4 - School of Biblical Hermeneutics, Dictionaries

Well, welcome to the

Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Biblical Harmonetics. This is a place where we learn how to better interpret the

Bible. We're going to give you some principles, but before we get to principles of interpretation, it's very, very helpful to first look into the tools that we end up using to help us with that interpretation.

Many people make a mistake. I know, you're not one of them, I understand. It's only me.

But many people actually make a mistake, and what they do is they try to jump right into Bible interpretation without understanding the principles or the tools to use to do that.

Well, what we're going to try to do is to give you both of those in these classes. Now, what we're going to look at today is dictionaries.

No, no, no, no, that's not that thing that you go and you look up the English word that your teacher used and you have no foggy idea what it means.

No, it's not that book you used when you were forced to do a 200 word essay and you had to use three of your vocabulary words.

No, no, no, no. It's a different kind of dictionary. We'll get there. Just chill. Man, some students are just so impatient,

I'll tell you, calling out like that. Anyway, we're going to look into dictionaries. So if you are an enrolled student of the academy,

I'd encourage you to go grab your syllabus. I can't quite grab it. My hands kind of hide behind it.

Wow. Anyway, but grab your syllabus and if you look in your syllabus, that is on the students that enroll get.

And if you want to enroll and get your syllabus, go down there and go to the Striving for Eternity Academy page and enroll.

What are you waiting for? It's worth the money. I'm hoping.

All right, so we looked last class into how to use a concordance.

That was that thing that's at the back of your Bible, right? No, it wasn't. That's actually like a condensed version.

We're talking about a real concordance, which helps you understand how to understand the different languages that the

Bible was originally written in without knowing Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic.

That's the value of it. So we are done with that. Now what we're going to look at is dictionaries. Now before actually we look at dictionaries, we want to look at one tool first and that's going to be helpful.

Now we spoke about study Bibles. Do you remember that lesson? No, you slept through it.

I'm sorry. Should I wake you up now? Hey, okay. I used to have a teacher in high school that if you fell asleep in his class, he had a stick.

He actually had a name for the stick and he'd walk and smack it on your desk. You only fell asleep once in class.

You would not want to remember. You don't want to be the kid that got woken up by a stick being smacked against the desk right in front of your ear.

Yeah, I've had it happen multiple times. No, I'm teasing. It only happened once.

We're going to first look at a thing called Bible handbooks. When we looked at study Bibles, we talked about the fact that with a study

Bible, you often before the introduction, there's an introduction port to each of the books.

Those provide some information about who the author was, when it was written, some of the key aspects of the book.

Well, that's basically a condensed version of what a Bible handbook does.

A Bible handbook, if you look at section number three there in your syllabus, a

Bible handbook provides opportunities to understand an overview of any of the books, to glean valuable background information, to see an overview or an outline sometimes of the book for content.

Now, let's look at this one.

This is one type. This is the New Ungers Bible Handbook.

This is one of the more popular ones. This is actually the one that I typically use, but to give you a couple others to look at, you can look at the

Halley's Bible Handbook. That's another one that you can look for.

Another one would be the Baker's Illustrated Bible Handbook.

Now, this one's different than the other two that we just looked at because this one over here, right here,

I can't quite grab it, this one over here gives more illustrations. It's going to have more pictures and things like that.

And so, this is one that is helpful because it'll give you more picturesque view sometimes of some of the things that you might want to look at.

So, let us look, so those are some suggested ones.

Now, again, and we're going to actually, in this lesson, what we're going to do is we're going to actually go to my

Bible software and we're going to try to bring that up, and if it works all well and dandy, we'll see, but we're going to bring that up and actually show you an example of how to use these different tools, the

Bible Handbook and then some of these dictionaries. I don't know if we're going to get through all of the dictionaries today. We'll try.

Okay, and what's it, oh, I was just told

I never started the timer. I was actually supposed to start it.

Okay, that means now that it's started, we can start class. Maybe you'll get an extra 10 minutes.

Sorry, that's what happens when you leave things for me to do. Teach them a lesson, silly engineers.

They think I have a clue. Look, you hire me to teach the

Bible and how to interpret the Bible, right? Yeah, I'll leave the rest to you. Talking to the guy in the mirror.

Yeah, the other side of the glass. Anyway, let us look at dictionaries.

Now, as I said, a dictionary is not, as many people will think when they hear of a dictionary, a typical dictionary people think of is, like for an example, the

English dictionary, you have English words and then they're given the pronunciation, the type of, whether it's a noun or verb, and then you're going to have something like the meaning of it.

If you have maybe a Spanish -English dictionary, well, then you're going to have something that's going to give you the

Spanish word and the English word so that you can translate between them. And so, someone is asking in the chat room whether the 50 minutes is a literal 50 minutes or millions of years.

Oh, how boring would that be to listen to me for 50 million years?

I got news for you. If you're a Christian, you're stuck with me for 50 million years anyway. But then again, then

I'll be glorified and so will you. So we'll like each other better. Hey, that's an idea. All right.

So, we are going to look at some dictionaries. All right. So when we look at, there's a variety of different tools that are under the title of a dictionary.

Okay. And so to eliminate any confusion, we're going to consider just a few types of these dictionaries, three specifically.

And there's other things that you can have as dictionaries, but we're just going to kind of focus on these. The first is going to be what's called an expository dictionary.

Now, for some, you know the word expository or to exposit, and you can maybe kind of guess what this one is.

Probably most familiar to us is our English dictionaries, and this is closest to that.

This is an expository dictionary, which will give you the words and its meaning, but not the meaning in English.

It actually gives you an English word and its meaning in the original language. One of the most common ones is

Vine's Complete Expository Dictionary. This is probably, if you're going to get one, this would be the one

I'd recommend. It's very good for a layman, someone to start studying without going too deep, because there's some that get very, very deep.

You can look at ones that are specific New Testament, Old Testament, and with this, keep in mind that the one that we have here is the complete one.

So that would be the one to get. You can get just the Old Testament or just the New Testament, but then you have some works that are, say, just for the

Old Testament like this. This is the Theological Workbook of the Old Testament.

This one's way more detailed and probably not something you want to dig into unless you're going to do some serious study in the

Old Testament. So I would recommend, if you're going to get one, grab this one, the

Vines. Just like if you're going to grab a Bible handbook, I'd recommend you get the Unger's Bible Handbook.

Although the Baker Illustrated one is good also, but I think Unger's going to give you a little bit more information.

This one, the Vines Complete Expository Dictionary, is going to give you more information.

We're going to actually see an example later on in class on how to use this, and so we'll hold off on some of that until then.

But basically what this is going to do is this is going to give you, as a student of to understand the original meanings.

Now like we said with the concordance, and if you remember as we said actually, that each of these tools build upon one another, when you first start out, maybe the concordance is enough for you to learn what the words meant in the

Greek and Hebrew. But those don't give a whole lot of details. The Expository Dictionary is the next step.

When you want more than what the Strong's Concordance or some other concordance offers, you want to get an

Expository Dictionary to get much more detail. Something like the Vines is going to be easy to understand.

It's going to give a little bit more detail so that you can dig into the

Scriptures a little bit better, and get back to those original languages without having to take a

Greek or Hebrew class. And so that would be a way to go after you're done with the concordance just isn't giving you enough of what you want.

So after that, the next type of dictionary that we want to talk about is called a

Bible Dictionary. Now a Bible Dictionary is one that furnishes the student of God's Word with the background information of various people, places, and things in the

Bible. So the first one, the Expository Dictionary, is focused on what class? Very good!

The person who called out words. Very good. This one is dealing with more of those nouns.

People, places, things. Alright? See, I went to English class once in a while.

I know what a noun is. Yeah, that surprises some of you. I know.

So, what are some examples? Well, one of the ones that I would recommend is the New Ungers Bible Dictionary.

That's a good overall one. It has a lot of information, easy to understand.

Another good one is the New Illustrated Dictionary.

Now the thing with this one, this is put out by Nelson. So it's the Nelson's New Illustrated Bible Dictionary.

And again, just like in the Bible Handbook, this is one that's going to provide more illustrations, more pictures.

So that might be something more you want. The one I use a lot is this one, the

New Bible Dictionary. Now, whether it be the Ungers Bible Dictionary or the

New Bible Dictionary, both are about equal. And they have basically the same information. The only difference with the

Nelson's is that it's going to deal with the same information but provide you with some more pictures.

Alright? So, let us go on to the next type of dictionary.

So we covered the Expositional Dictionary, that's dealing with words. We're dealing with the

Bible Dictionary. That deals with different places, people, things in the

Bible. And then the third type of dictionary is the Theological Dictionary.

A Theological Dictionary. The Theological Dictionary is one that is going to supply you with information on various theologies, their history, and those who held to them.

This supplies you with biographies of different people, key leaders in church history.

So let's take a look at two examples of those that we have. One would be the

Evangelical Dictionary of Theology. Another one would be the

New Dictionary of Theology. Both are very good resources. I would recommend either one for you.

You could use either one and gain a lot of information. Where that's going to be used is more when you say you want to understand some theological issue.

You heard someone in your Sunday school class and they mentioned the preservation of the saints.

What does that mean? Or eternal security. What exactly is that? It's a new term to you.

Well, this would be where you look it up. Maybe you want to look up a guy like Martin Luther. You ever hear of him? What did he believe?

What was his great claim to fame? Well, you'd use this type of dictionary in that sort of study when you want to understand things like that.

So, let us try. We're going to see how this works. Alright. What I want to do is

I am going to hopefully bring up for you... We got this running?

Okay. I'm told this is going to work. Let's see. Alright. There we go.

Is it up? Yes. Okay. So, this right here is...

I'm using some software. Whoop. Don't mind that. I'm going to try to make that larger for your screen.

Is that making it larger? No. Alright. Well, it's got a nice flicker effect.

And we all know... Whoop. Well, that was cool. Now you get to see some other software. Whoop. Don't trust me at the controls.

Oh, I'm looking at the camera and you can't see me. You know? Oh, now they can.

Thank you. Thanks. Okay. People playing games. Alright.

Alright. So, what I have here, if you look right... I don't know if you can see this circle right here.

This right here that I'm circling is the New Unger Bibles Handbook.

Alright. That is the one that I mentioned earlier. And this is the one that...

Now, what I'm looking at here is the book of 1 Timothy. 1

Timothy happens to be a book of the Bible that I'm looking at doing some work in right now. And so, as you go through here,

I just want you to take a look. You see that it gives a one -line overview of the entire book.

What's 1 Timothy about? Well, 1 Timothy is about directions for church order.

Directions for church order. You see here the writer and the date. We see that Paul is the writer.

And we see some information about him. He says here that it's one of the pastoral epistles here.

That it's dated later in Paul's life. How late depends on the question of whether the apostle had one or two imprisonments.

If two, it was apparently written during the interval between the two no later than 66

AD. If there was one, the letter was probably penned before his trip to Jerusalem in 64.

So, you kind of get an idea of when it would be. So, you can see here, there's a question in the chat room.

Do they have online versions of this stuff? And the answer is yes. You can find some of this stuff online.

And I will go over some of the places where you can get some of these things online for free.

So that you can use some of these tools if you don't have much in the way of finances.

So, you see here it gives you not only the writer and the date, but a theme. And then a brief outline.

So, chapter one deals with the discipline of sound doctrine. Chapter two, the disciplines of prayer and public worship.

Chapter three is the discipline of church government. And then the last three is the discipline of the local pastor.

That's their way. You see here we provide some pictures, okay, that you'll get of different things.

This is some things on the floor of the church of Ephesus. And then notice here an outline.

Very high level, but you see an outline of the book. It's going to help you to understand the theme of the book.

To understand how things go as far as working your way through.

Understanding, kind of like some of this is a commentary. But it's a high level commentary.

And what we see here is then, maybe something that will help you, a picture of Ephesus.

If we keep going, we see more of the outline. Sometimes they'll have some more pictures. This is an artist's impression of the writer of Luke, the gospel writer

Luke. Who's a friend and missionary companion with Paul.

See some more pictures. But you see, this is basically the purpose of the book. It's to provide you an outline that you're going to get a little bit more than you'd have.

I hope I'm not scrolling too fast with all that. But I think you're getting the point of what this is.

It's just a high level outline of the book. So that you can get an idea of its meaning.

And then you get to the next book and it's the same thing. This is the way you would use a

Bible handbook. If you're going through and you're studying a passage of scripture, a book.

If you're going verse by verse through a book. Which is a good way and the proper way to do things, as we'll get to later.

You want to actually interpret verse by verse because you want to make sure you do things in, what's that word?

Oh right, context. Because you don't like being taken out of context. And so you want to make sure you keep the

Bible in context. So you want to make sure that you're interpreting that properly.

And so this is a tool that's helpful to help you go through a book of the Bible. To kind of get the high level view and overview the outline.

Some of the basic themes and ideas of the book. So let us look from there.

Let us take a look at our, look here at our

Vines. And let me bring this up. You see here, it says it's the Vines Complete Expository Dictionary of the

Old and New Testament. I don't know if you can read that, but that's that wording that was there. So this is the one that we looked at.

Today we happen to have the word blameless. This word shows up in several books.

But here let's take a look. This word is used a couple different ways. Now, this is a word as you see here, blame or blameless.

This is like our English dictionary. Notice we have some that's a verb, some that's an adjective.

Okay, and you see then different usages. You see it as an adverb. Okay, so you have three different ways that this is used.

Now, as a verb, it means to find fault or to blame. Now notice this funny looking thing.

This is Greek to me. No, actually it is. It really is. It's Greek. It's Greek to me.

It should be to you. This what you have here, what they do is they provide you a way to pronounce that word.

They provide the actual Greek. Can you see this number right there? This, if you look at the bottom there of your screen, it says it's the

Strong's number. Because I'm using this Logos Bible software, it's all integrated, so that if I wanted to see what the

Strong's number, I just hover over that and it comes up with the concordance that I had.

So this is the Strong's concordance. As if I had gone and looked it up, but it saved me the time. And I could click on this and get the word.

But you can even see that it gives me the synonym and the antonym there. But you see here, after it gives me the

Greek, it then gives me the meaning, to find fault with, to blame. It gives you also, notice, the verse where it's found.

What about this next one? Without blemish. So you see that this word, this word here is used in Philippians 2 .15.

And you can see that right there if I hover over it. So that you may be blameless and pure children, who are faultless in a crooked and perverse generation, among those whom shine like stars in the world.

So you see, now, it's an interesting thing. This, in Philippians 2 .15,

says, without blemish. Do you see it? Now, in this different translation, this is, if you look at the bottom of that pop -up, this is the

Holman version. And so there it'll say that it's, may be blameless.

But in here, this is based off a different translation and it's without blemish. And it gives you the

KJV is without rebuke. Do you notice that? Without rebuke. And it's rendered blameless in 2

Peter. Both in the KJV and the RV, which is a revised version.

So you have here then, something that's going to give you a little bit more information.

So that's one use of it. You see, here's another use. So if I was studying in a book of Scripture, say 1

Timothy, for example, I'm going to go through these until I find, oh, look right here.

This is the three usages in 1 Timothy. 1 Timothy 3 .2, which talks about an overseer being blameless.

And then it's used again in 5 .7 and 6 .14. Now, the one I happen to have been interested in was this one here, in 1

Timothy 3 .2. So when I was looking this up, I came to this here, number five.

I don't know if the highlight works well there, if that shows up. But this is the one that was of interest to me.

And this means, when it talks about this word, it means that that cannot be laid hold of.

Hence, not open to censure or irreproach. It is an interesting word.

If we go into some of the, like here, if I bring this up now, and I want to look at the concordance, you'll see that this gives some information.

But I didn't actually mean to bring that up. I just hovered over it. But this word happens to be interesting.

And if I actually dig a little bit more into this word in some other tools that we're going to get to later, it actually has the idea of something that can't be nailed to.

Something that you can't nail to somebody. And so, what we have is, what's that?

Oh, okay. I was just told, I was just informed that, to let you know that the links were not, thank you, the links were not being allowed in the chat room.

So, they are now. If you're in the chat room and you want to post a link. So, why didn't you just get in the chat room and do that?

Oh, you're busy watching me talk. Thanks. Okay. So, do you see how this one's used?

This tool is used to be able to allow you to dig a little bit deeper into a specific word.

All right. So, that is a helpful. This is going to go into a little bit more detail.

Now, again, I said that the vines is going to be one of the, maybe one you want to get where it's a little bit, well, it's going to be less, there's just not going to be as much there that you might see in some others.

The deeper you go with this, the more detail you're going to get. All right. So, let's take a look at another one.

And let's go to, the next one is this one that we'll look at, is the

New Unger Bible Dictionary. The New Unger Bible Dictionary is,

I just happened to grab something that I was just looking up, not part of my study of 1

Timothy, but it was on the Sabbath. Now, we talk about a Sabbath. And this is where, let me just digress for a second and say this.

When you look through the Bible dictionaries, they can be a very enjoyable thing just to open up anywhere and just flip through.

Okay? Because there's a lot you can learn about different things you didn't know about. And so, let's take an example of the

Sabbath. And when we look at the Sabbath, you see, here you're going to see some information about the origin of it.

You're going to see what a Jewish Sabbath is. And you see all this information on the

Sabbath. The Sabbath comes up very often, not only in the Old Testament, but often in the New Testament. And then, there's some different things that come here, is the covered way for the

Sabbath, the day after the Sabbath, the second day, the second after the first Sabbath, a

Sabbath day's journey. You ever wonder what that is? Well, you can go here and find out that here they have linear measures that are in here.

Okay? And so, you can scroll down until you find these different cubits and what a cubit is.

And look, here's your Sabbath day's journey right there. So, it was a very limited distance that was used.

And so, this is something you can look up if you want to look into that.

So, this is one. Let's look at another one. And this one is the New Bible Dictionary that we have.

And this happens to be the Maccabees. Now, wait a minute. The Maccabees, where's that? Isn't that the Catholic books? Well, no. The Maccabees were a group of people, as you see here, from the surname of a

Jewish hero, Judas Ben Maccabeus. So, this is the

Maccabees. There was a Maccabean revolt. And so, they talk here about Judas Maccabeus.

And some of this information, you have Jonathan and Simon and, you know, different information about the

Maccabees. And so, this is going to be something that you'll see here, you know, helpful information if you happen to be studying about the

Maccabeans, Macedonia. You know, you have it in alphabetical order.

Let me just do this so you can see. It's alphabetical order. Here's all the words you want to study the

Magi. There they are. You can read about them. And so, what you have here is just a dictionary to help you go through and be able to study some different things.

So, I don't know if there's anything specific that we'd want to take a look at here with this.

Let's look at the next one. And we'll look at this here. This is the Evangelical Theological Dictionary.

And I happen to pull up the word sanctification. Okay, sanctification.

And so, this word here gives you a theology of sanctification.

It gives you what it means to make holy. Tells you some information about it. Alright. This then goes through the nature of sanctification.

And, I mean, the advantage of having this Bible software that I have is that, you see, I can just hover over and get the words.

Sometimes, even if it's in another translation, I can get it to show up. And here,

I tell you, I get to see which translation. But I can easily click on this if I wanted to read a verse.

I can just click on it and there that verse was to show up. So, that's an advantage of this.

But sometimes, these books will refer to other books. You might see this in some more of here.

But you see here, you get a theology of sanctification. That's really the purpose of it here, is to provide the theological background.

I don't know, let's think of a... Well, actually, here, this would be interesting. Sinless perfection. This is a doctrine that people hold to.

That some might, you may say, well, what does that mean? Well, this here is going to explain the doctrines, the theology behind sinless perfection.

And I bet if we were to look up sinless perfection, we might find more.

I'm not going to look at it that way, so let's go this way. That I have to do by page number. So, if I just go through this and scroll down to sinlessness of Christ is there.

So, I guess it doesn't show up. But, you know, what about sin? Okay, so here we have an understanding of sin.

And we can look at different breakdowns here of different doctrines relating sin.

We have a doctrine, a theology of slavery. And what was it like in the

Old Testament times, New Testament times. Maybe you want to study something.

You heard some talk of, you know, some guy named John Calvin. Well, who's him?

Well, here you have John Calvin. And so, this gives you the information about individuals as well.

So, you have John Calvin here and you have all about, you see all this information about John Calvin. And then, oh, what is

Calvinism? And so, here you can look up the different understandings of the doctrines that people hold to that they call

Calvinism. And so, this gives you that theology behind it.

So, this is where you hear some term and you don't quite know its usage. And so, you take this book.

Here's a history of Calvinism. And you look it up and you can read through all this information. And learn about these different things.

We have one more that we'll show and that is the New Dictionary of Theology. This is the doctrine of atonement.

This gets into the payment of, you know, our sins.

Alright, so you see with this I can study these things to have an understanding of different theologies.

Different things that people may have that they want to study out. So, these are the types of books you want to go to.

So, if you have a specific word in English you want to study, you want to understand which of these are you going to go to to have an understanding of what the meaning of a word is.

Very good. An expositional dictionary. Good. Now, if I want to study something that's a person, a place, a thing that is in the

Bible. Where am I going to go for that one? That's right, the Bible dictionary. Very good.

The third one, the theological dictionary. How's that one used? That's right. It's used to study theologies.

It's kind of in the name, isn't it? That's right. So, what we have here is we end up seeing that we have several different types that we could use.

So, what we have when we look at this, we want to take a look at these things and realize that this is stuff that's going to help us when we want to study the scripture.

We want to go in and examine these things.

The more that we can do in the study of God's word is, the more we do, the better it's going to be.

The more diligent we are with that, I should say, the better we're going to be able to trust our study.

Many people are a little bit sloppy in their interpretation. They kind of, well, they rush into it.

And we don't want to rush into this. We want to be careful when we interpret God's word. And so, we want to do the diligent work.

And so, with this, I encourage you to, as you look at this and go through these things, you want to make sure that you look even into the words.

Make sure the meanings are right. You want to make sure that you have the proper understanding of the words that are used.

You know, a word in English being read aloud can have a big difference.

I remember someone in a Sunday school class. We read a text, and he read the word in James that talked about the latter rain.

Now, maybe because he didn't have a Bible in class, or he wasn't really looking at the

Bible in his hand, I don't know, I can't remember. But he went off in great detail talking about this latter rain of Christ.

In Christ's second coming, there would be a latter rain. And that we would see that rain.

And this would be the, you know, the raining of Christ.

And that this would be sun to look up. And that, basically, he spoke for about 20 minutes trying to argue about Christ's second rain.

And, you know what, maybe let's switch back over. And let's bring up, here we go.

We'll bring up rain. So, let's see if we find about this. Now, in English, the rain is spelled this way,

R -A -I -N. And the way he was spelling it was the one of a rain of a king, and that's what the problem was.

Because he didn't understand what a latter rain was. But take a look at here. If we look here,

I bet if we read through this pretty quickly, here we see the rainfall in Palestine closely identified with the cool season.

Maybe this will tell us, if we look quickly, that there's actually two rain seasons in Israel.

And so, if we read through this, I'm trying to skim it as we go, but there were basically two raining seasons.

And there would be a first and early rain and a latter rain. And the people who would be sitting in as a farmer, they'd have to, you can see here, talks about the heat of the summer.

They would talk about patience being with that rain that would come later.

Because, as you see here, here it says in Amos 4 .7,

it talks about this former rain, the latter rain. So you see here that, oh here we go, here it is, right here, the latter rain.

And so, between April and early

May, the latter rain was described as the last showers that would close the rain season.

You see? So what you have there is that if you're looking up something like rain, and you shouldn't confuse it with the rain of a king, but if you look up a word rain, what's the big deal of a second rain?

Well, this explains to you a latter rain. And you can look these things up.

And so, when we go through this stuff, you go through and you find a word in the Bible, you find something like Sabbath.

It is good to look these things up so you understand the context.

Remember, we are about 2 ,000 to 3 ,500 years removed from the writing of Scripture.

Our culture is very different from the culture of the writing of Scripture.

And if we want to make sure that we're not taking the Bible out of context, what we have to do is make sure we understand the context and the culture and the backgrounds of which we speak and what we read and study.

And that's the reason you use these different types of dictionaries and handbooks. It's to give you a better background to understand the context of the book or words or culture in which you're studying.

It helps give you their theology and all these different things. And so that is what makes this important.

It's important to go through and study these things to show yourself approved unto

God. And so that is the importance of doing this kind of study.

Is it hard? Yes, it's hard. No question.

Is it profitable? Yes, it's profitable. So these are just some of the things that you want to have.

Now next class, what we're going to look at is things like Bible commentaries. This is going to go to the next level.

We're going to look at commentaries. We're going to look at maps or atlases, geography type stuff.

We're going to dig into encyclopedias, which is the next step after a Bible dictionary. What you want to do is do an encyclopedia.

We want to look at things like, after the encyclopedias, we'll look at things like a custom and manners book and give you more idea of the culture.

These things are all helpful and we want to walk you through this so you understand how to use these tools.

So I hope this gives you a better understanding of how to use a dictionary. Specifically, an expositional dictionary, a

Bible dictionary, and a theological dictionary. There's other dictionaries out there, but these are the main ones you're going to want to deal with.

And then a Bible handbook. So I hope that was helpful for you. I want to encourage you to enroll as a student for the academy so that you can get yourself this.

Right there. Like that? Okay. That. So the syllabus there for you.

Alright? That'll be very helpful for you to help as you get into studying these things, especially when you get into some of these principles.

We want you to be able to have this readily available for you. Alright? So we want to encourage you to look into enrolling.

We also want to bring up for you the fact that NorCal Fire is coming up.

We want to encourage you to think about enrolling. Enrollment is open. And I have noticed that many are starting.

We just got done with the Jersey Fire and already we got just 60 some days away from the

NorCal Fire. So I encourage you to, if you're out in the Northern California area, we'll have

Tony Miano, Matt Slick, and myself speaking. And we're going to be speaking on the subject of getting

Christianity right. And that's an important thing to do. We're going to have some messages dealing with some of the major doctrines of Scripture.

How some of the false religions get them wrong. What's the proper understanding of these doctrines?

And then practical ways to apply that to your evangelism. Now, we are going to have something with that that I should bring up in a moment.

I'm going to hold this because there is some with NorCal Fire that I want to encourage you with. But I'm going to hold off. If you're in the

Jackson, New Jersey area, I want to encourage you to consider coming out to Jackson. In Jackson Faith Bible Church of Jackson, New Jersey.

It's a church replant. I'm working alongside of Pastor Will Costello, who is the preaching pastor.

He's doing the bulk of the preaching. He is doing the church plant with Grace Advance, if you're familiar with them.

So we'll have that. I encourage you to come out. Now, as you know, if you're a student here, you know we want to encourage you to encourage others.

We try to do that every week. And so with that, we want to have someone for you to encourage this week.

This week, the person of encouragement that we have is someone we've asked to encourage in the past, and it's

Si Tim Brudenkate. Now, why would I ask you to encourage him again? Well, Si has recently come out with a new film.

It's called How to Answer the Fool. And you know, what ends up happening when people are...

Well, when people do something that betters the

Kingdom of God, there's always some who see it as their ministry to attack everyone else.

And that's been the case with some people. Well, Si has come under that. Our dear friend

Si has been coming under attack by people that are saying he's a cult leader, saying he's a heretic, saying all kinds of things.

And you know, it's really uncalled for. And so he could probably use some encouragement.

I'll tell you one way you could encourage him the most, and that would be to contact us at StrivingForEternity and help us send

Si Tim Brudenkate to the NorCal Fire. We're going to be trying to get him out there, to fly him out from Canada, eh?

And so you can contact us and let us know that you want to help send him out there.

He would like that encouragement. Another way you can encourage him is buy his film,

HowToAnswerTheFool .com. I believe is the site you can do that. And so the wrong link with his name,

ProofThatGodExists .org. Ah, thank you. Catch that.

There should be an S in there, is what I was just told. All right. So, well, you know, can't help some of the things that may happen in this show.

Is that right? Oh, okay. I was just told that if I go like this, it's suddenly changed.

Is that better? Thank you. ProofThatGodExists .org. So, we are glad that you were with us.

We hope you come back next class so you can learn some more ways of using some helpful tools that will help you in understanding

Scripture. After that, we're going to do some things like looking at some different things, such as Bible software that you looked at, a little peek at today, and some online stuff.

So those are some of the things coming up. And we just encourage you to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.