, you know, you're gonna show them, you're gonna show them up for being uh for being the evil people that they are. Another interpretation suggests that uh coal heaping coals on someone's head is that if someone's fire went out, that they would often go to their neighbor to borrow some of their coals to start the fire with, and that they would carry that on their head. And if you heat burning coals upon his head, you are being very generous with the number of coals you give him rather than just giving him one. That makes sense. If your enemy is hungry, feed him, if he's thirsty, give him a drink. You're doing even more than what is minimally required. That's another way of taking it. It sure is important to understanding the passage, because it's important to understanding what your motivation should be. And the second one seems a little bit more biblical, but I've heard teaching that goes both ways, aren't that? And that's an example of idioms that we're trying to understand. The Bible deals with a subject matter which requires us to be familiar with many difficult terms and concepts, many different terms and concepts. In fact, it's kind of unfortunate sometimes we have terms in the Bible like church and elder and deacon and things that we all think we understand, and gift, for example. And we think we understand that, but we understand it in terms of modern Christian culture today. We don't always understand it in terms of the biblical culture. And sometimes it's better to kind of throw out those words and try to make up a different word that doesn't use the either the biblical jargon or the modern Christian jargon. As an example, um, we have an idea of what a gift means just from teaching today. We kind of have the idea that it means an ability. Or uh, you know, someone is gifted, and we that means that they're they're uh more talented somehow. Well, that may be true, and that may be the way you should take it in in much of the Bible. But there's one passage in 1 Corinthians 7 where Paul says some of you are married and some of you are unmarried. Um, some have the gift of singleness. Now try to put ability in there and see if it fits, or talent. Some of you just have a talent for singleness. It doesn't fit. Some of you have the ability to be single. Well, that doesn't fit either. And so you have to begin to challenge then what is Paul talking about when he uses the term gift? And in 1 Corinthians 7, he uses the term gift. Does he mean something similar when he uses it in the passage on spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 12? See, I would interpret the 1 Corinthians 7 passage rather than a gift, it would be an opportunity. Some of you have the opportunity to serve God being single. Paul talks about being the gift that God has given him to be uh apostle to the to the Gentiles. It's not that he had a special ability for that. In fact, his ability was probably to be apostle to the Jews, but God didn't use him that way. God used him, and Paul considered it a great gift that God would use him at all. God used him to be apostle to the Gentiles. So, could you see spiritual gifts as opportunities to be used by God rather than abilities that we have? And does that make more sense out of the 1 Corinthians 12 passage? I'm leaning that way and I kind of throw it out as an example. But certainly the passage in 1 Corinthians 7 challenges our normal back of the mind interpretation of what a gift is. Okay. Now, having said all this, let's go back to a minute to 2 Timothy 3.16. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be adequate for every good work. It seems to me that what this methodology for interpretation and application provides us with is it provides us with an objective resource. It's not, it doesn't have to be some intervention that would be more of our subjective experience. And so, for example, I don't think that the Holy Spirit is the one who determines meaning. It's not somehow the Holy Spirit's uh inner testimony to you that makes a passage right. If that's true, what do you do when the Holy Spirit seems to be telling me one thing and the Holy Spirit seems to be telling me the other? Obviously, you'd say in that case, one of us is wrong and the Holy Spirit's not telling them that. But how do you convince someone? How would we decide if we both believe that this is what the passage means? You have to appeal to something that's objective that both of us can look at. What the Holy Spirit does, let me back up, what the Holy Spirit does do in our lives is it opens our eyes. It gives us eyes to see, it gives us a heart to know, it softens the hard hardness that we have. Because you can tell someone the truth and have them reject it quite easily. But the process of coming to the knowledge of that truth is, I think, a prop an objective process that you can go through. Let me let me give you an example. Um this chart, the process once you have some universal truths and principles, the arrow going down to adopt God's attitudes and perspectives in our lives, you know, as though we could do that, that's a process, first of all, that only the Holy Spirit can do. To grow in wisdom and righteousness is only the product of God at work in our lives, because we are rebellious sinners. And so, even if we have made it all the way to extrapolating universal truths and principles, we will never get anything beyond that, and it will never make one whit of difference in our lives without the Holy Spirit's work. Now, I have known unbelievers who have actually made it to that point. In fact, uh I had a class from the dean, clearly not a Christian, um, the dean of the chapel at the at Stanford, and um I remember him saying at one point, um, he'd come to this big revelation from studying Paul, and he said, Paul actually believed in a historical resurrection. It was a big shock to him. I thought it was kind of obvious from the text. But he'd worked with the text enough and overcome all of his biases against a historical resurrection and came to the understanding that Paul actually believed in a historical resurrection. Paul is wrong on a lot of things, he went on to say, but isn't that odd that Paul actually believed in a historical resurrection? It didn't make any difference to him, and he didn't believe it was true, but he actually had worked through the process of coming to understand the author's original intention. And realized that that is what the text means. That is what Paul intended to say. Paul was wrong. He's wrong on a lot of things, but that is what he intended to say. Um, I had a uh philosophy advisor as an undergrad, uh freshman year, and he described himself as being sympathetic to religion, which in the philosophy department was a rarity in itself. Most of the philosophy department was very hostile to religion. He described himself as being sympathetic to religion, and in uh in his teaching, he gave some of the best teaching on the Abraham story and some of the best teaching on Acts that I had ever heard. And I was kind of surprised by that. And after class, he knew I was a Christian and said, Well, what did you think of the way I covered in the Old Testament and the New Testament? I said it was really good. Except in the New Testament, you really never dealt with the claims of who Jesus was. He said, You're right. And so the next year, instead of Acts, they did the book of John. That was kind of exciting, you know, to have that in a philosophy course, because that was kind of unheard of. By my senior year, he was definitely a Christian, uh, actively involved in his church, uh, teaching Bible studies. And the reason was his area of specialty was Plato and Aristotle, primarily Plato. So he worked with Greek all day long. And in fact, he had already understood all the principles of interpretation enough, so that he'd written, you know, how Plato has dialogues between person A and person B, and they go back and forth and they argue this thing back and forth. And he'd looked at one of the dialogues and said, people who are misunderstanding this particular dialogue, they seem to think that Plato would have agreed with person A. That's not right. Plato would have agreed with person B, and it's it's surprising because we wouldn't. But you know, he'd already been trying to go back to what was uh Socrates or Plato's original understanding in the dialogues and looking at all the process and the genre of dialogue and trying to understand. So he was very well-versed in the whole process of interpretation. So that after he studied more and more of the Bible, the meanings became clear to him, and he became more and more convinced by them. And then when he went to study the Bible, he he was he had great insights into the text because he could look at Galatians and he could he could see the nuance in the Greek of the idioms and stuff and the and the word order, and he was like, it was like he was fluent in classical Greek. And that helps. That helps in an understanding of the text. So it seems to me that there's a lot of evidence that the process for communication and the process for understanding the author's original intention is a natural process. Having said that, the difficulty I think becomes that very, very few of us actually want to know the truth. It's very popular to say that you're seeking the truth, but to actually find it in this culture is not well received. You know, tell someone you're you're seeking the truth at a party and they'll, you know, oh that's cool. You know, what do you I'm I'm into I'm into uh organic gardening. You know, it's just this kind of another thing you can be into. But to sell so to tell someone at a party, I found the truth, you know, you get a cold shoulder at that point. Because you're claiming you're claiming to know something, and you're claiming to know something, well that's That's okay for you, they'll say, you know. I'm sure that's that's true for you, but you know, I I'm something different. There's a great poem by Stephen Crane that that I love. It's on page six. The wayfarer, perceiving the pathway to truth, was struck with astonishment. It was thickly grown with weeds. Ha! He said, I see that none has passed here in a long time. Later he saw that each weed was a singular knife. Well, he mumbled at last. Doubtless there are other roads. I think this is much more our response to the truth. The truth hurts more often than not. Why? Because we're not the people that we should be. And so, since people don't want to know the truth, the process of going from the biblical text back up to recreating the author's understanding can be objective, but none of us are particularly objective. And so, more often than not, we come to the text wanting to find what we want to find. We don't want to find anything that's going to make us uncomfortable. And I think that's the process where people go wrong. It's very difficult to subject yourself to the text and say, whatever, I want to know whatever this text means, I want to know. Most people don't want to know that. And in fact, most pastors don't even want to know that. I don't know how many times I had some topic I wanted to talk on. I want to talk on money. So I go to some passage that I think is teaching something about money. And I start studying it, and I can't teach it because it's not saying what I want it to say. And so I have to bend it to the point sometimes of breaking it to get it to say what I want it to say. Well, obviously, that that kind of integrity, not to do that, is the kind of integrity that we need. We need to submit ourselves to the passage and not come to the passage with a whole bunch of preconceived notions about what we want it to say, but really try to understand the passage itself. And some of the most delightful passages I've ever had is when I've been forced to study something and I didn't know what it meant to begin with. And just going at it and just trying to understand what it means. And just really wanting to know. Whatever it means, that's what I want to know. That's hard, and that's hard to do because we have certain things that we want it to mean. And so it's that stage that we are not objective people, and it's our subjectivity and our own biases and our own setting ourselves up above the text, but really get in the way of the process of understanding. I don't think it's that, and that's what the Holy Spirit does. The Holy Spirit breaks all that down and helps us. I mean, it's our prayerful attitude of saying, God, help me understand what this means. I really want to understand it, that helps take out those barriers and opens our eyes and our minds. Yeah. Speaker 2: I'm kind of confused when you're talking about the Bible as an objective resource, and talking about the possibility of two people conflicting your interpretation. On the other hand, earlier you were talking about um like the meaning versus the significance and how significance could could vary and can vary in one person's life at different points. Yes. It almost seems like like you're talking about like meaning is almost meaningless, actually, what you're calling meaning, and like what the text says is sort of meaningless until you find how it affects you personally, you know, like like those examples, um, you know, conveying this message to my dog and so dog again. I mean, that's sort of meaningless. Okay. So, how I mean, how do you deal with the significance for two different people being different and conflicting? And also, but then I'm talking about having, you know, one objective source and a one message. Speaker 4: Right. Um let me see if I give you a good concrete example. As I'm talking today, you're understanding my meaning. And my meaning is to argue for authority intent that the meaning of a passage is the same thing as the original author's understanding or intent. So the meaning is the original author's intention. So I'm that's what I'm arguing for, and I'm arguing that you should always have a filter in your mind. When you hear people understanding, interpreting the scriptures, you should have a filter in your mind, asking yourself the question, is this what the original author intended it to mean? That is an easier question to judge than trying to uncover the meaning for yourself. It's easier to filter than it is to generate truth. And we are all called to filter. We are not all called necessarily to become teachers. But Paul praises all the churches who say, you took everything I said and tried to see if it matched the Old Testament. And to see if it fit in the Old Testament. And I praise you for that. That's good. That's what you should be doing. And so we should all be doing that. Every time someone tries to understand the scriptures, does it fit with our understanding of the scriptures? And if it doesn't, then we really need to look at that and say, are we wrong or are they wrong? And try to understand that. So this is my meaning, if you will, part of the intention of why I'm talking. Now, the significance in your life could be all kinds of different things. Uh, the significance in your life could be that there are some teachers who don't fit that category, and you need to be more wary of them. Or it could be that your own personal study will change in the way you go about it. That y'all have. You see, I can't I can't necessarily say how this meaning will get applied in your life, or how you can integrate that in with your own personal Bible study. Speaker 2: To give another example, um let's see if we can take a passage from the Bible and look at different person's more dealing with like two different people reading the same passage and coming to different conclusions about what it is. Speaker 4: Okay, but let me use another example. Let's say that people are that there's a whole group of people and they're all studying the Bible, they're all looking at various teachings on uh sexuality. And let's say that some people are are understanding um that homosexuality is okay, and some are understanding that it's not okay, it's sinful, and some are looking at the Song of Solomon where it's talking about the goal of sexual love within marriage. Okay. Well, first of all, in the case of homosexuality, some say it's okay and some say it's not okay. There are specific passages in Romans 1, for example, where I think Paul seems to say that homosexuality is sinful. It's not God's intention. In fact, I think Paul's whole argument in Romans 1 is that look at homosexuality. You can see from the created order that it doesn't fit. And so Paul's whole argument is it's obvious there's something wrong with the world from that. It's interesting, we can't even say that in our culture. But Paul's argument is basically you can see it's obvious that there's something wrong with the world, that we live in a fallen, broken world. And so it's crucial, I think, to his argument, when you look at that passage, that homosexuality is sinful. So in that case, there is an objective meaning, and all the clues are there in the text to try to understand what Paul intended, and one of them is wrong and one of them is right. At least one of them is wrong. When one says that homosexuality, Paul says homosexuality is a sin, and one says that no, Paul doesn't say homosexuality is a sin, but that's not really true. One of those two people is wrong, and one of them is right. So that's in a case of an objective meaning that we truly can look at the scriptures and decide between the two. In the case of looking at Song of Songs and looking at um selfless love within the marital relationship. If someone is studying that and they are married, they will have very different applications in their lives than if someone is studying that and they are single. In fact, there is some teaching within the Song of Songs, what about singleness? And it's in Song of Songs 8. And in Song of Songs 8, it says that they've been going through marital love, and then in Song of Songs 8, the woman in the passage says, I have a little sister, and she has no breast, that is, she's not sexually mature. What should we do for her on the day in which she is spoken for? And it goes through, what should we do now when she's not sexually mature for the day in which she gets married? How should we handle that? Well, the significance of that in someone whose life is single is going to be very is going to be probably one of the most important parts of the passage and probably one of the most important things that they come away with, as opposed to the married parts, they're going to be for people who are married. They're going to contain more significance. So you can see how the significance of application in someone's life, depending upon whether they're married or single or what stage of life they're at, or whatever, is going to be different, even though they're the same principles. The reason is that the meaning of the text in the Song of Songs is clear. There's selfless love and giving of sexuality within marriage, and there's principles for that. And then there's some teaching that says that sexuality is reserved for marriage, and there's some principles for that. So those are the principles, and the universal principles you can extrapolate from the Song of Songs. When you go to apply those in your life, it's going to be very different. Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, I think that the reason the meaning is not meaningless is that the meaning is where we get our objective evidence for our application. That's right. I can say that, you know, the Song of Solomon says that I can have sex whenever I want to, but then you've got to go back and say, show me where you get that from. That's right. And that show me where you get that from is where we go back and say, where is the hard objective evidence? Where is the meaning of the text that you got that application from? Speaker 4: Right. How did you derive, how did you derive the universal principle that anyone can have sex whenever they want to? Where did you get that from the text? On the other hand, you know, am I making sense so far? Okay. On the other hand, you take a look at a passage like 1 Corinthians 11 that talks about women's head coverings. That was written in a specific situation within the Corinthian Church. And if you look at some of the, if you try to reconstruct some of the background behind it, the problem in the Corinthian Church at that point was that you had two different cultural principles that were coming into conflict. You had um you had the principle that said that Jewish men, when they prayed or prophesied in the synagogue, would take off their hats out of respect for God. And you had the principle that women within that culture who were married would wear their hats as a sign that they were married and chased to their husbands. Single women couldn't wear hats. They'd wear their hair down and long. And prostitutes were forbidden by law to wear any kind of a head covering. And so married women would put up their hat and their hair and they'd have a covering, and they'd only write it down within the privacy of their husbands. Now, in Christianity, for the first time, men and women are both participating in the worship service. So for the first time, women are now praying and prophesying in the church. And the question arises: should they keep their hats on, as the culture would seem to indicate, or should they take their hats off like the men as a sign of respect for God? Okay. So there's a specific cultural situation. And Paul gives them some specific advice within their culture. Now, from that, we can derive the principles that Paul was using to give that advice. And there are certain universal principles up here. And then we can take that back down and combine it with our culture, in which head coverings are no big deal. But the universal principles may lead us to some different conclusions. So in our culture, there may be some different things that we need to do and beware of. And they may have nothing to do with head coverings or worship or anything like that. They may have to do with all kinds of other different things. So that's a case where understanding the meaning does not yet get us to application. The meaning within the 1 Corinthian culture was written within a set of its constraints, and we still need to extrapolate the universal principles. And we'll go through that when we talk about deriving doctrine and application. So the meaning is objective, we can understand it, but having understood it, our work's not done. Because it's not. And here's the other thing that I've found. When you give a sermon, you have 40 minutes at the most. And that's not a lot of time to go through this whole process. And so a lot of pastors and ministers will jump from the text, they will make a leap over to application. And they'll kind of bypass a lot of the intermediate steps, they'll bypass talking about it in the individual culture, and they'll bypass extrapolating the universal principles sometimes, and they'll give you examples of application directly. Sometimes they'll jump from the text straight up to here. And you'll wonder how did they know to filter out head coverings as a cultural thing and extrapolate out other principles as universals. I mean, the problem is not necessarily with the work that they've done. They could have done all of this work impeccably, and they've got 40 minutes to try to explain it to you, and they want to make sure that you get to the to the rub where the, you know, where the rubber meets the road. They want to make sure you get this kind of stuff. And so they'll jump from the text straight into application, and they'll give you application and they'll give you examples. Here's an example if you're a student, how you might apply it. Here's an example if you're married with kids, you might apply it. And here's an example that fits just about everyone. So here's three examples. And it's a good thing to do when you talk about application and you're teaching a large group and you don't know, you know, to try to pick various stages of life and how you might apply it. How might you apply it with your wife? How might you apply it with your children? How might you apply it with your friends? How might you apply it with a roommate? Those are all good questions to ask in trying to help illustrate these kinds of principles. The difficulty is that sometimes they jump from the text to the application, and one of two things has happened. We can't see how they got there, and so it looks like they're giving us application out of the dark and we don't understand the process. Maybe they've done it right or maybe they haven't. We can't tell. And so it leaves us uneasy and it leaves us with that feeling: how did they get that from here? And sometimes it's just they haven't had the time to go through the whole process. And sometimes it might be that there's a that they have not quite gotten it correctly. And sometimes they're teaching things that are true, but they're not necessarily taught in this passage. So this passage doesn't go through the process of getting there very well, but what they're teaching is true. And that's what I find the most important in all of those situations is um we need to have our grids, but we need to not be critical. Not be critical of the people involved, and not be critical of um what I'm what I'm trying to do in this talk is to raise your awareness of all the possibilities without making you critical. And the reason why is because it's easy to sit back and be skeptical, like, how did you get that? And you haven't gone through this whole rigmarole process. And that's not the right thing to do. The right thing to do is to try to figure out what are the things that I can have real confidence in that I can stake my life on. That's the goal. We ought to be truth seekers, not skeptics. Do you follow that? And so when I sit and I listen to a talk, even if there are parts that I may kind of wonder, how did they get there? Well, I'll either think about it or I'll and try to work it out, or I'll say, I don't think that's right, but here's six things that were really good, and here's six things that I hadn't thought of that really do make sense through the process, and I'm going to try to grab hold of those. If you've been here in the fall, it's the whole process of trying to build your room, the room of your house, so that everything coordinates, that everything fits together, that nothing's out of place. And it all starts with having a good view of the scriptures. If you have a good view of the scriptures, then as you listen to good teaching, you'll be able to pick pieces of it out and build your framework. Sometimes I'm not ready for some of this process because my thinking is skewed. And there's only one step I can see, and that challenges my thinking, and all the rest of the steps are based on the next step that I haven't even gotten to yet. And so sometimes it's just my thinking that I'm not ready to hear all that yet. I'm not ready to really make that a part of my life because I'm wrong and I need to be corrected. And I'm only being corrected a little piece at a time. And so we need to constantly have that attitude. We put ourselves under the scriptures, and to the extent that someone else is correctly interpreting them, we put ourselves under their teaching as well. To the extent that they're not correctly interpreting them, we need to have humility in that process and not be critical. Because it's a hard process. It's a lot harder than the filter, and that's the stuff we're called to do. We're all called to be filtering and trying to make sure that everything is put through a Christian worldview and a biblical worldview and an interpretive methodology that makes sense. Do you follow that? Okay. After hearing some of this teaching, you know, the next three sermons I noticed were by three different people, and they all disagreed with each other, and I thought, whoa, that's it really is true. There really is some differences, and there are important differences. And some, you know, sometimes you'll get that at a particular church, or you'll get that when you have guest speakers, you'll get that with, and it's important to bear in mind. And so it was easy for me to become critical for a little while. Kind of like when you just got out of student driving. Dad, it's it's three and nine, it's not ten and two. You know what I mean? All the stuff that drives your parents crazy. It's all the stuff that drives your parents crazy. And it's easy to do that as you begin the process of understanding an interpretive methodology. It's easy to be like that. And then all it took for me was to actually try to sit down and understand something like the Song of Solomon. And boy, is it hard to try to understand the Song of Solomon. Because it's very clear that a lot of it is speaking figuratively. But figuratively of what? And how, you know, I can't even find, I've turned to all the best people I can find, and all the interpreters, and I can't even find two interpreters who agree. So it's a hard process to work through, and it's a humbling process to work through at times. Now, one more thing I wanted to say, and that is it is a hard process, and it is a humbling process, but we have a great confidence that God is understandable. And the reason is because the message of the Bible is incredibly redundant. That you could take out the Song of Solomon, you could take out half the books in the Bible, and you wouldn't have lost anything. I mean, you can really pick any one book of the Bible and you get the gist of what God's trying to communicate. Because the message of the Bible is not complex, it is very simple. And the message is having faith in God is what it's all about. That you need to trust God and give your life to Him. And you can't find a book in the Bible, I don't think, that doesn't teach that. So I used to think that what being wise was all about was taking the Bible and finding all of the wisdom in it. And there was like a handbook, and every page was an important part of the manual. And here were the six ways of how to handle people in authority who were above you and giving you grief, and here was the seven ways to raise your kid, and here was the five different methods. And some of Christian teaching tends to encourage that, but that's not the way it works. The problem with us is not a problem of knowledge as much as it is a problem of sin. And it's the sin that needs to get overcome, and the only way of overcoming that is casting ourselves upon God and having faith in Him. So the whole process of understanding the Bible is not hard. If there's one passage that you understand, you've understood the Bible as a whole. You've understood the gist of what's really important about the biblical message. Yes, there are passages that are hard to understand. And that's why you understand those in light of the passages that are clear. It's because the Bible really is a unified whole. And the unclear passages are not the majority, and they're There's no esoteric wisdom contained in those that's not repeated somewhere else. And that's the thing I've been finding about the passage in the Song of Songs that I actually do understand is you don't need the Song of Songs to understand them. You'll uncover them and you'll say, hey, Ephesians 5 teaches the same thing. Isn't that interesting? But it's all there. And it's repeated not only in Ephesians 5, it's repeated in 1 Peter, and it's repeated in six other places. Proverbs has the same thing in it. So it's not as though when we sit down to try to understand the Bible, there's going to be this process that if we don't get it right, we're not going to understand God's revelation to us. The application of all this, I think, is that when we read the Bible, we should read for understanding. That even when you read devotionally, you should read devotionally for understanding. And you can't read devotionally without some method of understanding. You look at the words and the words, you're trying to understand what the passage is talking about, and that sparks thoughts in your mind, and that's okay, but then come back to the text and figure out what the text is saying and read that way. I've taken to reading the Psalms a lot and studying the Psalms a lot, and the Psalms are great places to interpret the Bible for a number of reasons. It's Hebrew poetry. So if you don't understand one line, the next line probably means the exact same thing. So you get that kind of redundancy that you can get often when someone talks and they repeat themselves six or seven different ways. So the Psalms are good for that. The context is limited. The Psalm. You don't have to outline all the chapters in Romans to try to figure out how Romans 5 fits in. Psalm is a self-contained unit. And there are some really nice short ones. Start with Psalm 131, I think it's two or three lines, two or three verses. You know, it's a nice short little context that you can understand. Hebrew poetry, because it rhymes ideas, doesn't suffer anything in the translation. Hebrew poetry, in fact, is the only kind of poetry I've ever found that translated retains all of its poetic value. You know, if you our poetry with the rhymes at the end and the meter and stuff, is it's very important that you speak it in, you say it in English. You can't take French poetry and try to translate it into English and really think that you've gotten poetry. It's hard. But you can take Hebrew poetry and translate it into English, and you haven't lost anything. You've lost very, very little, if anything. And the other thing about the Psalms is they're a short enough, contained enough unit so that you can actually try to go through the process completely in understanding them. And go through the process of reading for understanding. So I started with a started out with the Psalms. And it actually was kind of an odd way. I started out with the goal of reading through the Psalms every month. There's 150 Psalms, that's five a morning. I thought five a morning, I read five in the morning. And I started out and I read the first one. It was really interesting, and I wanted to go back and look at some of the things that it said, and I got through one psalm. And I thought, well, this is gonna work. Alright, I'll read one psalm and I'll go through it every five months. So I started out, and then the next day, though, I wanted to go back to that first psalm because there were some questions I didn't have answered. So I did. I went back to that first psalm just to answer a few more questions. And after an hour, I thought, well, this isn't gonna work. And uh that was in 1979, and I'm not through the Psalms, so I'm still studying in the Psalms. I mean, that's that's just kind of where I am, and that's okay because I'm reading now for trying to understand it. And when I do understand a psalm, I really feel like I know what it says. And there are psalms I will never forget because I've gone through the process of trying to understand them fully. And that's what's important. And you can do that with almost anything. It's just the Psalms are nice because they're self-contained. You don't have to spend years and years studying a single book like Romans or 1 Peter. But Romans and 1 Peter, it was interesting to me too, because uh one of my heroes was Martin Luther. You might said some disparaging things about his interpretation on uh on the bread in the uh the communion. But uh Luther got most of his foundation for the Reformation, not from Romans, but from what he studied right before Romans, which was the Psalms. And actually, most of his enlightenment on the Reformation came from the Psalms, and then he studied Romans and really solidified it. But all of his early stuff is based on his study out of the Psalms. So that was kind of exciting to me too, and it also goes to prove the point that the Bible's incredibly redundant. You can get the entire gospel from the Psalms. You don't you don't even need the New Testament Romans. In fact, Martin Luther made the comment once that if someone had nothing but the Psalms, they could write Romans. Which I thought was an interesting comment. Because it's all contained with the entire gospel. Okay, questions on this? Discussion.