The Bible Is Not a Billy Club | Theocast

The Bible as a Balm Rather Than a Burden

Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, we are going to talk about the Bible and in particular we're going to talk about how we should understand it. I think if people were honest, they would often admit to coming away from God's Word confused or even discouraged and not filled with hope.

Is that how it should be? Our answer to that question is no, it shouldn't be that way. So we're going to talk today about how to go to the Scripture and understand it in light of Christ and what He's come to do for sinners.

And then over in the Semper Reformanda podcast, we're going to talk about the priesthood of all believers and how that's been misapplied and misunderstood. And we're also going to talk about some stuff that's happened through history that has produced the current church moment where you frankly just don't get a lot of good Christ-centered preaching and teaching.

We hope this is encouraging for you. We hope it's clarifying. Stay tuned.

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Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ. Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed and pastoral perspective. Your hosts today are John Moffitt, who is pastor of Grace Reform Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

And I'm Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. John, what's up, my man? We are recording another podcast today, an unusual day, an unusual time. And my whole podcast desk has been rearranged because we got a new mic and stuff.

And I just hope that I can make Upward and Down and Heads and Tails of the Scripture. The good thing for me, brother, is that Christ never changes. Amen.

That's right. Amen to that. Well, we were supposed to be in Knoxville today, and that didn't work out.

That didn't work out.

So we rescheduled and decided just to record. So one of the things we're doing different now is telling you a little bit about what we're preaching, since we're pastors and very passionate.

Yeah, John, what you preaching, man?

Passionate about what we preaching. And every summer, I just finished John, 97 sermons in John over the last three and a half years. That was fun. Starting James soon. I know a lot of people are looking forward to that.

I'll announce when that's up and running. Probably we'll do a Bible study that goes with it for any pastors who want to use it. But I do a series every year called The Purpose of the Church. And so this year is a little bit different.

So far, we talked about Shattered by the Church, just the experience that people have had, not only in the last 10 years, but really through COVID. And then now we're talking about Scattered Church. Why is it the church struggles so much to not only reach each other, but also the community around us?

So we had Scattered point part one and two. And then this week we're talking about fellowship and how that has even been lost. The art of loving one another has been lost. We'll talk about that this Sunday.

So that's what's been in my pulpit the last few weeks. What about you, JP?

I'm still trucking through Genesis. So this coming Sunday, I am at the end of chapter 30 through the end of chapter 33. So the most, I guess, well-known infamous part of that passage is when Jacob wrestles with God.

So I've got that this coming Sunday. I'm pretty excited about it. Because we were planning to be in Knoxville today, I kind of backed my sermon prep up earlier into the week. And so I did my little typically Friday afternoon bit yesterday afternoon, where I'm going to verbally process my outline with some guys from the church.

And it was a sweet time.

You're just going to do that today? You're going to do that on a podcast? Just verbally process with us?

Say what?

We could start a whole other, we could start a whole other podcast of just you verbally processing your sermons with us.

Yeah. So I don't practice preach. I don't do any of that jazz. I just, I kind of go in and I just get a lot of stuff down. And then what I do is verbally process it to kind of arrange it and get it the way I want.

And then I am ready to go. So, yeah, it was good, man. The whole Jacob wrestling with God bit is really, really gripping. Just in thinking about the God who came down in human form and willingly lost to save his people.

You know, it's pretty sweet.

Wait a minute, what you're telling me, Justin, what you're telling me is that in the story of Jacob wrestling, the gospel is there.

The gospel is there. I think it's one of the strongest pre the incarnation of Christ, like when he's born as a baby. I mean, I think it is as strong as anything that I can think of that screams about the fact that God is going to take on flesh to save his people.

So what you're telling me is that the application you didn't make is that you need to go somewhere and wrestle with God. That you, when you're trying to make a decision that you really need to wrestle with God to make sure that you get the right answer.

That's nowhere to be found. Neither is this whole business of like, you just need to take your Bible out into the countryside somewhere. And you need to spend some time with the Lord and wrestle with him and get some stuff sorted out.

That is also not an application that will be made on Sunday. It's going to be about God and it's going to be about his ways with us. And how Jacob does leave that experience forever altered. I mean, amen.

He's humbled. I mean, I think he understands that he's just wrestled with God. And the only reason that he did win is because God let that happen. And it's just wild, man. How God limits himself and takes on human flesh and willingly loses to Jacob.

Just like Christ will take on flesh and come and suffer and will willingly lose. He will lay his life down, you know, and then he'll take it up again. So that we might be rescued.

So you didn't bludgeon people with the Bible this last week?

The Bible's not a billy club, John.

I've heard somebody say that before.

There it is.

There it is. And that's what we're talking about today. We didn't even plan that transition. But it was well done.

We occasionally do it well. I don't know.

Justin, let's talk about this subject. Something you and I are extremely passionate about. The purpose and point of the Bible and how it often is misused, misinterpreted, and often used as a billy club.

Not for necessarily other people, but people use it to beat up their own selves. So let's give the people what they're really here for. Let's talk about Jesus.

Let's do talk about Christ from all the scripture. The title of the episode, even as we were trying to come up with what to call this thing, the Bible is not a billy club. I'm glad you said what you just did.

We don't necessarily mean it as, yeah, you don't want to use the Bible to beat other people up. Of course, you don't want to do that. But we're talking about it even with respect to you as you come to the scripture, as you study it, as you seek to understand it.

A lot of people, if they're honest, they leave their time in the Word of God sometimes just super confused. They don't know what to make of it. Or they leave their time in the Word of God really discouraged and feeling terribly about themselves and really questioning God and his love toward them, whether he's graciously inclined toward them, and how could God really love me.

That's the takeaways. Rather than the scripture being a balm for the soul, rather than it being the only thing that can legitimately give hope to a fallen sinner, it ends up being something very different than that.

I know you agree. That should scream to us that our hermeneutical tools, like the tools that we use to interpret scripture, are off somehow if we tend to come away from scripture discouraged. Convicted?

Okay, that's fine. To be convicted of sin and to then take that to Christ and then say, I want to pursue righteousness, I want to flee from sin, that's great, that's wonderful. But to leave the scripture legitimately just beat down and discouraged, something's off if that's the case.

I mean, the psalmist says in the Good King James, thy word is a lamp unto my feet, right? Good King James. A light unto my path. And it should be that. It should be in the midst of a dark, sinful, destructive, painful world, the light of God is seen in the face of Jesus Christ, or as Paul says, the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, the light of our life, and it shines.

And yet God's word is more of a discouragement for two reasons. One, because of our engagement with it, meaning we should engage with it more and we're not, and that's leading us to guilt and shame. And then when we do engage it, we don't necessarily know what we're doing, and that leads to confusion, doubt, and fear.

There's a phrase that I hear, I heard it growing up, all I need is my Bible and the Holy Spirit, and that's enough to gain the truth of God and what he has for me. And my reply to that is, well, okay, if that's true, then we have one problem.

Either the Bible's wrong or the Holy Spirit's schizophrenic because it seems like nobody can agree on what the Bible says if we're going to use that method, and we get all kinds of different explanations of religions and false teaching that comes from that, not just denominations, but I mean false teaching that comes from that type of a model.

So, Justin, that can't be the instructions that we are handed from the Bible. I'm pretty sure, well, I'm not sure, I'm confident the Bible tells us how we should be handling it, and that's really what we're going to talk about today is how the Word of God should be handled and the benefits it brings when handled properly.

Yeah, absolutely. Brief comment on what you said about you and your Bible and the Holy Spirit. We're not going this way today, but I just want to say this now, especially for those who might be newer with us.

Theology, in terms of our study of the Scripture and how we understand God and man and God's ways with us and salvation and all that, it should never be done by oneself, right? It needs to be done corporately, and that means not only corporately in the context of the local church that you're a part of, but even corporately in that it's done with people who have lived in different eras of history.

So this is why things like the confessions and the creeds and the like are really valuable, because the same Spirit of God has been at work in the church for 2 ,000 years, and there are a lot of things that the saints have hammered out over the course of centuries that we need not really address again, because the corporate witness of the church for two millennia says that this is true.

And we're going to trust the Holy Spirit that He's worked through the church in those ways. And so it's very frightening to me when people do just kind of go off by themselves with their Bible. A lot of crazy stuff is come up with in those kind of contexts, and a lot of damage has been done throughout the history of the church.

And you even see, I know we've talked about this some lately, even in our podcast on the rise and fall of Mars Hill, there is a lot of danger when people end up attaching themselves to the theology of one person.

That's right.

It becomes this kind of cult of personality, and somebody's confession of faith effectively becomes one man or one woman, and that's a scary proposition, right? So it's much safer for us to do this kind of stuff in conjunction in a corporate way with people who are alive now and people who have gone before.

So now let's turn our attention to the Bible and appropriate ways to understand it. And these ideas, these principles, these truths, these doctrines, etc., that we're going to talk about today are not original to me or to John.

We're just going to be saying things that many people have said before us, but there are things that I think sadly for many people they're just unaware of them and don't know what they are and certainly wouldn't know how to apply them.

So why don't we start by, do you want to define some terms first maybe and talk about some different understandings and methods of approaching the Bible?

Yeah, that's exactly where I was going to go. Some various popular views, and these are what I would conclude them to be the result of how do I say this? Everyone has a method. Hermeneutic literally means the science of interpretation.

So everybody has a hermeneutic. Everybody has a way in which you structure the Word of God and how you explain its interpretation. Throughout history, the various popular views are these. First, you have the intellectualist, and this is the person who is looking at it from a perspective that you aren't trying to find the spiritual meaning and application for the sake of hope in Christ.

You're looking at it as if it's pure data. You're looking at it as if what we can use the feeding of the 5 ,000 as an example. You're looking at why 5 ,000, and is that really 5 ,000? It's really 20 ,000 people, and it's on a hillside.

They're looking at the pure data as if it's something to just be consumed for the sake of knowledge, and that's it. That's the intellectualist. You also have the moralist or what's called the moralist exemplarist.

This is the person who looks at the text, and they can't necessarily see the connection to the whole Bible. What they're going to apply most passages, if we're talking specifically about the Old Testament, they're going to apply it as a moral example, either good or bad, right?

Daniel being good. You have different parts of David or negative positive or Joseph. You can have all these examples, Samson being a negative one. Every passage turns into an example of morality. Then you have the liberal critical.

This is not as popular today, but it used to be at one point where they look at the Bible, and their conclusions are, okay, we know it says that Jesus walked on water, but is that really a metaphor? How do we know the eyewitness of that being true?

Then the last one, which is where Justin and I are in a long line of history of those who espouse the Reformation, is the redemptive historic understanding or redemptive historical framework of Scripture, which we'll give an explanation of what that is here in a minute.

I want to read you this quote. I think it's really helpful. It comes from Edmund Clowney's book, The Unfolding Mystery, Discovering Christ in the Old Testament. When you don't understand what the point of the Old Testament is, which we are going to say, and we've said for almost every episode we have ever done on Theocast over the last 102 episodes or whatever this is now, that the point of the Old Testament, according to Jesus and Paul, is Jesus.

It is about him, and it is about not just him as a person, but his work. This is why we call it a redemptive historic, meaning that God is redeeming sinners as it unfolds through history, and that history is the Old Testament that we have.

Here's the quote. If we forget the storyline of the Old Testament, we will also miss the witness of their faith. That omission cuts to the heart of the Bible. Sunday school stories are then told as tamer versions of the Sunday comics, where Samson substitutes for Superman.

David, meeting Goliath, then dissolves into ancient Hebrew version of Jack, the giant killer. Note, David is not a brave little boy who isn't afraid of the big bad giant. He is the Lord's anointed, chosen of God to be the king and deliverer of Israel.

What I love just in that little point there, he actually makes the connection of the Davidic covenant, or the promise made to David, and if the king comes and perfectly obeys the law, then all the people in the kingdom enter into the kingdom with God.

Yet, instead of focusing on that part of it, we focus in on this weird story about a giant and a little boy. Part of what we want to do is convince everyone, show everyone, not only the biblical nature of holding to a redemptive historic understanding, but there is massive benefits to you as a believer and your faith and your encouragement in Christ.

Justin, I kind of laid out a bunch of stuff out there for you. I'll kind of throw it back over to you.

Sure. I suppose it makes sense to maybe contend for the legitimacy of a redemptive historical understanding for just a minute before we move forward. John already said that's where we are, that's where the reforms have been.

We understand that the point of the Scripture is God's plan of redemption to save sinners through Christ. And even maybe more pointedly than that, if we wanted to reduce it down even more, we would say that the entire Bible is about Jesus.

It's about who he is and what he came to do. And we take our cue from none other than Christ himself when he was on the earth and in understanding it this way. I mean, so you have John chapter 5 is a well-known section of Scripture.

Verse 39, verse 46 of that chapter, I believe as well, where Jesus will say to his Jewish audience that you search the Scriptures thinking that in them you find eternal life. And of course, in his context, the Scriptures were the Old Testament, what we know as the Old Testament.

And he says, but it is they, the Old Testament Scriptures, that bear witness about me. A few verses later he says that if you believed Moses, you would believe me because Moses wrote about me. And people may realize Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, what we often refer to as the Pentateuch.

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. And Christ is saying that what Moses wrote was about him. And you don't get that a lot, frankly, in the modern evangelical church. I don't think that would be people's knee-jerk reaction if they were going to be sitting through a sermon series in Genesis, for example, maybe like I'm doing in my local church right now, or a series through Exodus or Numbers.

I don't know that people immediately would be thinking, oh my gosh, yeah, we're going to hear about Christ a lot today, sadly.

Can I interject and say that means any point of the Bible that you go to, you should have the anticipation of saying we're going to hear about Jesus today.

No, amen, brother. Amen. Here's what's hard.

If we were to go back, just to compare Justin real quick and contrast this to the ones that we said, the intellectualist is going to read Genesis. And even talking about your section that you were dealing with, the battle there with Jacob, they would look at the information and they would receive the information and that would be the farthest they would go.

The Morris's application, we were playing around with the morality. And then liberalism, awesome. They're just going to say, well, did he really wrestle with God?

Yeah.

Right.

And a lot of that has to do with how they interpret things. And if they're only looking at the grammar and the context and they're only looking at the immediate history, then they're going to get stuck.

And what I find great comfort in is that what you're arguing for from Jesus is that Jesus is saying, if you read Moses and you understood what Moses meant, Moses meant to me, that's right. Let me just look at another part.

Go ahead.

Are you going to Luke 24?

No, I'm going to Acts. I'll let you take Luke.

All right.

Let me just get while you're going to Acts. So Luke 24 is the other passage where Jesus is super clear about this. This is after his resurrection and he encounters some of his disciples on the road to Emmaus.

Many people are familiar with this and he does not reveal himself to them initially. And he's having a conversation with them and they're like, you know, you don't know what's happened in Jerusalem in these recent days.

And he's like, you know, what things, what are you talking about? What's happened? And so then they talk about, you know, how Jesus was killed and all this kind of stuff. And we had hoped that he was all these things.

And he says, oh, you know, basically he tells them, he rebukes them. He says, do you not realize that all these things needed to happen to the Christ? You know, and then he begins, it says, beginning with Moses and the prophets.

He explained to them all the things written concerning himself. So he goes back to Moses and the prophets and explains to them how all of that was ultimately about him and what he would come to do and how if they had eyes to see that, they wouldn't be surprised at all that the Christ was resurrected, that he would suffer and that he would die and then rise again and all this.

And then those disciples even remark after Jesus reveals himself to them over a meal and then departs from them, they're like, didn't our hearts burn when he opened to us the scriptures? And it's like, well, what does that mean?

He opened to us the scriptures. He opened to us the scriptures in terms of them being the witness about him. So that's what we ought to be doing every time we go to the book, man, is reveal. I mean, you and I are preachers, right?

We're pastors of local churches. So when we preach every week, we ought to be doing that, revealing to our people how this is a testimony of Christ.

So good.

So famous passage, Acts chapter 8, you have Philip who's reading about Isaiah or he's reading Isaiah and he says, about whom, this is verse 34, about whom I ask you, does the prophet say this about himself or about someone else?

He's getting it. He's reading it going.

Yeah, the Ethiopian eunuch is reading it.

Yeah.

And it's like, what's this about?

Something seems like there's more in the text here. So what is Philip? Yeah, the Ethiopian eunuch. Thank you. Then Philip opened his mouth and beginning with the scriptures, so beginning with this scripture, sorry, he told him the good news about Jesus.

So, so far we've heard about the law, which is the first five books from Moses. Now we're hearing about the prophets. And not only that, we have both of those combined later on where Jesus says the law and the prophets are about me.

So it's safe to conclude that we also know that the psalms, there are multiple psalms that point us to Christ, that the Old Testament's design and purpose was to do one thing. I think it'd be safe to say, and these aren't even all the passages, that we could also look at 2 Corinthians 1 .20 or Romans 5 .18 and 19, sorry, 15 .8 and 9 where it talks about, well, let me just say it.

I'll just read Romans 15 .8 real quick. For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God's truthfulness in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.

And so these promises are fulfilled by Jesus. What does it say here to confirm these promises given to the patriarchs? So you have these promises given and Paul is saying the fulfillment of these promises is Jesus.

Right. I mean, Paul over and over again, every promise of God finds its yes and amen in Christ.

Yeah. I mean, correct.

And then even, I mean, throughout Galatians, throughout Romans, throughout so much of what Paul writes, he may, I mean, in Ephesians, my goodness, it's the mystery, you know, that was hidden for ages in God that's now being revealed, you know, that Christ came to save Jew and Gentile in the church and all of these things.

Paul constantly, I mean, he is the preeminent redemptive historical theologian, the preeminent covenantal theologian too. I mean, if we're going to even talk about that, but then the other apostles do the same thing.

I mean, think about how Peter, you know, I recently preached Noah and the ark and all that. Think about how Peter connects what God did in saving Noah and his family and bringing them safely through water.

Think about how he connects that to baptism, you know, in our union with Christ. And I mean, it's just all over the place, you know, where the apostles constantly interpret everything that happened before Christ in light of Christ.

And I mean, if I may just interject this right now, this is probably as good a time as any to say it. We're talking about various things right now, and we've mentioned various schools of thought in terms of approaching the scripture.

I want to do this really quickly. I'm going to try. I hope everybody can track. So sometimes in our context, John, amongst like serious Bible students of a more Calvinistic ilk, sometimes people will try to pit what we would call a grammatical historical understanding of the Bible over and against a redemptive historical understanding of the Bible.

Grammatical historical meaning we're looking at the words on the page, grammar, right? We're looking at them in their historical setting, historical. We're looking at the syntax. We're looking at all that.

We're really concerned about original authorial intent. What did Moses mean when he wrote Exodus? What did David mean when he wrote this Psalm? What did Isaiah mean when he penned this? Or et cetera, right?

And as though that is contradictory somehow to what we're articulating and advocating for today, as redemptive historical theologians, we are also doing the grammatical historical thing. But we are asking the question, as we look at the words and the grammar and the syntax on the page and the immediate authorial intent, we're asking the question, where does this text stand in light of Christ, who is the point of the whole Bible?

Where does this text stand in relation to the plan of God to save sinners through Jesus, which is the point of biblical revelation? That's important. And so then I think, John, and I'm happy to let you riff on this too, this is another big observation that needs to be made.

There are a lot of people who take the Bible very seriously who are happy to say that the New Testament needs to be understood in light of the Old Testament.

Right.

But as soon as we start to say, like we're articulating today and advocating for today, that you actually need to understand your Old Testament in light of the New, people lose their minds. They wig out about it.

So I'm going to quote Nehemiah Cox, but he is not unique in saying this. He says, in some of his writings on covenant theology, that quote, I don't have it in front of me, but I know this is what it says, quote, the best interpreter of the Old Testament is the Holy Spirit speaking to us in the New, close quote.

To which we're like, yes and amen. That is exactly right. And that's exactly what Paul did. That's exactly what Peter did. That's exactly what John did. And that's exactly what Christ did. He understood everything.

These apostles understood everything that was written before Christ came to be ultimately about Jesus. And if we're not studying the Bible that way, we're not going to get it right. And we're going to do all this other stuff with it.

Like you mentioned, we're going to moralize it, or we're just going to gather a bunch of data. We're going to say a bunch of like true things, but that never actually give us any good news.

Give us hope.

Right.

It's hopeless. It's discouraging. It's a beat down because it ends up being all about me, whether how much I understand or what I need to be doing. And it's like, man alive, if that's what you're coming away with from the Scripture, you will be discouraged.

That's right.

But if you're coming away from the Scripture with Christ, Christ is the point of this.

That's right.

There's hope.

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So I just finished John, and John uses more of the Old Testament than almost any other gospel writer. He uses a ton of the Old Testament.

I mean, and they all do, obviously.

They do, obviously. But what we don't understand is that, unfortunately, a lot of people spend most of their time either in the Psalm, Proverbs, and then New Testament. And because they don't have a robust understanding of the Old Testament, the Old Testament is what's shining the light on Christ, and it's casting this shadow.

And as you get closer to the shadow, then eventually you get closer to the substance, which is Jesus. But because we don't understand the light of this Old Testament that is just giving us so much information, we actually lose a lot of what this bolster, I would say we lose color and flavor of Jesus because we don't interpret the Old Testament the way it was designed.

Justin, let me do this. This is not a trick question. Just answer right when it comes to mind. When I say—.

You want me to step in the trap?

No, it's not a trap. When I say 9 -11, what's the first thing that comes to mind?

Well, of course, the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Right.

20 years, it's coming up, believe it or not.

Tomorrow.

20 years tomorrow. We just dated this recording. There we go.

Yeah.

So when you read the New Testament, it will make references just like that, that if you don't have the context and you don't have an understanding of what's going on before, John will say things like, this is the day of the feast or this is this Passover, and he's making connections, and those connections are extremely important because what he's doing is he's telling you, this is what's happening, and it's giving us a setup for Jesus.

Ultimately, what he's saying is that whole event, like the Passover or the Exodus or Israel walking through the divided water, all of these pictures, as the serpent was raised up in the wilderness, so much the Son of Man.

So you have these events. So if you go and read your Bible from the Old Testament saying, okay, this is setting me up to see Jesus, you'll then have this robust flavor and light and color, and then you go read John, and it just immediately pops out.

Oh, wow, that's Jesus. He is our priest. I'll throw this one out there, Justin. Most people don't know why it's so significant for Jesus to be our king. Why is that so important? Well, if you understand the Davidic covenant, which is in the Old Testament, when Jesus as king, you're going, yes, yes, yes.

He's the one who earned for us righteousness and sits on the throne.

He's a king, but not only that, he's a son of David.

That's right.

So he's one from David's household who will represent the people, because that's what the king did. As the king went, so went the nation. So he is a son of David who is going to keep the law. Because God even gives, in the Davidic covenant, when it's given in 2 Samuel 7, the Lord says you're going to have one who's going to sit on the throne forever, provided that he keeps my law.

And it's like, well, none of David's sons do that. David didn't do that, but Jesus did. And so Christ is what the Davidic covenant is all about. He's going to come. He's a son of David. He's going to keep the law perfectly.

He's going to accomplish righteousness to represent the people, and he will rule in righteousness forever. I mean, you've got the passages. I'm going to find them in Jeremiah where, like talking about the one who would come, you can give me just a second to flip here.

Well, as you're flipping there, I'll get us set up there. So if you think about Genesis 3. Yeah, Genesis 3 .15 is the first mention of the gospel. It's the seed promised to Eve, and then it's further explained that that seed is going to be picked up by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Then it's picked up by David, and it's passed down through the seed of David's children, which then leads us to this point. Meaning from Genesis 3 .15 to the final section where you have 400 years of nothing going on, as far as what's being written, it's all about this unfolding of how we're getting this Messiah.

So go ahead.

Totally.