Living by the Book - Workbook Discussion

Workbook Overview and How to Study a Passage

We are now going to look at our workbook overview. I understand some have had some difficulty with it, so we're just going to walk through it. If you did write your answers in, raise your hand when it comes time if you want to share your answers with the class.

But the goal this week was to do pages 15 through 20. Now next week, you have the option of choosing which ones you want to do. I think there's five choices I gave you. You can choose which one. So I'm not asking you to do everything every week.

It's to choose which ones you want to do. And then next week at the end of class, just like tonight, you'll have the opportunity to share what you did. So please choose what you're going to do next week.

So under number one on page 15, observing a passage of scripture, it quotes from our textbook. It says, what makes one person a better Bible student than another? He can see more. That's all. The same truth is available to both of them in the text.

But one sees more than the other. That's it. If you want to get more out of Bible study, it helps to know what you're looking for. Use the following list of questions to help guide you in your search of scripture.

You probably won't use every question for each passage you study, but at least they provide a good starting point. The more completely you can answer these questions, the better you will observe God's truth, which then provides a strong foundation for interpretation and application.

So these are the questions. Who is the author of the passage? Whom is the author addressing? God's people, a specific church, unbelievers. What is the most important term and or concept of the passage?

Remember we just talked about terms. Is there a term that's used? Maybe it's a term you're not familiar with. What are the main verbs? What do verbs do? Show action. They're the action words. Ran, sat, you know, all those words, they're verbs.

What are the tenses of those verbs? What does tense mean? Yeah, is it something that happened before? Is it something happening now? Is it something that has happened or will happen? All of those are tenses of the verbs.

In fact, one of my favorite Bible verses to preach, and if I were ever invited to a church and given no time to prepare, let's say I was sitting in church and somebody says, brother Foskey, stand up and give us a word from the Lord.

And I just had to preach on the spot. I would preach Romans chapter five, verse one. Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. And the reason why I would choose that passage is I would focus on the tense of the verbs.

Therefore, having been justified, that's already happened. We have peace. That's a present. And through, which is the preposition, our Lord Jesus Christ. How do we have peace with God? Through our Lord Jesus Christ.

So I would just, honestly, I would do a grammar lesson. We have peace because we have been justified. Right? So that's what you look for. Look for the verbs and the tenses of the verbs. Another thing, are there terms you need to define so that you can better understand the passage?

Maybe the passage mentioned something like Leverite marriage. You don't know what that is. Maybe the passage member is a city of refuge and you're reading the Old Testament and it mentions a city of refuge and you don't know what that is.

We're gonna talk later in the course about Bible dictionaries. We're gonna talk about looking up phrases and words and terms that you're not familiar with. Those are helpful. Are there people or places you need to identify?

What do you already know about the people and places mentioned? Like for instance, if we said, if we were reading about the Mount of Transfiguration, who was with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration?

The three disciples were Peter, James, and John, and then Moses and Elijah were with the Lord. So there were six figures, right? Jesus, Moses and Elijah, Peter, James, and John. What do we know about Peter, James, and John?

They're disciples. What else do we know? James and John are brothers. James and John are brothers, yeah. Closest. Every time something big happened in Jesus's ministry, there was always those three guys.

They were the inner circle of Jesus's ministry, Peter, James, and then what do we call John? The beloved disciple, right? So right there, just right away, we already know these things, but that doesn't mean that's not an observation.

That's an observation that you've already made in the past that you bring into what you're reading in the present. You know it, so you keep that knowledge. Can you identify any cause effect relationships in the author's writing?

Cause and effect is very important. In what ways does the passage apply to your own personal life? If there isn't any obvious application, is there a more subtle application? Now, when we talk about application, we're gonna talk about some of the dangers of misapplying texts, which does happen, but there's nothing wrong with recognizing some things immediately.

You know, when it says Jesus was hungry, well, I get hungry, and I know what it means to be hungry. And I know it's so silly. No, it's an observation. I know what that means. But I don't know this. I don't know how the divine son of God experienced hunger because I know he was a man, but I don't know what his experience would have been like.

So it begins a series of questions in my mind about him and his humanity, right? All right. What things from this passage might you want to study later in further detail? That happens a lot when I'm preparing a sermon because I'll get to the point where I have so much information.

Oftentimes, I do not preach all that I have in my notes because if I did, I would be there much longer. And, you know, that's just natural. You write more than you preach. And oftentimes, I have... Give a little secret away here.

There are times where I have so much information that I'll put at the end of my notes various things that I want to go back and deal with later. And sometimes they'll come in. It'll be just notes at the bottom of the page.

And that'll sometimes turn into another sermon because as I'm preaching the sermon, I'll be thinking about one of those things and that'll become what I do next week because I see that's more important than I even realized.

And so that happens. That's the study. And what do you want to study in further detail? What, you know, maybe you're doing something about the Jesus going into the temple and cleaning out all those money changers.

And maybe in your mind, you start to think, you know what, I wonder what they sold in that bazaar, that sales area. I wonder what was being sold there. And so you began this study of the first century temple and you start studying the court of the Gentiles and the court of the women and you start in your mind, you start learning about that.

Something that wasn't there before, but now it's of great interest to you. Yeah, rabbit trail, but a good one. Well, that's right, John. It's like a rabbit trail. So one of the things it says in the workbook, you may want to photocopy this page and put it in your Bible.

Use this as a starting point, especially if you are somebody who's teaching. This is a good place to start. All right. So with that being said, that was page 15. Now we're going to look at page 17 and this is going to give us a verse.

Now this says it's going to take 30 minutes. So we're not obviously going to do the whole thing, but we're going to do observing a verse. We're going to look at the passage that is here, Psalm 93 verse one.

And he quotes from the book. He says, remember an observation, your main concern is what do I see? Pay special attention to terms and grammatical structure. Also look at the context. All right. So let's try observing Psalm 93 verse one.

Since we're choosing a Psalm, the context of what comes before and afterward may not be as important as in a narrative passage. However, the more you read the Psalms, the better you can detect similarities and contrasts.

But for now, let's turn our attention to the single verse, Psalm 93 verse one, which says, the Lord reigns. He is clothed with majesty. The Lord has clothed and girded himself with strength. Indeed, the world is firmly established.

It will not be moved. All right. So we're going to read the questions. How many of you have something written in your workbook? You do. Okay, I'm going to ask you maybe what you wrote, but let's read the question first.

Begin by going through the questions on observing a passage, page 15. Not all of them, excuse me, not all of them will apply, of course, but note the present tense of the verbs. If the Psalmist wrote in present tense, does that mean the verse is now past tense?

That's a good question. Understand what he's asking, because notice what it says. It says in the verse, the Lord reigns. Well, that's present. Can we say that today? Or was that only true when the Psalmist wrote it?

It's still true today. So it's still in the present tense today. Okay. And it goes on. He is clothed with majesty. That's he's still clothed with majesty even today. All right. Did you have something brother you wanted to share?

That's right. Amen. Now, what would you say is the main theme of this verse? Majesty. He reigns. Can't be moved. Sovereignty. Okay. That's a good word. That's a 50 cent word. It's a good one too. You know, when we named our church Sovereign Grace, a lot of folks were afraid that people were going to have trouble because it was such a long word, like have trouble spelling it.

And honestly, I mean, sovereign is not a word most people use in their daily lives, you know, but we felt like it was all right. But it was a question. It's just, you know, we didn't call it, you know, Grace Church.

That one sounds a little easier. Sovereign Grace. That's tough. He is eternal. That's right. Strong, his power. All right. Forgetting about religious language for a moment, what comes to the mind when you think of a Lord?

Someone of noble birth, someone in charge. Yeah. Having power to hold something over somewhere. King, Lord, King. Okay. What does it say? Yeah. And even in older English, when people would use Lord simply to reference the head of the house, some, you know, you might call the man of the house, Lord, Lord and lady, whatever, you know, and even then it still represented a position of authority.

You know, you don't call the child Lord. It's always the, what's that? He's a lad. He's a lad. Yeah, not a Lord. He's a lad. In addition to the questions already provided, let's go to page 18. In addition to the questions already provided, here are a few additional things to observe to get you started.

What words or phrases are repeated? Why do you suppose they're emphasized? Let's go back and look for repeated words. Are there any? Yeah. The word Lord is repeated. The word clothed is repeated. He is repeated.

Is he repeated? Himself, himself. Okay. All right. All right. God is described by the terms majesty and strength. What connection, if any, do these terms have? Does one necessarily suggest the other? I think they're separate.

Okay. I do agree they're distinct. Wouldn't we say though, it would be hard to imagine a weak majesty? I mean, so I would think that there would be some connection, not in meaning, but in how they flow, in the flow.

And I think that's what he's saying. Is there an idea that when we think of majesty, we don't think of weakness. We think of power.

One is visual, more visual. The other is more physical. Okay. Strength would be probably construed as being more physical, as for the majesty being more physical.

Do you have something, Julie? You look like you're Yeah, well, yeah, because I had put he is royal over all. His strength and his wisdom cannot be moved. Okay. So I kind of thought they sort of ran along the same line in that regard.

I mean, that he is above all, which would make him the strongest of all.

Okay. Yeah, and again, these are your observations. I'm not, yeah, I'm just, I'm throwing out ideas. And I think that these are good questions that we ask. I think this next one is actually interesting.

He said, why did the author suddenly move from describing the Lord to writing about the world? You notice he does that. The Lord reigns, he's clothed with majesty. The Lord has clothed himself, girded himself with strength.

Indeed, the world is firmly established. It will not be moved. Why go from talking about one to the other? It, yeah, it identifies him. The world is his creation. And what does creation do? It reflects the creator.

Yeah. It won't be moved, neither will he. In Psalm 46, what is Psalm 46? This is, ah, now I've lost it. What, how does Psalm 46 begin? Begins, ha ha, somebody find it, because I just, it ran out of my mind.

Psalm 46, I'm God is our refuge and our strength, our very present help in times of trouble. Therefore, I will not be, what? Moved. I will not be moved. Even if the earth gives way, even if the mountains are picked up and thrown into the sea, I will not be moved because the Lord is my refuge and strength, right?

That's the, that's what we're seeing. And going back to now, back to Psalm 93, it references God as Lord, and then it says, and his world will not be moved by, because it's his world. Nobody's going to, nobody's going to come in and rock God's world.

Nobody's going to turn his world upside down. It's his, right? I remember R .C. Sproul said this. He said, if there's one molecule in the universe that is not under the command of almighty God, that molecule could be the one that threw his entire plan upside down.

God is sovereign over everything, every molecule. As if there were one that was not under his control, that could be the one that destroyed everything. All right. For the sake of time, let's just quickly jump to the next one.

We won't do the whole thing, but you see how this is working right now. Do you see how the workbook works? We, and this is basically what it's going to keep doing. Gives you passages, it asks you questions, forces you to dig deeper, forces you to look for things, gives you things to think about in your looking.

So on page 19, we have 1 John 3, 12. This is what he says at the beginning. He says, whenever you study any verse of scripture, be sure to place it in its own context. See it both in terms of what goes before and what follows.

1 John 3, 12 should provide ample opportunity for you to practice your observation skills. Here's the verse with space provided for your notations. Quote, not as Cain, who was of the evil one and slew his brother.

And for what reason did he slay him? Because his deeds were evil and his brothers were righteous. Now, before we even get to Dr. Hendricks' questions, I want to ask you a question. What do we notice right away in this translation?

Anything, anything. Yeah, it's a middle of a thought, right? So it would be almost impossible to know what he's talking about without at least having some context, right? There's something that he is addressing, a subject that he's addressing.

This is why I really loathe fortune cookie Bible study. Fortune cookie Bible studies where somebody just comes in and throws out a verse. Well, what do you think it means? What do you think it means? It's like we sit around a table after Chinese food and we all open up our fortune cookies, which interestingly enough did not originate in China.

Fortune cookies are not from China, but we use them thinking they're Chinese. But we open it up, we read a sentence and we all talk about what it means. So people do that with the Bible. People read a Bible verse, divorced from its context.

And then they say, well, Wilma, what do you think it means? Chuck, what do you think it means? Sharon, what do you think it means? You go around the table and they never figure out what it does mean because they're too interested in learning about what they think it means.

Yeah, sorry, that was a... But the first thing we observe is this is in the middle of a context and to understand this passage, context would be necessary. All right, so getting down the list again, we'll only do a couple of these and then we'll pray and be done.

It says, again, begin by using the questions on the observer passage of scripture sheet, page 15. This time you should find more significance in the author, the context and the people mentioned regarding context, anytime a verse begins mid-sentence, you have a clear mandate to take note of what precedes it.

That's what we just said. Read the story the writer refers to. Genesis four, we're not gonna do that. If you guys remember the story, Genesis four, Cain and Abel, right? Now, if you were doing this right, if you were taking the 30 minutes it says that it should take, then that's what you would do.

If you came to this passage and you read that and you said, I wanna understand this better, then you should try to read whatever the passage is citing. In fact, many of us have Bibles that do us a great favor.

They do this when they're, they will have your passage, like let's say it's John chapter four and it'll have the verse and then it will quote an Old Testament section and it will be indented. And then it will go back to here.

Then it'll quote another passage and it's indented, right? When you see that indentation or sometimes your Bible will have it in italics where it's curved just slightly, that's usually telling you that that's quoting an Old Testament passage and your inquisitive observational mind, which we are honing like a sharp knife, should go, bing, I wanna know where that came from.

No, I wanna, in fact, if you ever read Hebrews without cross-referencing, shame on you because it's all referencing the Old Testament. It's referencing the sacrifice. It's referencing those things. And if you read the book of Hebrews and never looked at the cross-references, I don't think you would really be able to arrive at a proper understanding of what the writer's saying because understand this, the reason why it's called to the Hebrews is because that book was written to people who knew that Old Testament well enough that he could write those things.

Most of us don't. Most of us don't know the Old Testament well enough that we don't need to look at those cross-references. So the indentions are typically the way modern Bibles show a quotation of the Old Testament.

If you have a study Bible, it's even better because if you have a study Bible, it's right there in the text, tells you this is a quote from 1 Chronicles or this is a quote from Leviticus or whatever, and you can jump right to it.

All right. Last thing on page 19, it says, determine why this verse is dropped into the center of a chapter focused on God's love. Did you write anything about that, brother? You said you did it, I didn't know if you...

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. God's justice, which is part of God loves and he loves justice. That's right. Okay. All right. Anybody else?

Okay. Let's look at one more. What? He showed mercy on Cain even after he stole Abel. He did. He could have destroyed him right there but he let him when he saw him.

Do you know what I thought on the previous question that really surprised me was that I didn't realize that God told Cain, sin is knocking at your door and then he went out and he killed his brother anyways.

Yeah. I did not catch that God had actually...

Yeah, God did that before he went and because he was angry and God came to him and said, you know, your angers, you addressed the issue and he still went and slayed his brother. And again, what did you do?

You observed. Sorry, I'm excited. That's what we want. Cause you didn't remember that, but you read it. And that's what this is. You know, oftentimes, you know the most dangerous thing you can do in Bible study?

I already know that. People do that all the time. I'll say, turn your Bibles to John three. I know that. I didn't ask you if you knew it. I told you to turn your Bible. No, I'm just kidding. I'm gonna get serious.

Turn in your Bible, you know. But it's so important for us to never ever say, I already know that. Because even if we do already know it, every time you observe, this might be that hundredth time where God says, here's what I'm gonna show you that you didn't see before.

All right. Last thing, we'll look at one more. The middle one on page 20, it says, when in your life have you acted as Cain did to a lesser extent? When have you suffered as Abel did? Obviously to a lesser extent, cause you're still alive.

How does this verse speak to each of those situations? Now, again, this is kind of moving toward application a little bit, but it's still getting, it's still the observational phase because we're still thinking about what's happening.

And so when I begin to think about Cain, I think about those times that I have been terribly jealous of other people. And I don't know if you've ever had somebody in your life where it seemed like God was blessing them left, right, and center, and you couldn't even get your foot on the bottom of the mountain to begin walking up and you hated that person.

Am I the only one? Am I not sanctified enough to be amongst you all? You know what I'm talking about. And so now we can begin to observe it from a different perspective. Observe this from the position of Cain.

Observe this from the position of Abel. Abel didn't know his brother was gonna kill him. Come out into the field with me. I have something to show you. What do you show him? This is the back end of a rock.

All of these things we be imaginatively, remember we talked about reading the story imaginatively? It's very helpful. All right, that is the end of class two. Is that helpful? Yes. Good, well, let's pray.

Father, thank you for your word. Thank you for your truth. Thank you, Lord, that you have given us the scriptures. Help us to love them and love you more. In Christ's name, amen. All right, let's talk real quick.

Good question, what are we supposed to do next week? All right, on your sheet, lecture three tells you what we're doing in class. This is on the back of this sheet. It's right there. What you are supposed to do this week.

You don't have any reading in your book. So if you didn't finish your readings from the previous weeks, this is a good catch-up week. You don't have any textbook reading this week. The only thing you have to do is choose either exercises 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, or 38.

Any one of those exercises, any one, not all of them. They're in the textbook or in the workbook. Go, yes, when it says exercises, that's referencing the workbook. Go to the workbook, look for exercises 28, 30, 32.

Look them over and see which one you wanna do because they're basically gonna do what we did tonight. They're gonna show you a text and you're gonna go through that text. Pick one. Next week, I expect everybody to have one that you can tell me what you did and we can see what you drew out of the text, okay?

All right, that's it.