Is it "Just Your Interpretation"? How to Study Your Bible w/Andrew Rappaport

Thoroughly Equipped

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

All right, there it goes. All right.

00:06

OK, so. Shall I just start? I can't even hear you.

00:15

Because I'm waiting for. All right. You want me to start the recording over on my hands or?

00:22

No, no, it's OK. I'll cut. I'll edit it all out. You want this for the bloopers? OK. That'd be great.

00:28

First intro. There you go. Hey, have you ever had anybody after you've recited a passage from Scripture or given your views on what you thought the meaning of a particular passage of Scripture was?

00:43

Have you ever had anybody after that situation just sort of look at you and dismiss all of your statements by one simple statement?

00:51

They look at you and they say, well, that's your interpretation.

00:58

I've certainly had that done to me on many occasions, and I've often asked myself, what do people mean when they say that that's your interpretation?

01:08

What do people have in mind when they say that's your interpretation? I thought about it.

01:15

I thought, well, maybe they're just pointing out the obvious. I'm the one who just gave the interpretation of the Scripture.

01:20

But surely they wouldn't be wasting everybody's time by just pointing out something that everybody knew already, that it was my interpretation.

01:26

There must be more to it than that. And maybe what it is, is a veiled rebuttal by getting to the bottom line as quickly as possible to refute what

01:37

I've just said by a simple little equation, the simplest of all kinds of syllogism. The idea that's unspoken would be this.

01:44

Everything that R .C. Sproul interprets is wrong. Since R .C. Sproul interpreted this passage, the only conclusion we can come to is what?

01:53

It is wrong. But I don't think people are being that unkind or that nasty when they say that's your interpretation, and just by putting it at your doorstep, therefore saying that it's wrong, because obviously anything that you touch would turn to error.

02:07

But I'll tell you what terrifies me. I'm afraid that so often what people mean when they dismiss us lightly by that's your interpretation is, well, that's your interpretation.

02:21

You read it one way. I look at it another way, and a third party over here reads it still a third way.

02:29

And these three may be mutually exclusive. They may contradict each other, but that's all right.

02:36

Because the Bible is a matter of individual subjective interpretation.

02:43

Whatever it means to you is fine. Like I say, if that's what people have in mind, it terrifies me.

02:52

For this reason, because then it becomes a slogan for what we call subjectivism, where the meaning of the

03:03

Word of God becomes tied to who's ever interpreting. That's what Luther was so afraid of, that the

03:09

Bible might become a wax nose that would be shaped and formed and molded according to the pride and the prejudice of whoever was studying it and whoever was reading it.

03:21

If we let that happen, dear friends, then the Bible's authority collapses.

03:27

Its truth has been relativized and the Word of God is slain.

03:34

Welcome to the Thirdly Equipped podcast, where we compare the teachings from popular women's ministry, books, conferences,

03:41

Bible studies, etc. to Scripture. Our focus is 2 Timothy 3, 16 to 17, that all

03:48

Scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.

03:55

So the man or woman of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

04:01

I'm your host, Melba Toast. May this episode bless you and bring glory to God.

04:13

Ladies, welcome back to another episode of Thoroughly Equipped. I want to say again, thank you for all of the new subscribers.

04:23

Thank you for joining and I think liking this channel enough to continue watching it.

04:31

I really appreciate that. It's growing. And so I just pray that I can continue to bless you in any way to get in God's Word and know more about God and be a woman of God and and all that that entails.

04:49

So we've been going through a series of discernment when it comes to women's ministry.

04:57

And so I've been laying out for you guys how we can discern female teachers in women's ministry.

05:07

And I missed last week, been a bit busy. I'm also part of another ministry that's in the co -op for my area here, and it's registration time for that co -op.

05:21

And so I've been busy with that. I also have construction going on in my house. So I might be a little sporadic in posting here.

05:31

I'm going to make it a goal not to be, but life happens, right? Anyway, so we have one last little portion of the discernment series that I want to do, and we're going to be looking at doctrine, female teachers and more specific about what they teach, looking at what is doctrine, what happens or what's the effect of good doctrine on a woman?

05:59

And what's the effect of false doctrine on a woman? And what's the importance or how important it is for a female teacher, a leader in women's ministry to exercise discernment and present discernment and call the women in the church and the women in ministry to display discernment.

06:28

What does that look like? So to start off, I thought,

06:34

OK. You know how my mind goes. We would need to know what doctrine is.

06:41

But one of the more foundational things when we talk about doctrine, I think, is just the way we read our

06:48

Bible. How do we study our Bible? And so I thought, well,

06:54

I'll produce a previous podcast episode. Luckily that I video recorded as well.

07:02

And that way I'll post it onto YouTube for you guys who are new to the podcast to see it on YouTube.

07:13

Those of you who have listened to the podcast since the beginning, you would have heard this interview with Andrew Rappaport on hermeneutics.

07:23

But this way you get to see it visually. So. All right. Well, I hope you enjoy.

07:29

I hope it blesses you. And hermeneutics was a topic until, well, 2020 that I didn't really know what it was.

07:41

I knew there was a correct way to read our Bible, but I didn't understand the science behind it until I took

07:48

Andrew Rappaport's class, which is free, by the way. You can go to Striving for Eternity to tap into those teachings on how to read your scripture and how to read it in context and how to put hermeneutics to use, which is a blessing.

08:07

It has helped me quite a lot grow into the study of God's word.

08:15

And it's important because as we grow into how we study the word, we can interpret it correctly and then we can exercise discernment.

08:27

So that's the main reason why I wanted to kind of repost this podcast episode for YouTube, for all the new people who have joined the

08:39

Thoroughly Equipped community and for the ladies out there who want to know more about how to study

08:48

God's word. We start with hermeneutics. So God bless you guys and enjoy.

08:54

There you go. All right. Andrew, I just wanted to say thank you, number one, for coming on my show, my little show.

09:04

Thank you so much for your time. And before we really get started on our topic today, would you just introduce yourself and tell us about your ministry?

09:15

Sure. And thank you for having me on your big show because it's not so little. So, but no,

09:22

I do appreciate coming on. And I appreciate what you've been doing with your podcast.

09:28

I've been enjoying it. As you know, when I first found out about your podcast,

09:33

I was a little nervous podcast for women's ministry. Yeah, it's usually problematic.

09:41

But I've been at least pleasantly surprised and enjoying the episodes and what you've been providing for women to be able to equip them.

09:51

So with that, I'll introduce myself. My name is Andrew Rappaport. I guess one of the tidbits people find interesting about me is

09:58

I grew up in a Jewish home. So I was bar mitzvahed and then came to Christ. I have pastored several churches.

10:05

I am the president and executive director of both the Striving Fraternity and the Christian Podcast Community, which is how you know of me because you are a member of the

10:14

Christian Podcast Community. So I've written a couple of books, What Do They Believe, which is a systematic theology of Western religions.

10:22

And What Do We Believe, which is a Christian systematic theology. I have contributed to several books like On the

10:27

Origin of Kinds, Sharing the Good News with Mormons, When My Ox Scores My Neighbor. Yeah, I know that one sounds really strange, but that is on topic for what we're going to talk about tonight.

10:37

Really? That is a good primer if you want to learn how to interpret the

10:43

Bible. What he does is takes that Old Testament passage that says, When My Ox Scores My Neighbor, and he works through with that passage through the entire book, stepping you through how to interpret that passage and how to apply it to us today.

10:59

So yeah, it is kind of neat. I wrote the foreword to that. All right. Is that all you do?

11:06

No, I do more. You don't expect to take the whole hour just talking about what

11:11

I've written. Some of the other Christian podcast members joke about the fact that I have five podcasts on the

11:18

Christian podcast community. Two that are most active on weekly is Andrew Rapport's Rapp Report, and that's just search for Rapp Report, Rapp with two

11:26

Ps, or Apologetics Live. So the Rapp Report is about, basically, we're trying to give biblical interpretations and applications to all things of Christian life.

11:37

Apologetics Live is a live show Thursday nights, 8 to 10 Eastern time. Anyone can come in. They go to ApologeticsLive .com, and we can answer any question or any challenge they have about God and the

11:46

Bible. Yeah, that's a great show. It's fun to watch. It's more fun when people come in and ask questions, which you should do sometime.

11:54

I have been tempted to. Okay, well, now we're going to wait for it. Okay, what day am

12:01

I? So all of you now know to be watching that to see when Melissa comes in. There you go, in all anticipation.

12:08

All right. Well, before I ask you the very important questions

12:13

I want to ask you. And for your audience that they know, because they may not know, you called your show a little show.

12:20

Your show is in the top 50 % of all podcasts.

12:26

It's not that little. I have no clue what that means. That means that if you look at all the podcasts in the world, and you look at the downloads, you're in the top 50%.

12:39

Well, that's because I'm on the Christian podcast community. That's why.

12:44

Because you're producing good content. Otherwise, they would stop listening. Oh, okay. I'll take that, too.

12:52

So I wanted to explain to you why I wanted to have you on. You do know that I'm going through this critique series on the

13:02

If Gathering, which is a humongous women's conference that's held in Dallas, Texas, but also online.

13:12

I wasn't sure if you knew just how big they are. They technically have over 4 ,000 locals, which is basically church locations, home locations, as well as college locations.

13:30

And in those locals, individual spots, you could have five to 10 to 30 women in each one.

13:39

So they reach over 4 million women, and it's hosted. These locals are located in all 50 states and even in 45 continents,

13:51

I think, or countries. They said not continents because they're not 45 continents, but 45 countries.

13:58

Well, they don't know how to interpret the Bible. They may not be able to know how to interpret a continent either.

14:06

Maybe a country identifies as a continent. Yeah. Oh, there you go. That's the new thing, right?

14:14

All right. So yeah, because of that, specifically in this part of the series,

14:20

I am looking at the 2020 conference, which Jenny Allen had these women each be given a section of Romans chapter eight, is what they went through.

14:34

And the claim was that they were going to get more Christ. I want to have you on because you have done classes on what we call hermeneutics.

14:47

And I think maybe there's a lot of listeners, at least I know when I was younger, and not too long ago, didn't know what hermeneutics was.

14:56

Didn't know how it related to discernment and didn't even know how it could benefit me. So I wanted to have you on to explain.

15:03

So let's go for our first question, which is what is hermeneutics?

15:10

So hermeneutics is basically the art and science of interpretation. And it applies to anything.

15:16

I mean, you can take a literary degree and what you're doing is hermeneutics. You're learning how to interpret

15:23

Shakespeare versus someone else. Because Shakespeare is going to have a style of writing that would be different than John Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress.

15:34

There's a way to interpret Pilgrim's Progress. We're not going to interpret Pilgrim's Progress the way we would the

15:40

Bible. Why? Pilgrim's Progress is designed to be an allegory. The whole book is an allegory.

15:45

So when you meet Christian, he represents a Christian. You meet worldly wise man, he is a worldly wise man.

15:52

So you have where all those names are descriptive of the people. But you're not going to interpret the

15:59

Bible any old way. There are rules to interpretation. Things like grammar.

16:06

We speak, we have a language. That language has a grammar, it has rules. There's going to be things we do.

16:12

And we can get into this more because I'm sure one of the questions you'll ask me is how do we do hermeneutics? Because that usually comes up.

16:18

But some of the basic things of how we communicate. I am using words right now to communicate to you.

16:24

And you are understanding my words. Whether you realize it or not, you are practicing hermeneutics.

16:31

Now the question is, what are the rules you're using to employ? Right. And we'll get into that too.

16:39

All right. So it's an interpretation, the way we interpret it and read literature or understand words, right, is basically what you're telling me.

16:49

Correct. Correct. And when people will come to me on the street or on Apologetics Live or wherever, and they'll say that there's multiple interpretations, like the

16:57

Bible has lots of interpretations. My response, because it depends the setting, but if I'm on Apologetics Live or on the street, if I'm doing open air evangelism and I have a crowd there and someone says, well, there's lots of ways to interpret the

17:12

Bible. I'll say something like blue cheese, jump over moon cow. And they go, what?

17:18

That's what I interpreted you said. You know, or I'll just turn and say, so you're saying rape is

17:24

OK? And like, I didn't say anything like that. That's how I interpreted what you said. You people, folks, you believe this guy says rape is

17:31

OK? And the guy gets upset with it. And I go, wait, it's just the way I interpret it.

17:37

You said we can have multiple ways to interpret things. And it's funny when you put it that way on people, they suddenly get, you know, that doesn't work when you type, by the way.

17:44

Don't do this on social media. It's failed every time that I've tried to do that. It just doesn't come across the same way.

17:50

But what I do is I'll say something ridiculous to show that, no, you are expecting me to follow the rules of language.

18:01

And that's why you think it's ridiculous that I'm saying you think rape is OK or I say random words.

18:07

You recognize that as being ridiculous. Why? Because you expect there to be an interpretation.

18:14

Because you expect me to follow the same rules you follow when we speak together. Right. And this is one of the things that you hear probably a lot often when you're in discernment.

18:25

I remember having conversations, having to address a certain topic that is brought up in a sermon.

18:34

And you're like, well, that doesn't look like what the text is saying. And always going to either the person that you're listening to the sermon with.

18:47

And at least this is my experience. And being like, well, wait, that's not what that says.

18:53

And then they turn to me and go, well, that's your interpretation of that passage.

19:00

And it always made me go, what? My face is like, big question mark.

19:07

OK. So this is why I think women with our postmodern ideas now, this idea that we can just change interpretation.

19:20

We can't even describe what a woman is. We can make it whatever we want. So I want our listeners and the women to understand that there's a right way to interpret the

19:33

Bible. And so why, then, should we use hermeneutics and understand humanetics and then apply it to when we study and read the

19:42

Bible? Why is it important? Well, this is God's Word. And so there's one interpretation, many applications.

19:52

So I can take the same passage of Scripture and apply it to the nation of Israel different than I would the church.

20:00

That's possible with some passages. There's some passages where we can have multiple ways of applying it in different situations.

20:07

But there's one interpretation. This is something you'll end up seeing very often with cults and groups that are misapplying

20:16

Scripture. Usually, they take Old Testament to start with, and they butcher that. But they take

20:21

Old Testament historical narratives and want to apply it to themselves today, things that have no application to them.

20:28

Because what they do is jump right to application. So in hermeneutics, we have a thing that we've referred to as authorial intent.

20:38

It means what did the author intend by what he was writing? So in that, there's several questions you have to ask.

20:46

Who is the author? So let's take 1 John. 1 John is used by many groups that teach sinless perfectionism.

20:53

They believe they can be sinlessly perfect and that you have to be absolutely perfect as a Christian. This is someone they teach, and they get it from 1

21:02

John. Well, okay, who's John? John is one of the apostles. He's one of the oldest living apostles.

21:08

The rest had died out. And he's there. Who's he writing to? He's writing to people that are dealing with Gnostics.

21:15

Who are the Gnostics? Gnostics are people that believed that anything physical was evil, but anything spiritual is good.

21:21

So they would actually teach that you can sleep with a prostitute as long as you didn't give your spirit over to her.

21:26

Well, this is the thing that John is trying to answer. John wants to answer that very issue.

21:32

He wants to answer that if you have a pattern of sin in your life, you are not saved. So he makes these absolute statements.

21:40

Why? Because he's dealing with people that are trying to hedge and play word games. And for that reason, he's not having any of it.

21:48

He's very, very clear. It's completely on or completely off. It's light or dark, no in between.

21:54

Why is he doing that? Because of who he's writing to. So you have to understand who's writing and who he's writing to.

22:01

Why is he writing it? Because all of that's going to play in heavily when you read the book of 1

22:06

John to understand why he's saying what he's saying. Because it sure seems like John is saying, you can't even have any sin in your life if you're a

22:14

Christian. Now, to those of us today where we have lots of gray areas in Christianity today, way too many, we've gone too far the other way, right?

22:24

John is being very concise saying, no, it is this or that. There's a pattern of sin or a pattern of living for Christ, as if there's no in between.

22:34

He's not saying that we can't sin because, well, he does say in there, if we say we have no sin, we make

22:39

God a liar. But we have to understand what the author meant to his readers by what he said.

22:49

We don't ask the question, what does this mean to me? We ask, what did John write to his audience?

22:57

Right. And so that sounds like there's a lot more work than just asking what it means to me going on in that, which is why

23:06

I think this is very important to understand. So you got into this, right?

23:12

When you answered the question about that, you know, this is God's word and we want to know what God has to say.

23:18

So I'm trying to relate this to women. I don't think that women necessarily have a different way of going about studying

23:30

God's word, but I think we, not intentionally, I think just the overall

23:38

Christian evangelicalism of women's ministry of today is just, it's been all about devotions and not really

23:48

Bible studies and the fields and the books that come with the Bible. So I wanted to ask you, like, what's the difference between, and it seems like a pretty straightforward answer, but studying the

24:04

Bible on a devotional, and is there a big difference in, you know, taking the time to learn how to study the

24:12

Bible yourself or just using a devotional for your morning, you know, devotion time?

24:21

What do you think? Doing the study and doing devotions are two different things.

24:28

So we have a seminar at Striving for Eternity that we come into churches for a weekend and we do a, what we call

24:35

Bible interpretation made easy. Okay, we'll spend between four and eight hours with a church teaching them how to interpret the

24:42

Bible. And at the end of it, I end up saying, did this seem like a lot of work for y 'all?

24:48

And people go, yeah, this is what your pastor does every week. If he's doing a good job, if he's a good pastor, this is what he's doing every week.

24:56

This is not easy work. And when people are busy and people have a lot to do, especially if you're a mother with young children, yeah,

25:06

I mean, when am I going to have time to do all this study? Well, that's why most people, what they do is devotions.

25:12

They'll maybe get a devotional book. Maybe they'll read a commentary as a devotion, but you're getting one person's interpretation that could taint you.

25:24

If you want to really know what God's word is, you got to do the work on your own because the commentary, any commentary is one person's view of it.

25:33

I could be wrong in my interpretation of the passage. You can't trust me. You have to actually do the research yourself.

25:40

And there's no shortcuts to that. The reality is, let me encourage you though with this. Yes, I know busy moms having to take care of the house, having to take care of the children, at least

25:53

I hope, and it's not like trying to take care of the job and someone else takes care of the children, but I'm going to get myself in trouble with your audience.

26:02

But no, the reality is that it's not easy. It's just not easy to do that. And then where do you find the time to do 10, 20 hours of study?

26:11

Well, you're not going to do 10, 20 hours of study. Not all at once, but maybe it's going to be somewhere something perks your interest and you're going to dive deep and maybe spend many weeks studying it out a little at a time.

26:22

Maybe you're going to read the Bible in a systematic way so that you can start to think hermeneutically.

26:29

What do I mean by that? One of the things I do in our course and our seminar, and I have a course online at Striving Fraternity Academy, just go to strivingfraternity .org

26:38

and under the academy, it's called biblical hermeneutics. And we have a sheet that we give to people that just has five simple questions that you could fill out with any passage of scripture to help in your study of it, which is just who, when, where, why, what?

26:56

Basic journalistic type of questions. You ask those questions as you're reading a passage, fill those out. Just doing that will make you more curious about the text you're studying.

27:07

Yes. And that is really important because devotions are meant to be something for the way that people do mostly today is meant to be,

27:18

I read my Bible, I meditate on it for a few minutes, I go about my day. And when we talk about devotions, that's what most people think of.

27:26

They don't think of actually doing the study of engaging with the text.

27:32

I never preach a sermon without teaching hermeneutics either directly or indirectly.

27:39

People who've been under my teaching for a long time know that because I'll say things like, have you ever thought what it's like to be

27:47

Peter in this situation? Here he is with Jesus and he just said something really stupid. What has

27:55

Peter feeling being chastised by Christ? Things like that to put people in the mindset of what we need to do is say, what were these guys going through?

28:06

They lived through this and we just read it. We pass over so much because we just read it.

28:12

You think about the disciples, they're in a boat, Jesus is asleep and a storm comes.

28:20

Well, what's the big deal? I mean, it was a storm. You'd be scared at sea, right? Well, no, wait, four of these guys are fishermen.

28:28

Not only are they fishermen, they're fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. What's important about that? Well, Galilee is in a valley and so you got this mountain range all around it, which means these guys are used to being at sea when you can't see a storm coming from miles away.

28:42

You only see it when it comes just over the ridge of the mountains. So, they must be used to being in a storm.

28:49

So, they're scared. I mean, the other guys are probably even more scared, but these guys are experienced fishermen in a sea where storms come up out of nowhere.

28:57

They would be used to being at storms, they would be desensitized to it, but they're scared this time. Why? Oh, let's look at the

29:04

Greek there. The Greek defines it as a mega storm, a super storm, a super hurricane like.

29:12

Now we understand. So, this is a storm that is so severe that these experienced disciples are frightened on the water and Jesus is sound asleep.

29:25

You see how, what am I doing? I'm giving the interpretation. I'm taking the geography.

29:31

I'm taking their profession. I'm asking the questions of what would it be like being a fisherman on the

29:37

Sea of Galilee knowing the geography? See, all that comes into play and all of a sudden we get a bigger picture of this.

29:44

I mean, you think about the, you know, Matthew, he's a tax collector. He must have been freaking out, like scared out of his mind because if Peter, Andrew, James, and John are scared, then the others must really be scared, right?

29:58

So, that adds a whole lot more than just reading it and seeing that they're, you know, Jesus is asleep.

30:04

Jesus is asleep during a hurricane. Okay. Now, here's the neat thing about that.

30:11

And also, I'm talking about knowing some of the original language, right? Well, this is the neat thing.

30:17

When Jesus says to the storm to be still, it's called a mega calm.

30:25

So, not only was it a super storm, but now it's a super calm and it happens instantaneously.

30:30

No ripples in the water. It just, boom, stops. Now, that's some power.

30:36

Yeah. What is Jesus doing there? Well, now we see that Jesus is putting his deity on display. He's not just saying, hey, storm, stop.

30:42

And then it's like the faith healers that, you know, slowly it just stops raining a little bit, a little bit. No, he said stop.

30:48

And it stopped even the ripples in the water, just complete calm. Wow. Yeah. Instantaneously.

30:55

Do you know why they might've been frightened? Yeah. The only thing worse than being in the center of a storm is realizing

31:02

Jesus is in your boat. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Amen to that. Wow.

31:07

So, yeah. I really think that's missing. You can't get that from a devotional. Most definitely.

31:15

That's too, too deep. Oh, man. So, okay. So, in going back to the devotionals issues, another thing

31:24

I'm wondering what you see is I feel as if the devotions, like you did kind of allude to this, they're almost geared towards asking, there are somebody else's interpretation, but they're always kind of geared towards what

31:42

God can do for you. What God has for you that day, how he wants to bless you that day.

31:47

At least that's my experience in the devotionals. And when you study scripture, you seem to be getting a lot more about Christ.

31:55

I mean, like the story you just told there, how many devotionals flip it to make it about how we can trust

32:02

God through storms and stuff. And that's great. And it's good. But, I mean, you displayed just in your talk and your, you know, expositing just those, the story behind it, the history behind it.

32:14

And you get, Jesus is really at the center of it. And I really feel like that's missing.

32:20

I don't know if I have a question in that, but I just had to say. Here's really what it comes down to. It's because most of the devotional works that are written today are geared toward application and not interpretation.

32:32

Right. That's what I, okay. That's going to be the difference. Most of the, and I'm saying most, because I mean, there's some,

32:38

John MacArthur has devotionals and his are, he's going to go verse by verse through like a chapter of a book and give the interpretation.

32:47

Why? Because he realizes he's doing that because he wants a different kind of devotional. He wants one that teaches interpretation.

32:55

So there are some of those out there, but the majority of them, the worst of them, I'm really going to get in trouble.

33:01

I, let me just front apologize, Melissa, your audience is going to send you nasty emails. I'm sorry.

33:07

The worst of them is our daily bread. Please just get rid of it. Please, please.

33:14

Because what is it? They give you one verse and give you like two or three paragraphs that have usually absolutely nothing to do with the verse.

33:22

But there's one word in the verse that they jump off of and give you some feel good type of message.

33:30

And that's, that's really what it comes down to. It's not helping you in understanding what the text means.

33:35

It doesn't help you in really living out the text because you don't know what it means. One of the goals

33:40

I have in preaching is that 10 years from now, someone will forget all about me and the message

33:46

I preach, but they're going to come to a text of scripture and go, I know what that means. I understand that.

33:53

I know the culture behind that. I understand the history behind it. I know what's going on at that time.

33:59

That's the goal. Yeah. Okay. So that's a great way to segue into my next kind of question.

34:07

Because devotionals kind of make it more applicable and we tend to go to our scripture, especially us women,

34:13

I think, go to scripture. We have the short time. So we're reading and picking, cherry picking verses and stuff like that.

34:21

Let's talk about the ways not to interpret. Because I did your class online.

34:29

And it was you. I was wondering who that person was. So in your class, you did, which

34:36

I would highly recommend anybody listening to this to go to, because you actually not just going into hermeneutics, but you talk about, sorry, you talk about Bibles and other resources to help you study the

34:52

Bible, the tools that we use to interpret. Right. And I think surprisingly, a lot of women do not know about that.

35:01

They don't even know that there's a study Bible is different from the woman's Bible and any of that kind of stuff.

35:07

And the difference in translations and paraphrase and all that.

35:12

So, but that's not what we're going to talk about today. But the lesson is all -encompassing, ladies.

35:20

So definitely go in. And I think you offered this, what is it? Not a synopsis.

35:25

What did you call it in your class? Yeah, syllabus. And you're basically just, it's very affordable.

35:32

I mean, extremely affordable. And then watch the videos online. All right. Plug in for that. And the videos are free.

35:39

Yes. Exactly. So what are the ways that we are not to interpret the

35:50

Bible? One of the worst ways that people interpret the Bible is just to open to a random text, stick their finger and read.

35:59

Judas hung himself. Okay. I didn't like that. Let me flip to another one. Flip, go and do likewise.

36:06

No, but like, I'm joking about that, but there are people, I know someone that took a job because they read in the

36:13

Bible, go north. And they took the job that was further north. They were looking for an answer.

36:19

And they at the time believed that God was giving them the answer to their prayer, which job to take.

36:27

They should go north because God said, go north. Has nothing to do with it.

36:34

To take a passage out of its context. People will often, again,

36:39

I'm going to get myself in trouble. Please take the whole course. And then you'll see why

36:45

I say these are bad verses. Jeremiah 29, 11, a lot of people have as their life verse. God knows the plans he has for me.

36:53

Plans that are just all wonderful plans of prospering and all this. Why does no one want to go a couple of verses later, just seven verses later where he says,

37:03

God says, I know the plans I have for you, plans of famine and destruction and disease. How come that's not on someone's refrigerator?

37:11

It's like, who is God writing this to? Wouldn't it be nice if he would have told us? Jeremiah 29, 10, he tells us it is written to those who come through the 70 year

37:24

Babylonian captivity. So if you live through the 70 year Babylonian captivity, that verse is for you, but you're not that old.

37:34

But are there things we can learn from that? Well, yeah, we can learn that God is faithful. He was faithful to those that he put into captivity for 70 years.

37:43

He gave promises to them and he was faithful and he's faithful to them. He could be faithful to us.

37:48

But what we shouldn't do is just grab a verse and not read its context. A friend of mine says it this way.

37:55

He says, you should never read a Bible verse. What does he mean? Read the whole chapter. And that's the thing you want to do.

38:02

The worst way to read the Bible is by verses. The chapter breaks and verse breaks were not added for like seven to 800 years after the writings of the

38:12

New Testament. And so those were not inspired. Those were put there so that people could quickly get to a verse they're referring to instead of saying somewhere in the middle of the book of John.

38:27

Where? John's pretty long, right? So they added the chapter breaks and verses.

38:32

The problem is that people think that those verses should be read apart from all the other verses.

38:38

And that's the biggest mistake people make. I think most of the problems are solved just by reading in context.

38:43

Let me give you a quick story on this. I do open air evangelism. So I would stand up for years in New York City.

38:49

I'd go to Union Square, have a little box, get on the box, and I would just preach the gospel. And people would challenge me and someone would say, well, the

38:56

Bible says whatever. And all I would do is say, where does it say that? And they'd give it to me.

39:01

I'd say, oh, why don't we just back up? Let me start reading it for everyone. I'll start at verse one. And when

39:07

I get to verse 17, what they mentioned, it's like everyone in the crowd realizes, oh, that's what it's talking about.

39:14

It's not what he said. It's a totally different context. We don't like to be taken out of context, neither does

39:21

God. And so that's probably the easiest way to understand the scriptures better is to read the whole chapter.

39:28

Don't read just the verse. Right. Okay. So you've answered why it's important or the first.

39:38

That was the only way to misinterpret. Aren't there other ways? Well, other ways we twist because I guess misinterpretation.

39:46

The twist. Yeah. Ways that people will twist. One of the most common ways is someone will take a word that they see and they follow that through the whole

39:54

Bible. And then what they'll do is they'll give a word. They'll say, oh, well, see, this word means this here, here, here, and here.

40:00

So it must mean it over here. Right. No, the words have meaning within their context.

40:09

If I say you look green today, I could mean that you look pretty sick.

40:16

I mean, you're like, color your skin. Or I could mean that you're looking pretty, you know, like.

40:23

Greedy. Envious. So it could have a different meaning. Well, what's the context?

40:29

So every word is going to have a meaning within a context. And so you need to look at the context.

40:35

So people will do that often. They take a word and they try to make it say something it doesn't say. Another thing they'll do is they'll try to give a context.

40:43

They'll mix up Old Testament, New Testament. They'll take things that are for a nation of Israel and try to apply it either to the church or to people that live today.

40:52

And those were rules for Israel. You're not Israel. You know, so you'll see things like that that people will do.

41:00

You'll see where often what people do when they want to twist is they'll mix up the rules.

41:07

In other words, they'll take something that's a historical narrative. And I can get into this later on what a historical narrative is.

41:13

But it's a style of literature. And they will use the rules for like we have the epistles.

41:20

Well, those two styles of literature have different rules to them. And sometimes, and cults do this very often, is they take the historical narratives and imply or interpret it as if it's doctrine, as if it's an epistle.

41:35

And they use the rules for one genre or one style of literature and apply it to the wrong one.

41:42

But they do that usually because they start with a conclusion. Okay, so you're going through the

41:48

Ifgat conference. That was like consistent throughout. They start with a conclusion and they look at the passage and say, how can we make this say what we want it to say?

41:59

Okay, well, if we twist this and twist this, oh, we could jump here, here, here, here, here, here. And then look, this says this.

42:05

And doesn't it look so amazing how God's work? Because look at the brilliance of this.

42:11

All of this works together to say this. And people are amazed. Oh, that lady, she's, oh, clap.

42:17

She's so great. She's so deep. I would never have seen that. Because it's not there. God would not have seen it because it was never meant to be there.

42:27

That's what they do. An example of that, I was at church once, visiting my sister -in -law's church.

42:34

My sister -in -law's church is in Chinese, but I stuck around for the English congregation. I got more out of the

42:39

Chinese, by the way. Yeah, the English was that bad. But his whole message, his

42:45

Resurrection Sunday, his whole message is on, you know, it was before, you know, when

42:51

Christ is in the tomb, it's the day of resurrection and the women come and it's still dark.

42:56

His whole message was, it was still dark. And he's talking about dark times in our lives where you might have financial troubles and you may have lost your job and all this stuff.

43:07

But light, there's light coming. That was like his whole thing. And he went through this whole thing. I'm sitting there, we're walking out and the guy, two people in front of me says, oh, pastor, that was great.

43:16

I would never have seen that in the passage. I was so close to going, Jesus wouldn't have seen that in the passage because it wasn't there.

43:23

You know why it was dark? It's not really hard to figure out because in the passage, it says it, it was still early.

43:30

You know why it was dark? The sun didn't rise. Oh my goodness. That's why it was dark.

43:36

Oh my goodness. That's so typical of what I'm used to hearing. They, they, um, allegorize or spiritualize, um, the historical texts.

43:47

And like, I immediately went to the one sermon I remember hearing. Um, and it's a common sermon about the resurrection and the stone rolled away and how you, you know,

43:59

God wants to roll away the stones in your lives. And it's no different than, you know, David or your

44:05

David. Everyone is David. David has been, I feel so. David is probably rolling over in his grave so many times.

44:12

Poor David is being used for everything. Oh man. All right. So, um, um, that actually brings into, well, you mentioned the different types when you're looking, you mentioned historical, um, and you mentioned about how we might talk about the types of context, right?

44:31

So why don't you tell me about what are the different types of context when we're, when we're, and it, it does.

44:36

Yeah. I'll let you explain. Different types of context or different type of literature. Um, oh, right, right.

44:43

So let's do the literature. Okay. So we'll start with literature. So there's, there's, you have a historical narrative, historical narratives, or think about a book of Genesis, you know, the first five books of the

44:53

Bible or, or the gospels. Those are going to be historical narratives. What they're doing is telling you what actually happened.

45:00

It is not telling you what you should do. It's not telling you what you shouldn't do unless God is condemning or commending behavior.

45:08

So the fact that David had many wives doesn't mean you should have many wives. It means that the

45:14

Bible is historically accurate in what actually did happen. David had many wives. He was in sin.

45:21

So the thing is when we're looking at a historical narrative is telling us the history.

45:26

It's telling us what actually happened. And so it's accurate in its historical events, not necessarily saying what should happen.

45:38

That's going to be different than something like, as I said, the epistles. Epistles are doctrinal.

45:43

They are instructional. So you're going to interpret them as doctrine. You're looking at the epistles as instructional literature, as something that's telling us how to behave.

45:53

But then we have things like wisdom literature or Hebrew poetry. Hebrew poetry, much of wisdom literature uses

46:01

Hebrew poetry. And Hebrew poetry is different than our poetry. Our poetry relies on rhyming.

46:07

But Hebrew poetry relies on parallelism. So when you come to the

46:13

Psalms or much of Proverbs, what you're looking for is two parallel lines of thought.

46:20

And you want to know how these lines relate to one another. Sometimes they're contrasting.

46:27

So the context is going to be you have line one and line two, and you're going to see the word but or something like this where that shows you there's a contrast.

46:37

Well, that contrast is going to tell us throughout Proverbs, you see the contrast between the wise and the fool.

46:46

That contrast is helping us to know where we are supposed to be focusing. You will have things where sometimes you have the line one is going to emphasize line two.

46:57

So the real thing is going to be what's line two? What's the extra emphasis in line two?

47:03

So you're going to have a different style when it comes to parallels, parallelism in Hebrew poetry.

47:08

You'll have things like parables. Parables are illustrations of things. And this goes back to the question of how do people not, how should you not interpret?

47:18

People will take a parable and try to make it say more than it actually says. The parable is an illustration of one point, and it's geared toward explaining one point.

47:29

And so it's not meant to be used for a lot of different points. And that's how many people will use it.

47:35

But when we have a parable, what we want to do is ask what is the purpose in the greater context of this parable?

47:46

So you have the two sons. So many people interpret that one so many different ways, get into lots of different things of the two sons.

47:59

Well, what you end up seeing is that's in a greater context than Luke. First, you had a hundred sheep where one goes astray and is returned.

48:09

And there's much rejoicing in heaven for the one that was found.

48:14

You have 10 coins. One was lost in the rejoicing when the one was found.

48:22

You have two sons and one was that one gets lost and then is found.

48:29

What ends up, you end up seeing in all three of those parables in the greater context was a condemnation on the self -righteous

48:35

Pharisees who were the representative of the 99 sheep, the nine coins.

48:42

And then really what struck home is the older brother. And that's the context.

48:48

It's talking about the hypocrisy of the self -righteous Pharisees looking down at these worthless sinners that are getting saved.

48:57

And Jesus is focusing on the worthless sinners. And Jesus' whole focus on the one, the one, the one is focusing on the one that repents, where there's much rejoicing in heaven for the lost soul, that wicked sinner that was saved.

49:12

You know why the 99 sheep and 10 coins and the older brother aren't rejoicing? Because they were self -righteous.

49:18

They represented those that didn't think they needed to be lost. That was great. Yeah, I've always, one of the things

49:25

I've noticed about the parables is they are always in answering a question that the, well, not always, that somebody's asking.

49:33

So there's got to be a point to why they, why he gives the parables.

49:39

You know, most of the parables actually answer. And this is the thing people don't think through. But, you know, maybe at the

49:46

IF conference, I doubt they would bring this up. I doubt they would focus on this.

49:52

But they deal with one topic, most of the parables. And here's the thing. When you, you'll hear this sometimes that people will say that Jesus spoke about hell more than heaven.

50:01

That's true. He spoke about money more than heaven and hell combined. That's true.

50:07

But he spoke about hypocrisy more than heaven, hell and money combined.

50:13

That's true. And most of the parables are dealing with hypocrisy. He's calling out the

50:19

Jewish elite that think they're self -righteous. They're acting like they're

50:24

God's children, but they're not God's children. That's a message that still carries over into the church today with many, even in leadership, even at an

50:34

IF gathering that say they're saved, but they are self -righteous.

50:40

They're misinterpreting God's word. They're twisting it and they're leading people toward destruction.

50:46

Right. All right. So you've explained some of the literature, the way the

50:53

Bible has different types of literature. Now explain, if I remember correctly from your class, there are three different types of context, correct?

51:03

Well, there's more than three, but yeah, there's about five. You have historical context.

51:10

When is this being written? Is this Old Testament? Is this New Testament? If it's

51:16

Old Testament, is it during Moses' time? Is it during the dispersion?

51:21

When is that? That can play into things in understanding the time that it's written.

51:28

You have the cultural context, and a lot of it, you have to understand the culture.

51:35

When Jesus is going to make a statement that many people misinterpret,

51:41

He says, when they ask Him, when are these things going to happen? When's the end times? When are these things going to happen? And He says, no man knows the day or the hour, only the

51:50

Father knows. And people say, oh, see, in His humanity, He didn't know something, but in His divinity,

51:56

He did. And what do they do? They just fell into a heresy, an ancient heresy of dividing the nature of God, of Christ.

52:04

No, if you understand the culture, you know that's a Jewish idiom. It has to do with a wedding feast.

52:12

The Father is the one who decides when the son is going to go get married. The son prepares a house, and the

52:18

Father, the house can be done. The Father just decides, says, go get your bride. He doesn't know. So the phrase is that here to live your life in anticipation, as if any moment is it.

52:29

That's what that idiom has to do with, living a life of expectancy. So cultural context is going to help.

52:36

We have grammatical context. Just looking at within that, wherever you have, if you're in verse 17, start at verse 1, what's the context here as far as where this is in the passage of Scripture?

52:54

You have a spiritual context. Where are we? Are we the nation of Israel? Are we the church?

53:00

Are we before the church? Are we in Adam's day? There's a spiritual context there, because what you end up seeing is that God throughout history dealt differently with His people.

53:12

And you end up seeing that He deals spiritually with them differently, and therefore there's a spiritual context we have to know.

53:20

And so with each of these things, you have a different context to it, that we have to take all of these and understand them when we're looking at one passage of Scripture.

53:31

Right. That's very helpful. So it seems like a lot, and I think as a woman might be listening to this going, man, that's a lot to have to know before I can even study my

53:45

Bible. So what kind of advice would you give for a woman who's come to realize, okay, maybe

53:52

I need to throw the devotion in the trash and actually just get into God's Word?

53:59

What would you, what kind of encouragement and suggestions and maybe even resources that could help her start?

54:06

Sure. Let me make it easy for you, because we want to take small bite -sized times, periods of time, right?

54:13

When people listen to me preach, they will hear me talk a lot about what was happening in the culture and the background to the times.

54:22

And people have asked me, like, how do you study all that? I studied it a little bit every day for many, many years.

54:29

So one of the things my pastor encouraged me to do was to get a Bible dictionary or Bible encyclopedia.

54:36

There's many good ones you can get. Just get one and open to random articles.

54:43

Articles you may otherwise have absolutely no interest in reading. Some articles are short. Some are maybe a paragraph or two.

54:51

Some are maybe a page or two. But they're usually not more than a few pages.

54:57

And just read that. See what you can learn from it. Why do I say that? As you keep doing that every day,

55:03

I would just sit with a cup of coffee and my Bible encyclopedia, open up to a random article and read it.

55:10

And then years later, I'd be like, oh, wait, I remember something about that. And I would go and either go search that again or remember what

55:17

I had remembered. And all of a sudden, it's helping me when

55:22

I read through the Bible and I see something that says, oh, they're in the Sea of Galilee. Well, I read an article on the

55:29

Sea of Galilee, how it's in a valley. Hmm, got me thinking about things.

55:34

So the combination of just reading random articles in a Bible encyclopedia and being curious and trying to say, what does that mean?

55:44

If I was living in that day, what would that mean? That will help. And so actually

55:51

Logos Bible Software has a thing where their front page, when you go to their homepage, if you get that software, you can actually have it go through your library and pick up random articles.

56:04

I know where they got that idea from. It was me. They asked a bunch of pastors, how do you guys do your study?

56:12

And one of the things I said is I open to a random encyclopedia every morning with a cup of coffee.

56:18

And I just read a random article. And they put that in. And so that's something you do in a small amount of time that what you're doing, whether you realize it or not, is building up a repertoire of things that as you read through the scriptures, you're going to come to things and you're going to remember what you had read.

56:37

And it's going to help in the study without you having to do a lot of study all at once. Now, you want to do more study.

56:45

What I would say is don't try to do everything in a week. You know, maybe you want to, you know,

56:51

I took a look at the parable in Luke 16, and I just gave away my position.

56:57

But the rich man and Lazarus, I had taken the position previously that that was not a parable.

57:05

I studied it for like two years. Was I doing anything else?

57:10

No, I was doing a lot of other things. But I just kept returning to this study. So I just, it was something that I spent a lot of time just digging in and I'd read different articles on it.

57:21

And I had lots of questions. I'd try to get answers, but I wasn't trying to get them all at once. I wasn't spending lots of hours at a time.

57:28

I'd spend an hour here, an hour there, maybe half an hour here. But it was one passage that I was just curious of.

57:35

And I devoted a lot of time to it. I spent a little bit of time over a long period of time.

57:42

It ended up being a lot of time, but I didn't do it all at once. And so you could do things like that. Yeah, yeah, just start with,

57:50

I think even John MacArthur, this is how I kind of started with my study is

57:56

John MacArthur suggested, just take the shortest book and just read it and just read it again and read it again.

58:05

And as I found, you know, your reading of it becomes quicker, but then I start asking these questions.

58:12

And not only that, I got myself a study Bible, which I would suggest women do get a study

58:19

Bible. A good study Bible. Yes, thank you. Here's the thing that MacArthur has a style of doing, and this will be helpful for folks if you want to do his style.

58:28

What he does is he reads through the Old Testament once a year and he'll start with, say,

58:34

Matthew 1 to 7. And he will read Matthew 1 to 7 every day for a month.

58:40

And then he reads the next seven chapters every day for a month and so on and so on. What that actually doing, that repetition is helping you to notice things, to see, to ask questions, to start to pick up things you don't pick up right away.

58:56

And that's the same thing I did. I used to memorize books of the Bible. And in memorizing a book, you end up having to memorize it, you end up having to form an outline.

59:04

You end up picking up a whole lot more because you're reciting it over and over and over and over again.

59:11

That and having a good study Bible, I would recommend the MacArthur Study Bible.

59:17

The ESV Study Bible is pretty good. Holman has, well, the old

59:23

Holman had good study Bibles. Now they got rid of the Holman Christian Standard.

59:30

So I don't know if they're recent ones. But there's a lot of good study Bibles to get.

59:35

But you got to check into, because remember, that's someone's interpretation. That's their notes. So you want to know that they're a solid person first.

59:44

Right. And that was one of the, I have the MacArthur Study Bible. And one of the things that I really enjoyed about it was the historical background.

59:54

And then he also brought into it some of the critical, where they didn't quite agree, where there were some,

01:00:04

I don't know what, I forget what it's called in the introduction. I'm so bad with names.

01:00:10

But where there were, it's not that they're critical, but some interpret it this way.

01:00:17

I think it's interpretal. Oh, man. But anyway.

01:00:22

I don't know the exact word you're trying for. But I mean, there are, MacArthur will put in there ways that people will misinterpret.

01:00:31

Yes, yes. But I don't know the name that he calls it. Right. But hold on, and I'll look for it.

01:00:38

You keep talking, I'll find it. So, yeah. And so that's really, really helped me.

01:00:44

And that's how I really did start studying, besides the fact that I, you know, was a

01:00:51

Christian for how many years and realized I hadn't actually read through the whole entire Bible. So just starting to read through the entire

01:00:59

Bible. But as I grew to love it more and understand that there was one way to interpret it.

01:01:08

And yeah, we're not all going to get it right. But my job is to at least do my best to get

01:01:16

God's word right. I began to love the history, to learn, to want to learn about the history around it with each book and the times.

01:01:28

And like you said, the context and everything. So MacArthur calls that interpretive challenges.

01:01:35

Now, I jokingly say this, that if you were to follow the rules of interpretation consistently all the time, you'd agree with me.

01:01:47

Of course. That's a joke, folks. It's a joke.

01:01:52

But the reality is, if we all did that, we would come to the same conclusion.

01:01:57

The problem is we just none of us follow the rules perfectly. Right, right. Yeah. And so my next couple of questions are a little more female oriented because I just really.

01:02:12

The question I'm going to have there now is we have to ask, what is a woman? Okay. Well, I don't know what a woman is anymore.

01:02:18

And so I don't know. You know, we're now being told that I wouldn't be able to answer these questions unless I identify as a woman.

01:02:25

Therefore, I guess to answer these, I will identify as a woman. Thank you. All right. Good. Now we're all set.

01:02:32

That is great. I was wondering about that. You know, if the woman means nothing, then that means she could be anything.

01:02:39

A woman is someone that identifies as a woman. But what is that? You can't find something by using its own word.

01:02:46

Right. This is the culture we live in now. Yes. We live in a culture that we can't even define a woman.

01:02:51

But yes. And you can have a woman who's on the first. She's elected to the

01:02:57

Supreme Court because she's a woman, but she can't answer the question, what is a woman? Because she's not a biologist.

01:03:04

And yet we can't look at the biology of what a woman is because this is a psychological issue. Yes. Right.

01:03:10

Are you confused yet? Yes, it is very confusing. And you can get me off talking about it because honestly, we laugh or I laugh about it.

01:03:19

And it's it's so sad. It's so sad. And it's so bad for us women.

01:03:24

It's just really bad for us. But anyway, so I did an episode. Anybody want to know what a woman is?

01:03:30

I answered that question before this all broke out, by the way. But anyway. Before Matt Walsh did his documentary on what is a woman.

01:03:38

Yeah. Well, even before what's her name said, she couldn't she wasn't a biologist. So she couldn't answer.

01:03:44

You know, the one thing of Matt Walsh's documentary that really was kind of funny and sad at the same time was there was a there was a woman, clearly someone that looked like a woman, claimed to be a a gay man.

01:03:58

So just okay. Well, if your head hasn't wrapped around that, he's asking this woman who identifies as a gay man, what is a woman?

01:04:09

And the the lady says, well, I wouldn't pretend to know I'm not a woman. She's a gay man.

01:04:18

You don't have to be a woman to know what a woman is. I mean, can you tell me what a woman is? You should go ask a woman.

01:04:26

That's what Matt Walsh says. Are you a cat? I saw the clip for that one. She goes, no.

01:04:32

And he goes, what's a cat? And like the realization comes over, she puts her head down, she looks up at him and says,

01:04:40

I really regret doing this and just turns and walks away. And he's going, well, what's a woman?

01:04:47

That was both funny and sad at the same time. Yeah, well, you know, everybody keeps giving these spoilers.

01:04:53

I haven't seen it yet and I want to see it. So yeah. But anyway, you got to watch it before I give you the rest of the spoilers.

01:05:00

Oh, I think I think I know the premise, at least. And the outcome. So I won't be too surprised.

01:05:07

There's a woman who's a wolf. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness.

01:05:13

OK, well, I will be shocked at some points, but not too shocked. I think so.

01:05:19

But yeah, for four women. And then we are learning about hermeneutics, why it's important and then also why it's important to study our our

01:05:31

Bible and Bible versus devotions and how important the history are, the looking at the literature types and the context.

01:05:43

One of the things that I've found learning hermeneutics is really good for and and all that information is for discernment.

01:05:52

And this is my main goal for my podcast, and it's my main goal to for having you on and for all that I'm doing right now with all this.

01:06:05

So just talk to me a little bit about her, you know, studying the

01:06:11

Bible and how it's really good for discernment. Well, this is what discernment is going to be about is interpreting the

01:06:19

Bible. The whole thing of discernment is going to be, am

01:06:25

I rightly handling God's word? That's how you're going to have discernment. So what we end up seeing is when we look and say we're discerning something, we have two ways we're going to discern it.

01:06:41

I feel this way. I feel you're being hateful, right?

01:06:46

I'm going to look at what the Bible says. Oh, I realize now the Bible says you're being loving. I mean, how many people, when we tell them the truth of God's word, tell us that we're hateful, we're mean, and yet we're saying, no, we're doing the most loving thing we could do.

01:07:04

I mean, this is loving. And two totally different perspectives.

01:07:11

Why? Well, because we're looking at it from God's perspective or our perspective. When I tell someone that you violated

01:07:18

God's law and you'd be headed to hell, they're going to look at that and say, that's so mean to say because it hurts my feelings.

01:07:26

But God says it's true. And so the loving thing to do is to warn you of the danger to come.

01:07:34

So this is the thing that in discernment is about harmonics. People ask me, because I do a lot of debates.

01:07:43

And I mean, I do apologetics live every week and anyone can come in and challenge me. How do you prepare for that?

01:07:49

How do you prepare for questions you don't even know are coming? Very simple. Harmonics.

01:07:55

Any debate you see that I do, I'm pretty much dealing with a passage of scripture for the most part and just working through it and explaining the rules and pointing out how someone else is breaking the rules.

01:08:06

So the two things I use in any debates I do is hermeneutics and logic.

01:08:13

And that's about it. And I don't fear debating people because all I'm going to do is say, well, thus says the

01:08:18

Lord. Here's why I'm saying God says this. And they're going to throw something at me. I'm going to go, but the

01:08:23

Bible says this. But the Bible says this. But the Bible says this. I just have to be right in my interpretation.

01:08:36

Now, what are some of the benefits then for learning about the hermeneutics and Bible study?

01:08:45

What are some of the benefits that you see spiritually for a human being? Well, I think that some of the benefits we have really is getting to know our

01:08:57

Lord and Savior better. That's the biggest thing. You think about things and say, okay,

01:09:07

I want to know God. I mean, so many people say that. I want to know God.

01:09:13

How are you going to know him? One of the things I do when I'm on the street,

01:09:19

I'm evangelizing, and people will say, I'm a Christian. I ask, how many times roughly a month do you read your

01:09:27

Bible? Not study it, just read it. Oh, three or four. Let me ask you a question.

01:09:33

You go get married, come back from the honeymoon. It was a great honeymoon. Come back. Your spouse says, hey, you know what?

01:09:40

I'm going to go back to my place. I'll give you a call three or four times a month. I had one woman go,

01:09:46

I'd kill the guy. Yeah, that wouldn't apply. Why? Because you have no relationship.

01:09:52

And one was, yeah, I said, but that's the relationship you said you have with God. You kind of read his, you listen to him three or four times a month.

01:10:01

If you're not talking to him and hearing from him every day in his word, how are you going to discern anything?

01:10:09

How are you going to know? This is the whole reason we do this is because we want to know the one we love.

01:10:15

This is the way we get to know more about Christ, the one who died for us, the one who paid an eternal fine for us.

01:10:27

You tell me you love Christ and don't read your Bible. I don't believe you. You tell me you're a

01:10:33

Christian and you understand the depth of your depravity and what God did for you on that cross and you don't read your

01:10:41

Bible. I don't believe you. If someone paid a hundred million dollar fine for you, you would learn everything you can about that person.

01:10:51

And you would try to find ways to please that person. But you wouldn't just go up to that person and go, hey, you know,

01:10:57

I don't know if you like flowers or not. You may hate them, but you know, hey, here's some flowers for you. Maybe the person's allergic to flowers.

01:11:05

You would first study that. God died for you. You'd study that.

01:11:12

Amen to that. Amen. So good. All right. Is there anything else that you would suggest would be beneficial for women in any form of Bible study or anything like that before we close out?

01:11:30

There's some good books you can get on hermeneutics, some that are more technical, some that are less technical.

01:11:36

I mean, you could take our course. It's free. I mean, you could go to strivingfortraining .org, go to the academy, watch the class on biblical hermeneutics, and you can watch all those for free.

01:11:47

You don't have to buy the syllabus. That's how we make our money. Wait, no, that doesn't quite work.

01:11:52

We don't make money that way. But we do that just so people can get the lessons, get the understanding.

01:12:00

But some books you could get. MacArthur has a book. I'm drawing a blank on the title, but John MacArthur has a book on hermeneutics, which is good.

01:12:14

Roy Zuck has a book called Basic Bible Interpretations, which is a good entry level.

01:12:21

You really want a good primer, one that is easy to read and short. You can get the book

01:12:28

I mentioned in the beginning, When the Ox Scores My Neighbor. You can get those at, I believe they're at the store at Striving for Eternity.

01:12:36

But that is a really good primer to just get started. If that book is too big, he has,

01:12:45

Josiah Nichols has an even smaller booklet, like maybe 40 pages, and it's only like a,

01:12:52

I think a three and a half by three or three and a half by two and a half. So it's a really small little booklet called

01:12:57

What It Means to Me. And I think that's available at trackplanet .com. So there's things like that that I could recommend.

01:13:07

But it's something that if you really love your Lord, then you want to do this study.

01:13:15

Is it hard? Does it take time? Yes and yes. Is it worth it? Extremely yes.

01:13:24

Emphatically yes. It is worth it because the more you know God, the more you will live for God.

01:13:32

And let me say this, ladies, many of you know, whether it's yourself or women that you know, there's so many women that struggle with counseling.

01:13:44

They need counseling. They struggle with decision making. They struggle with just, you've seen them make poor decisions.

01:13:52

Guys do it too, by the way, but women will see this with friends of theirs who just, you wish they would listen to you.

01:14:00

You know why they make bad decisions? Because they don't know their Bible. They don't know how God wants them to live.

01:14:07

How are you going to know that? By studying the Bible. So that's why it's so important for us.

01:14:14

Yes, so good. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you so much again for coming on to my show.

01:14:21

Well, thank you for having me. Thank you for taking me on in the

01:14:26

Christian podcast community. I am very grateful. I have grown so much listening to bunches and there's so many episodes really, but there's just so many good stuff on there.

01:14:41

I cannot stop telling people about it. Um, so again, yes, just thank you.

01:14:49

And maybe, oh, I'm looking forward to so that the people who are listening to this now, that we are moving on to our part four in which we will be talking about some of the analytical tools that are being used in the gathering.

01:15:06

And I will have you on again to talk about specifically CRT, correct?

01:15:13

Critical racism theory. I said it correctly. It's some of you might have heard it. It's critical race theory.

01:15:19

It's critical racism theory. Right. So I mentioned you here.

01:15:25

Now you have to come on. Not that you are going to come on. It's a privilege to be on your show, be able to talk to your audience and, you know, hopefully get to know them a bit as, you know, as they email you and let let you know what they think of the episode.

01:15:43

But it's just it's it's neat to get to know new folks. And, you know, I'm sure I'm going to go to some conference and they're going to say,

01:15:50

I heard you are thoroughly equipped. And I'm going to go, cool, because that happens.

01:15:56

So I look forward to those things. Oh, awesome. All right. All right. Thank you, Andrew. Have a great night.

01:16:03

All right. Don't click off the episode just yet, because I got a surprise for all of you who watched this episode all the way through.

01:16:13

I recently interviewed Pastor Jim Osman about his book, God Doesn't Whisper, which tackles the hearing the voice of God teaching that is prevalent in evangelical

01:16:23

Christianity today. He has graciously donated five copies of his book to Thoroughly Equipped for a giveaway.

01:16:30

To enter the giveaway, go to podcast .strivingforeternity .org forward slash whisper or click on the link in the show notes.

01:16:40

Enter your email and you will receive ways to earn points by watching that episode, sharing that interview on social media and visiting the websites and social media pages.

01:16:50

You can continually earn points by daily participation from July 1st, 2024 to August 5th, 2024.

01:16:59

Just want to give a great big thanks to Pastor Jim Osman for his donation and a great big thanks to those who participate in a giveaway.

01:17:08

God bless you guys. I pray you are in His Word.