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

All right, there it goes. All right. OK, so. Shall I just start?

I can't even hear you. Because I'm waiting for. All right. You want me to start the recording over on my end? Or 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. First intro. There you go.

The Problem of “That’s Your Interpretation”

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

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

What do people have in mind when they say that's your interpretation? I've thought about it. I thought, well, maybe they're just pointing out the obvious. I'm the one who just gave the interpretation of the Scripture.

But surely they wouldn't be wasting everybody's time by just pointing out something that everybody knew already, that it was my interpretation. 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 I've just said by a simple little equation, the simplest of all kinds of syllogism, the idea that's unspoken would be this.

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

You read it one way. I look at it another way, and a third party over here reads it still a third way. And these three may be mutually exclusive. They may contradict each other, but that's all right, because the Bible is a matter of individual subjective interpretation.

Whatever it means to you is fine. Like I say, if that's what people have in mind, it terrifies me for this reason, because then it becomes a slogan for what we call subjectivism, where the meaning of the word of God becomes tied to who's ever interpreting.

That's what Luther was so afraid of, that the 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.

If we let that happen, dear friends, then the Bible's authority collapses. Its truth has been relativized and the word of God is slain.

Thoroughly Equipped, Women’s Ministry, and the Hermeneutics Interview

Welcome to the Thoroughly Equipped podcast, where we compare the teachings from popular women's ministry books, conferences, Bible studies, et cetera, to scripture. Our focus is 2 Timothy 3, 16 to 17, that all scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.

So the man or woman of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. I'm your host, Melba Toast. May this episode bless you and bring glory to God. Ladies, welcome back to another episode of Thoroughly Equipped.

I want to say again, thank you for all of the new subscribers. Thank you for joining. And I think liking this channel enough to continue watching it. 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.

So we've been going through a series of discernment when it comes to women's ministry. And so I've been laying out for you guys how we can discern female teachers in women's ministry. 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. And so I've been busy with that. I also have construction going on in my house. So I might be a little sporadic and posting here.

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 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 exercise discernment and present discernment and call the women in the church and the women in ministry to display discernment.

What does that look like? So to start off, I thought, OK. You know how my mind goes. We need to know what doctrine is. But one of the more foundational things when we talk about doctrine, I think, is just the way we read our Bible.

How do we study our Bible? And so I thought, well, I'll produce a previous podcast episode. Luckily, that I video recorded as well. And that way I'll post it onto YouTube for you guys who are new to the podcast to see it on YouTube.

Those of you who have listened to the podcast since the beginning, you would have heard this interview with Andrew Rappaport on hermeneutics. But this way you get to see it visually. So. All right. Well, I hope you enjoy.

I hope it blesses you. And hermeneutics was a topic until, well, 2020 that I didn't really know what it was. I knew there was a correct way to read our Bible, but I didn't understand the science behind it until I took 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. It has been helped me.

It has helped me quite a lot grow into the study of God's word. 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. 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 Thoroughly Equipped community and for the ladies out there who want to know more about how to study God's word, we start with hermeneutics.

So God bless you guys and enjoy. There you go. All right, Andrew, I just wanted to say thank you, number one, for coming on my show, my little show. 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?

Sure. And thank you for having me on your big show, because it's not so little. So but no, I do appreciate coming on. And I appreciate what you've been doing with with your podcast. I've been enjoying it.

There's as you know, when I first found out about your podcast, I was a little nervous podcast about for women's ministry. Yeah, that's usually problematic. But, you know, we have been I've been at least pleasantly surprised and enjoying the episodes and what you've been providing for women to be able to to equip them.

So with that, I'll sure I'll introduce myself. My name is Andrew Rappaport. I guess one of the tidbits people find interesting about me as I grew up in a Jewish home. So I was bar mitzvahed and then came to Christ.

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

And so that's I've written a couple of books. What do they believe? Which is a systematic theology of Western religions. And what do we believe? Which is a Christian systematic theology. I have contributed to several books like on the origin of kinds, sharing the good news with Mormons.

When my oxcords, my neighbor. Yeah, I know that sounds really strange, but that is on topic for what we're going to talk about tonight. Really? That is a good primer. If you want to learn how to interpret the Bible, what he does is takes that Old Testament passage that says when my oxcords, my neighbor.

And he works through with that passage through the entire book, stepping you through how to do it, how to interpret that passage and how to apply it to us today. Oh, wow. So, yeah, it is kind of neat.

I wrote the forward to that.

All right. Is that all you do?

No, I do more. But I mean, you don't expect to take the whole hour just talking about what I do. Some of the other Christian podcast members like joke about the fact that like I have five podcasts on the Christian podcast community to that are most active on weekly is Andrew Rapport's rap report.

And that's just search for rap report, rap with two Ps or Apologetics Live. So the rap report is about basically we're trying to give biblical interpretations and applications to all things of Christian life.

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

I have been tempted to. But now we're going to wait for it. OK, I don't know.

To be watching that, to see when Melissa comes in.

There you go. And now in anticipation. All right. Well, before I ask you the very important questions.

I want to ask you and for your audience that they know because they may not know you called your show a little show. Your show is in the top 50 percent of all podcasts. It's not that little.

You 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 percent.

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

That's why you're producing good content. Otherwise they would stop listening.

Oh, OK. I'll take that, too. Yeah. 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 gathering, which is a humongous woman's conference that's held in Dallas, Texas, but also online.

I wasn't sure if you knew just how big they are. They technically have over 4000 locals, which is basically church locations, home locations, and as well as college locations. And in those locals, individual spots, you could have, you know, five to ten to 30 women in each one.

So they reach over four million women. And it's hosted. These local locals are located in all 50 states and even in 45 continents, I think, or countries. They said not continents because they're not 45 continents.

But 45 countries.

They don't know how to interpret the Bible. They may not be able to know how to interpret a continent either. I mean, that's me. Maybe a country identifies as a continent. Yeah. Oh, there you go.

That's the new thing, right? All right. So, yeah, because of that, specifically in this part of the series, I am looking at the 2020 conference, which Jenny Allen had these women go each be given a section of Romans chapter of Romans chapter eight is what they went through.

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

So hermeneutics is basically the art and science of interpretation. And it applies to anything. I mean, there's you can take a literary degree. And what you're doing is hermeneutics. You're learning how to interpret 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.

There's a way to interpret Pilgrim's Progress. We're not going to interpret Pilgrim's Progress the way we would the Bible. Why? Pilgrim's Progress is designed to be an allegory. The whole book is an allegory.

So when you meet Christian, he represents a Christian. You meet worldly wise man. He is a worldly wise man. So you have where all those names are descriptive of the people. But you're not going to interpret the Bible any old way.

There are rules to interpretation. Things like grammar. We speak, we have a language. That language has a grammar. It has rules. There's going to be things we do, and we can get into this more, because I'm sure one of the questions you'll ask me is, how do we do harmonetics?

But because that usually comes up. But some of the basic things of how we communicate. I am using words right now to communicate to you, and you are understanding my words. Whether you realize it or not, you are practicing harmonetics.

Now the question is, what are the rules you're using that you'll employ?

Right. And we'll get into that too. All right. It's an interpretation. The way we interpret it and read literature or understand words, right? Is basically what you're telling me.

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. The Bible has lots of interpretations. My response, because it depends the setting, but if 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 Bible.

I'll say something like blue cheese, jump over moon cow. And they go, what? That's what I interpreted you said. Or I'll just turn and say, so you're saying rape is okay? And like, I didn't say anything like that.

That's how I interpreted what you said. Folks, you believe this guy says rape is okay? And the guy gets upset with it. And I go, wait, it's just the way I interpret it. 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... That doesn't work when you type, by the way. 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.

But what I do is I'll say something ridiculous to show that, no, you are expecting me to follow the rules of language. And that's why you think it's ridiculous that I'm saying you think rape is okay, or I say random words.

You recognize that as being ridiculous. Why? Because you expect there to be an interpretation. 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. I remember having conversations, having to address a certain topic that is brought up in a sermon. 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. And at least this is my experience. And being like, well, wait, that's not what that says. And then they turn to me and go, well, that's your interpretation of that passage.

And it always made me go, right? You know, just my face is like, big question mark. Okay. So this is why I think women with our postmodern ideas now this idea that we can just change interpretation to 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, you know, there's a right way to interpret the Bible. And so why then should we use hermeneutics and understand humanetics and then apply it to when we study and read the Bible?

Why is it important?

Well, this is God's word. And so there's one interpretation, many applications. So I can take the same passage of scripture and apply it to the nation of Israel different than I would the church. That's possible with some passages.

There's some passages where we can have multiple ways of applying it in different situations. But there's one interpretation. This is something you'll end up seeing very often with cults and groups that are misapplying scripture.

They'll take it. Usually they take Old Testament to start with, and they butcher that. But they take Old Testament historical narratives and want to apply it to themselves today, things that have no application to them, because what they do is jump right to application.

So in hermeneutics, we have a thing that we've referred to as authorial intent. It means what did the author intend by what he was writing? So in that, there's several questions you have to ask. Who is the author?

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

Well, okay, who's John? John is one of the apostles. He's one of the oldest living apostles. The rest had died out. And he's there. Who's he writing to? He's writing to people that are dealing with Gnostics.

Who are the Gnostics? Gnostics were people that believed that anything physical was evil, but anything spiritual is good. So they would actually teach that you can sleep with a prostitute as long as you didn't give your spirit over to her.

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

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

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

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. 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 God a liar.

But we have to understand what the author meant to his readers by what he said. It doesn't, we don't ask the question, what does this mean to me? We ask, what did John write to his audience?

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 I think this is very important to understand. So you got into this, right? When you answered the question about that, you know, this is God's word and we want to know what God has to say.

So, and I'm trying to relate this to women. I don't think that women necessarily have a different way of going about studying God's word, but I think we, not intentionally. I think just the overall Christian evangelicalism of, you know, women's ministry of today is just, it's been all about devotions and not really Bible studies and the, 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 Bible on a devotional, and is there a big difference in, you know, taking the time to learn how to study the Bible yourself or just using a devotional for your morning, you know, devotion time?

What do you, what do you think?

Doing the study and doing devotions are two different things. So we have a seminar at Striving for Eternity that we come into churches for a weekend and we do a, what we call Bible interpretation made easy.

Okay. We'll spend between four and eight hours with, with a church teaching them how to interpret the Bible. And at the end of it, I end up saying, did this seem like a lot of work for y 'all? 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. This is not easy work. And when people are busy and people are, have a lot to do, especially if you're a mother with young children, yeah.

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

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. I could be wrong in my interpretation of the passage.

You can't trust me. You have to actually do the research yourself. 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 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. 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? 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.

Maybe you're going to read the Bible in a systematic way so that you can start to think hermeneutically. What do I mean by that? One of the things I do in our course, in our seminar, and I have a course online at Striving Fraternity Academy, just go to strivingfraternity .org 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?

You just need a 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. Yes.

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

They don't think of actually doing the study of engaging with the text. I never preach a sermon without teaching hermeneutics either directly or indirectly. 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 Peter in this situation?

Here he is with Jesus and he just said something really stupid. What has 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?

They lived through this and we just read it. We pass over so much because we just read it. You think about the disciples, they're in a boat. Jesus is asleep and a storm comes. 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. 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. You only see it when it comes just over the ridge of the mountains.

So they must be used to being in a storm. 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.

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

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

I'm taking the geography. I'm taking their profession. I'm asking the questions of what would it be like being a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee knowing the geography? See, all that comes into play and all of a sudden we get a bigger picture of this.

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?

So that adds a whole lot more than just reading it and seeing that they're, you know, Jesus is asleep. Jesus is asleep during a hurricane. Okay. Now here's the neat thing about that. And also I'm talking about knowing some of the original language, right?

Well, this is the neat thing. When Jesus says to the storm to be still, it's called a mega calm. So not only was it a super storm, but now it's a super calm and it happens instantaneously. No ripples in the water.

It just, boom, stops. Now that's some power. 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. 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. And it stopped even the ripples in the water, just complete calm. Wow. Yeah. Instantaneously. Do you know why they might've been frightened? Yeah. The only thing worse than being in the center of a storm is realizing Jesus is in your boat.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Amen to that. Wow. So, yeah, I really think that's missing. You can't get that from a devotional. Most definitely. That's too deep. Oh, man. So, okay. So in going back to the devotional's issues, another thing 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 God can do for you. What God has for you that day, how he wants to bless you that day.

At least that's my experience in the devotionals. And when you study scripture, you seem to be getting a lot more about Christ. I mean, like the story you just told there, how many devotionals flip it to make it about how we can trust God through storms and stuff.

And that's great. And it's good. But I mean, you displayed just in your talk and you're expositing just those, the story behind it, the history behind it. And you get Jesus is really at the center of it.

And I really feel like that's missing. 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. 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, John MacArthur has common devotionals and his are, he's going to go verse by verse through like a chapter of a book and give the interpretation.

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

Let me just front apologize, Melissa, your audience is going to send you nasty emails. I'm sorry. The worst of them is Our Daily Bread. Please just get rid of it. Please, please. 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, but there's one word in the verse that they jump off of and give you some feel good type of message.

And that's really what it comes down to. It's not helping you in understanding what the text means. It doesn't help you in really living out the text because you don't know what it means. One of the goals I have in preaching is that 10 years from now, someone will forget all about me and the message I preach, but they're going to come to a text of scripture and go, I know what that means.

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

That's the goal. Yeah. Okay. So that's a great way to segue into my next kind of question, because devotionals kind of make it more applicable and we tend to go to our scripture, especially us women, I think, go to scripture.

We have the short time, so we're reading and picking, cherry picking verses and stuff like that. Let's talk about the ways not to interpret, because I did your class online. And it was you. I was wondering who that person was.

So yeah. So in your class, you did, which 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 Bible, the tools that we use to interpret.

Yep. Right. And I think surprisingly, a lot of women do not know about that. 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 and the difference in translations and paraphrase and all that.

So, but that's not what we're going to talk about today, but the lesson is all encompassing ladies. So definitely go in. And I think you offered this. What is it? There's not a synopsis. What'd you call it in your class?

Syllabus. Yeah. Syllabus. And you're basically just, it's very affordable. I mean, extremely affordable. And then watch the videos online. All right. Plug in for that. But and the videos are free. Yes, exactly.

So what are the ways that we are not to interpret the Bible?

Well, one of the worst ways that people interpret the Bible is just to open to a random text, stick their finger and read. Judas hung himself. Okay. Let me, I didn't like that. Let me flip to another one.

Flip, go and do likewise. No, but like, I'm joking about that, but there are people, I know someone that took a job because they read in the Bible, go north. And they took the job that was further north.

They were looking for an answer. And they at the time believed that God was giving them the answer to their prayer, which job to take. They should go north because God said, go north. Has nothing to do with it.

To take a passage out of its context. People will often, again, I'm going to get myself in trouble. Please take the whole course. And then you'll see why I say these are bad verses. But Jeremiah 29, 11, a lot of people have as their life verse.

Oh, it's God knows the plans he has for me. Plans that are just all wonderful plans of, of prospering and all this. Why does no one want to go a couple of verses later, just seven verses later where he says, you know, 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? You know, it's like, who is God writing this to? Wouldn't it be nice if he would have told us, oh, wait, Jeremiah 29, 10, he tells us. It is written to those who, who come through the 70 year Babylonian captivity.

So if you live through the 70 year Babylonian captivity, that verse is for you. But you're not that old, right? But are there things we can learn from that? Well, yeah, we can learn that God is faithful.

He, he was faithful to those that he put into captivity for 70 years. He gave promises to them and he was faithful and he's, he's faithful to them. He could be faithful to us. But what we shouldn't do is just grab a verse and not read its context.

A friend of mine says it this way. 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. The worst way to read the Bible is by verses.

The, the chapter breaks and verse breaks were not added for like six, sorry, seven to 800 years after the writings of the 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, where John's pretty long, right? So they, they added the chapter breaks and verses. The problem is that people think that those verses should be read apart from all the other verses.

And that's the biggest mistake people make. I think most of the problems are solved just by reading in context. Let me give you a quick story on this is I do open air evangelism. So I would stand up for years in New York city.

I'd go 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 Bible says whatever, you know, and all I would do is say, where does it say that?