13 - Biblical Hermeneutics, Interpretation, Part 2

Welcome to the

Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Biblical Harmonetics.

We are in Part 2 of the Key on Interpretation.

What is Harmonetics, you may ask? I hope by now, if you started from the beginning of this class, you are not asking that question.

Maybe you just jumped in to today's class for the first time, which means you really should start at the beginning.

But anyway, Harmonetics is the art and science of interpretation. In other words, when we interpret things, languages, anything, when we read books, magazines, newspapers, love letters, even when we speak to people, we're using styles, we're using principles to interpret.

The question is, are we following them properly or not? Are we following the proper principles or are we kind of making things up as we go?

I sure hope we're not doing that, but many are, unfortunately. And that's what this class is to do, is to help us understand a biblical way to understand how to interpret

God's Word. So, as we welcome you, we encourage you, if you're an enrolled student, that you'll grab your

Academy syllabus, which is over there, and turn to Key Number 3, which

I think is thereabouts on page 24. You'll have all your notes there, more than we go over in class.

And sometimes you will have things that you'll only have in your syllabus, but the advantage of the syllabus is you will be able to follow along and get some extra things in there, but more so, what you'll also get is be able to grab some place to put notes on your own, so that you have them.

And so, that way you have it right there, and you don't have to go, Oh, where was that? He was talking about this. Well, you can look it up and see for yourself in your own notes.

So, we are in the second lesson of interpretation. We said there are four keys that we're going to look at.

The first was identification. That means to identify the type of literature that you have and follow the principles that are for that style of literature.

The second was investigation. That's where you're going to ask yourself questions about the text.

In other words, you're going to think critically. That's something we don't do anymore, but we want you to think critically.

Five questions we encourage you to ask. Who, what, when, where, and why. So, you want to ask yourself those questions as you go through, and look to fill those questions out as you deal with the text, and so that you have them.

Now, we're in the lesson or the key on interpretation. And that is where we are now, where we're looking into what does the meaning of the text.

And then next lesson, we'll look at the implementation, which is unfortunately kind of where most people start.

They start with looking at how they apply the text, and then take the application and give it the meaning that they want it to mean, and that's not how you're supposed to do it.

In other words, most people have it backwards. Yeah. So, we are going to look at a couple things when it comes to interpretation.

I said last week that we'd look into what it is to do some of these block diagrammings.

We talked about, first thing is you want to chart a passage. Now, charting a passage is the idea when we're going to kind of follow it through.

There's two different ways. I actually want to show an example from my study of the book of James. And what you see here, if you look at the top, and this is actually

James 3, the first 12 verses. And when you look at that, you see that I've kind of set it up.

This is my block diagram, which is going to be a little different than just an outline.

But you see I say my. Now, my is a pronoun, not really a pronoun, but it refers to a person.

So, I'm going to put who it refers to. My, that's James. James is the speaker.

So, my was referring to James. Brethren, so in the brackets, who are the brethren? Well, it says in James 1 .1

who they are. That's the scattered Jewish believers. Let not many.

Now, notice the of you. Of is a prepositional phrase, which means that it is a supporting clause.

So, what I did was I put that on a new line and I indented that. Now, you is a pronoun, so what

I did there is said again who it's referring to. And then you see become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a destrictor judgment for.

Now, for is actually a prepositional phrase. So, that should have been, typically that would be indented.

But really the idea there is it's for in English. But in the Greek, the way

I saw that was it's really we teachers stumble. It's not so much a supporting clause.

So, I pushed that back out. But the in many things was supporting. And so, you kind of see this is, let me go on to the next section here.

You just see how we've gone through this with all 12 verses.

And you can see that I have the verses numbered. This is verses 5 and 6 and 7. And you're seeing how, look in the middle there.

The tongue is said among our. Well, who's the our? Well, it's any people, any person.

Our members. That it, the it I put what the it is.

The it is the tongue. That it is supporting the initial statement that the tongue is said among our members.

So, you see how with each one of these things, we indent them. Let's go to the next. And you see there again, you can see on this one, the thing about this verse is you see how much it indents.

How much support the one thing is. But no man can tame the tongue. That's the main thing. And you see all these other things end up supporting that.

It, the tongue, is unruly evil. Full of deadly poison. Well, the full deadly poison supports the unruly evil.

So, you see how this continues to work that way. That is how you chart a passage.

So, that is called block diagramming. And we also said that what you want to do, and this was from last week, what you want to do is develop an outline.

And take the outline by breaking down each sentence in its noun, its verb, and its complete thought.

To get an idea of each, the meaning of each sentence. And sometimes that helps us to see what is supporting and what is main.

And so we can kind of get those straightened out and make the main thing the main thing. And not take something that's supportive and make that the main thing.

Okay. So, what we are looking at now, so that's kind of like what we looked at last class.

What we want to look at this class is that important word that I said we would spend some time again doing.

And that is context. Boy, we always seem to bring up this word.

It almost should make you think that this may be important.

Context, context, context. It's like a broken record. But context is one of the most important things to understanding the passage.

The meaning of the passage. There's a lot of times where people get things wrong just because they've read a verse and not its context.

So we have to keep the main thing the main thing. And not make things that aren't main, main.

We've got to do that by making sure we understand what the context of the passage is.

Again, I love the quote from Calvin, or about Calvin. That, you know, he had said that if you misinterpret

Scripture then you don't have the Scripture. You just have your own opinion. And that's not good to just say it's your opinion and claim it's

God's word. So, we want to look at context. And there's a couple different things. And we've looked at this several different ways when we look at context.

We're going to break it down a little bit different this class. But at the same time, some things you've heard before.

And repetition is good because it helps us to remember. In other words, repetition is good because it helps us remember.

In other words, repetition... No, I'm not going to go there. So, that was kind of getting repetitious.

Kind of like the Department of Redundancy, redundancy. Alright, so what we want to do though is we want to look at different ways that we have to understand the context.

One area that we examine context is to background of the characters.

Again, remember the investigation we did. This is where we start taking all those tools that we looked at in the beginning of class.

We looked at Bible dictionaries, encyclopedias, things like that. We want to bring all that together now. Because now we've done that examination, asking the questions of who, what, when, where, why.

Now we have all those tools. We're going to start looking those things up. Now we want to get the context. We want to ask background of the different characters within the book.

People that are in other books of the Bible. Outside sources, different things that would be affected.

In other words, we looked earlier just in this class on the book of James. And I mentioned that James is writing to the 12 tribes scattered abroad.

That's what he says in chapter 1, verse 1. So, it gives the idea who he's writing to, James. Well, let's do some looking into James.

James is the pastor at the church in Jerusalem. If we do some studying at that and study who these 12 tribes are that's referred to, we see that these are people who lived in Jerusalem and were scattered out because of persecution.

And they scattered. James, the pastor of that church, having a care for his people who have left the area, is writing a letter to them.

That makes sense. And you understand that when you start to look into who James is. James is the half -brother of Jesus, born from Mary and Joseph, who had pastored the church in Jerusalem.

These are believers who were in Jerusalem that were Jewish. Well, now you get some idea of who he's writing to. If you read, say, the book of Philippians, and you go in Philippians, and you see that you might want to study out who

Paul's writing to in the Philippians. Some things about the Philippians were from a town called

Philippi, which is a very unique town. It's a town where many Roman generals and people who were in the military.

One way to get citizenship was to become a military person. They actually had resided in Philippi, and by having so many of them there, they ended up getting a special kind of edict from Rome that Philippi was actually a

Roman city. So the reason that was important is that if you were born in Philippi, you could be born a

Roman citizen. Not all towns in Rome gave you that privilege. So people would have that privilege of getting

Roman citizenship as if they were in Rome. And that becomes important.

And as you read through the book of Philippians, you see citizenship becomes an important key that works its way through.

There's also some military phrases used throughout. So writing to people that are from a military background and understand and value their

Roman citizenship, this would be important things to understand as you go through that.

And so looking at some key characters and characteristics would be good. Another thing to look at when it comes to context is key themes and events.

We want to observe comments that maybe we see. Maybe you get a

Bible dictionary and you see some comments that are mentioned. Write down some key words and definitions, some time factors.

When was it written? These are some of the key questions we're talking about, right? We're talking about the who, what, when, where, why.

Well, finding out the date of the book is going to be helpful. Observing some other books of the

Bible that may give you more insight into the historical setting. In other words, I mentioned Philippi.

Well, if you read in the book of Acts, it mentions the Philippian jailer when Paul was first in Philippi.

That might give you some insight and some background. Even though that's the book of Acts, it may tell you something about what is happening in Philippi where he's writing.

So you want to look up some information that will give you insight into the historical settings and the feasts and different things.

So now is where you're going to go to those Bible dictionaries and you're going to start digging into them. Encyclopedias and different things.

More than just looking into key words. Now we want to understand more of the events and the persons and the places and all those five questions that we're talking about.

Now we want to dig into them further. We want to try to gain the understanding of these different things and how it fits this direct context.

It doesn't always fit directly. In other words, just because someone is using a word one way in one passage doesn't mean it always means that.

So you have to understand the direct context of things. Which goes into letter

D there in your syllabus is the purpose or reason. What's the need for the recipient?

What's the message of the writer? Why is the writer writing? Keep in mind that writing was not like we have today.

You don't just type away or use your voice and have it dictate it.

Kind of like I do with my sermons. But you would actually have to write out.

We kind of lost the art of writing. But back then writing was expensive. It wasn't as easily done as we have today.

You couldn't go to your local office store and buy tons of pens and pads of paper. These were expensive things.

So writing meant you typically thought through what you were going to say and tried to be concise. And tried to really get down your thoughts well and in as few words as possible.

And so when you're doing that you want to ask yourself why is the writer writing what he's writing?

And why is it important to the recipients to receive it? And when you understand some of those things it helps you to understand what's happening.

That is another realm of the context. Then lastly and these are again all the questions that we asked earlier.

We're going to look at some examples of this. But location and geography. Note the place of the recipients, the study of the events at the place of the time.

Look at information, cities, countries, bodies of water, mountains that are relevant to the passage.

Now there's things that we have to understand and things that as we study this we want to make sure that we take this into context.

The meaning of passages. Let's take an example of a couple of passages to see how we want to use the context to let the context interpret for us.

Now there are some passages. We're going to look at John chapter 8 and John chapter 10.

Where we see very clearly that Jesus is going to claim to be God. But in doing so he does it in language that was understood at the time that the

Bible was written. And when Jesus walked the earth. But it isn't so clear to you and I today maybe.

Jesus is going to say before Abraham was I am. And you're going to say well some translations say

I am he. And you're going to go well how is that really a claim of deity? What's the big deal?

Why would I say this is a claim of deity? And why did Jewish people respond the way they do?

In John chapter 10 he's going to say a similar thing. He's going to say you know the Father and I are one. Okay you might say what's the big deal?

There's many ways people interpret that. But looking at that the

Jehovah Witnesses would say well one in essence. So the Father and I are one in essence.

A new age person would read that and say well yeah. We're one we're all God. We're all one in God because we're all

God. And so they'd have no problem with that passage. It makes perfect sense in their mindset. And so the question you want to ask in looking at this is what is the meaning?

Of this passage and is there anything in the context that gives us some clues to the meaning?

Well look at this. This is John chapter 8 and verses 51 to 59.

Truly truly I say to you if anyone keeps my word he will never see death.

And the Jews said to him now we know you have a demon.

Abraham died as did the prophets. You say if anyone keeps my word he will never taste death.

Are you greater than our father Abraham who died? And the prophets died?

Who do you make yourself out to be? Notice the question. Who do you make yourself out to be?

They're interpreting Jesus' words. And they're saying hey you're saying that no one's going to die but Abraham died.

The prophets died so are you making yourself out to be greater than them? And that your words are greater than their words?

And they're dead and how does this work? So their question is who do you make yourself out to be? Almost as if they're understanding that he's claiming to be something more than just a man.

Because he's claiming to be greater than Abraham and the prophets. So he's saying at the least he's a very good person.

But maybe something even more. And they're saying who do you make yourself out to be? I kind of think they're already saying that or understanding that he's making himself out to be

God. But Jesus answered, this is verse 54. Jesus answered if I glorify myself my glory is nothing.

It is my father who glorifies me. Of whom I say he is our

God. Of whom you say he is our God. But you have not known him.

I know him. For if I say I do not know him

I would be a liar like you. But I do know him and keep his word.

Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day.

He saw it and was glad. And so the Jews answered him you're not yet 50 years old.

And have you seen Abraham? Now I think what's going on here is they're understanding that he's saying he pre -existed.

And Abraham saw him. He's saying he's older than Abraham and they're having an issue with that.

He's basically claiming eternality here. He's claiming to have a pre -existence. So look at what they say.

Jesus said to them truly truly I say to you before Abraham was

I am. And they picked up stones to stone him. But Jesus hid himself and went out from the temple.

Now Jesus made a claim that he was the I am. Now there's more going on than just the

I am statement. And many people focus on that and say see that's proof of him claiming to be deity. But do you see the context there?

There's a whole lot more. It's more than just him saying I am. They're questioning who are you?

Who do you say you are? You're claiming that you're greater than Abraham and the prophets?

I mean really? Is that your claim? In a Jewish mindset there is no one better than Abraham.

Abraham is the dude. He is the man. There is no one greater than him in Judaism.

He is the guy. The go to guy when you talk about who's the best of the best.

Abraham was him. And so to sit there and say are you better than Abraham and all the prophets?

They're kind of challenging him and saying who exactly do you claim you are? Notice he doesn't deny it.

He calls them a bunch of liars for claiming they know God. He says he does know God because he was previously with God and he was also previously with Abraham.

Claiming some eternality there. But you see they get, what do they do? When he says before Abraham was

I am they pick up stones to stone him. Now keep that in mind. We're going to come back to that.

Let's go to John chapter 10 now and continue to see how context helps us to understand the meaning of a passage.

There's John 10 22 to 30. It says and at that time of the feast of dedication.

Oh this should get you to go wait a minute feast of dedication. That's something to pay attention to.

Let me go study out in my Bible dictionary what the feast of dedication was. And I might see that it's a feast that I need to head to Jerusalem for.

And oh look at the place that it took place. In Jerusalem. Wow okay now I know where this is happening.

This becomes helpful. So this was taking place during a feast time when everyone would gather.

So we're getting an idea of what's happening here. It was winter. There we now have a time frame.

Well the feast of dedication would have told us the time frame but it's a little clearer now. Jesus was walking in the temple.

Oh we got a location again. Even more specific in the colonnade of Solomon. Okay so the

Jews were gathered around him. So where is he? He's in a place where we would expect to see him.

And that is with the other people who are out there looking at studying the scriptures and wanting to compare things.

So that's what we have going on here. Now take a look at this and you'll see it says in verse 24.

So the Jews gathered around him and said, How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the

Christ, tell us plainly. Now notice here you see they're asking him again.

They're asking him very specifically. Are you the Christ? We need to study what the Christ is and who the

Christ is to understand. This is more than just a simple claim.

This is a claim of deity. And so when we look at this we would understand some of that and see more of that.

And so we see Jesus answered them, I told you. Because they want to know an answer.

So he says, Jesus answered them, I told you and you do not believe the works that I do in my

Father's name. Now that's the whole issue they were debating here was this healing of a blind man. The works that I do in my

Father's name bear witness about me. So he's appealing to his works to testify to who he is.

And he says, But you do not believe me because you are not among my sheep.

My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life and they will not perish.

No one will snatch them out of my hand, my Father. And so what we have here is we have here a case where we see that it says in this passage that here he's claiming to be

God. That's the question, are you the Christ? That's the question they're asking. They're asking him, you know, who are you?

And in the context of asking this question, he says the

Father and I are one. So is he really claiming here very clearly that he's

God? That would be a good question. They want to know, are you the Christ? And he's basically saying, yes

I am. Well how do we know that's what he's saying? Good question,

I'm glad you asked. And I think the context helps us to understand it. So let's look at the very next passage picking up in John 10 and 31 because when we look at the context we'll see what he's saying.

Is this when he says before Abraham was, I am? They picked up stones to stone him, remember that.

Here in this passage he says the Father and I are one. And let's look at what they say. The Jews picked up stones again.

The again, what's that referred to? Oh, that refers back to John 8 where they picked up stones to stone him.

The Jews pick up stones again to stone him. And Jesus answered them, I have shown you many good works from the

Father. For which of them are you going to stone me? The Jews answered him,

It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy. Because you being a man make yourself

God. You see the context here is that here

Jesus makes it abundantly clear what is going on.

What's very clear here is that when we look at the whole context the

Jewish people are looking to stone Jesus because he's claiming to be

God. How do we know he's claiming to be God? We know he's claiming to be God because of what their response is.

They pick up stones to stone him. He goes, for what good works? They're going, not for good works, but you being a man claim to be

God for blasphemy. They understand the meaning of what he's saying. They understand that he's claiming to be

God. That's why they want to kill him and stone him. That is what we have to understand when we look at these things.

The context gives us the meaning. We look at all this around. We see where they are.

We see the times. This helps us to understand. If you look at comparing scripture with scripture, we can look and see how these passages relate.

That's one of the things we want to do. When we say, it's in your syllabus there, interpreting scripture with scripture, you compare other scriptures.

This is where we take something like the Bible knowledge, scripture knowledge,

I'm forgetting the name of it. Knowledge of Scripture Treasury is the name of the book. It was one of the books we went over that gives you all the cross references.

You can look in your study Bible. Sometimes your Bibles will give you all the cross references. They become helpful.

Maybe use a topical Bible. That's especially helpful if you are doing a topical study.

You might want a topical index study Bible, like the Thompson Chain Reference. Look at cross references.

Things like this. Where this helps us is to look at the different passages of scripture and how these multiple passages relate to one another.

That becomes very helpful for this study, is to look at how these things work, and how they relate to one another.

Another thing to do, and this is where commentaries come in, is consult another student of scripture. See what others say about it.

Is there any references from commentaries that would enhance your understanding of the passage of scripture?

Understanding some details. Then you want to systematize all of your study. You want to take all of this, and systematize it.

Take it and pull it together. You want to ask yourself some questions. Let's go to one more passage that may be helpful to look at in understanding, again a little bit of a lengthy one, but in learning how to ask the questions that we need to ask.

You see here it says, 70 weeks are decreed. This is, by the way, this is in Daniel.

That's what we have here. This is Daniel. In Daniel what we see is, this is a vision of the 70 weeks of Daniel.

What we end up having here is the idea here of this dream that he has and an interpretation of this dream.

Here's the interpretation of this 70 weeks. Week here is really 70 sevens.

What often happens is we see that a seven is a seven a seven week seven year period.

What we have in this is two seven 70 seven year periods is how most commentators interpret this.

We're going to see why they interpret this as a seven year period each week. 70 weeks are decreed about your people and holy city to finish their transgression, to put an end to sin and atone for iniquity, to bring everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet and to anoint the holy place.

This is a promise. There are certain things that are going to happen. To finish their transgression, to put an end to sin and atone for iniquity.

Some of these things you could say the atoning of iniquity could be

Christ's first coming when he dies on the cross. That's when he does the atoning work. Is that the final thing?

Maybe but maybe not. Hard to say when we look at these. Remember this is one of the most difficult types of language to interpret.

Because it is prophetic and so it's difficult. So we look at verse 25.

Know therefore and understand that from the going out of the word to restore and build

Jerusalem to the coming of the anointed one a prince shall be seven weeks.

That's seven year periods or 49 years. That happens to coincide with a period of time between a decree going out to rebuild and the time that it took to rebuild.

And so then for 62 weeks it shall be built again with the squares and the moat but in a troubled time.

So here you have a period of time it would take from the decree going out to the rebuilding of Jerusalem and then another period of time until this last period.

So after 62 weeks the anointed one shall be cut off. So what you have here is when you add this together you have the 62 weeks and the 70 weeks is 79 weeks and after 79 times 7 years then the

Messiah the anointed one shall be cut off. So that means that's a time when the Messiah is going to come.

So we have a time frame from this decree to the time that Messiah would come and we have that time frame and that fits with history.

Now what we have is all that is taken literally. After 62 weeks the anointed one shall be cut off.

That's interesting that it's cut off and the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary which didn't happen until 70

AD its end shall come with a flood and shall be the end of war and they shall make a strong covenant with many for one week that's one 7 year period and for half a week it shall put an end to sacrifices and offerings and the wing of abomination shall make desolate until the decree pours the end of the desolate.

So what you have here when you look at this is you have a period of time notice that everything there is literal you have that 7 year 7 times 7 the first 49 years very literal then you have 62 weeks 62 times 7 very literal then you have another passage last week but you notice there is some time there it says after 62 weeks then

Messiah will be cut off it doesn't necessarily follow that those weeks have to be all together because what it does say is that the 69 weeks will be together and then after that you have that last week and that last week could be sometime in the future this becomes an issue for any of my amillennial friends or postmillennial friends because what you have to do is somehow take the first 69 weeks as literal and take that last week the last 7 year period or the last half a week the last 3 .5

year period and take that figurative but notice in the context there is nothing that says that we should but there is some in the context that would allow for a time gap and that is that after 69 weeks 69 7 year periods the

Messiah will be cut off and then we see after it's cut off then we see that last week at some point so it might be easier to understand that there is a gap there that the

Jewish people would not have seen but in hindsight we can now see because we see it literally and when we look at things in history we can see the decrees that were given during the

Medo Persian Empire we can look at some other Old Testament books and see what was going on at the time this is the time of Nehemiah and we can see these things and read what was going on in Ezra and Nehemiah so this becomes a thing to do you can look at other books now what we are doing at this stage is this is where we are starting to pull all this stuff together so that we can have a more systematized understanding of what's happening that's what becomes important at this point is to grab this stuff and understand how this stuff pull this stuff together kind of need to pull yourself together well pull the study together now you've done all the study, you've done all the interpreting you've asked all the questions, you've dug into your resources now it's like how does this all fit together that's what you want to be asking at this point to understand what's happening why is this what it means, why is he saying what he says what's happening, what's all the details going on, you want to gather all that together at this point because this is now where you're starting to gain the understanding of what the text means you want to compare it to other scriptures but notice what you're doing when you compare to other scriptures is you're comparing it in context you're saying what does this mean in this context, how does this relate to the context of the other passages that you're bringing in to make sure it's fitting the same context, ok so we always want to make sure we're doing that so it's important to grab these things first to do all this work before we look at all the other passages that it could refer to or to look at what other students of scripture say, in other words commentaries those become the last thing that we're going to do and so, which is really unfortunately the first place many people start, so those really should be the last, to do all this interpretation and then you get to this point now where we're going to now that we have the interpretation we've done all the work, we've done all the study now we try to systematize it and bring it together and understand its meaning, ok that is how we do the interpretation now next class we're going to look at implementation and take a look at the importance of applying

God's word and we're going to have some differences there with how to do that and see some of that, now if you have any questions about this or want to get a better understanding, you can always email us academy at strivingforeternity .org

academy at striving for eternity dot org now a programming note there will be no class next week, no class next week

I will be in the Columbus Ohio area, actually Cedarville Ohio is where I will be this weekend be out there until Monday be driving back and so I will probably not make it so we will not have class next week, now as we do each time we want to encourage someone, we like to encourage you to encourage others and so this week we have a dear sister we want to ask you to encourage and that is

Christine LaValle you can find her on Facebook, in our Facebook group striving for eternity group you can find

Christine there Christine does a lot, she is the one who gathers all of the notes in the chat room, of all those chatters in the chat room and she gathers them together and sends them to me afterwards so I can see all the things you guys are saying about me when

I can't read it you think I don't know what you are saying but Christine is a dear sister who is checking that out and letting me know what you are saying she is someone who is always encouraging other people and therefore