Understanding Parables

Welcome to Wednesday in the Word with Krisan Marotta. What the Bible means and how we know. For more talks and study materials, visit wednesdayintheword.com. Speaker 2: So today we're going to talk about how to understand the parables because that is our subject for the fall. So suppose I want to tell you what happened on September 11th in 2001 in New York City. I could tell you two planes crashed into two tall buildings and knocked them down. And everything I said would be factually true and correct, but I haven't really explained the event. So I could also tell you what happened by saying terrorists hijacked two commercial airliners, flew them into the World Trade Center towers, killing everyone on board and thousands of unsuspecting office workers. That statement's also factually true. It's a little more fully told. I've started to identify the culprits, the victims, and some of the significance of the events. But I could go farther and I could say on September 11, 2001, the walls of freedom were torn down. Americans felt they looked into the face of terror and people wept in the streets. Now my third statement's also a true statement, but it presupposes that you know what happened, that you know the facts in the first two statements. And in my third statement, I've attempted to explain the significance of the tragedy and the significance of what happened. And my third statement calls for a response. It's emotional language, it's it helps, tries to engage your heart as well as your mind. And what I want to I bring that up because I think the parables of Jesus are more like my third statement. They teach through dramatic conflict and they teach through a story that calls for a response. And that's unusual for us because in Western tradition, serious theology is always done through carefully constructed logical sequences of ideas. And of course, the more educated the theologian, the more abstract the ideas seem to become, and the more difficult to understand. But that's not true in Hebrew thought. In Jewish thought, they talk often through stories and parables. And we so we come to the Gospels and we find the words of Jesus difficult frequently because he's not talking in these logical theological concepts, he's talking in metaphors and pictures. So for example, this is Luke 9.57. As they were going along the road, someone said to him, I will follow you wherever you go. Now, a Westerner like myself, I would respond to this, well, you know, bold statements are easy to make, but you ought to seriously consider what it will cost you to follow me. And I don't think you have, you've done that so far. So I will let me tell you plainly, I can't offer you any salary, I can't offer you any security, and if my point's not clear, perhaps an illustration will help. I don't even have a bed of my own to sleep in. Well, that's not how Jesus responds. He says, the foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. He's essentially told you what I just said, only he told you in pictures and metaphor, rather than abstract statements. So he gives this dramatic illustration that makes an impact on his listener and calls for a response. And that's what parables are. They're serious theology, but they're metaphorical theology. They teach us through metaphor, through simile, and through dramatic action rather than logical reasoning. And we had a taste of this last spring. Remember our James study. For those of you who are here, we kept running into these beautiful metaphors in his letter, and it was, I think, largely because of his Hebrew background. So what we're going to talk about today, we're going to talk about how to understand parables, how to deal with all this metaphorical language, and the mistakes people make when they come to them, and then how to do it right. And I recommend, if you want more help on this, that you read chapter 8 in Fianne Stewart's book, How to Read the Bible for All It's Worth. I think every Bible student should own this book. It's a great book. There are two copies in the Trinity Library, so you can read it there. And if you since there are only two copies, if you do do that, why don't you make a chance to read it, put it back on the shelf, and leave it for the next person? It's not very long, it's only about twelve pages or so, so you can read it fairly quickly. But they have a kind of a great introduction to how to understand parables. So there are two reasons that parables have been misinterpreted for so long. First is we took them out of their original culture and context, and second, we treated them as allegories when in fact they're analogies, and we're going to talk a lot about that. So let me first explain what I mean by culture and context. So parables are stories that are set in a particular culture that's foreign to ours. So if I were an Englishman and I was telling you a story about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and you were all Englishmen as well, or English, we would have kind of we would have a common language. Both the storyteller and the listener then have this kind of invisible mental switch that they throw. Because we know how characters are expected to act in the days of the knights, we know what it means to be a knight, to have honor, to have courage, and the days of the round table. So one commentator explained it that the storyteller has an invisible grand piano on which he plays, and that piano is our shared knowledge about what life was like in the days of King Arthur. So that when Lancelot's eye strays toward Guinevere, the tension mounts because we know knights are not supposed to betray their king. So now imagine that same storyteller is trying to tell the story of King Arthur to Alaskan Eskimos. Now he has no grand piano. There is no shared knowledge on which to build, and worse still, the Eskimos have an entirely different set of cultural expectations that they're bringing to the story, almost as if they're playing a saxophone instead of a piano. So they're they don't have the same set. So in the case of the parables, we're the Eskimos. We're the ones who've lost that that uh shared common knowledge, and that's what we want to try to recover as Bible students. We want to look back and say, what would the parables have meant to a first century Middle Eastern peasant who most likely was Jewish? So we're modern Americans living 2,000 years later, so to understand the parables, we have to get back to what they what they meant to the original audience. So parables are stories, their theologies expressed in stories, but they're stories about a particular people living in a particular culture and a point in history, and that's what we're going to try to recover. And it's really only been in the last 50 years or so that scholars have made a real concerted effort to recover kind of the culture of the Bible. So before we look at the right approach, I want to look at the wrong ones. So here's four solutions people have come up with to solve this problem of cultural foreignness, or the fact that we've lost the common language. And I'm telling you this because we do them almost subconsciously. So the first mistake is to think all people are like me, or the fancy word for this is indigenize. So the mistake here is to say, well, we know what it means to knock on a neighbor's door at midnight. We know what it means to be a parent, we know what it means to be a loot to lose something. So it's reasonable to assume that it meant the same thing to them as it means to me today. But the key is reasonable for whom? Even the today the answer would be different for Germans and Americans and Koreans and British. We all come from slightly different, different viewpoints. And if any of you have lived overseas, you know right away that there are cultural differences and that what means one thing in one culture doesn't mean the same thing in another culture. So in the parables, there are clues that were significant to first situate Jews, but we miss them entirely because our culture is so different. But you don't even have to leave the country to find cultural differences. I went to college in California in Stanford at the heart of the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, you know, it's the high-tech capital of the world. And in that area, the highest prestige you can have is to start your own business. So, you know, this is the reason that gave us Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Hewlett and Packard, Google and Yahoo. But you don't have to start a technology business. You can start your own floor shop or bicycle delivery business or whatever. But the real goal there is start something, build something. So then we moved to Charlottesville, which is of course, you know, the land of Thomas Jefferson's university, and here the big ticket item is how many degrees do you have? You know? How much academic achievement have you reached? And so the business gurus from the Bay Area would come here and go, You're 28 and you're still in school. What what's up with that? And the academics from Charlottesville would go to the Bay Area and go, You dropped out of college, why are you wasting your education? You know, so it's it's just a diff neither is necessarily right or wrong, it's just a cultural difference. So what we're trying to look at is what was the culture of Jesus Day, and realize all people are not like me. So that's the first mistake. The second mistake is to think all people are alike, i.e., like me. So we call this universalizing. So to universalize the parables means to assume that all people are basically alive. We know what it means to be a parent, a child, a neighbor, and so on, and because the parables deal with basic human relationships, they all we don't need to understand anything about their culture. And that is actually true to a certain extent. But the problem, because there are problems we all struggle with and relationships we're all familiar with, but the way we approach them varies greatly. So in practice, we often take all people are alike to mean all people think like me, and it's the same problem. Okay, the third mistake then is to say it only matters what it means to me, or to existentialize it. And this approach kind of skirts the issue by saying it really doesn't matter, it only what it meant to the first century believer, it only matters what it means to me today. And we could do a whole class on this by itself, but let me assure you, a text means what the author intended it to mean, and we have to know what the author meant before we can ask what it means to me. So, what it meant is exegesis and interpretation. What it means to me is application and deriving doctrine, and those are two very, very different processes. So I'm not going to go into a whole lot of that except to say you can't know what it means to you until you know first what Jesus was trying to teach. Okay, and then the last mistake is it can't be done. I give up, it's too hard, despair, um, it's impossible, we'll never understand the parables, we're too far removed, we live in a Western society, well, Jesus lived in an Eastern society. How can we possibly move back and over? Well, don't give up, we're gonna do it. And in fact, we live in an age when so much more information is coming to light, it's amazing. People are really beginning to starting to apply archaeology and not only the culture of ancient Jewish culture, but also its neighbors, and we're combining all that with finds like the Dead Sea Scrolls, and there's just a ton more information now than there was even say 20 or 30 years ago. So don't give up. And I hope by the by the end of next week you're gonna be so excited about parables you'll want to study them all. Okay, the last solution then, or the last mistake, is to allegorize the parables, and we're gonna talk a lot about this, but first let me give you an example of what I mean. This is actually from Augustine, and you can find this in Fein Stewart, the book I just recommended. He gives goes into it in great detail. And Augustine was a brilliant theologian, but he did, I think, miss the boat on parables. So he took the parable of the Good Samaritan and he started making these one-to-one substitutions so that each element in the story was a symbol of something else. So he said, um, the man going down the road was Adam, the Jerusalem was the heavenly city of peace from which Adam fell, Jericho was the moon, and because it waxes and wanes, it's it symbolizes his mortality. The robbers or the devil and the and his angels, they stripped him, that is, they stripped him of his immortality, they beat him, persuading him to sin, is the idea. And he goes on making these substitutions, and his conclusion is that the parable of the Good Samaritan predicts the ministry of the Apostle Paul. Not likely, but that was the accepted understanding for a long time. And it's because of a basic problem with methodology, and but I think it's highly unlikely that Jesus was predicting the new covenant, the ministry of the church, and specifically the ministry of the Apostle Paul through the parable of the Good Samaritan. But if you go back to sermons from, if you can find them online, there's a lot of sermons like from the 1800s, you will find them allegorizing the parables. The problem with this methodology is you can get anything from anything. You can make any parable mean anything you want, depending on what substitutions you make. And it came, I think the problem came because rabbis treated parables as analogies, but Greeks treated their mythology as allegories. So when they came to the Bible, they transferred that methodology to the Bible, because most of our early church fathers were Greek. So there was a debate very early on between Jerome and Augustine over how you should handle the parables. And Augustine argued that you should allegorize them, and Jerome argued, no, that's incorrect, you should treat them as analogies. Now both these were brilliant scholars were Greek, but Jerome had translated the Bible into Latin, so he's the one who authored the Vulgate translation, and in doing that, he went and studied Hebrew with the rabbis, and he learned from the rabbis how to understand parables, which was to treat them as analogies. But there was this debate early in church history over should we do it this way or that way? And basically Augustine won and Jerome lost in popular opinion, and the church began allegorizing the parables ever since. But in this case, I believe Jerome was correct. It wasn't until 1910 that a German scholar began to question allegory as a methodology. The man you don't particularly need to know this, but if you'd like to, his name was Adolf Ulicker, and he wrote a paper questioning this methodology, but he offered no alternative approach. And then in 1936, uh two scholars, one named Dodd and one named Austerly, independently said, We think this guy Ulicker was right, and here's how we should understand them, and begin treating them again as analogies. And now basically every good book on interpretation will talk about the difference between allegory and analogy and say analogy is the right understanding. And then in the 1970s, a scholar named Kenneth Bailey, who specialized in in Middle Eastern theology, began applying, seriously applying what we know about ancient cultures to the parables. And for the last 40 years he's been doing this in both English and Arabic, and I am stealing heavily from him. His work is amazing. He's lived in the Middle East, he teaches it in the Middle East, and I believe in Egypt, and he's so thoroughly immersed in the cultures and the ancient cultures, he's really opened our eyes. So it's really been since the 1970s that we've gotten this wealth of information. Alright, so let me explain the difference between allegory and analogy. And I'm the chart is on page six in your booklet. That's essentially what I'm going to go over now. So the right way and the wrong way. So allegory is not the way we want you to treat parables. Analogy is. So this is kind of the formal definition. An analogy is an extended account or a story which describes a situation which is like reality, the keyword being like reality there in some way, specified by the author and is told as a practical illustration of that reality. An allegory is an extended account which describes reality through symbolic, the symbolic meaning of its elements. And it's told to specify that reality for those who know the symbolism used by the author. So this is going to sound really complicated until I give you some examples and you will all recognize them right off the bat. So when you're looking at a story and you ask yourself, why did the author choose the elements in the story? For an analogy, it's because they make sense. They make sense as a story. For an allegory, it's because they have predetermined symbolic value in the culture. Must the elements in the story make sense? Yes, if it's an analogy, no, if it's an allegory. So, yes, for analogy, the story must make sense as a story. You aren't going to see um, you know, what would we say, uh eagles uh writing um declarations of independence? Now I could use that in our culture because we know that eagle is a the eagle is a symbol of freedom, but in an analogy it wouldn't work because it has to make sense. So what questions should I answer to interpret the parable? For an analogy, you want to ask, what is the dynamic of the story? For an allegory, what do the elements in the story symbolize? And there are some allegories in the Bible. You'll find them in Ezekiel, uh, Revelation, not surprisingly, but not the parables of Jesus. So then reality. Why did the author use the story to explain reality? Because it makes sense if it's an analogy, because they have symbolic value if it's an allegory. Oh wait, I'm on the wrong slide. The dynamic of the story is like reality, and then if it's an analogy, and then the allegory of the story is a symbolic way of saying reality. And then how do I expect the story to teach me if it's an analogy, something about the situation in the story is similar to reality? If it's an allegory, when I replace the symbolic elements with what they correspond to, I have a statement about reality. And then the key bottom line is what question should I answer to understand reality? What I'm going to encourage you to come up with is a statement that says, just as A in the story, so B in reality. That's the kind of the goal with parables. So that's what we're looking for in analogy. So when Jesus comes along and he says, the kingdom of heaven is light, and then he tells you a story, you want to say, just as something in reality, so the kingdom of heaven is, or just as in the story, so the kingdom of heaven is whatever the comparison is. And we're going to look at some examples. Now, all this you're probably going, oh my gosh, this is too confusing. I'm never going to remember this, but you will grasp this immediately. So I want to give you some examples. Okay, so here's an analogy. An old eccentric millionaire lay in bed dying with his son and daughter by his side. He told them that his life savings was in a trunk in the attic. The son went to the attic, opened the trunk, removed some musty clothes, and found a handful of gold coins. He returned with the gold coins and shared them with his sister, explaining that this was the extent of their inheritance. His sister said, That cannot be the inheritance. There's surely more. Let me take a look. So she went to the attic, opened the trunk, removed the musty clothes, and found nothing in the trunk. But she didn't give up. Carefully she searched until she found a way to remove the bottom of the trunk. There she discovered millions of pieces of gold beneath its false floor. Rejoicing, she took the gold and divided it with her brother. So it is with Christians who study the Bible such that they can teach others. So what am I trying to say? Not um keep digging, yeah. Take perseverance. So just as the sister kept looking and looking until she found the treasure, so a Bible student who keeps looking will will be rewarded with treasure. Okay, I could say the same thing as an allegory. A man was trying to look over a wall in order to see a light on the horizon. First he stood on the back of a rabbit, but he could not see the light. Then he stood on the back of a snail and he could see the light perfectly. Now you all understood that immediately because you know the symbolism. You know that a wall is su is an obstacle, light is often truth, and and revelation, a rabbit is fast, a snail is slow. But this doesn't make sense. We don't stand on the backs of rabbits, we don't stand on the back of snails. So both my stories make the same point. God's revelation is profound, and the student who looks superficially is only going to find superficial things, but the one who diligently studies and carefully looks for more will be rewarded. So you don't expect a one-to-one correspondence. With an analogy, we don't, we aren't trying to substitute who's the girl, who's the son, who's the daughter. And the point is the point that I want to make. So I told you the point I was trying to make. So it is with Christians who study the Bible. The fact that it was the daughter who found the riches in no way implies that women are better Bible teachers. True, though that may be. It's not taught here. Okay, so so the point is just what I the point the author is trying to make. Um Don't you every analogy breaks down eventually, so we don't want to go hog wild and stretch the old rubber band to s to try to read everything we ever know into an analogy. And while analogies may have symbolic elements in them, it's usually not the point. So wait, here's my I forgot I had this slide. This is my explanation of what they were doing. Okay, let me give you another one. The crowd asked a young man where his shirt was made. He answered, it just happened. Everyone in the crowd laughed. An old man pointed to a monkey and said, It just happened. To this, everyone applauded. Now this is a little trickier because it's a story, but I've given you no context. The only context I've given you is a symbol. So I'm using the symbol to tell you I'm trying to make a point about evolution because I'm counting on you to think, oh, monkeys, that that's people use that as a symbol of evolution, Big Bang. And so it is it's still an analogy because it's a story, and it's just as the crowd thought one thing was plausible and not the other, so it is with evolution. I didn't quite write that out. But I'm giving you the monkey as a as a symbol to determine to kind of clue you into what I'm trying to say. Now, the problem with our society is a lot of the things in the parables have become symbols to us, but they weren't symbols when they were originally told. So we have to get back to. So how do you tell which is which? Ask yourself, is the story meaningful or not? Do the elements contribute to the story the sense of the story, or are they nonsensical? If it's nonsensical, it's a good chance it's allegory. Um do the elements which don't contribute to the sense have symbolic meaning in the culture apart from this story? If so, it's probably an allegory. Does the story make sense without the symbolic value of the elements? If it doesn't, it's an allegory. Is the author expecting his audience to make a judgment based on the story itself? If so, it's an analogy. You don't have to write all these down, but I think you'll get them as we go along. Is it difficult, impossible, or easy to substitute reality for elements in the story and have a meaning that corresponds to reality? Again, that would make it an allegory. So now it's quiz time to see if you were listening. I'm gonna give you a story and I want you to tell me if it's an analogy or an allegory. So here's the first one. The man who commits adultery is like a little girl who had a secret that she shared only with one friend. Her friend felt very special to the little girl and especially close to her. Then one day the little girl told her secret to a third little girl. The second little girl felt betrayed and said to the first girl, I thought I was your best friend. Why did you tell your secret to someone else? The first girl little girl responded, I wanted her to be my best friend too. The second girl answered and said through tears, Then I'm not your best friend anymore. No, I'm nobody's friend. Analogy or allegory? unknown: Analogies. Speaker 2: Analogy. See, I told you, this sounds complex, but when you start thinking about it, it's perfectly easy. Okay. I'm gonna give you another one. Every four years, an elephant and a donkey dress up and run a race against each other. Years ago, the two lined up at the starting line, the gun went off, and around the track they raced. Out of the stands poured many spectators who chased the racers. When the spectators caught up with the racers, some climbed onto the donkey and some climbed onto the elephant. With each new rider they gained the elephant and the donkey grew stronger. The elephant began to pull ahead. However, one spectator didn't run on the back of either the donkey or the elephant, but began running by himself toward the finish line. When the other spectator saw what was happening, some climbed off the back of the elephant and climbed onto the back of the lone spectator. Soon the elephant collapsed from the lightness of his load, and the spectator tripped over him while the donkey crossed the finish line victoriously, and that's how we got a donkey in the big white house. Speaker 1: Allegory. Allegory! Speaker 2: Very good. I actually wrote this about Ross Perot years ago. I wanted to see if it still worked all these years later. But you see, these are our cultural symbols. The story doesn't make sense. Yes, good. Okay. Another one. The judge sits on his throne and makes judgments on the people. The blindfolded lady standing behind him begins to scream. The scale she's holding is a skew on one side of the scale. The scale is scraping the floor, while the other nearly touches the ceiling. The judge turns, moves the blindfold from over her eyes to over her mouth, then he pulls the high scale down with his hand. Continuing to hold the scales roughly even with his hand, the judge turns around and resumes pronouncing judgments. Allegory. Now I've given you no context. So you have no idea what the point of all this is, maybe most likely. But that's that um I'm not sure what this one there really is a point. It just worked as an allegory. So I'm not asking you to interpret them, but just to recognize what they are. Okay, one more. The people of the kingdom came to the king and cried, Oh, king, you must do something about the flies. We can't eat, we can't sleep, we can't work, you must get rid of the flies. The next day all the kingdom gathered in front of the palace as the king read a decree. From this day forward, throughout the kingdom, flies will no longer be called flies, they will now be called firkins. Thus the king rid the kingdom of all the flies, but there sure were a lot of firkins. Okay? Analogy? Allegory. unknown: Analogy. Speaker 2: Analogy. Story makes sense. That now if there was a just as and so it is with, or the kingdom of heaven is like, those are the tip-offs. So when we come to the parables of Jesus, and he said, and they the author will often give us a clue, like he told them this parable in order that they should pray and not worry. So we want to go, aha, this is the point is wrapped up in here. Or when Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like, we want to go, okay, what's the comparison? How are we doing on time? Let me give you one more warning that I've seen now with parables is you're gonna start getting very excited about them, and we're gonna start pulling in the culture and all gaining all these facts, and we can go hog wild with that and fall into what I call backgrounditis, which is um applying everything we've learned, trying to cram it into the parable. So what that's the one that's one more warning I want to give you. I I hope that you'll get as excited about parables as I do. But somehow when we get into metaphorical language, the temptation is to stretch the rubber band as far as we can stretch it. And I like to gather all this vast array of facts, culture, background, word usage, whatever it is, and then I fall in love with all that information so much, you know, it's like I've got a fact, I've got to use it. And so I cram it into the text or the story. But Bible study is pruning, you know, we gather all this stuff and then we prune off all the things that aren't that relevant to to come up with the essential truth. And the thing that we prune with is context. Context, context, context. It's the magic tool in my hand. It is what I use to say, this is what Jesus could mean, where I go from that list of maybe ten things to this is what he must have meant is context. And it works for background as well. So let me give you an example. One thing I have absolute confidence in is that everyone in this room knows that chairs are for sitting. So in fact, I can look around and see confident uh evidence that everyone who has a chair is sitting in it, and that's true in every culture throughout the world. So chairs are designed for someone just to sit on. So we all know that, that's our background. Now, suppose I'm trying to reach a f my favorite copy of Jane Austen off the top shelf of my bookshelf, and I'm standing on tiptoe, struggling to knock the book loose, and my husband comes in and he says, Here's a chair. What does he mean? He doesn't want me to sit on the chair, does he? He means stand on this chair and hand me the book because you're gonna fall and break your neck, right? So we know the chairs are for sitting, but in this context, I'm not supposed to sit in it. Okay, let me give you another one. Suppose while I'm on assignment for the CIA, my husband and I are trapped in the back room of our favorite Parisian restaurant. The KGB is agents are rapidly sneaking up on us, and as I frantically search for something to defend myself with, my husband says, Here's a chair. Okay, now what does he mean? He means pick up the chair and beam the guy when he comes around the corner, right? He doesn't want me to sit in it. But context tells me what I'm supposed to do with it. Okay, one more. So my husband and I win uh seats on the first private space shuttle to Mars. And as the first to set foot on the planet, part of our job is to investigate is this a suitable habitat and look for evidence of extraterrestrial life. And my husband says, Here's a chair. What does he mean? He means set the phaser on stun deer, we're not alone, right? You don't expect to find chairs on Mars, right? So in each of those, he would have been appalled if I had sat down in the chair he handed me, because that's not what he expected me to do with it. And how did I know? Context. Context makes the difference. Now you may think my examples are silly, but think about this when we come to Bible study. Context is king. So consider this is from our James study last fall. In James 5, 11, we read, We count those as blessed who endured. You have endured the dur you have heard of the endurance of Job and have seen the outcome of the Lord's dealings, that the Lord is full of compassion and is merciful. Now, James is not inviting us to cram everything we know about Job into verse 11. He says right up front, we count those as blessed who've endured. You've heard of the endurance of Job. That's the context. That's the point he's trying to make, the comparison. So if we learn something about Job's charity or his choice of friends, or maybe the even the state of his marriage, it doesn't matter. We may have all this extra information, but in terms of the context of James, what James wants us to consider is endurance, not all that other stuff. But there's something about parables that just it's so tempting to violate this rule. The minute I'm told X is like Y, I want to stuff everything I know about X into Y. Let me give you an example. So Jesus said in Matthew 5.13, you're the salt of the earth. So our job as Bible students is to figure out what did he mean? What is it about salt that is like us? So what is it that is true of salt that is also true about us? So suppose I go to the beach and I learn that salt water leaves this white deposit behind when it evaporates. So I go, aha, we're the salt of the earth. So when we die or evaporate, we leave behind this white deposit of good works. You know, white, good, salt, salt works, right? Do you think that's what Jesus meant? No. Hopefully that analogy sounds far-fetched to you. But that's what I call background itis. You learn something that is true and you think, it must be what he meant. Let me cram it into this. And if you listen carefully to sermons and podcasts, and often you will hear exactly this kind of mistake, and I confess I myself am guilty of making this mistake. That's how I learned it. So sometimes it's just sloppy Bible study, sometimes it's just the zeal because I'm so in love with what I learned, I have to use it. Or and sometimes it's true, but not taught in this passage. So let me warn you the parables are going to tempt you to fall into this background itis, to just stretch that rubber band, the point of comparison, as far as you can. So, how do you go, how do you rein yourself in? Context. Context, context, context. And when you when you're tempted, I want you to think to yourself, here's a chair. Remember that? What am I supposed to do with it? Here's a fact. Is it relevant to the discussion at hand? What would the context suggest? Okay. So next week we will jump right in. We're gonna start with the two parables that Jesus interpreted for us. So we're gonna do the um parable of the sower and the seed and then the wheat and the weeds, because those are the only two where Jesus told them and then later explained what he meant by them. So I want you to watch carefully his explanation to see how he's coming up with a how the especially with the parable of the sower and the seed, a lot of say, oh look, it looks like he's treating it as an allegory, but he actually isn't. So that um so before you have uh, you know, have to jump off on your own, we're gonna look at the two that Jesus interpreted as for us and how he understood them. Let me pray for us, and then I'll give you a chance to ask a couple of questions, and then I think Libby has more, a few more announcements. Is that right? Okay, let's pray. Father, we just thank you for this year and this chance to study your word and to go back to the gospels and learn from the words of Jesus. And we pray that you will be blessing the study, that you will be increasing our knowledge of you and our love of you and our understanding, increasing our joy in Bible study and in fellowship with each other, helping us to learn and grow from each other, to challenge and inspire each other, and to carry each other's burdens and walk through this um the days and the journeys ahead that you have planned for us. And we thank you that we are able to be here to worship freely and openly. And I just pray for each woman here that you would enrich her week and her study and give her the excitement to come to the Bible to learn more about you. In Jesus' name. Thank you for listening to Wednesday in the Word with Krisan Marotta. What the Bible means and how we know. For notes and study questions, visit wednesdayintheword.com. We hope you'll join us again, and may God richly bless you.