The Right Way vs The Wong Way to Interpret Scripture

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Andrew Rappaport from The Rappaport, and I have something special for you. I have a podcast that is very different, mostly geared toward ladies, but this episode won't be that way.

This is the Thoroughly Equipped Podcast with Melissa Lacks. It's one of the podcasts on the

Christian Podcast Community. She has taken this year going in -depth into looking at the if -gatherings, and if you're not familiar with the if -gatherings, it's a woman's online conference that is having a massive impact on so many churches.

When she had gone through that, she realized the major issue that they have is the fact that people do not know how to interpret

Scripture. So what we do on this episode is talk about harmoneutics, the art and science of interpretation.

So this is an episode that was from Thoroughly Equipped Podcast. I encourage you to go check that out and listen to them.

Follow that podcast, especially you ladies. This podcast is devoted to women's

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I just start? I can't even hear you. Because I'm waiting for a question.

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God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. So the man or woman of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

I am your host, Melba Toast. May this episode bless you and bring glory to God. Hello, ladies, and welcome back to another episode of Thoroughly Equipped.

I am so glad you could join me today. I have a very special episode for you guys.

So the last episode was the final episode of part three of the

If Gathering critique, where we looked at the way some of these popular speakers at the

IF handled scripture. Now, normally, after a book critique, I produce an episode looking at the false doctrine that was prominent in the book and compare it to historical

Christian doctrine that is derived from scripture. I usually title these episodes

Two Opposing Doctrines. While there's not necessarily doctrines to be addressed in this part of the critique, the way these women handle scripture has been a problem.

So for this critique Two Opposing Doctrines episode, I want to bring in someone who could teach us about handling scripture, how not to interpret scripture versus how to rightly interpret scripture.

The science of interpretation is called hermeneutics. And to help teach us about the interpretation of scripture and why it's so important to learn hermeneutics,

I have asked Andrew Rapoport of Striving for Eternity to guide us and educate us a bit on what it is and how to practice it.

Along with having a little bit of laughs along the way, I hope this interview educates and blesses you.

So without further ado, let's just dive in. Let's talk about hermeneutics.

Andrew, I just wanted to say thank you, number one, for coming on my show, my little show.

Thank you so much for your time. And before we really get started on our topic today, would you just introduce yourself and tell us about your ministry?

Sure. And thank you for having me on your big show, because it's not so little. So, but no,

I do appreciate coming on and I appreciate what you've been doing with your podcast.

I've been enjoying it. There's, as you know, when I first found out about your podcast,

I was a little nervous. Podcast for women's ministry. Yeah, that's usually problematic. But, you know, we have been,

I've been at least pleasantly surprised and enjoying the episodes and what you've been providing for women to be able to equip them.

So with that, I'll introduce myself. My name is Andrew Rappaport. I guess one of the tidbits people find interesting about me is

I grew up in a Jewish home. So I was bar mitzvahed and then came to Christ. I have pastored several churches.

I am the president and executive director of both the Striving Fraternity and the Christian Podcast Community, which is how you know of me, because you are a member of the

Christian Podcast Community. And so that's, I've written a couple books, What Do They Believe, which is a systematic theology of Western religions.

And What Do We Believe, which is a Christian systematic theology. I have contributed to several books like On the

Origin of Kinds, Sharing the Good News with Mormons, When My Ox Scores My Neighbor. Yeah, I know that one sounds really strange, but that is on topic for what we're going to talk about tonight.

That is a good primer if you want to learn how to interpret the

Bible. What he does is takes that Old Testament passage that says, When My Ox Scores My Neighbor, and he works through with that passage through the entire book, stepping you through how to interpret that passage and how to apply it to us today.

So yeah, it is kind of neat. I wrote the foreword to that. All right. Is that all you do?

No, I do more. I mean, you don't expect to take the whole hour just talking about what

I do. Some of the other Christian Podcast Community members joke about the fact that I have five podcasts on the

Christian Podcast Community. The two that are most active on weekly is Andrew Rapport's Rapp Report, and that's just search for Rapp Report, Rapp with two

Ps, or Apologetics Live. So the Rapp Report is about basically, we're trying to give biblical interpretations and applications to all things of Christian life.

Apologetics Live is a live show Thursday nights, 8 to 10 Eastern Time. Anyone can come in. They go to apologeticslive .com, and we can answer any question or any challenge they have about God and the

Bible. Yeah, that's a great show. It's fun to watch. It's more fun when people come in and ask questions, which you should do sometime.

I have been tempted to. Okay, well now we're going to wait for it. Okay. Okay, so audience, you now know to be watching that to see when

Melissa comes in. There you go. In all anticipation. All right.

Well, before I ask you the very important questions I want to ask you. And for your audience that they know, because they may not know, you called your show a little show.

Your show is in the top 50 % of all podcasts.

It's not that little. You're in the top half. I have no clue what that means. That means that if you look at all the podcasts in the world, and you look at the downloads, you're in the top 50%.

Well, that's because I'm on the Christian podcast community. No, it's because you're producing good content.

Otherwise, they would stop listening. Oh, okay. I'll take that, too. Yeah, so I wanted to explain to you why

I wanted to have you on. You do know that I'm going through this critique series on the

IfGathering, which is a humongous women's conference that's held in Dallas, Texas, but also online.

I wasn't sure if you knew just how big they are. They technically have over 4 ,000 locals, which is basically church locations, home locations, as well as college locations.

In those locals, individual spots, you could have 5 to 10 to 30 women in each one.

They reach over 4 million women. These locals are located in all 50 states and even in 45 continents,

I think, or countries. They said not continents because they're not 45 continents, but 45 countries.

Well, look, they don't know how to interpret the Bible. They may not be able to know how to interpret a continent either.

I mean, who knows nowadays? Maybe a country identifies as a continent.

Yeah, oh, there you go. That's the new thing, right? All right.

So, yeah, because of that, specifically in this part of the series,

I am looking at the 2020 conference, which Jenny Allen had these women each be given a section of Romans chapter 8 is what they went through.

And the claim was that they were going to get more Christ and they were going to love leaving

Christ more. I want to have you on because you have done classes on what we call hermeneutics.

And I think maybe there's a lot of listeners, at least I know when I was younger and not too long ago, didn't know what hermeneutics was, didn't know how it related to discernment and didn't even know how it could benefit me.

So I wanted to have you on to explain. So let's go for our first question, which is what is hermeneutics?

So hermeneutics is basically the art and science of interpretation, and it applies to anything.

I mean, there's you can take a literary degree and what you're doing is hermeneutics. You're learning how to interpret

Shakespeare versus someone else. Because Shakespeare is going to have a style of writing that would be different than John Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress.

There's a way to interpret Pilgrim's Progress. We're not going to interpret Pilgrim's Progress the way we would the

Bible. Why? Pilgrim's Progress is designed to be an allegory. The whole book is an allegory.

So when you meet Christian, he represents a Christian. You meet worldly wise man, he is a worldly wise man.

So you have where all those names are descriptive of the people. But you're not going to interpret the

Bible any old way. There are rules to interpretation. Things like grammar.

We speak, we have a language. That language has a grammar, it has rules. There's going to be things we do, and we can get into this more because I'm sure one of the questions you'll ask me is, how do we do hermeneutics?

Because that usually comes up. Some of the basic things of how we communicate. I am using words right now to communicate to you, and you are understanding my words.

Whether you realize it or not, you are practicing hermeneutics. Now the question is, what are the rules you're using to employ?

Right, and we'll get into that too. All right, so it's an interpretation the way we interpret it and read literature or understand words, right, is basically what you're telling me.

Correct, correct. And when people will come to me on the street or on Apologetics Live or wherever, and they'll say that there's multiple interpretations, like the

Bible has lots of interpretations. My response, because it depends on the setting, but on Apologetics Live or on the street, if I'm doing open air evangelism and I have a crowd there, and someone says, well there's lots of ways to interpret the

Bible. I'll say something like, blue cheese jump over moon cow. And they go, what?

That's what I interpreted you said. Or I'll just turn and say, so you're saying rape is okay?

And like, I didn't say anything like that. That's how I interpreted what you said. Folks, you believe this guy says rape is okay?

And the guy gets upset with it. And I go, wait, it's just the way I interpret it. You said we can have multiple ways to interpret things.

And it's funny when you put it that way on people, that doesn't work when you type, by the way. Don't do this on social media.

It's failed every time that I've tried to do that. It just doesn't come across the same way. But what

I do is, I'll say something ridiculous to show that, no, you are expecting me to follow the rules of language.

And that's why you think it's ridiculous that I'm saying you think rape is okay, or I say random words. You recognize that as being ridiculous.

Why? Because you expect there to be an interpretation. Because you expect me to follow the same rules you follow when we speak together.

Right. And this is one of the things that you hear probably a lot often when you're in discernment.

I remember having conversations, having to address a certain topic that is brought up in a sermon.

And you're like, well, that doesn't look like what the text is saying. And always going to either the person that you're listening to the sermon with, and at least this is my experience, and being like, well, wait, that's not what that says.

And then they turn to me and go, well, that's your interpretation of that passage.

And it always made me go, what? My face is like, big question mark.

Okay. So this is why I think women, with our postmodern ideas now, this idea that we can just change interpretation.

We can't even describe what a woman is. We can make it whatever we want. So I want our listeners and the women to understand that there's a right way to interpret the

Bible. And so why then should we use hermeneutics and understand humanetics and then apply it to when we study and read the

Bible? Why is it important? Well, this is God's Word. And so there's one interpretation, many applications.

So I can take the same passage of Scripture and apply it to the nation of Israel different than I would the church.

That's possible with some passages. There's some passages where we can have multiple ways of applying it in different situations.

But there's one interpretation. This is something you'll end up seeing very often with cults and groups that are misapplying

Scripture. Usually they take Old Testament to start with, and they butcher that. But they take

Old Testament historical narratives and want to apply it to themselves today, things that have no application to them, because what they do is jump right to application.

So in hermeneutics, we have a thing that we've referred to as authorial intent. It means what did the author intend by what he was writing?

So in that, there's several questions you have to ask. Who is the author? So let's take 1

John. 1 John is used by many groups that teach sinless perfectionism.

They believe they can be sinlessly perfect, and that you have to be absolutely perfect as a Christian. This is someone they teach, and they get it from 1

John. Well, okay, who's John? John is one of the apostles. He's one of the oldest living apostles.

The rest had died out. And he's there. Who's he writing to? He's writing to people that are dealing with Gnostics.

Who are the Gnostics? Gnostics were people that believed that anything physical was evil, but anything spiritual is good.

So they would actually teach that you can sleep with a prostitute as long as you didn't give your spirit over to her.

Well, this is the thing that John is trying to answer. John wants to answer that very issue.

He wants to answer that if you have a pattern of sin in your life, you are not saved. So he makes these absolute statements.

Why? Because he's dealing with people that are trying to hedge and play word games. And for that reason, he's not having any of it.

He's very, very clear. It's completely on or completely off. It's light or dark, no in between.

Why is he doing that? Because of who he's writing to. So you have to understand who's writing and who he's writing to.

Why is he writing it? Because all of that's going to play in heavily when you read the book of 1

John to understand why he's saying what he's saying. Because it sure seems like John is saying, you can't even have any sin in your life if you're a

Christian. Now, to those of us today, where we have lots of gray areas in Christianity today, way too many, we've gone too far the other way.

Right. John is being very concise. I know it is it is this or that there's a pattern of sin or a pattern of living for Christ as if there's no in between.

He's not saying that we can't sin because, well, he does say in there, if we say we have no sin, we make out a liar.

But we have to understand what the author meant to his readers by what he said.

It doesn't we don't ask the question, what does this mean to me? We ask, what did John write to his audience?

Right. And so that sounds like there's a lot more work than just asking what it means to me going on in that, which is why

I think this is very important to understand. So you got into this right when you answered the question about that, you know, this is

God's word and we want to know what God has to say. So I'm trying to relate this to to women.

I don't think that women necessarily have a different way of going about studying

God's word. But I think we not intentionally. I think just the overall

Christian evangelicalism of women's ministry of today is just it's been all about devotions and not really

Bible studies and the and the fields and the books that come with the Bible. So I wanted to ask you, like, what's the difference between and it seems like a pretty straightforward answer, but studying the

Bible on a devotional. And is there a big difference in, you know, taking the time to learn how to study the

Bible yourself or just using a devotional for your morning, you know, devotion time?

What do you think? Doing the study and doing devotions are two different things.

So we have a seminar at Striving for Eternity that we come into churches for a weekend and we do a what we call

Bible interpretation made easy. OK, we'll spend between four and eight hours with with a church teaching them how to interpret the

Bible. And at the end of it, I end up saying, did it seem like a lot of work for you all?

And people go, yeah, this is what your pastor does every week. If he's doing a good job, if he's a good pastor, this is what he's doing every week.

This is not easy work. And when people are busy and people are have a lot to do, especially if you're a mother with young children.

Yeah. I mean, when am I going to have time to do all this study? Well, that's that's why most people what they do is devotions.

They'll they'll maybe get a devotional book. Maybe they'll read a commentary as a devotion, but you're getting one person's interpretation that could taint you.

If you want to really know what God's word is, you got to do the work on your own because the commentary, any commentary is one person's view of it.

I could be wrong in my interpretation of the passage. You can't trust me. You have to actually do the research yourself.

And there's no shortcuts to that. The reality is, let me encourage you with this. Yes, I know busy moms having to take care of the house, having to take care of the children.

At least I hope and it's not like trying to take care of the job and someone else takes care of the children. But I'm going to get myself in trouble with your audience.

But no, the reality is that it's not easy. It's just not easy to do that. And then where do you find the time to do 10, 20 hours of study?

Well, you're not going to do 10, 20 hours of study, not all at once, but maybe it's going to be somewhere something perks your interest and you're going to dive deep and maybe spend many weeks studying it out a little at a time.

Maybe you're going to read the Bible in a systematic way so that you can start to think harmonetically.

What do I mean by that? One of the things I do in our course and our seminar, and I have a course online at Striving Fraternity Academy, just go to strivingfraternity .org

and under the academy, it's called Biblical Harmonetics. And we have a sheet that we give to people that just has five simple questions that you could fill out with any passage of scripture to help in your study of it, which is just who, when, where, why, what?

I mean, the basic journalistic type of questions, you ask those questions as you're reading a passage, fill those out.

Just doing that will make you more curious about the text you're studying. Yes.

And that is really important because devotions are meant to be, the way that people do mostly today, is meant to be,

I read my Bible, I meditate on it for a few minutes, I go about my day. And when we talk about devotions, that's what most people think of.

They don't think of actually doing the study of engaging with the text.

I never preach a sermon without teaching hermeneutics either directly or indirectly.

And people who've been under my teaching for a long time know that because I'll say things like, have you ever thought what it's like to be

Peter in this situation? Here he is with Jesus and he just said something really stupid. How's Peter feeling being chastised by Christ?

Things like that, to put people in the mindset of what we need to do is say, what were these guys going through?

They lived through this, and we just read it. We pass over so much because we just read it.

I mean, you think about the disciples. They're in a boat. Jesus is asleep and a storm comes.

Well, what's the big deal? I mean, it was a storm. I mean, you'd be scared at sea, right? Well, no, wait, four of these guys are fishermen.

Not only are they fishermen, they're fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. What's important about that? Well, Galilee is in a valley.

And so you get this mountain range all around it, which means these guys are used to being at sea when you can't see a storm coming from miles away.

You only see it when it comes just over the ridge of the mountains. So they must be used to being in a storm.

Huh? So they're scared. I mean, the other guys are probably even more scared, but these guys are experienced fishermen in a sea where storms come up out of nowhere.

They would be used to being at storms. They would be desensitized to it, but they're scared this time. Why? Oh, let's look at the

Greek there. The Greek defines it as a mega storm, a super storm, a super hurricane -like.

Now we understand. So this is a storm that is so severe that these experienced disciples are frightened on the water, and Jesus is sound asleep.

You see, what am I doing? I'm giving the interpretation. I'm taking the geography.

I'm taking their profession. I'm asking the question, what would it be like being a fisherman on the

Sea of Galilee, knowing the geography? See, all that comes into play, and all of a sudden we get a bigger picture of this.

I mean, you think about Matthew. He's a tax collector. He must have been freaking out like scared out of his mind, because if Peter, Andrew, James, and John are scared, then the others must really be scared, right?

Yeah. So that adds a whole lot more than just reading it and seeing that Jesus is asleep.

Jesus is asleep during a hurricane, okay? This is a mega storm.

Now here's the neat thing about that, and also I'm talking about knowing some of the original language, right?

Well, this is the neat thing. When Jesus says to the storm, be still, it's called a mega calm.

So not only was it a super storm, but now it's a super calm, and it happens instantaneously.

No ripples in the water. It just, boom, stops. Now that's some power.

What's Jesus doing there? Well, now we see that Jesus is putting his deity on display. He's not just saying, hey, storm, stop, and then it's like the faith healers that slowly it just stops raining a little bit, a little bit, a little bit.

No, no, he said stop, and it stopped even the ripples in the water, just complete calm. Wow. Instantaneously.

Do you know why they might have been frightened? Yeah. Do you know what the only thing worse than being in the center of a storm is?

Realizing Jesus is in your boat. God's in your boat. Yeah, amen to that.

Wow. So yeah, I really think that's missing. You can't get that from a devotional.

Most definitely. Yeah, too deep. Oh man. So okay, so in going back to the devotionals issues, another thing

I'm wondering what you see is, I feel as if the devotions, like you did kind of allude to this, they're almost geared towards asking, there are somebody else's interpretation, but they're always kind of geared towards what

God can do for you, what God has for you that day, how he wants to bless you that day.

At least that's my experience in the devotionals. And when you study scripture, you seem to be getting a lot more about Christ.

I mean, like the story you just told there, how many devotionals flip it to make it about how we can trust

God, your story, and that's great, and it's good. But I mean, you displayed this in your talk, and you're expositing just the story behind it, the history behind it, and you get

Jesus is really at the center of it. And I really feel like that's missing.

I don't know if I have a question in that. Well, here's really what it comes down to. It's because most of the devotional works that are written today are geared toward application and not interpretation.

Right, that's what I, okay. And that's going to be the difference. Most of the, and I'm saying most because,

I mean, there's some, John MacArthur has common devotionals, and his are, he's going to go verse by verse through like a chapter of a book and give the interpretation.

Why? Because he realizes he's doing that because he wants a different kind of devotional. He wants one that teaches interpretation.

So there are some of those out there, but the majority of them, the worst of them, I'm really going to get in trouble.

Let me front apologize, Melissa. Your audience is going to send you nasty emails. I'm sorry.

The worst of them is Our Daily Bread. Please just get rid of it. Please, please.

Because what is it? They give you one verse and give you like two or three paragraphs that have usually absolutely nothing to do with the verse, but there's one word in the verse that they jump off of and give you some feel -good type of message.

And that's really what it comes down to. It's not helping you in understanding what the text means. It doesn't help you in really living out the text because you don't know what it means.

One of the goals I have in preaching is that 10 years from now, someone will forget all about me and the message

I preach, but they're going to come to a text of Scripture and go, I know what that means. I understand that.

I know the culture behind that. I understand the history behind it. I know what's going on at that time.

That's the goal. Yeah. Okay. So that's a great way to segue to my next kind of question, because devotionals kind of make it more applicable, and we tend to go to our

Scripture, especially us women, I think, go to Scripture. We have the short time, so we're reading and picking, cherry -picking verses and stuff like that.

Let's talk about the ways not to interpret, because I did your class online.

Oh, yeah. That was you. I was wondering who that person was that took the class. Yeah. So in your class, you did, which

I would highly recommend anybody listening to this to go to, because you actually, not just going into hermeneutics, but you talk about, sorry, you talk about Bibles and other resources to help you study the

Bible. The tools that we use to interpret, yep. Right. And I think, surprisingly, a lot of women do not know about that.

They don't even know that there's a study Bible that's different from the woman's Bible and any of that kind of stuff, and the difference in translations and paraphrase and all that.

But that's not what we're going to talk about today. But the lesson is all -encompassing, ladies, so definitely go in.

And I think you offered this, what is it? Not a synopsis, what did you call it in your class?

A syllabus? Yeah, a syllabus. And you're basically just, it's very affordable.

I mean, extremely affordable. And then watch the videos online. All right. Plug in for that. And the videos are free.

They can watch them anywhere. Exactly. So what are the ways that we are not to interpret the

Bible? Well, one of the worst ways that people interpret the Bible is just to open to a random text, stick their finger and read,

Judas hung himself. Okay, I didn't like that. Let me flip to another one. Flip, go and do likewise.

No, but like, I'm joking about that, but there are people, I know someone that took a job because they read in the

Bible, go north. And they took the job that was further north. They were looking for an answer.

And they, at the time, believed that God was giving them the answer to their prayer, which job to take.

They should go north because God said, go north. And they went north.

And they went north. And they went north. And they went north. Seven verses later where he says, you know, God says, I know the plans

I have for you, plans of famine and destruction and disease. How come that's not on someone's refrigerator?

You know, it's like, who is God writing this to? Wouldn't it be nice if he would have told us, oh, wait,

Jeremiah 29, 10. He tells us it is written to those who come through the 70 year

Babylonian captivity. So if you lived through the 70 year Babylonian captivity, that verse is for you.

But you're not that old. Right. But are there things we can learn from that? Well, yeah, we can learn that God is faithful.

He was faithful to those that he put into captivity for 70 years. He gave promises to them, and he was faithful and he's faithful to them.

He could be faithful to us. But what we shouldn't do is just grab a verse and not read its context.

A friend of says it this way. He says you should never read a Bible verse. What does he mean? Read the whole chapter.

And that's the thing you want to do. The worst way to read the Bible is by verses.

The chapter breaks and verse breaks were not added for like six or seven to 800 years after the writings of the

New Testament. And so those were not inspired. Those were put there so that people could quickly get to a verse they're referring to instead of saying somewhere in the middle of the book of John where John's pretty long.

Right. So they added the chapter breaks and verses. The problem is that people think that those verses should be read apart from all the other verses.

And that's the biggest mistake people make. I think most of the problems are solved just by reading in context.

Let me give you a quick story on this is I do open air evangelism. So I would stand up for years in New York City.

I'd go to Union Square, have a little box, get on the box, and I would just preach the gospel. And people would challenge me.

And someone would say, well, the Bible says whatever, you know, and all I would do is say, where does it say that?

And they give me, oh, why don't we just back up? Let me start reading it for everyone. I'll start at verse one.

And when I get to verse 17, what they mentioned, it's like everyone in the crowd realizes, oh, that's what it's talking about.

It's not what he said. It's a totally different context. You know, we don't like to be taken out of context.

Neither does God. And so that's probably the easiest way to to understand the scriptures better is to read the whole chapter.

Don't read just the verse. Great. Great. Okay. So you've answered why it's important or the first that was the only way to misinterpret.

Aren't there other ways? Well, other ways we twist. Oh, there's lots of ways to twist. Yeah. I mean, ways that people will twist.

One is one of the most common ways that someone will take a word that they see and they follow that through the whole

Bible. And then what they'll do is they'll give a word. They'll say, oh, well, see, this word means this here, here, here, here.

So it must mean it over here. Right. No, the words have meaning within their context.

If I say you look. Green today. I could mean that you look pretty sick.

I mean, you're like color your skin or I could mean that you're looking pretty, you know, like.

Envious and, you know, so it could have a different meaning. Well, what's the context? So every word is going to have a meaning within in a context.

And so you need to look at the context. So people will do that often. They take a word and they try to make it say something it doesn't say.

Another thing they'll do is they'll try to give a context. They'll mix up Old Testament, New Testament.

They'll take things that are for a nation of Israel and try to apply it either to the church or to people that live today.

And that those are rules for Israel. You're not Israel. You know, so so you'll see things like that that people will do.

You'll see where often what people do when they want to twist is they'll they will mix up the rules.

In other words, they'll take something that's a historical narrative. And I can get into this later on what a historical narrative is, but it's a style of literature and they will use the rules for like we have the epistles.

Well, those those two styles of literature have different rules to them. And sometimes and cults do this very often is they take the historical narratives and imply or interpret it as if it's doctrine, as if it's an epistle.

And they use the rules for one genre or one style of literature and apply it to the wrong one.

But they do that usually because they start with a conclusion. OK, so you you're going through the conference that was like consistent throughout.

They start with a conclusion and they look at the passage and say, how can we make this say what we want it to say?

Right. OK, well, if we twist this and twist this, oh, we could jump here, here, here, here, here, here, here. And then look, this says this.

And doesn't it look so amazing how God's work? Because look at the brilliance of this that all of this works together to say this.

And people are amazed all that lady. She's oh, clap. She's so great. She's so deep.

I would never have seen that because it's not there. God would not have seen it because it was never meant to be there.

That's what they do. An example of that, I had a I was at church once visiting my sister -in -law's church.

My sister -in -law's church is in Chinese, but I stuck around for the English congregation. I got more out of the

Chinese, by the way. Yeah, it was that the English was that bad. But his whole message is

Resurrection Sunday. His whole message is on, you know, it was before, you know, when

Christ is in the tomb, it's the day of resurrection and the women come and it's still dark.

His whole message was it was still dark. And he's talking about dark times in our lives where you might have financial troubles and you may have lost your job and all this stuff.

But light, there's light coming. That was like his whole thing. And he went through this whole thing. And I'm sitting there.

We're walking out and the guy, two people in front of me says, oh, pastor, that was great. I would never have seen that in the passage.

I was so close to going. Jesus wouldn't have seen that in the passage because it wasn't there. You know why it was dark.

It's not really hard to figure out because in the passage, it says it. It was still early.

You know why it was dark. The sun didn't rise. That's why it was dark.

Oh, my goodness. That's so typical of what I'm used to hearing. They allegorize or spiritualize the historical texts.

I immediately went to the one sermon I remember hearing. It's a common sermon about the resurrection and the stone rolled away and how

God wants to roll away the stones in your lives. It's so different than David and Goliath.

David and Goliath. Everyone is David. I feel so. David is probably rolling over in his grave so many times.

Poor David is being used for everything. Oh, man. All right. So that actually brings into, well, you mentioned the different types.

When you're looking, you mentioned historical and you mentioned about how we might talk about the types of context, right?

So why don't you tell me about what are the different types of context when we're and it doesn't.

Yeah, I'll let you explain. OK, different types of context, a different type of literature, because there's differences there.

Oh, right, right. So let me go over. OK, so we'll start with literature. So there's you have a historical narrative, historical narratives.

Think about the book of Genesis, you know, the first five books of the Bible or the Gospels. Those are going to be historical narratives.

What they're doing is telling you what actually happened is not telling you what you should do.

It's not telling you what you shouldn't do unless God is condemning or commending behavior.

So the fact that David had many wives doesn't mean you should have many wives. It means that the

Bible is historically accurate in what actually did happen. David had many wives. He was in sin.

OK, so the thing is when we're looking at a historical narrative is telling us the history.

It's telling us what actually happened. And so it's accurate in its historical events, not necessarily saying what should happen.

That's going to be different than something like, as I said, the epistles. Epistles are doctrinal. They are instructional.

So you're going to interpret them as doctrine. You're looking at the epistles as instructional literature, as something that's telling us how to behave.

But then we have things like wisdom literature or Hebrew poetry and Hebrew poetry.

Much of wisdom literature uses Hebrew poetry and Hebrew poetry is different than our poetry. Our poetry relies on rhyming, but Hebrew poetry relies on parallelism.

So when you come to the Psalms or much of Proverbs, what you're looking for is two parallel lines of thought.

And you want to know how these lines relate to one another. Sometimes they're contrasting.

So the context is going to be you have line one and line two, and you're going to see the word but or something like this, where that shows you there's a contrast.

Well, that contrast is going to tell us throughout Proverbs, you see the contrast between the wise and the fool.

That contrast is helping us to know where we are supposed to be focusing. You will have things where sometimes you have the line one is going to emphasize line two.

And so the real thing is going to be what's line two? What's the extra emphasis in line two? So you're going to have a different style when it comes to parallels, parallelism in Hebrew poetry.

You'll have things like parables. Parables are illustrations of things. And this goes back to the question of how should you not interpret?

People will take a parable and try to make it say more than it actually says. The parable is an illustration of one point, and it's geared toward explaining one point.

And so it's not meant to be used for a lot of different points. And that's how many people will use it.

But when we have a parable, what we want to do is ask what is the purpose in the greater context of this parable?

So you have the two sons. So many people interpret that one so many different ways, get into lots of different things of the two sons.

Well, what you end up seeing is that's in a greater context than Luke. First, you had a hundred sheep where one goes astray and is returned, and there's much rejoicing in heaven for the one that was found.

You have ten coins. One was lost, and the rejoicing one, the one was found.

You have two sons, and one gets lost and then is found.

What you end up seeing in all three of those parables in the greater context was a condemnation on the self -righteous

Pharisees, who were the representative of the ninety -nine sheep, the nine coins, and then really what struck home is the older brother.

And that's the context. It's talking about the hypocrisy of the self -righteous

Pharisees looking down at these worthless sinners that are getting saved, and Jesus is focusing on the worthless sinners, and Jesus' whole focus on the one, the one, the one, is focusing on the one that repents, where there's much rejoicing in heaven for the lost soul, that wicked sinner that was saved.

You know why the ninety -nine sheep and ten coins and the older brother aren't rejoicing? Because they were self -righteous.

They represented those that didn't think they needed to be lost. All right, that was great.

Yeah, I've always, one of the things I've noticed about parables is they are always in answering a question that the, well, not always, that somebody's asking.

So there's got to be a point to why they, why he gives the parable.

You know, most of the parables actually answer, and this is the thing people don't think through, but, you know, maybe at the

IF conference, I doubt they would bring this up. I doubt they would focus on this, but they deal with one topic, most of the parables, and here's the thing.

When you, you'll hear this sometimes that people will say that Jesus spoke about hell more than heaven. That's true.

He spoke about money more than heaven and hell combined. That's true. But he spoke about hypocrisy more than heaven, hell, and money combined.

That's true, and most of the parables are dealing with hypocrisy. He's calling out the

Jewish elite that think they're self -righteous. They're acting like they're

God's children, but they're not God's children. That's a message that still carries over into the church today with many, even in leadership, even at an

IF gathering, that say they're saved, but they are self -righteous.

They're misinterpreting God's word. They're twisting it, and they're leading people toward destruction.

Right. All right, so you've explained some of the literature, the way the

Bible has different types of literature. Now explain, if I remember correctly from your class, there are three different types of context, correct?

Well, there's more than three, but yeah, there's about five, but so you have historical context.

The when is this being written? Is this Old Testament? Is this New Testament? If it's

Old Testament, is it during Moses' time? Is it during the dispersion?

Like when is that? Because that can play into things in understanding the time that it's written.

You have the cultural context, and a lot of it you have to understand the culture.

When Jesus is going to make a statement that many people misinterpret,

He says, when they ask Him, when are these things going to happen? When's the end times? When are these things going to happen? And He says, no man knows the day or the hour, only the

Father knows. And people say, oh see, in His humanity, He didn't know something, but in His divinity,

He did. And what did they do? They just fell into a heresy, an ancient heresy, of dividing the nature of God, of Christ.

No. If you understand the culture, you know that's a Jewish idiom. It has to do with a wedding feast.

The Father is the one who decides when the son is going to go get married. The son prepares a house, and the

Father, the house can be done, the Father just decides, says, go get your bride. He doesn't know. So the phrase is that here to live your life in anticipation, as if any moment is it.

That's what that idiom has to do with, living a life of expectancy. So cultural context is going to help.

We have grammatical context. Just looking at within that, wherever you have, if you're in verse 17, start at verse 1.

What's the context here as far as where this is in the passage of Scripture?

You have a spiritual context. Where are we? Are we the nation of Israel? Are we the church?

Are we before the church? Are we in Adam's day? There's a spiritual context there, because what you end up seeing is that God throughout history dealt differently with his people, and you end up seeing that he deals spiritually with them differently, and therefore there's a spiritual context we have to know.

And so with each of these things, you have a different context to it, that we have to take all of these and understand them when we're looking at one passage of Scripture.

Right. That's very helpful. So it seems like a lot, and I think as a woman might be listening to this going, man, that's a lot to have to know before I can even study my

Bible. So what kind of advice would you give for a woman who's come to realize, okay, maybe

I need to throw the devotion in the trash and actually just get into God's Word?

What kind of encouragement and suggestions and maybe even resources that could help her start?

Sure. Let me make it easy for you, because we want to take small bite -sized times, periods of time, right?

When people listen to me preach, they will hear me talk a lot about what was happening in the culture and the background to the times.

And people have asked me, like, how do you study all that? I studied it a little bit every day for many, many years.

So one of the things my pastor encouraged me to do was to get a Bible dictionary or Bible encyclopedia.

There's many good ones you can get. Just get one and open to random articles.

Articles you may otherwise have absolutely no interest in reading. Some articles are short. Some are maybe a paragraph or two.

Some are maybe a page or two. But they're usually not more than a few pages.

And just read that. See what you can learn from it. Why do I say that? Because as you keep doing that every day,

I would just sit with a cup of coffee and my Bible encyclopedia, open up to a random article and read it.

And then years later, I'd be like, oh, wait, I remember something about that. And I would go and either go search that again or remember what

I had remembered. And all of a sudden, it's helping me when

I read through the Bible and I see something that says, oh, they're in the Sea of Galilee. Well, I read an article on the

Sea of Galilee, how it's in a valley. Got me thinking about things.

So the combination of just reading random articles in a Bible encyclopedia and being curious and trying to say, what does that mean?

Like, if I was living in that day, what would that mean? That will help. And so actually

Lagos Bible Software has a thing where their front page, when you go to their homepage, if you get that software, you can actually have it go through your library and pick up random articles.

I know where they got that idea from. It was me because they asked a bunch of pastors, like, how do you guys do your study?

And one of the things I said is I opened to a random encyclopedia every morning with a cup of coffee and I just read a random article and they put that in.

And so that's something you do in a small amount of time that what you're doing, whether you realize it or not, is building up a of things that as you read through the scriptures, you're going to come to things and you're going to remember what you had read and it's going to help in the study without you having to do a lot of study all at once.

Now, you want to do more study. What I would say is don't try to do everything in a week. You know, maybe you want to, you know,

I took a look at the parable in Luke 16 and I just gave away my position.

But the rich man and Lazarus, I had taken the position previously that that was not a parable.

I studied it for like two years. Now, was I doing anything else?

No, I was doing a lot of other things, but I just kept returning to this study. So I just, it was something that I spent a lot of time just digging in and I'd read different articles on it and I had lots of questions.

I'd try to get answers, but I wasn't trying to get them all at once. I wasn't spending lots of hours at a time. I'd spend an hour here, an hour there, maybe half an hour here.

But it was one passage that I was just curious of and I devoted a lot of time to it.

I spent a little bit of time over a long period of time. It ended up being a lot of time, but I didn't do it all at once.

And so you could do things like that. Yeah. Yeah. Just start with, I think even

John MacArthur, this is how I kind of started with my study is John MacArthur suggested, just take the shortest book and just read it and just read it again and read it again.

And as I found, you know, your reading of it becomes quicker, but then I start asking these questions.

And not only that, I got myself a study Bible, which I would suggest women do.

A good study Bible. Right. So here'd be a thing that MacArthur has a style of doing, and this, this will be helpful for folks who, if you, if you want to do his style, what he does is he reads through the old

Testament once a year and he'll start with say Matthew one to seven, and he will read

Matthew one to seven every day for a month. And then he reads the next seven chapters every day for a month and so on and so on.

What that actually do in that repetition is helping you to notice things, to see, to ask questions, to, you'll start to pick up things you don't pick up right away.

And that's the same thing I did. I used to memorize books of the Bible and in memorizing a book, you end up having to memorize it.

You end up having to form an outline. You end up picking up a whole lot more because you're, you're reciting it over and over and over and over again.

That, that and having a good study Bible, I would, I would recommend the MacArthur study

Bible. The ESV study Bible is pretty good. Holman has, well, the old

Holman had good study Bibles. Now it's, they got rid of the Holman study, Holman Christian Standard.

So I don't know if they're recent ones, but there's a lot of good study Bibles to get, but you got to check into, because remember that's someone's interpretation.

That's their notes. So you want to know that they're a solid person first. Right. And that was one of the,

I have the MacArthur study Bible. And one of the things that I really enjoyed about it was the historical background.

And then he also brought into it some of the critical, where they didn't quite agree where there were some,

I don't know what, I forget what it's called in the introduction. I'm so bad with names, but where there were, it's not that they're critical, but some interpret it this way.

I mean, it's interpretive. Oh man. Well, I'm not sure the exact word you're trying for, but I mean, the, there are,

MacArthur will put in there ways that people will misinterpret the passage.

Yes, yes. And so I don't know the name that I call it. I don't remember offhand the name he has for it, but hold on and I'll look for it.

You keep, you keep talking, I'll find it. So, yeah. And so that's really, really helped me.

And that's how I really did start studying besides the fact that I, you know, was a

Christian for how many years and realized hadn't actually read through the whole entire Bible. So just starting to read through the entire

Bible. But as I grew to love it more and understand that there was one way to interpret it, and yeah, we're not all going to get it right, but my job is to at least do my best to get

God's word right, is I began to love the history, to learn, to want to learn about the history around it, with each book and the times and like you said, the context and everything.

So MacArthur calls that interpretive challenges. Challenges. Now I joke, I jokingly say this, that if you were to follow the rules of interpretation consistently all the time, you'd agree with me.

Of course. That's a joke, folks. It's a joke.

But the reality is if we all did that, we would, we would come to the same conclusion. The problem is we just, none of us follow the rules perfectly.

Right. Right. Yeah. And so my next couple of questions are a little more female oriented because I just, well, look, the question

I'm going to have there now is we have to ask, what is a woman? Because we really don't know what a woman is anymore.

And so I don't know, you know, we're now being told that I wouldn't be able to answer these questions unless I identify as a woman.

Therefore, I guess to answer these, I will identify as a woman. Okay. Thank you. All right. Good. Now, now we're all set.

I was wondering about that. You know, if a woman means nothing, then that means she can be anything.

A woman is someone that identifies as a woman. But what is that? You can't define something by using its own word.

This is the culture we live in now, ladies. We live in a culture that we can't even define a woman. But yet we can have a woman who's on the first.

She's, she's, she's elected to the Supreme Court because she's a woman, but she can't answer the question.

What is a woman? Cause she's not a biologist. And yet we can't look at the biology of what a woman is because this is a psychological issue.

Yes. Okay. Are you confused yet? Yes. I mean, it was very confusing. I know. And you can get me off talking about it because honestly, we laugh or I laugh about it.

And it's, it's so sad. It's so sad. And it's so bad for us women.

It's just really bad for us. But anyway, um, so I did an episode. Anybody want to know what a woman is?

I answered that question before this all broke out, by the way. Before, before Matt Walsh did his documentary on what is a woman?

Yeah. Well, even before what's her name said, she couldn't, she wasn't a biologist, so she couldn't answer.

You know, the one thing of Matt Walsh's documentary that really was kind of funny and sad at the same time was there was a, there was a woman, clearly someone that looked like a woman claimed to be a, a gay man.

So just, okay. Okay. If your, if your head hasn't wrapped around that, he's asking this woman who identifies as a gay man, what is a woman?

And the lady says, well, I wouldn't pretend to know I'm not a woman. And Matt says, well, you don't have to be a woman to know what a woman is.

I mean, can you tell me what a woman is? You should go ask a woman. And so Matt Walsh says, are you a cat?

She goes, no. And he goes, what's a cat?

And like the realization comes over, she puts her head down. She looked up at him and says, I really regret doing this and just turns and walks away.

And he's going, well, what's a woman? That was both funny and sad at the same time.

Yeah. Well, you're doing everybody keeps giving me spoilers. I haven't seen it yet and I want to see it. So yeah.

Um, well then you better watch it before I give you the rest of the spoilers. Oh, I think, I think I know the premise at least from the outcome.

So I won't be too surprised. There's a woman who's a wolf. Oh my goodness.

Oh my goodness. Okay. Well, I will be shocked at some points, but not too shocked. I think. Um, so, but yeah, for, for women, um, and, and then we are learning about hermeneutics, why it's important.

And then also why it's important to study our, our Bible and Bible versus devotions and how important the history or the literature, looking at the literature types and the context.

Um, one of the things that I've found, um, learning hermeneutics is really good for, and, and all that information is for discernment.

And this is my main goal for my podcast. And it's my main goal to, um, for having you on and for all that I'm doing right now with all this.

So, um, just talk to me a little bit about, uh, her, you know, studying the

Bible and how it's really good for discernment. Well, this is what discernment is going to be about is interpreting the

Bible. The whole thing of discernment is going to be, am

I rightly handling God's word? That's how you're going to have discernment. So what we end up seeing is when we look and say we were discerning something, we have two ways we're going to discern it.

I feel this way. I feel you're, you're being hateful, right?

I'm going to look at what the Bible says. Oh, I realize now the Bible says you're being loving. I mean, how many people, when we tell them the truth of God's word, tell us that we are hateful, we're mean, and yet we're saying, no, we're doing the most loving thing we could do.

I mean, this, this is loving. And, and two totally different perspectives.

Why? Well, because we're looking at it from God's perspective or our perspective. You know, when

I tell someone that you violated God's law and you'd be headed to hell, they're going to look at that and say, that's so mean to say because it hurts my feelings.

But God says it's true. And so the loving thing to do is to warn you of the danger to come.

So this is the thing that in discernment is about hermeneutics. You know, people ask me, because I do a lot of debates.

And I mean, I do apologetics live every week and anyone can come in and challenge me. How do you prepare for that?

How do you prepare for questions you don't even know are coming? Very simple hermeneutics.

Any debate you see that I do, I'm pretty much dealing with a passage of scripture for the most part, and just working through it and explaining the rules and pointing out how someone else is breaking the rules.

So the two things I use in any debates I do is hermeneutics and logic.

And that's about it. And I don't fear debating people because all I'm going to do is say, well, thus says the

Lord. Here's why I'm saying God says this, and they're going to throw something at me. I'm going to go, but the

Bible says this, but the Bible says this, but the Bible says this. All the pressure's off of me.

I just have to be right in my interpretation. Great. Now, what are some of the benefits then for learning about hermeneutics and Bible study?

What are some of the benefits that you see spiritually for a human being? Well, I think that some of the benefits we have really is getting to know our

Lord and Savior better. That's the biggest thing. You think about things and say, okay,

I want to know God. I mean, so many people say that. I want to know God. How are you going to know him?

One of the things I do when I'm on the street, I'm evangelizing and people will say,

I'm a Christian. I ask, how many times roughly a month do you read your

Bible? Not study it, just read it. Oh, three or four. Okay. Let me ask you a question.

You go get married, come back from the honeymoon. It was a great honeymoon. Come back. Your spouse says, hey, you know what?

I'm going to go back to my place. I'll give you a call three or four times a month. I had one woman go,

I'd kill the guy. Yeah, that wouldn't apply. Why? Because you have no relationship.

And one was, yeah, I said, but that's the relationship you said you have with God. You kind of read his, you listen to him three or four times a month.

If you're not talking to him and hearing from him every day in his word, how are you going to discern anything?

How are you going to know? This is the whole reason we do this is because we want to know the one we love.

This is the way we get to know more about Christ, the one who died for us, the one who paid an eternal fine for us.

You tell me you love Christ and don't read your Bible. I don't believe you. You tell me you're a

Christian and you understand the depth of your depravity and what God did for you on that cross and you don't read your

Bible. I don't believe you. If someone paid a hundred million dollar fine for you, you would learn everything you can about that person and you would try to find ways to please that person.

But you wouldn't just go up to that person and go, hey, you know, I don't know if you like flowers or not. You may hate them, but you know, hey, here's some flowers for you.

Maybe the person's allergic to flowers. You would first study that. God died for you.

You'd study that. Amen to that. Amen. So good.

All right. Is there anything else that you would suggest would be beneficial for women in any form of Bible study or anything like that?

Yeah. There's some good books you can get on hermeneutics, some that are more technical, some that are less technical.

I mean, you could take our course. It's free. I mean, you could go to strivingfortraining .org, go to the academy, watch the class on biblical hermeneutics, and you can watch all those for free.

You don't have to buy the syllabus. That's how we make our money. Wait, no, that doesn't quite work.

We don't make money that way. But we do that just so people can get the lessons, get the understanding.

But some books you could get. MacArthur has a book. I'm drawing a blank on the title, but John MacArthur has a book on hermeneutics, which is good.

Roy Zuck has a book called Basic Bible Interpretations, which is a good entry level.

You really want a good primer, one that is easy to read and short. You can get the book

I mentioned in the beginning, When the Ox Scores My Neighbor. You can get those that I believe they're at the store at Striving for Eternity.

But that is a really good primer to just get started. If that book is too big, he has,

Josiah Nichols has an even smaller booklet, like maybe 40 pages, and it's only like I think a three and a half by three or three and a half by two and a half.

So it's a really small little booklet called What It Means to Me, and I think that's available at trackplanet .com.

So there's things like that that I could recommend, but it's something that if you really love your

Lord, then you want to do this study. Is it hard?

Does it take time? Yes and yes. Is it worth it? Extremely yes.

Emphatically yes. It is worth it because the more you know God, the more you will live for God.

And let me say this, ladies, many of you know, whether it's yourself or women that you know, there's so many women that struggle with counseling.

They need counseling. They struggle with decision making. They struggle with just you've seen them make poor decisions.

Guys do it too, by the way, but women will see this with friends of theirs who just you wish they would listen to you.

You know why they make bad decisions? Because they don't know their Bible. They don't know how God wants them to live.

How are you going to know that? By studying the Bible. So that's why it's so important for us.

Yes, so good. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you so much again for coming on to my show.

Well, thank you for having me. Thank you for taking me on in the

Christian podcast community. I am very grateful. I have grown so much listening to bunches and there's so many episodes really, but there's just so many good stuff on there.

I cannot stop telling people about it. So again, yes, just thank you.

And maybe oh, I'm looking forward to so that the people who are listening to this now that we are moving on to our part four, in which we will be talking about some of the analytical tools that are being used in the gathering.

And I will have you on again to talk about specifically CRT, correct?

Critical racism theory. I said it correctly. It's some of you might have heard it as critical race theory.

It's critical racism theory. Right. So I mentioned you here.

Now you have to come on. I am willing to come on. It's a privilege to be on your show, to be able to talk to your audience and hopefully get to know them a bit as they email you and let you know what they think of the episode.

But it's neat to get to know new folks. And I'm sure I'm going to go to some conference and they're going to say,

I heard you on Thoroughly Equipped and I'm going to go, cool. So because that happens.

So I look forward to those things. Oh, awesome. All right. Thank you, Andrew. Have a great night.

Thanks for having me. So, ladies, I hope that that was very helpful in bringing to your attention what hermeneutics is, why it's important to study your

Bible and what to do and not to do when it comes to interpreting scripture.

I pray, ladies, that you are eager to read God's word and come to know him more and more.

I pray that as you do, your eyes are opened and on account of God's mercy, you offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Then you will be able to test and approve what is the good, pleasing and perfect will of God.

Romans 12, 2. I pray the more you are in the scriptures, the more you are sanctified in the truth.

John 17, 17. I pray that in that sanctification, your love deepens for Christ.

Your trust is rooted in the Father and your hands are guided by the

Spirit. I pray you are in his word. Ladies, if you are interested in the transcript for this episode, you can go to ttew .org.

You can find other great resources, articles, blogs and videos that may bless you in your Christian walk, as well as links to follow me on social media.

If you wish to contact me, you can email me at thoroughlyequipped316 at gmail .com.

Again, the website address is ttew .org. Thoroughly Equipped is part of Striving for Eternity's Christian podcast community.

Striving for Eternity is a Christ -centered ministry focused on equipping people for eternity by assisting

Christians to have an eternal perspective on life. They strive to bring evangelism, discipleship, apologetics, and Christian living together for the purpose of eternal preparation by exalting

God, edifying and equipping the saints, and evangelizing the lost. They provide speakers, online articles, online courses, books, podcasts, and other theological resources, all centered on God's word.

To find out more, go to strivingforeternity .org. And to listen to other podcasts, go to podcast .strivingforeternity

.org. I pray that their resources bless you as they have blessed me, as we live our lives day by day, praising and glorifying

God. Everybody's choosy about something.

It might be your favorite snack. Two scoops of rocky road, please. Your style.

Those earrings look amazing on you. Or the things you like to do with your best friend.

You can be choosy when it comes to getting a COVID -19 vaccine too. If you're thinking about getting an updated vaccine, there's more than one type available.

You can find out more at wedovaccines .com. This message was brought to you by Novavax.