Matt Slick Bible Study, Biblical Interpretation

All right, there it worked, a little tech stuff. It's a good thing I'm a tech guy, but I know tech stuff. All right, so here we are. It is, let's see, September 2nd, and we're gonna be going over tonight.

We're gonna be going over the issue of biblical interpretation. And so we're gonna go slowly through things. It's very simple to do. And then what we're gonna do is at one point, we're gonna tackle a scripture.

I'm gonna have someone volunteer to give me some scriptures and we'll just go through. And one of the things I can do for the camera is change the camera angle, put it over here and I can see everybody if they want, if you guys out there wanted to see me, because there's gonna be interaction for the people that are here.

So we'll just see what happens. All right, as usual, let's pray and we'll get going, okay? All right, Lord Jesus, thank you for today. And I ask Lord that you would bless the people here, that you bless the listeners, Lord.

And just ask that you would equip us to be able to better understand your word and to teach your word and discern the truth that your word contains and that's for us. We ask Jesus that you bless us, bind the evil one and we just ask this Lord in your precious name, amen.

Hermeneutics, Denominations, and the Need for Careful Interpretation

All right. Okay, so hermeneutics is the process of interpretation or the study of how to interpret something. And interpretation is very important, particularly with the scriptures. We have hundreds and hundreds of denominations in America alone.

I don't know how it is in Albania, as an example, are there many Christian denominations? There are, but you have them there too, okay. And the denominations occur because there are variations inside the essentials of the Christian faith.

Excuse me, on the non-essentials of the Christian faith. The essentials we can't deviate on, the non-essentials we can. And so infant baptism or not infant baptism, worship on Saturday, worship on Sunday, worship on Wednesday, charismatic gifts for today, charismatic gifts not for today.

The piano goes on the front of the church or on the side of the church. People do all kinds of stuff and they get ridiculous about necessities and I'll mute one of the mics, okay. So when it comes to understanding scripture, it becomes very important that we take it very seriously because we can make mistakes when we interpret.

And how do you know if you've made a mistake? Well, the more you know, the less likely you're to make mistakes. Less likely, doesn't mean you're not gonna make mistakes. As we're talking before here, before I turn this on, when I am debating people and I'm talking to a Muslim or something like that and Muslim, for example, would say that's not a position, I'm open to being corrected because I don't have all knowledge and I need to be humble before my Lord because all truth comes from God.

Now there are lies like Islam, but they have a set of lies that they teach. They don't, cause it doesn't respect the true God, but what they believe is a truth in a subset. It's true that they teach this.

I need to know what they teach accurately. And so I am more than willing to be corrected to have, is the cat still in? Yes. Okay, who's that? Station. Oh, okay, station. And so what we want is, well, what we want is accuracy in our interpretation.

And as I like to say, I joke and take times like this, as long as you believe whatever I tell you in the Bible, you'll be fine, especially because you got to listen to a guy named Slip. And I don't joke around and stuff like that.

And people have differences of opinions on things. However, nevertheless, there are basic principles that we would use to interpret scripture. So I'd like to say to people, think of a target. You have a target and then you have a circle and a circle and a circle and a circle.

It gets bigger and bigger. And if you look at that, you will be able to do better in the interpretation of scripture. A point that I like to teach people is to focus on one point at a time, get the one point down and then learn what that is.

And then move to another point and see how it relates to the first point. And you expand your understanding because as you understand one thing clearly, when you interpret another verse, it has to match this one.

In fact, that just perfectly, I just something came to my mind, I know it will study. And I'll show you some stuff later, but on, he wants all to be saved. Okay, we'll do that later. So that is yawn working.

I can't quite get it right. So when there are general rules, sometimes people say there's 10 general rules or seven, but we could use our common sense and we could come up with a set of rules of principles or ideas.

So if you break one of the rules, it doesn't mean you're gonna arrive at something false. But one of the things you wanna do, for example, is know who wrote in the Bible, who wrote the passage, who was it addressed to?

So there's this verse, Matthew 24, 40, there'll be two men in the field, one will be taken, one will be left. This is a very common used verse. And you guys already know what I'm gonna say about it. That the two men, the one who's taken, the one who's left, the one who's taken is the wicked.

And I've taught this for years and it's not the good who are taken. When I tell people this, they're often very surprised. They say, no, no, no, man, it's with the good who are taken because that's the rapture.

And this is a good time to be able to say, well, let's look at what the scripture says. So who wrote this? Well, in Matthew 24, 40, it's Matthew who wrote this, the gospel writer, Matthew. And who was it addressed to?

Well, in the context, Jesus is speaking to the disciples and some others, but that's what's going on. And we just read the context. Why is it important? Well, because for example, the term, the new covenant is used in Hebrews and it appears to be used in Hebrews specifically to only the Hebrews, but it seems to be used outside of the book of Hebrews in a more generic sense.

So Hebrew, the Hebrew people are gonna understand a certain term differently than a Gentile might. So the way a writer is speaking to that group will influence what they say. I do this all the time in my impromptu debates which I have frequently.

Someone will come on the radio or someone will come on in discord or someone will come on in some, whatever it is I'm at and they'll ask me a question. And the question, sometimes you can tell it might be an atheist or it might be a Roman Catholic because of the way the question's asked.

And I'll say, well, let me ask you, what are you? Are you an atheist or a Christian? Well, it's irrelevant. I said, no, it's not irrelevant because if I'm going to address you, I want to address you according to your worldview, to what you understand, I will know how to better cater my answer to you as I speak to you because if you're a Christian, I'm going to assume you believe certain things I won't have to establish.

But if you're an atheist, I'll have to go to a different, slightly different direction to answer your question. And I say, so how I would, if I were to write this, I'm going to write it differently to different people.

In fact, when there's what's called a documentary hypothesis or the JEDP, the graph Wellhausen theory. And it's that there are at least four different authors of the first five books of Moses, the JEDP, Yahweh, Elohim, Patriarch and Deuteronomy.

And so you can tell that they're different writing styles. And so therefore there are different authors and this has been debunked. But I wrote an article on that back in Escondido maybe 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I don't know.

And I wrote, I've been thinking about it and researching and I wrote, what is the documentary hypothesis? And I wrote it before I went to church. Now I was in church, remember thinking, I can say this, I just want to go home and write the response, you know?

And so when I got home, I sat down and wrote a response on the same day, I wrote what is the graph Wellhausen or the documentary hypothesis? And then I wrote how to refute it or how to deal with it, how to answer it.

Then I had this idea and I was using WordPerfect at the time and it had a grammar level analyzer and it was able to tell me what grade level I was at, active voice, passive voice of construction, sentence complexity and things like that.

Well, I think there were four categories, excuse me. Whoops, I might pull it down here. Is it? Behind you. There it is. Sorry about that. I thought I clipped it on. Sorry about that, folks. I thought I had clipped this on, but I didn't.

And so what I do, as I wrote the articles, the same author wrote two different articles, just a few hours apart, discussing the same topic, but one was to explain what it was and one was to refute it.

And when I put them through the analyzer, they were different results, different sentence structure complexity, passive active voice ratios and things like that. And you'd think, well, a different writer.

And that just, anyway, that's about the graph Wellhausen I put it in, but nevertheless, the point is that what you're intending to write and who you're addressing affects what you say. We need to be aware of that when we are discussing things.

So Jesus said, you know, I was sent only to the lost. He wasn't talking to the Gentiles. There are places where he talks to the Gentiles. He's gonna speak to them differently. So this is just something to consider when we're looking at passages.

Word Studies, Semantic Range, and Illegitimate Totality Transfer

Well, anyway, one of the things we do is we just look at what the passage says. Let's just do John 3, 16, everybody knows John 3, 16. So God still loved the world. He gave his only begotten son that whoever would believe in him would not perish, but have everlasting life.

All right. So we'll just use that passage. So what does the passage say? It says God still loved the world, right? We can say part A, God still loved the world. He gave his only begotten son that whoever would believe in him would not perish, but have everlasting life.

We could say there's five parts of that. And incidentally, when you read a reference in a book or whatever it is, and it'll say John 3, 16, A. What does that mean? There's no A, it means the first segment.

Okay, and if it says C, it means the third segment of whatever it is. And that's generally what, that's what that means. So we know that it says God still loved the world. Now, the word world. One of the things I've discovered about biblical interpretation is word studies.

And to be perfectly frank, it was one of the most enlightening and useful things I'd ever come across was to do word studies. And I'll give you some examples of some things. But word studies told me and taught me that God uses words differently than we do.

And it forced me to recognize that I would come to the text a lot of times with preconceived ideas. And my preconceived ideas were wrong. This is why when I was reading Paul back in my early days of Christianity, that Paul damaged my faith because I did not understand what he was saying because I assumed certain words meant certain things all the time and I was wrong.

So here's an example of something. And I'll say to people, and you guys already know the answers. I've been teaching this for a while. Does God know everyone? People say, well, yeah, he knows everybody.

He's all-knowing. And I say, well, why did Jesus say in Matthew 7, 23, get away from me, I never knew you, okay? Does he know everyone? Well, no, but in what sense? That's the right question. In what sense?

Can you turn that light on? I should have it on, sorry. So what sense does he say no, K-N-O-W? Well, when we look at this word and we do a study and we find out that what he's, thank you, what he's doing, what God is doing is using the word no in different contexts and different ways.

So a word will have what's called a semantic domain, a range of meanings that it has in a set of scriptures or a set of contexts. So the word green, for example, green can mean envy, color, money, sickness, being naive, chlorophyll.

It can mean a lot of things. I think it has, it's one of the words I looked up that has one of the widest varieties of meanings in English, the word green, but nevertheless. So words mean what they mean in context.

And sometimes what people do is they will say, for example, God still loved the world, he gave his only begotten son. The word world obviously means every individual who ever lived. And I'll ask people and I'll say, well, how do you know that's what it means?

Of course, that's what it means. Okay, why does it mean that? Man, how could you ever think it doesn't mean that? Well, I can, I can think it doesn't mean every individual, but I want you to demonstrate that it does from scripture.

And what I do sometimes, and this is not malicious, I'm not intending to embarrass anybody, I'm not intending to make them mad, but I'm trying to teach them and others, don't make assumptions. What does it say, he loved the world?

Okay, what does the word world mean? And I've had this conversation on this very exact word in this very verse, many times. So what does it mean? Well, it means the whole world. Does it mean plants, the water, the earth, which is an oblate spheroid, it's not a sphere, it's an oblate spheroid.

I usually show off my words and stuff like that, it's kind of fun. And I say, you know, so basically the world's a sphere. So is it the planet, is it the water, is it the mountains, is it the air, the birds?

No, man, it's the people. Okay, so he loves the world. So the word world means people, yes. I say, okay, so was Jesus sent to everybody, all the people? And they'll say, well, of course he was. And I go to Matthew 15, 24.

Jesus says, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. So the house of Israel, what does that mean? Well, you do research on it, you find out it means the nation of Israel. So I ask him, was Jesus sent to the whole world?

Now they're not so sure what to say, because if he's sent to every individual, but Jesus says he was sent only to Israel, but not to the world, now we have a problem. And all I've done is show a scripture that carries a meaning of something and contrasted it with what they think it means in another verse.

Now, am I setting scripture against scripture? Never gonna do that. But what I will do is say, if that's what you think that means there, what do you do with this? Because if this is clear, then how do we relate those?

So this is one of the things about interpretation, is causing our understanding to adjust to what it is that the text is actually saying, but also in light of other things. And this is what hermeneutics is, we'll get to this.

So are there any words or phrases in the passage that need to be examined? So the word world, right? Needs to be examined. And guess what? I've actually studied the word world and the word cosmos, I believe it is there.

It's been a while since I've done it. And I've written, it's on CARM and you could actually go on CARM and you could find a word studies world. And then I think I actually did other words that are translated into the English world.

And I did those as well. And so when I did my study of annihilationism, I did, I don't know, 50, 60, 70 word studies where I take one word, look at the original Greek word, go into my Bible program, take the Greek words equivalent in a number, because they have them all arranged numerically, and say, find every use of that word, that number, okay?

Every use in the entire Bible. And I'd find it. And then I would export those, export that file, that result into Excel because I should teach Excel. So I know how to do stuff. So I did some tricks and then I would do stuff.

And then what I would do is I'd convert that into HTML. I know tricks, I convert an HTML, put it into a webpage. Then what I would do is go through and analyze every single one of them and say the word world here means limited area.

The word world here means broad area. The word world here means just the Jews or the word world here means the whole planet or whatever it might be in its context. And I would develop these columns that I'd put Xs underneath each one, sometimes two Xs in different columns because a word might have different meanings in a particular context.

And so someone who's anal retentive has Asperger's and is not quite right mentally, things like that are actually enjoyable. And I do enjoy doing them because I enjoy the discovery. And I've done this before.

And as I mentioned, the word no, K-N-O-W. Does God know everyone? No, he doesn't. Get away from me, I never knew you. Well, I also know from Galatians 4, 8, 9. When you did not know God, you serve by nature those which are not God's.

But now that you've come to know God or rather are known by him, now you've come to serve a true and living God. But oh, you have to be known by God. Well, you go to John 10, 27, 28, my sheep hear my voice and I know them and I give eternal life to them and they shall never perish.

So then I discovered by looking at the word no in Greek, gnosko, I discovered that it could be used of man knows his wife, and we know what that means, sexual relations. God knows all things, 1 John 3, 20, right?

He knows all things. But it also means he goes, I never knew you. And that means salvation. So now we have, the word no means different things in different places. And what I'll often do with people is I'll say, when I teach them this, I say, can I, you mind if I trick you?

I'm gonna trick you. Can I trick you and set you up for a fall and stuff and you'll enjoy it while I do it? Is that okay? And they smile, they go, okay. They go, and I do it. They go, I said, do you enjoy that?

Yes, I did. And because I'm not being malicious, I'm trying to teach them. And I tell them ahead of time, I'm gonna trick them. And so I have ways of doing that with the word all, for example. But the point I'm trying to make is that, and there's another thing, since I'll talk about this, the word no, for example, can mean, have sexual relations with your spouse, right?

So if Jesus were to say, I never knew you, and we took that meaning there, we're getting sacrilegious, okay? And that's not what's going on there. So we can't take the meaning of one context and transfer it to some other context.

Gotta be very careful because then you can get things to say bad things, wrong things. And this is what the cults do. And this is what a lot of Christians do too. They will take a meaning of a word. Here's another example of this.

In Matthew 1 .25, it says that Joseph kept Mary, kept her a virgin until they were married, until they're married. What do you think that means? Well, it means that on their wedding night, okay, that's what that means.

They had relations, right? So you're talking to a Roman Catholic who says, no, Mary never lost her virginity. Well, what do you do with Matthew 1 .25? What they do is they take, they go over to where the Greek word, I forget what it is, ethos, I think, I can't remember.

It appears like in 1 Corinthians 15, all things will rain until he puts them all under his feet. Well, the word until here means a continued raining, doesn't it? Well, how do you know it doesn't mean that over here?

Because of the context, kept her virgin until. If I said to someone, my wife and I, I'm not gonna have relations with my wife until our wedding night. We know exactly what that means in that context. So I'm not gonna transfer, it's called illegitimate totality transfer, where they take a particular meaning of the word that has a broad, different meanings, right?

They take it, well, it means over this over here, let's transfer it over here. Illegitimate totality transfer. And it's an exegetical error. Cults do it all the time. A lot of Christians do it all the time.

So you'll hear me sometimes, if you're listening to me on debates, I'll say, well, what does that word mean? What do you mean by that phrase? People sometimes think I'm just being pedantic, maybe obstreperous, obnoxious, obtuse, irritating.

And I say, no, what do you mean by that phrase? Last night, this guy asked me, well, do you think Jesus is God the Son? And I said, well, it depends. What do you mean by that phrase? What do you think that phrase means?

He goes, you're the one who believes it. I go, wait a minute, you don't know what I believe until we've defined it. So what does it mean? And he argued with me, he goes, that's your term. I go, no, I didn't bring it up.

Did you hear me use the phrase God the Son? I said, no, but it's what you believe. I go, dude, listen, what does it mean? This is how this guy was last night. He was being obstreperous. Now, so interpreting scripture takes experience, practice, concentration, a little bit of brains and knowledge.

The more you have in those areas, the better off you're gonna be. Just what it is. Does it then mean you're gonna get it all right all the time? Absolutely not. Now, I would say, I've studied, learned a lot and I teach a lot of Bible studies and I can teach on a lot of topics.

Does it mean that I'm right? No. I remember once in Escondido, San Diego County, Escondido, that I was teaching a Bible study and a guy, I've told you this before, a guy came to me one week and he said, I don't agree with what you said last week.

I said, really? And he said, on what? And I forgot what the point was. But what he did was he said, you said this about this passage and I didn't quite think it was correct. So I went and studied it and blah, blah, blah.

And I'm listening to him. And I told these guys this before, but I was listening to him and I just listened for two or three minutes and he explained it. And he said, well, what do you think? And I actually said to him, I said, you're right.

I said, that's correct. I said, you've absolutely convinced me. And he looked at me and said, what? And I said, well, you convinced me that that's a better interpretation. Mine wasn't heretical. It was just, he had really nailed it better.

I forgot what it was. And he said, you mean I corrected you? I taught you? And I said, yeah. And he goes, I can't believe that. And he goes, well, you're not upset? I said, why would I be upset? You see, here's one of the problems of Bible interpretation.

Sometimes we get prideful and it's easy to do. So you always have to be open to being corrected. So when people say to me, well, I don't think you're right, Matt, my automatic reaction is, okay, maybe I'm not.

Now, if it's in the Trinity or the Deity of Christ, I know they're wrong, but okay, let's talk about this. I had to remain open about what things say. Anyway, so what we do is we look at a phrase and we look at the context of things.

You can have my notes later. And we look at what, this is just my article on karma actually, because boy, that's a good website. Whoever wrote this really was just, man, he was such a good guy. Oh, man.

He just did. Yes and no, in the sense that the Greek language is still spoken in Greece, but there's a lot, a lot of it has changed. It's like Latin is a dead language, so it doesn't change its meaning and Koine Greek, the same thing.

It has a set of meanings from that time, in that context, in that way. And that's why, believe it or not, people now can actually understand Greek language better than the original speakers did in some areas.

Now, usually that's what I call in denotative means, not connotative, because denotation is a literal translation, literal meaning of something. But connotation, it deals with kind of a heartfelt meaning.

And so I knew, I still know him. He was raised in an Arabic country, speaks Arabic fluently, it's his first language, and worked for the United States government translating Arab intercepts. And they would have people who were, who had, like me, who had learned a language and would translate it.

And they would have to run it by him. Okay, I don't know Arabic, but they'd have these translators. They were school taught. They could translate it and they'd translate it. And he would say, yes, that's correct in its translation, but that's not what it means.

What you've translated into English is not what it means in the original. And it was because there's certain cultural norms, like, man, I was just, I beat him till his back, black and blue. Well, how are you gonna convey that to another language?

Well, it really hurt him and he's bruised up, is what it meant. And there were phrases like that, and this happens. So by the examination of more and more Greek manuscripts that are uncovered, and they look at these, they see how a semantic domain occurs, they see patterns.

But I'll tell you, they've got rules, like the Granville Sharpe rule out of Protitus 2 .13. And it's a rule in Greek. When this happens, I remember in Greek, oh, we'd get sentences like this. When the genitive absolute follows a predicate nominative, it always is translated as a, and you're like.

And because it's a rule, whatever it was, it would be a rule that was like this. You had to know these rules, and you had to know what a genitive absolute was, and you had to know what a predicate nominative was, and you had to be able to see how it was in the, it just, it was really a lot of work.

But at any rate, so the answer is yes and no. No, in the original Greek, no, it doesn't change. It's very, oh, Greek is very precise. Oh, Greek is a very, very precise language. In fact, let me give you an illustration of it.

This comes into interpretation sometimes too. So the, I'll do it from this way, left to right, okay? The good man. In English, the is a definite article. Good, adjective. Man is a noun. The good man. We don't say the man good, but we can say good man doesn't quite flow as nicely, or man good is even less.

Now, the good man. So, but the, T-H-E-G-O-O-D-M-A-N. They're not related in their spelling. In Greek, they are. Ha, it's an O, with a rough breezing mark, means the word the. Anthropos, or agathos, good.

Anthropos, man. So that's called, it's called the nominative singular. The omicron sigma, and the word the doesn't have the O-S ending, it's just the O ending. It's Greek. So it means nominative masculine singular, nominative masculine singular, nominative masculine singular.

So that the forms of the nouns have to match each other, mostly. So ha agathos, anthropos, the good man. And ha is masculine, agathos is masculine, and singular, as is that one. And anthropos is masculine and singular by its construction.

When we say the good man, we understand it's talking about an individual. The good men, then we understand it's talking about more. But the and good don't change their structure. The object does, the good men.

So the good men, oh, it's plural. But they do, hoi agathoi anthropoi, the good men. That's how Greek works, right? Now, you can take the word, I'll go back to has, the good man. Ha agathos anthropos, and you can take, ha agathos anthropos, you can take the ha away.

And you can take anthropos away, and now you have the word agathos, which is masculine singular, by necessity. And then you can translate it as the in italics, good in regular letters, and man in italics.

Because the word the and man aren't there in the Greek, in this instance, but the gender and the number is. That's why they will do that like that in English, they'll have a word in italics, because it's meant that in the original.

This comes into interpretation, this is later on when you interpret scripture. And I just, because you asked, I thought I would jump in, I was just jumping ahead. But this is part of interpretation, and it helps to know Greek, it helps.

This is why I use it when I discuss various things, like I'll go to Romans 5 .19, to one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners. Were made sinners is the aorist passive indicative. And I'm gonna get all this stuff, but I go, oh, that means this, it helps me interpret things better.

So if you guys want, I can give you a Greek lesson sometime without teaching you Greek, and teach you active, passive, nominative, dative, accusative, and optative, and how they work so that you can use tools and know what's going on.

I can do that. If you want, next week, I'll do it for you. Wanna do that? Well, you guys are just eager for punishment.

Real quick, one more question. So with the Greek, in Greek. Yes. So if you can actually translate a fragment of a manuscript just based off of like what you were saying, just that word as well, but give me some context to what you're saying.

Right.

You see, Greek is more precise and has more in it. Like Spanish, you know, what's that? Oh, thank you very much. Thank you. Someone said that. Okay, thank you. So in Spanish, you have gender also. So, you know, hermana, you know, sister.

Hermano is brother. And so the one letter at the end tells you gender, and it can also tell you number. But in Greek, gender and number exist, plus the case. I won't get into all this stuff, but this helps.

Okay. It does help when you interpret scripture. Let's get back on track. Okay. So we always want to look at the immediate context, and that's very important. It just makes sense, doesn't it? The immediate context of something is what we want to look at.

And then what we do, the broader context. Remember, we're looking here narrow. What is the verse? And to be ultra simple, you go, what is it? What does it say? What's its context? You know, verses before and verses after.

What are the chapters that relate? Anything else that relates to that topic anywhere in the Bible? Very important, right? That's a broader context. What related verses to the passage of the subject, and how do they affect the understanding of the passage?

Okay. Also, historical background can help you a great deal. Historical background to interpret something, right? So, for example. Okay, I like this one. In Luke 7, I believe it is, Jesus goes over to the Pharisee's house, Simon's house, to have dinner with them.

Dinner in the culture was a sign of fellowship, but he'd already been at odds with the Pharisees. In the culture, the Pharisees would walk around and speak openly, and people would follow them and listen to them.

You wouldn't know that by reading the Bible, okay? That's a culture. And they would often open their homes up, because they didn't have screens and sliding glass doors. They would just open up the door and people would stand out on the door.

So, imagine, in this context, that in that they wanted to hear what I had to say, there are people standing there and sitting on top of here, sitting here, sitting here, up over there behind the couch, outside, windows up like that, all up around.

This is the kind of setup that would have been when they asked, when Jesus says, you wanna come over and eat? Because the people would have known, they're already at odds, and et cetera. Anyway, so Jesus comes in, and the obligation of the host culturally is to give him a kiss, anoint his head with oil, and have his feet cleaned.

And he refuses to do that. That's an insult. And then this woman comes in, who's a prostitute, who, now remember, if she's unclean and she brushes up against someone who is clean, he becomes unclean. They're not gonna like that.

They're gonna get PO'd. And if she rubs up against somebody, what are you trying to do? You trying to get me to go to bed with you? I mean, she's just guilty. And in that culture, if a woman let her hair down in public, a husband could divorce her because it was sensuous.

It was only let down in the privacy of the home and in the bedroom, or maybe it's in the home where the children could see, and it was guarded. So a woman did this in public is insulting the husband directly and even advertising for sexual stuff.

So you can see how this is. And then when she comes in and lets her hair down in the room, you can't believe what's happening. And then she's kissing his feet, the dirty feet. So you can see when you understand the culture, oh my stinking goodness, this is incredible what she was doing.

And she was a filthy, vile, sinful, adulterous crap woman who gets praised by Jesus and did one of the most greatest acts of worship and adoration, period. My favorite stories. And it shows the depravity and yet the grace of God.

And now we can see more about the text because we understand the culture. Or how about when the man born blind and spits and does like that, because I see men walking about his trees. We've talked about this before.

People would go into the hills, the foothills, and they would get branches off of trees. They would bundle them and wrap them up, tie them up. Then he would crawl underneath them and then they would lift up.

They would walk on their back. They look like trees. I see trees walking about. And that was idiomatic from that time. So culture has a broad effect on what we understand a text to mean. The more you understand culturally and historically, culturally, the better off.

It just works that way. Now, then we say, well, what do I conclude about what the passage says? You know, if you go back to John 3, 16, God's love the world that gave his only begotten son. Well, if the word world, we do a study, we find out the word world has many meanings.