Sunday Night, March 28, 2021 PM

We are going to look at our last lesson in our study, Coming to the Bible. And we save this last question because it comes up so often, I think, in reference to possibly, you know, why the Bible doesn't have any real relevance or authority or meaning today.

It usually, the question is posed, you know, well, why is there so much disagreement about the Bible? Right? Why is there so much arguing about the Bible? Why are there so many different opinions and different interpretations of the Bible?

Sometimes the question is asked directly in that way. Sometimes it's just tossed out there in basically a defense mechanism. Well, that's one interpretation, you know. Well, not everybody thinks that way about the Bible.

Well, there's a lot of people, you know, who love and respect the Bible, and they don't think that way. And so there seems to be this endless disagreement about the Bible that's posed time and again as a reason why one doesn't have to follow or believe or consider something in a certain way.

Well, there's all this disagreement. And you can understand that if there is something that, you know, we're saying this is an authority, this is the word of God, this is the scepter of Christ's lordship in our life.

And yet at the same time, everyone's saying, well, who knows what it really means? Then you have completely removed any force of that authority. So in one sense, of course, there was in recent history, a great deal of focus on the doctrine of Scripture, particularly on the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture, that there is no error in the Bible.

It not only is it infallible, but it is also inerrant. It does not fail. It is completely true. There are no errors in the Bible. But what was left somewhat unresolved is what's called the doctrine of the clarity of Scripture.

The old scholars would call it the perpiscuity of Scripture, that the Bible is clear and understandable, which that is derived from the doctrine of God, who is God? What kind of a communicator is he anyhow?

Can he communicate clearly? Or does he have trouble getting his point across? Well, what about us? We are sinful, we are limited, we are corrupt. We have skewed understandings and so on. The question always comes back to the power of God, the authority of God, the sovereignty of God.

Can't God get his message through? Is he a bad communicator that makes things, he makes things fuzzy and hard to understand, hides them, fills his word with things that just leave us with no understanding?

Is that the way God is? So I remember being a little frustrated at first when I was thinking we're having another fight over the inerrancy of Scripture. But whereas the debates a generation ago or more were about if the Scripture is full of errors, then it's not authoritative, right?

It's about the authority of Scripture. If there's errors in here, well, then how authoritative can it be? I think presently, really, it's about the clarity of Scripture. There's lots of affirmation of the inerrancy of Scripture within the wider bounds of evangelicalism.

There is, oh yes, the Scripture is inerrant, and everybody rises and pledges allegiance to the doctrine of inerrancy. But there is a strike against the authority of Scripture. There is an attack against the authority of Scripture from the angle of, well, that's your way of reading it, but not everyone's.

So it could be a multiplicity of things because it's not clear. And of course, nobody would say that God's a bad communicator. They would just say, well, it's just not possible for us to understand it clearly due to all the problems that we all have in reading the Bible.

But there's no thought given to whether or not God himself is able. If God is able to communicate clearly to us through his word, despite our shortcomings. And I think he is. I think he is. And I think the Scripture actually testifies to that.

So in my mind, that's the backdrop to this question, why so much disagreement? Now, of course, we could be just basically curious. Why is there such disagreement about the word? And I wanna talk about that tonight.

We have gone through a series of questions already that I think, upon reflection, give us the opportunity to understand why there's such disagreement. The first five questions that we went over, if we have different starting points with those questions, it's understandable why there would be disagreement about what we think the Bible says about any given issue.

For example, the first question, can I have one of those books? Does God want us to have his word? Yeah, absolutely. God wants us to have his word. He wants those, he wants everyday people, those he's made in his image, he has made us to live according to his word.

And he wants us to have his word, to meditate upon his word, to memorize it, to love it, to enjoy it, to ponder it, to apply it, to share it with others. But what if you're of the assumption that the word of God is just too holy for normal folk, only certain folk can have it?

Well, you're gonna end up disagreeing about all kinds of things in the Bible. If you think that, well, the common folk aren't really, even if they do get themselves a copy, they're not gonna, it's not really for them, it's for others to officially have.

Why are there so many disagreements between Protestants and Roman Catholics? Well, that's the reason why. That's the reason why. The scriptures aren't for the everyday folk, according to the Council of Trent, the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church.

So there's gonna be, they're gonna end up in various, widely separate starting points. Which translation? Your understanding of what translations ought to be, how they function, and so on. If you disagree about that, you're gonna end up in different places when it comes to the scriptures, and there's gonna be disagreement.

Who wrote it? How about that one? If it was, if it's basically a human book with, it's basically, this is basically just a human book with some divine cologne sprayed on. There's a divine essence to it, but it's basically a human book.

If that's your starting point, versus someone who's affirming what the scriptures say, that this is a fully divine, fully human authorship going on here, you're gonna have a completely different outcome to what you understand the Bible to be saying, because of the different starting point that you have.

When you answer that question differently, you're gonna end up reading the Bible differently. That's another reason why there's disagreement. We answered the question about why these books and not others.

Now, again, people will, what about the Apocrypha? The Roman Catholics bring that in, too, as part of the Vulgate that Jerome translated. Why these books and not others? There could be disagreement there.

Doctrine of Purgatory being developed out of one particular passage in the Apocrypha, and then developed by the Roman Catholic Church. Why these books and not others? If we have a different understanding of that, we're gonna end up in different places.

Same with, what good is it? If we disagree about that, we're gonna end up in far different areas when we end up reading the scriptures. And so, when I'm talking about our presuppositions, those things that we believe, those things that we have a position on before we start reading the Bible, before we start coming to conclusions about any given text or doctrine of the scripture, if we have different presuppositions, different starting points, we're gonna end up in a different place.

I cannot give you directions successfully of how to get to the state capital from my house if you're starting from your house, right? All my directions are going to be wrong. I'm gonna be telling you to turn down roads and go directions that is not going to work for you.

We have different starting points. So what we've been doing in our study of coming to the Bible, we've been settling some basic questions. We've been settling some basic things. And we can tell if we're in different places in that, we're going to end up in different conclusions.

Consider the way that Jesus, we've read a lot of those passages, the way Jesus dealt with the religious leaders, either Pharisees or Sadducees, chief priests and so on, as he and they are looking at the same text of scriptures.

They're considering the very same words of God and they're coming to different conclusions. Does that mean God's a bad communicator? Or does it mean that they weren't, that the religious leaders of the day weren't starting at the right place?

And that's what Jesus was calling them to, a repentance to start at the right place in reading the word of God. So that's one reason why there's so much disagreement, are those pre-commitments we bring to the text before we ever get started.

Some of that can be beyond the scope of our study. You could start off with an idea of who you think God is and any other idea of God would just be unreasonable. And then you start reading the Bible and you'll selectively move out those things that don't agree with your understanding of God and then you'll really harp on the things that you think do agree with your view of God and so on.

Presuppositions, pre-commitments, does that mean that the Bible isn't clear? Not at all. It just means that there's a need for us to humbly submit ourselves to the word of God, whatever it says. So there's presuppositions as a consideration and then some people are aware of those and some people aren't.

There's like the scribes and Pharisees who weren't aware that they were just, this is the only way to read the Bible. They weren't thinking about their presuppositions versus others who are more intentional about there's only one way we're going to do it and we have an agenda.

This naturally flows into something called hermeneutics and the old joke is Herman who? The way we interpret the scriptures and it's like, well, I just read them. That's great, you just read them. But there's a way that you're reading the Bible.

If you think that everything in here is true, that's part of your hermeneutical model. If you think that everything in here was authored by God, God breathed through human authors that were born along by the Holy Spirit to give us a perfectly true text, that's part of your way of reading the Bible, that's part of your hermeneutic.

Okay, that factors in. So there are various hermeneutical models that have been proposed and they've all been written about in papers and in journals and in books and all of them expect authorial intent to be upheld.

Let me explain this. All sorts of people think that the Bible is to be variously understood according to, and legitimately variously understood according to the starting point of whoever you are, okay?

Some people call that the reader response, hermeneutic. What does it mean to me? And whatever it means to me is what God wants it to mean. Or there's been a lot of work in recent decades on, well, your hermeneutic has to be whatever your political identity is.

Like when you, so when you read the Bible as a gay man, then you have a gay hermeneutic. If you read the Bible as a woman, then you have to have a feminist hermeneutic. If you read the Bible as a black man, you have to have an African American hermeneutic.

If you read the Bible as an immigrant, you have an immigrant hermeneutic. And if you're white and you're straight, then you read the Bible wrong. It was a long setup, but it was worth it. But that's the basic idea, that you're, it's inescapable.

Your, whatever you've been identified as in the current political system, it's inescapable. You can't get out of that worldview. And so there's a black gospel, and there's a Latin American, there's a Latin gospel, there's a white gospel, there's Eastern gospel, there's all these different ways to read the Bible.

And of course, there'll be some crossover, but. Now this is, you might every once in a while come across a phrase called the hermeneutical spiral, hermeneutical spiral. And it's meant to be a good thing, but it's basically the flight plan of a doomed airplane.

What happens in the hermeneutical spiral is they say that you're supposed to, the text and your context are in conversation with one another. And in the interplay back and forth from my, let's say I was from Latin America and an immigrant and oppressed and so on and so forth.

And so I'm reading the Bible and the Bible's reading me and back and forth until it finally zeros in on the meaning. And the meaning for me is in a different location than for, let's say, somebody living in Europe.

Because their context is different from my context. And when they do the hermeneutical spiral, that goes back and forth and it lands at a different spot. But this is the way that we come to meaning from the word of God.

And that's a very common way that people read the Bible and legitimize the disagreement of the scriptures. Now I wanted to talk about some practical ways that comes out, things that you've seen. Okay.

Possibly. When you flip through the Christian book distributors catalog, anybody ever done that? Okay. And there's all sorts of Bibles in there with identifiers before the word, you have study Bible, but before the word study Bible, there's like all these identifiers.

Women's study Bible, children's study Bible. They say, well, this is pretty tame. You could have African-Americans study Bible, Patriots study Bible, so on and so forth, right? So you have all these modifiers before you get to Bible.

What's going on there? We're gonna read the Bible through this context. Right? Oh, you get a fresh new look at the Bible if you read it through this lens in this context. Well, that's the use of a hermeneutical spiral.

Okay. That's not the way, and that's not the way by the, and so those who propose that that's the way that we should read the Bible, and that's legitimate and good, they write papers and journals and books that if we were to employ a hermeneutical spiral in reading their works, they would be very offended with us, very offended.

In describing what they believe to be a legitimate way to read the Bible, they write papers and books and journals in which they expect us to take them for what they mean when they write down a word, authorial intent, but they think it's okay to read the Bible and forget about authorial intent, the intent of the author.

Now that smells like a dead rat. So when we interpret the Bible, how do we, how do we, well, we've already talked about how to do that. We know who wrote it. God wrote it through these servants, these holy servants.

There was a particular time and context in which they wrote. We recognize that as being a very human aspect of the Bible. You know, Paul was talking about slavery in the Roman Empire in the ancient Near East prior to the fall of Jerusalem.

I mean, there's a particular context in which we recognize this is a very human book, but it's a divine book in that God intends his, he super intends the truth of his words through these people within their times.

So we're gonna try to approach it from what is God saying about these things. And when we're reading, we're, you know, again, okay, what God said to Abraham and then what God said to Paul, and we're gonna look at it and see how scripture interprets scripture.

Why would we do that? Because the Bible models that for us. Jesus kept on using scripture to interpret scripture. The apostles would use scripture to interpret scripture. The latter prophets would use scripture to interpret scripture.

And that was given to us as the model of what kind of hermeneutic we ought to have. Remembering the places and times and the realities of what was going on, but that the scripture is the authority upon scripture.

I'll give you another example of how this is manifesting. You may not have been confronted with that. Back in the late, let's see, to 2000, 2008 through about early, you know, 2012, and somewhere around there and centered on that, there was a great attack launched on the doctrine of the atonement.

The vicarious atonement of Jesus Christ, that he died in our place for our sake, satisfying the wrath of God, propitiating our guilt on the cross, God's sacrifice on the cross for us. Okay, this was claimed to be nothing more than cosmic child abuse.

Okay, that was the shock attack that this is cosmic child abuse. They would also say that the penal substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ dying upon the cross, satisfying the legal demands of God, they called this a legal fiction, a legal fiction.

They said this is a very Western idea of justification, a very Western idea of salvation. Now, what's going on when they say something like that? What they're saying is, well, that's the way that people in Western culture, like the first world culture, Europe and America and so on, that's how they read the Bible, that's how they understand salvation, but this is not an Eastern doctrine.

This isn't a third world doctrine. They see salvation totally different. Your idea of Christ being sacrificed in our place, satisfying the justice of God, that's a very Western reading of the text. And they got a lot, they made a lot of ground with that.

They got a long headway with that because it was considered very arrogant for anybody to only think in their Western way. Once they learned that they were only thinking in a Western way, then like, oh, well, I better not do that.

You know what's funny? Where did the idea of a substitute sacrifice being offered up on an altar in the place of somebody else, where did that idea originate from? The East, and most definitely the East, for it was the quite literally at the East of Eden before the path closed up by the cherubim, the flaming sword turning every which way, that Adam and Eve taught their sons to offer their sacrifices.

It is not at all something derived from a Western legal tradition that one man can stand in the place of another and be judged for their sins. That is not sustainable according to legal traditions. That is from the Bible, something that man is not gonna come up with, but God instituted from just after the fall, a hope of salvation in the sacrificial system, the shadow of the one to come, Jesus Christ, who is the Lamb of God, who comes and takes away the sins of the world.

And the whole idea of substitutionary sacrifice is something that is so reprehensible to the Western mind that all sorts of Westerners were crying about it and complaining about it, as proven by all of their books and articles against it.

But I wanted you to be aware when you hear people saying, well, that's a Western way of reading it, or so on. There's a lot of room left with this deception. How are they, and again, the attack is always going to be about Christ, because that's the goal.

Right now, there's all sorts of mess going on, but give them a chance to catch their breath. And the next thing they're gonna be saying is the idea that only those who repent of their sins and trust in Jesus Christ go to heaven is a very white way to read the Bible.

Give them a chance to catch their breath, that'll be next, okay? And when they use approaches like that, what are they doing with their hermeneutic? They're using a hermeneutical spiral, they're using reader response.

But when we read, don't be afraid of reading the Bible and saying, well, the Bible interprets itself, and the meaning is plain. God is a great communicator, and he tells us what he means. We don't have to have a bunch of special degrees and be published in order to read the Bible.

We can read the Bible, pray to God, dear Father, help me read and understand, bless me with your Holy Spirit, show me your son, Jesus, and we can read the Bible, and we will come away knowing what God has to say.

Praise the Lord. And we don't have to have special knowledge in order to read the Bible correctly. So I think those are the main reasons why there's so much disagreement, and I think the last reason, sanctification, is just a matter of this, where people who agree with, God wants us to have his word, all of it's true, and we should let scripture interpret scripture, and we agree with all of that, and yet we still disagree about this issue over here, which is not gonna be a major issue, but it's still gonna be there, okay?

Why do we disagree even then, right? For example, why do we disagree about eschatology, okay? Why do we disagree about the end times and so on? Why is there disagreement amongst Bible-believing, Jesus-loving people about things like that, or some other issues?

Well, the fact of the matter is, it's humbling to recognize that we still need some sanctification. We still need to grow. Not only do we need more holiness in the way we act, in the way we feel, but also in the way we think, and what we believe.

So we need holiness in thought, and belief, affection, understanding, intelligence, and so on. And recognizing that, I've got a lot to learn, I've got a lot of places to grow. We should have patience, and kindness, and discussion of the word.

I've noticed as I've sat with men, we used to have pastor's breakfast back in Tennessee, and back then I was really young. Some of you think I'm young now. Back then, I'm 26 years old, and pastor of a church, and sitting with men who've been in the ministry for decades, who disagree with me about various things.

But then if I listen to them talk, and we talk about the word, there's far more agreement than disagreement when we're not in an official debate. You know, when we're just talking about the basic meaning of the text, and nobody has brought up the buzzwords, and nobody's fighting over this particular word, there's actually a ton of agreement.

And I've seen the spirit work in that way. So sometimes the question, why so much disagreement? People will point at the different denominations, and so on and so forth. Well, there's actually a ton of agreement.

And praise the Lord that we're able to worship God with a church of like faith and practice that fits with our convictions, and praise God that we can do that. But there's a ton of agreement, actually.

And where there is disagreement, Jesus is gonna fix that. He's washing his bride with the water of his word. You know? And the disagreements we have today as Christians are not nearly as sharp and deep and wide as they were two, three, four, 500 years ago.

And we can praise the Lord for that. Any questions or thoughts before we close with the doxology? Yes, Norm? Yeah, I think there's one meaning to the text, essentially, one meaning to the text, and that's going to be anchored in Jesus Christ.

And there may indeed be many applications of a text, but there are not endless applications to the text. So there may be more than one application, but the application of any text should not burst the bounds of its meaning.

Yes? Yeah, I think so. It's, boy, when you do Bible study, you should study the Bible, right? Actually, read the Bible. Someone said that to me. You know, the old flip it open and point is notoriously a bad idea, especially when it's like Judas went and hung himself, go and do likewise.

You get yourself into some problems. Taking a verse by itself here and there, you know, the feel-good ones or the interesting ones. And it has been, as Francis Schaeffer observed, the problem with Christians has been thinking of the Bible in parts instead of wholes, to think of it in little slivers here and there rather than thinking of it as the whole, and we get ourselves into some trouble with that.

And it is perhaps a temptation to study things about the Bible rather than the Bible itself, because when you study things about the Bible, you walk away with more knowledge and more information. I feel like I'm better educated now.

But when you study the Bible itself, you're confronted with a living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword instrument of God. And it's very challenging, humbling. It's easier to study about the Bible than study the Bible.

Yeah, so the model, it needs to be, you know, I would have never preached certain things out of Jeremiah had I not been going passage by passage. And the same goes for a lot of books of the Bible. And yet it challenges us and it stretches us, and we learn more about God, and we're confronted with things that we would never think before.

And it's a way for God to set the agenda with what we believe and how we live rather than us. And that keeping things shallow and so on means that we're kind of setting the agenda. Yeah, I think there is a God-ordained hermeneutic, a way to read his word.

I don't think he leaves that as a mystery, but he gives us examples of that aplenty. And not least of which is the New Testament's handling of the Old Testament as the supreme example. And to summarize it, the old language about the analogy of faith, I would say the analogy of scripture means that you take up the scriptures and to see how they interpret one another.

And that's not easy to do, okay? But you could even then be in an endless effort to try to see how these connect. But we're not left in darkness there either because God has told us that when we try to understand his word, the only way to do it is to have scripture interpret scripture understood through Christ.

And all of a sudden, we receive the light that we need to understand the text. We receive the anchor for the meaning of the text. We're not endlessly flailing about. Jesus said this a multiple of times, and he gave that model to his apostles who preached it over and over again and applied it throughout their letters.

And so I think that that's the model. I think scripture interpreting scripture as it pertains to Jesus Christ. I'm not saying every single passage has some sort of type or shape. It's a shadow of Christ, but all of it has to be anchored in who he is.

The incarnation is the central point of the universe. It is the centerpiece of all meaning. We can't really do anything or understand anything or proceed without the incarnation. So I would say the incarnation is at the heart of everything, engineering, gardening, everything.

But especially when we come to the word of God, how are we going to read the scriptures outside of, in or in ignorance of, or in disregarding to Christ? That's, that will end up definitely getting the wrong interpretation then.

And Jesus warns us about that.

Mentioned, it's obvious he shouldn't have to, but he said, Mr. Moody, you're trying to tell people what the Bible teaches and you don't even know what it says. From then on, he took one week every year and went to and spent the week and read all the way through the scripture.

That week, every year that he lived after that. You don't know what it says.

Yeah, and this is where a familiarity with the scripture in and of itself does not solve all the problems because I mean, the Pharisees were very familiar, but if you know Jesus and you wanna know what the Bible says and being familiar with the word, that's everything.

Just having, I mean, the word of God should be the one subject that we know more about than most anything else. You know, that we should, and when we do that, we have all sorts of promises from God about the blessing of knowing the word of God and being familiar with the word of God,.

Being conversant in the word of God. And every time you read through it.

Yeah, it will never be a master of the word of God, but we sure need to be familiar with it. Yes, Brother Julian. Yeah, that's very important observation. One of my, I don't know if it was one of my professors, but someone said one time it was, when we come to the Bible, we don't need a hermeneutic of suspicion.

We need a hermeneutic of submission. Yeah, that's good. Ready and willing to hear what God has to say and we want to know him or we want to obey what he has to say. That makes a huge difference. All right, well, let's close by singing the doxology together.