How to Interpret the Bible | Andrew Rappaport | Striving for Eternity | SFE

How many of you, like me, wish that Matt would actually say what he thinks? I just wish for once he stops beating around the bush. I mean, really. All right. So Matt said a lot of things. And I could sit up here and correct all of it.

But instead, what I'm going to do is I'm going to teach you how to do that. All right? My goal, this is going to be a condensed version. We have, on our class, we have a striving current academy. We have a bizarre model.

We figure we'll teach you for free. You can go on YouTube and get 20 classes for free. And that's how we make money. No. That doesn't quite work. But they are available. There's 20 lessons that we have out on how we interpret the Bible and how to do Bible studies.

This is a condensed version of our seminar where we come into churches. And we do it in eight hours over six sessions. And we try to teach people one weekend. We try to teach people what's wrong with all the people you've been listening to on the radio or on TV.

All right? Matt, maybe some names? Why are they wrong? Well, we're going to show you how to identify what's wrong with some of those teachers. And so the thing is that this is the most important thing we can do.

We hold in our hands, many of us, something that many of our brothers and sisters around the world, even today, do not have. It's called God's Word. There are places in the world where they do not have full copies of the Bible.

We do. Many of us have many copies of the Bible collecting dust. So what I want to do with you guys is to show you ways to simply understand how to follow rules of interpretation. OK? I grew up in a Jewish family.

So I didn't understand all the Christianese that you all speak. You kind of talk funny. You don't realize that because some of you grew up in a church. But you have plenty of ways of speaking. And you have language.

It's all your own. And it's a thing that I ended up discovering that there's ways that we end up seeing things in the Bible if we understand who wrote it, why they wrote it, when did they write it, things like that.

Matt mentioned already. This is why I love Matt. He's one of the few people I know that actually gets this passage right. You see, when the first time I heard someone preaching on the passage, it talks about that Jesus, when they ask Jesus about the end times, and he says, no man knows the day or the hour.

And I heard this pastor that was preaching for 20 minutes explaining why Jesus Christ was fully God and knew everything. But somehow he didn't know this. I was very puzzled. You know why? It's a Jewish idiom referring to marriage.

I didn't see a problem when I heard that. He's just saying the father decides when the marriage festival is going to begin. The son doesn't know. In other words, he's saying no man knows. The father knows.

He's speaking of a marriage ceremony that the father decides when the time will be. And it was so simple to me. Why? Because I always grew up in an area with an understanding of that idiom. We have idioms, right?

I say, I'm so hungry I can eat a cow. How many of you believe I can eat a cow? OK, one person has seen me eat. All right. I have gone into a restaurant. I'm a Jersey boy. I've been here 49 years. We went down to South Carolina when I was in college because there was a restaurant where if you had a 24-ounce steak, you only had to pay half price.

They had a 48-ounce steak where if you ate the whole thing, you didn't have to pay for it. My buddies wanted to see me do it. I was 110 pounds, 120, 130 pounds. We went down there. I was not the guy that they have on the wall with all the big pictures where you see the big guys that eat this.

I ate a 48-ounce steak. Yeah, so me being the practical joker and the kind of guy I am, I said, you know, I'm still a little hungry. The guy says, you know what? If you eat another 12 ounce, your whole table eats for free.

My friend said, thanks for dinner. Thank you. But you realize that there's an idiom. There's things we use in language that doesn't exactly mean literally what it should mean. So there are things like, you know.

Good, he's not here. So like the fact that we can sit here and say that, yes, when we look at something like sprinkling, for when it speaks of Aaron, is that how the Aaronic priesthood would be anointed?

Yeah. Mark is a deck. Oops. Aaron's my family line, by the way. So what I want to do is I would like to go over with you a little bit of a quick version of a seminar that has to come with a warning. That's never good to start off with a warning.

There's a high probability that this hour I will upset you. I know this up front. I have no delusions. I will teach you how to properly interpret God's word, which means I could expose at the best many passages you have in your favorite verse that have been in your favorite verse for all your life you have been using.

I'll say I'm sorry up front. Some of them are even my favorite verse, maybe. But I will try to teach you how to interpret by the rules and not feelings, not your experience, and as Matt said, not your theological system or denomination.

One of the things that Matt and I have in common is we're men of the book. We don't fit perfectly into any theological system. But dispensationalism is the right one. Hey, it was good enough for Paul.

It's good enough for me. So I first want to start with some tools. And this is going to be really quick. The one thing I do like about being in Jersey is because in Jersey we speak fast. I can actually speak like my normal pace.

And the rest of you can understand. When I go around the country, I have to start to speak like this because they're not used to the way we are, right? We're a fast-paced culture. So let me start with some tools.

You guys have, if you have a Bible. OK, you have your phone, so same thing. You have the most important thing that you have to understand with your Bible. That's the first thing. To understand the Bible, I want you to understand there's three different types of Bibles that you can have.

OK? If you're going to do serious study of God's word, you're going to want to stay in what's called a literal or a formal equivalent. This is going to be where they translate from the Greek or the Hebrew, and they take the word, they translate it into, we'll use English because that's what I hope we're all speaking.

If anyone doesn't understand what I'm saying, then I'll get a big problem. But if you take one word, you translate it, you take the next word, you translate it, and after you translate word by word, then you start to look at the language to figure out how you might need to shuffle words around or add words to make it flow better for that language.

How many people speak more than one language? You guys probably weren't born in America. We only speak one language here. That's a problem you have, right? I had 11 years of Hebrew. I still didn't understand it, right?

So the thing is that when you have to translate, languages don't perfectly translate over. So sometimes what you have to do is put words in to make it flow better in the new language. A word-for-word translation is going to get you closest to the original means of things.

So you're going to have your King James, your New King James, your ESV, your Pullman, your New American Standard Bible. All of those are going to be a literal or formal equivalent. That's word by word.

Those are going to be ones you want to look at and you want to use when doing serious study. Now I'm not saying that the others are bad, but if you want to do serious study and you don't want to go into the original languages, which if you want to do real serious study, you want to, but I'll show you in a few minutes why that is later.

But if you want to just stay off the English, you want to try to stay to one of those if you're going to do study. So the next one down would be something called a freer or dynamic equivalent. This is going to be where you're taking sentence by sentence.

This is going to be like your NIV. Is NIV bad? No, that's fine. Just use an NIV for your devotions. But if you're going to sit and use an NIV and try to focus on the specific words in the NIV to make a doctrinal point, you may get into trouble because it's trying to translate the sentence, not the words.

The third is called a paraphrase. I'm not going to ask how many of you read the message, but read it like a commentary. What that's trying to do is translate thought by thought. You're getting someone's interpretation of the Bible.

Is it bad? No. I read commentaries all the time, and I read something like the message or an Amplified Bible because it is helpful, but you have to remember what type of translation it is. Does that make sense to you guys?

Okay. So let's talk about models of interpretation. This is where I'm going to get in trouble. Sorry. All right, so let's look at some incorrect models. Now, let's hope that your pastor doesn't do this, but if you watch guys on the TV or you listen to guys on the radio you're going to watch these things happen often.

All right? First one is isolationism. Isolationism is going to be where you take the passage, you're going to interpret the passage without any regards of the verses before it or the verses after it. I love when I come in contact...

Any of you have experiences with black people or Israelites? Some of you are saying, what? Praise God, you don't know what that's like. I do street ministry. They are probably one of the roughest guys to deal with, especially for someone like me.

They believe that only blacks are going to heaven and that the African slaves were brought over and that those were the Israelites. I present a real problem for them. They're like, oh, wait a minute. I can trace my line all the way back through Levi.

Can you? Oops. That's how we figure out genealogy. They have a way of thinking. The way they interpret the passage, it's not to read it like it's a novel. No, they go out to Isaiah and they say, you have to read it line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, there a little.

So they say, you've got to grab here, and you grab there. No, that's not how you do it. So what they do is they grab one verse, they take it out of context, they grab another verse out of context. And ultimately what they do is they slam them together and that's called proof texting.

You grab a verse over here, regardless of what the context is, you grab another verse over here, and you slam them together. I'll show you some examples. The last one is spiritualizing, where you try to take something and give it a meaning.

Let me give you the most popular one, I believe. The Song of Solomon. What is the Song of Solomon about? Is it about Christ and the church? So it had no purpose for 700 years? Right? Not actually 500 years.

No! You see, it's actually something that is glorifying of God, it's talking about a marriage. It's a whole marriage ceremony. That has implications for the church. By the way, side note, why is it that we should be against same-sex marriage?

For a very simple reason, what does marriage represent? It is a covenant between God and His people. Why is it that they don't want to just call it same-sex unions? You know, it's funny, the one thing I always find is these are the same people that say there should be a separation of church and state.

Really? Who gets to define the definition of marriage? Oh, that's a church issue, stay out of it. Right? They don't want to stay out of it. So, let's look at some examples here. First example on isolationism.

If you know that this verse has now taken over in the last three years which is the most popular verse over John 3 .16. This verse, Jeremiah 29 .11, is on more refrigerators, backpacks, things like this.

This is now the light verse for more Christians in America than John 3 .16. Let's read this. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and hope.

That's so good, isn't it? It makes me feel good. I just wonder, if I look at the context of that, why is this the known light verse? It's only six verses later, seven verses later. Thus says the Lord of hosts, Behold, I am sending on them sword, famine, and pestilence, and I will make them like vile figs, that they are so rotten they cannot be eaten.

I will pursue them with sword and famine and pestilence and make them a horror to the kingdoms of the earth and be a curse, a terror, a hissing, and a reproach among all the nations where I've driven them.

How come no one's got that on their refrigerator? I did a seminar in Georgia, and one of the guys took that verse, put a nice picture of like a sunset, and put it up on his Facebook wall, and people were liking it.

And he's like, I didn't even read it. Wouldn't it be nice, I mean, if God just would tell us, Who is he speaking to in Jeremiah 29? Wouldn't it be nice if he... Oh, wait. One verse before, he just did that.

For thus says the Lord, When 70 years are complete for Babylon, I will visit you and fulfill to you my promise to bring you back to this place. Were any of you in the captivity for 70 years in Babylon?

Then that verse wasn't for you. You see, we take the verse that we really like, and it makes us feel good. So we rip it right out of its context, and say, this is a promise. God's going to give me blessings.

Seven verses later, he told Israel that he wasn't going to give them blessings. He was going to make them a horror to the nations. Context becomes important. When you rip a verse out of its context, you might make it say something it doesn't actually say.

This is a verse that was for those people who were taken captive in Babylon. And that's who that's for. So if you were not one of those Israelites taken into captivity, the verse doesn't apply directly to you.

Oh, but wait. Could it apply? Sure it can. You know what this does? When you look at this, what's this? He will fulfill his promise. That's right. This verse is there to show us that God is faithful. The things he promises, he will keep.

He made very specific promises to the nation of Israel, and he fulfilled those promises. He told them they would go into captivity for 70 years. They went into captivity for 70 years. He said that during those 70 years, he would cure them of their idolatry.

Guess what? Israel never had an idolatry problem since that captivity. They traded in it for legalism. So let's look at another example. Another one of the most misused ones. Matthew 18 to 19. Again, I say to you, if two or three agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done to them by my Father in heaven.

Had a friend of mine in college who told me he had no money for a car. They co-signed a loan for him. Yeah, I'm not that dumb. And so, you know, the next day he said, hey, I'm getting a brand new car.

He's getting a brand new car. Where did he get the money from? Did your parents suddenly change your mind and give you money? He said, no. I got a couple of friends of mine who agree with me on earth.

And where two or three agree, God's going to give you. You know what? The very next verse is another one that's misused. Look at this one. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in their midst.

This is like every pastor of a small church's favorite verse to use in a prayer meeting. Well, where two or three are gathered, are either of these verses dealing with either of those two contexts. Church discipline.

These are dealing with and encouraging people when you're having to deal with a church discipline situation. No pastor likes to deal with church discipline. I've counseled many pastors through different church discipline settings.

I've never met a single pastor that ever slept well before church discipline had to take place. Okay? This is an assurance to someone that had to do something that's very uncomfortable. All right? That's the two or three.

This one, let me give you this one. This is proof testing. Grab one verse from one spot, grab another verse from another spot, slam them together. This was used on me when I did a debate with Joshua Evans.

Joshua Evans is one of the leading Muslim apologists, Montclair State University. By the way, Joshua Evans now has in his contract after that discussion, Joshua Evans will not be on stage with a Christian ever again.

In other words, he only likes talking to people about what Christianity believes to people who don't know what Christianity believes. Here's what his argument was. He said that Jesus, he was going to prove to his audience that Jesus Christ was not God.

He said, see here, truly, truly I say to you that a servant is not greater, a servant is not greater than its master nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him, John 13, 16. And he said, see, Jesus is saying that if you have our servant, you can be greater than your master, but you can't be equal to your master.

And then he goes to John 6, 57 and says, the living, as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he will also live because of me. And he says, see, the Father sent him.

That makes him a servant. Therefore, Jesus can't be God because he was sent. And he said, he can't be equal to the Father. You see, each one of those have two totally different contexts. And neither one of them were trying to make the point that he was using.

But no one in the audience that was Muslim understood that. Here's one that, when we talk about spirituality, I went to, my wife is from Hong Kong, and so we went to church once with her sister. And this was Resurrection Sunday.

This was the pastor's verse. John 20, verse 1. It says, And now on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, and when it was still dark, and they saw the stone, and it had been taken away from the tomb.

That's a good verse for Resurrection Sunday, right? Yeah. You know what? I got more when I was sitting in the Chinese service and not understanding a word of what was being said and just reading the Bible than I did out of this message that this guy preached.

Focused on one word, dark. His whole message was about the dark. We have dark times in our lives, and we have spiritual depression, and we have things that don't go our way. The whole thing was on darkness in our life.

At the end, when people were reading the pastor, this one guy that was two in front of me was saying, you know, pastor, you know, first of all, the pastor said, hey, I haven't seen you since Christmas, so I kind of figured out who he was.

But the crazy guy says, oh, pastor, that was such a good message. I would never have seen that in a text. Madness, spiritual caress, I suffered from it. I'm just a little bit more in my sanctification because I learned to hold my tongue that time.

I was going to go, of course you wouldn't have seen it in a text. Christ wouldn't have seen it in a text because I wasn't in the text. You want to know why it was dark? The sun had arisen. That's why it was dark while it was still dark.

I mean, it was still dark. The sun hadn't risen. It wasn't talking about depression. This is not a verse talking about depression. He didn't mention what the tomb was representing, but spiritually, I was kind of always wondering as he was preaching through this, okay, if the darkness is talking about depression, what's the tomb?

Like, you know, what's the stone going to be, you know? So let's deal with some correct models, okay? It's always good to have some correctness. So we want to use an inductive Bible study. In other words, we want to take what the text says and we'll look at it in the big picture and understand what the context is of things and break it down piece by piece.

So we want to use what I'm going to say as a normal or literal interpretation. As a dispensationalist, we would always say we use a literal interpretation, okay? If you don't know the term dispensationalist, that's okay, but we can talk after.

But the idea is that what the thing is is I say a normal interpretation. Why? Well, because if I say I'm so hungry I can eat a cow, that's an idiom and you know not to take that literal, right? There are certain things that you know not to take literal.

In other words, if someone has a literal dream of a dragon with keys, you know it's a literal dream and you don't have to take the keys as literal. Just saying. So the importance of context, right? You guys are picking up where Matt and I kind of have some disagreements.

I'll let you know what you want to say. So let's look. The first thing we want to talk about is there's going to be a biblical context. Okay? What's happening at this time, biblically? There is a big difference between what happened in Israel and what happened in the New Testament.

For example, someone asked a question to Matt about the baptisms. What was the baptism of John? Many of you probably don't know what the baptism of John was. The baptism of repentance. Why would John the Baptist seem so strange?

Very simple. John was doing a Jewish ceremony when a Gentile would want to be Jewish, he would be immersed into a pool as a ceremony of conversion to Judaism. That's what John was doing. That seems really strange that John is doing that to Jewish people.

Right? That's the whole thing. So what's going on in a biblical context? What's going on in a historical context? That becomes important. Where are you if you look at Jeremiah 29? Where is that in history?

How does that play out in a biblical context? How does that cultural context? I already gave you the example. One of the few times when Matt Slick is actually right is when we talk about the fact that this idiom of only the Father knows the day and the hour.

That's a cultural thing. You have to understand the culture to pick that up. Grammatical context. We can look at that, but there's times where even the specific letters, the specific tense of words can make a difference.

A spiritual context. All right? So let's look at some examples. I'm going to try to go through this kind of quickly. And now, I have the advantage of going this way. Like Matt said, as he went through things really quick, you can go to QARM and follow up and see more details of everything he went over on the doctrinal grid.

Same thing here. I have all this on, we have 20 lessons on YouTube. So if you want to slow down and go at a slower pace, it's all available to you. And it's really expensive. It's free. So, that's strange, right?

A Jew giving things away. I'm like the only one that's not a lawyer in my family, right? You know? So, so when we talk about historical context, we want to understand, you know, think about understanding the Book of Jonah.

Why is it that Jonah didn't want to go to Nineveh? You know, when I preached through the Book of Jonah, there were so many commentaries talking about how bad the Ninevites were. And they were really people.

They would take their enemies and they'd put them in like a plaster paris with their mouth open and have them pour hot liquids down their throat. And all these commentaries were saying, Jonah was afraid.

No, no, no, no. Jonah says why. In chapter four, he knew God would show mercy and he did not want that kind of mercy. He did not like those Ninevites. He wanted justice. He wanted judgment. Actually, I think he went up on that hill in Jonah chapter four to get you watching.

I'm waiting. That fire's going to come down. I'm just going to get inside. I'm waiting. He did not want that because they were enemies. So, you have to understand, if you're going to look at Daniel, you're going to need to understand something about Babylonian history.

When is that? You're going to need to understand the Medo-Persian Empire. If you're going to understand the book of Daniel. So, much of the New Testament is going to require some study of history. Understand the history of the times.

You know, something else that is helpful is geography. Let me show you a quick picture to show this. It doesn't come up so well on the thing here, but you see here, these are all mountains. You see that?

Those are all mountain ranges in the Sea of Galilee. Matt tried walking on water there. It didn't work well for him. If I was there with Matt, I would baptize him and just held him under until he gave up.

Here's an interesting thing. I'm going to show you how just understanding something of geography can give you a better understanding Bible. Do you remember when they were talking, they were on a boat, and all of a sudden a storm comes up and the sailors get nervous?

They were fishermen. They were used to being on this water. Let me tell you something about how many of you have been into boating? Very few. I grew up in a Jewish family. I grew up on a ship. That's my childhood.

I understand much about boating. I've been in some rough waters. I've only been steered once on a boat. It was when I was at the bridge. My father had me to steer, to pilot the boat. I could see the next wave that we were supposed to go over.

I'm 35 feet off the sea. That's how high the bridge was. These guys had that experience. Why? Because you see this bridge. They're in a valley. A storm is going to come. They can't see over the mountain range, when they're in this water.

Storms come in from nowhere. If you're out at sea, you can see storms from miles away. You know where to avoid them. When they come in over a range, they almost seem like they come out of nowhere. In other words, if you're fishing on a regular basis, you're used to being in storms that you couldn't prepare for because you didn't see them coming.

When they get nervous, these are people who are used to being caught in storms, and they're scared. That was not a normal storm. Something like just this bridge line helps us understand that there's something different about that.

Let's take a look at a cultural context. Is Jesus Christ God when he says he's the Son of God? Well, if you have that, knock at your door with people that want to give you a magazine called Watchtower, and they're going to want to share with you that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, not God.

Is that what Son of God means? Well, it's a simple question. You can ask him. Does that mean he wasn't a man? Because he called himself Son of Man more than anything else. Just ask him. And by the way, if he was, if he was, like, not God, why did he always have to remind people he was the Son of Man?

Like, why would he have to keep saying he's a man? I mean, at some point, if someone keeps reminding you they're a human being, what do you do at some point? You're like, of course you're a human being, what do you think you are?

Why did he have to keep reminding them? What does Son of mean? Does it mean offspring? Well, let's see. Here we see James and the son of Zebedee. Who's his father? Zebedee. That seems pretty easy. No, that actually can't be.

He's the sons of thunder. See, James and John are the sons of thunder. Zebedee must be a storm. That's the name of lightning, right? Zebedee and Mary were two clouds of thunder that got together and...

No. No. This means they were loud and strong. Now, I have a friend of mine who actually has been a professional fighter in cages. He said he would rather get in a cage and fight someone than go on the streets of New York and openly proclaim the gospel.

That's how free he is. But here, what you see is son of God, not the offspring of God. That Jesus is a character of man, not just the offspring of man. It can mean offspring, but that's not the only meaning of it.

Let's look at a grammatical one, 1 John 5 13. Matt was talking about the fact of can you lose your salvation? Well, I'm going to give you a verse to show that you cannot read this. And this is where grammar matters.

This is why you should go back into the original languages if you can, and afterwards I can give you some help with tools that can help you. But I write these things to you who what? Believe. What context is belief?

Is that past, present, future? Present. So you currently believe. To those who currently believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may, what's this? Is that future? You may know that you, you're going to get it later?

No, you have eternal life. If you know God, then you have eternal life. It's not something you get later. Just the simple thing of a tense in the Greek can make all the difference. Sometimes our English doesn't have that word too well.

Let's look at an example of that. Matt was mentioning or I think came up in a question the issue of agape love. There's three words for love used in the Bible. There's eros, which is more of an erotic love.

There's philebo, some of you can pick that one up, the city of brotherly love. And then there's agape, self-sacrificing love. In this passage in John 21, this is a case where Peter is coming and what you have is you basically have Peter coming to Christ and now Peter has denied him three times.

I don't know how many commentators will focus on the fact that the reason that Jesus asks him, do you love me? He asks him three times because Peter denied him three times. Well, let's look at the brief.

Now I color-coded this for you. I'm going to replace the word philebo, which is in blue, with the word like. I'm going to replace the word agape, which is in red, with the word love. Let's see if we can figure out the difference.

John 21, 15 -17. When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon, Peter, Simon, son of God, do you love me more than these? And he said to him, Lord, you know that I like you. He said to him, feed my lambs.

He said to him a second time, Simon, son of do you love me? And he said to him, Lord, yes, Lord, you know that I like you. He said to him, tend my sheep. He said to him a third time, Simon, son of John, do you like me?

Peter was grieved that he asked him a third time, do you like me? And he Lord, you know all things, you know I like you. Why was he grieved? Not because he denied him three times and he asked him three times.

He was grieved because Christ was questioning the level of love that he had. Here he's saying, do you love me? Oh, you know I like you. No, no, no, do you love me? You know I like you. Do you even like me?

You know all things, Lord, you know that I at least like you. There is everyone, he went through, yes, he was questioning his own level of love. But you see, even in something like this, the grammar matters.

The specific tenses, the specific words used make a difference. I'm not going to get into this, but I'll just touch on it lightly. Revelation 3, what you end up seeing there, the focus that people do is they say that the hot and cold, people try to argue the hot and cold or whether you're really on fire for God or just dead.

Does God want you as a believer in Christ being dead? No. Okay? So this is not speaking of that God would wish that you were really on fire or just warming a pew. It's just that he doesn't want you in between.

That's what people talk about. They talk about being lukewarm. No. This is talking about historically, culturally, where this is geographically. You understand that in Laodicea there were two streams of water, hot springs that were good for meditating.

Many of us like to go into a hot tub. It feels good, especially after doing some heavy training or something. Or they also had a cool stream of refreshing water, even like a nice cold glass of water. Refreshing.

How about lukewarm? What do you do when you have lukewarm water that was really cold but you left it out in the hot summer day and then if you had to drink it and you wanted that cool, refreshing water, what do you want to do with that water?