17 - Biblical Hermeneutics, Biographical Studies, Part 2

Well, welcome to the Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Biblical Harmonetics. We appreciate having you with us. We are continuing to have more students join us. We encourage you to get your syllabus and follow along.

You can get a syllabus by enrolling down there and be able to get a hold of the syllabus from there. But with the syllabus, you'll get all the notes. You'll get some extra things that we don't always go over in class that will be an advantage to you, I hope.

If not, well, next time you go camping, you need some kindling. There you go. You just pull out your syllabus. No, maybe you shouldn't do that. All right. So, where we are this class is we are continuing, having finished up all the work in how to actually interpret something.

We're now at a point where we're looking at the question of how do we go about doing different kinds of study. We're looking specifically at biographical types of study. In other words, we study the life of an individual, some person that we want to get a better gleam of their life.

And we're going to go over some review from last class and new material this class. But here's the thing of why this becomes important. You know, many people look at someone's life and they study it quickly.

And we're going to look at this when we talk about points to avoid and points to learn from in someone's life. But the importance of not just jumping into the Bible and say, you know, I want to study the life of David and just take that on.

You know, a lot of people do that without looking at all that earlier study that we talked about in how to interpret. And when they do that, what ends up happening is they jump right in to a study without making sure they're properly interpreting.

That leads people astray sometimes. For example, I've heard, unfortunately, many sermons about David and Goliath. Oh, and they talk about, you know, Goliath being a giant. Sometimes you have to have a, you know, to deal with the giants in your life.

And they talk about things like, you know, I've heard sermons where they'll talk about, you know, having these five small stones and it's just having a little bit of faith and you can conquer the giants of your life, whether it be health problems or economic problems or depression or whatever it is.

It has, the story of David and Goliath has nothing to do with your depression or your economic situation. That's somebody making something up, basically. What it is, it's someone that is going into what, taking something from the Bible and trying to make that argue for something that's totally not there, but they want to make a case for it.

The reason that David had five stones is because he picked five smooth stones. David went after Goliath, not because he was worried about some giant in his life, but because he was going to not allow this Philistine, this man from Goth, actually, to ridicule the Lord.

That was the issue. It wasn't about depression and financial situations, things like that. People end up jumping into scriptures and without doing the interpretation, spending that time in all that we've looked at up until this class.

People don't want to spend the time and be diligent in the work. What ends up happening when you do that is you end up in a case where you have something that you can't say, thus says the Lord, because you don't know because you haven't studied.

What we end up doing is having to do all that work, all that interpretation, with every text that we look at when we look at an individual. I was talking with some folks this past week and we were discussing some of the ways people misinterpret the scriptures.

I was relaying back to an event where I went to a church. It was a resurrection Sunday and the pastor was preaching that it was dark, that before the women came to a tomb, it was dark, and he's talking about depression in their lives and how times could be bad, but don't worry because Sunday is coming.

That was his whole message. Sunday was coming. In other words, there's going to be light. The reason it was dark for the women had nothing to do with depression or bad times. It was dark because the sun hasn't risen.

That's why it was dark. It was dark because it was early in the morning. It has more to say with the fact that the women didn't want to wait until morning. They were in a rush to get to the tomb more than it's saying anything about depression.

But people do this. They take a passage of the scripture and they jump right in and try to give it a meaning. They use really a sloppy hermeneutic, a sloppy interpretation because properly interpreting the Word of God takes time.

You can't make mistakes with this. Think about what you're doing when you're saying, thus says the Lord. You're saying that God is saying something. You're attributing something to God and saying that He's doing this.

He's saying this. You better be right. So when we look at a biographical study, as we looked at last class, we go into this and we want to make sure that we do all the interpretation for all the different passages that we're going to study.

That's why we said we gave a little bit of a warning last week. If you're going to study an individual, you're going to study a person, you want to make sure you're studying that person, but you've got to sometimes limit it.

If you're dealing with someone that there's not a lot of passages of scripture, maybe you want to study Jesus' half-brother Jude. Well, there's not a lot of scripture that deals with Jude, so you could probably deal with all those.

But if you want to take someone like David or Moses or Jesus, you have a lot of scripture that you're going to have to deal with. And if you are not ready to deal with all of those passages, then you're going to have this dilemma where you're going to have a lot of work to do.

So you may want to limit it. But you know, there's a warning that also has to be with that because you could limit it too much. Now, last week I mentioned, do you want to maybe limit, say, you do a study on John Mark and you want to limit it just to the book of Acts.

Well, that's where John Mark is mentioned the most. And you can look at that and say, well, I'm just going to examine the book of Acts. That might be a good idea, but there's one dilemma. You see, if you just study a man's life in, say, a book and you limit it to that, you may get a wrong idea of the person.

What do I mean by that? Well, if you look at someone like John Mark and you look at his life, what's recorded just within the scriptures, here's what you end up with. You end up with the fact that it seems that, you know, after the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, going into Acts 16, Paul and Barnabas say, hey, let's go back to the other churches where you're at and go and encourage them.

And Barnabas says, hey, that's a great idea. Let me take my cousin, John, John Mark. Paul says, whoa, hold your horses there, Barnabas. I know you're a son of encouragement. You love to encourage people.

You want to encourage your cousin, but you know what? That dude abandoned us. He left us on the first missionary journey. Let's not take him. And I'm guessing Barnabas said, no, no, no, we really should take him.

And Paul said, no, no, no, we really shouldn't take him. Because it says in the book of Acts that there was a strong division between the two of them. And the end result was Paul went one way and Barnabas went another.

Barnabas took John Mark and Paul went off and got some others to go with. And so what we ended up seeing is that they both went separate ways. Now, if you stopped there in the life of John Mark, you kind of get a bad idea.

All you know about the guy was he kind of, I mean, did some other things, but he ditched Paul and Barnabas. And yeah, he went on another missionary journey with Barnabas, but you don't know anything about it.

And you might be left with the impression that, you know, Barnabas is a quitter, sorry, John Mark is a quitter, and that he and Paul may never have restored that relationship. But you see, if you read later in Paul's writing to Timothy, you end up seeing that he says, hey, everyone's abandoned me.

He's feeling left out, right? He ends up saying, hey, to Timothy, can you do me a favor, send Mark. Why Mark? Because he's profitable for me. You see, Mark ended up being someone who not only wrote one of the Gospels, and many think that he wrote it on Peter's behalf, but the idea is that he was profitable to Paul.

So, whatever division they had, whatever tensions they had in Acts 16, 15 -16, we end up seeing that those were resolved, and we have to broaden the passages. Now, one of the things you want to do is you may not want to deal with every passage, but it'd be good to at least read the passages that deal with your character, because you may find something that you think is insignificant, such as the case with John Mark, and you find out it actually is very valuable to keeping you, kind of keeping some guardrails on you to make sure you don't go off on a tangent that's not true.

In other words, another example would be Jephthah in the book of Judges. He's asked to be a judge, to lead the people. He goes off to war and he says, Lord, if you bring success to this, I will offer as a burnt offering, as a sacrifice to you, the first thing that comes out of my door when I return.

Probably thinking maybe a cow was going to be the first thing, I don't know. But the first thing that came out of his door when he got home was his daughter. And so, if you read just a short, brief account in the book of Judges, as some have done, they go, okay, so then if he was, you know, going to be doing this, he must have offered his daughter as a burnt sacrifice.

Well, God wouldn't honor that. And so, you could have a very bad idea of Jephthah, unless of course you read Hebrews 11 and see he's mentioned as a man of faith for what he had done. Well, God wouldn't honor the faith of someone that breaks his law and say that's a faithful act by taking the life of his daughter.

But if you read the context in Judges, you read that he's a man of faith, you start to think maybe he offered his daughter as a virgin. In other words, he never allowed her to marry. And so, if you read the fuller accounts, you get a broader impression.

Another example of this would be Balaam in Numbers. If you read Numbers 22, 23, and 24, you see Balaam, he's a man who goes after the Lord and he's a prophet for the Lord and Balak, a king of Moab, wants Balaam to curse Israel.

Because if he will curse Israel, the God of Israel, who Balaam serves, will curse them and then Balak, who doesn't want Israel overtaking him, doesn't have to worry about him. That's basically what's going on.

And Balaam seems to be like, hey, I can't do whatever, if the Lord allows me to say it, I'll say it. But I can't say what the Lord doesn't allow me to say. And three times he ends up blessing Israel. And then what you end up seeing in chapter 25 of Numbers is that we see that Balak ends up sending his young women to basically marry the young men and that God ends up being very upset with Israel and they lose his favor in that sense.

Now, what is important about that? Well, what becomes important is, if you look at Balaam's life, you think that he was a man who really honored God. He was offered much riches, he rejected them. He was going to honor God.

Until you get to other passages in the Bible, the clearest would be something like in Jude where it talks about the counsel of Balaam that he did for the riches. And what is that counsel? Well, when you read other passages, you end up realizing that Balaam is the one that's credited, I don't know if that's the right word, more blamed for what happens in Numbers 25.

Even though in Numbers 25 you don't see Balaam referenced, when you read the other passages of Scripture, you see that Balaam is the one blamed for giving the counsel to Balak to go send the young women to marry the young men of Israel and to lead them astray and to lead them to worship false gods.

And so, this was something that Balaam had done and he did it for money, for the riches he was promised. And you don't see that directly in him being named directly in Numbers 25, so you might read over that and not think that that deals with Balaam.

And that's where if you're going to interpret Numbers 22 -25, you want to at least study the other references, take out your concordance and study out all the other passages that deal with Balaam. Or get a topical Bible or who's who of the Bible and from those things you'll be able to see some other places where your character is mentioned.

So you can make sure that you don't say something based on the fact that you limited your text. Okay? So let's do a quick review. When we take someone, we're going to take a character, there's certain things we want to look at.

We mentioned this last week as we start looking at biographical Bible studies. One of the things when we do a biographical Bible study is you want to choose your character, we mentioned that. You want to locate all the revelation that deals with that.

You may want to limit that. We said all that. You want to look at the dates of your character. You want to look at anything that deals with the family members of your character. The conversion, we mentioned that last class.

How did he get saved? The case of Paul becomes significant. You want to look at their ministry or their vocation. What do they do for a living? I have just recently in a church was preaching out of the passage with the disciples being in the boat with Jesus when this storm comes up.

One of the significant things you have to understand about that text is you need to understand something about the biographical characters. Why is that important? Well, the reason it's important is because a couple of them, at least four of those disciples were fishermen.

I mean, their father were fishermen. They grew up on water, on the Sea of Galilee. They were used to being on the boat during storms. That tells you something about how serious the storm is if experienced fishermen are scared to be out in this storm.

They're saying they're going to perish. They would know a little bit better than maybe a tax collector. Matthew was a tax collector. Maybe he wasn't out on the sea very much. In that case, any kind of storm could be scary.

I remember, and I use this illustration in my sermon, but when I was out on a, I took a cruise with my wife, and I who grew up on a ship, I grew up spending the summers on a ship with my dad as a professional captain, and so I was very used to being out on water.

I was used to being on water and rough water. I was used to being out there when the boat would be rocking, and so it was one of these cases where when we go out on a cruise ship, my wife who's never been on a boat was nervous as is.

Okay, maybe it wasn't a good idea to watch the movie Titanic just before the cruise. No, I'm kidding. I didn't do that. That would be bad. That really would have drove her nuts, but what we ended up doing was we were on this cruise, and we're having dinner, nice quiet dinner, the two of us, and the cruise ship hit a whale.

Oh, I know. The captain said he didn't hit it. He was trying to avoid it, but I understand what happened. I grew up on a ship. I mean, we hit a whale. The whale might have come up right from underneath, but the entire ship started to keel over, and then the captain of the ship at the time moved very quickly one direction to get away from whatever they hit, but then had to go very far the other direction because he was overcompensating, and so the whole ship went kind of one way and then keeled over the other way and then bounced itself out.

My wife who thought, immediate thought, hands over the head like, we're sinking. That's it. This is it. Titanic. Ah. What did I do? I just grabbed my plate of food because it was sliding off the table and grabbed my water glass.

It didn't bother me. Why? I grew up in this kind of thing. I grew up having a boat that rocks very much one side to the other. All I did was grab my plate and kept eating. My wife thought I was nuts, but you see, they would have been experienced on the sea.

That becomes important. When you look at their vocation, they were fishermen. It helps to understand how serious the storm is when you realize they were scared. They were nervous. All right? So you want to look at their ministry and their vocation.

That plays into it. Sometimes we mention the death of the individual. How did he die? That may play into understanding something about the character of your character. That didn't come out well. Well, anyway, you understand the point.

Now let's pick up somewhere we left off last class, and that is some key verses. You want to find anything, any significant verses that would be practical for your life in the study of your character.

If you're going to be studying out an individual, you want to make sure you find those verses that really define the person. For example, if you are studying the book of Joseph, sorry, the life of Joseph, you're going to spend a lot of time in the book of Genesis, but you would be amiss if you study his life and don't turn to one verse, and that is Genesis chapter 50 and verse 19 and 20, where he says, Joseph said to them, do not fear, and this is when his brothers come to him, and they come with this thing like, oh, your father wanted you to spare our lives, like forgive them.

And Joseph says, do not fear, am I in the place of God? For you meant it for evil against me, but God meant it for good to bring about that many people should be kept alive as they are today. You see, that's a key verse in the life of Joseph.

If you want to understand how Joseph could be thrown into slavery by his brothers and still persevere, how he could rise up into Potiphar's house and then be accused of rape and thrown into prison and still persevere, and how he could rise up even within prison to be seen as somewhat important in the prison and then be forgotten about and still persevere and then be in Pharaoh's house or in Pharaoh's, you know, be second in command to Pharaoh and then have his brothers come back.

How could he deal with all these temptations in his life and persevere? Well, that verse is key. He realized that he is not God. Now, he's saying that at a point where he is in a position of authority where he could do pretty much whatever he wanted to do to his brothers.

I mean, they were under his authority. He could do what he wants and he doesn't. Why? Because you have to understand the mindset of Joseph. Those key verses help us to understand that Joseph had a different way of thinking.

He didn't think of himself in getting revenge. What he thought of was putting God first and what God was doing. He could see, even in them throwing him into slavery, he could see God's hand behind that.

That's important to understanding how Joseph could go through being enslaved, being thrown in prison, having all these things happen to him. It explains those things. Now, let's take a look at the next one, letter H in your syllabus, and that is points to practice.

You notice here that you want to notice any virtues of the character that you're studying. If you're taking David, for example, you're going to see, you're going to note that his character of such things as courage with Goliath, submission to government with what happened with him and Saul, steadfastness in trials, you can see that with him and his son Absalom.

You take a look at his life and you see, okay, hey, this is a guy, he sees Goliath, and Goliath is a big dude. He would have been about nine foot tall, roughly, and people say, oh, no one's lived that long.

Actually, the tallest man that ever lived was, I think, about a little over nine foot, nine two, nine three, something like that. And I actually have a picture of my wife who's about, oh, five two or so, and so she's about the height that people think David would have been, okay?

I also have a picture of me next to this wax statue of the tallest man that ever lived, and it's a real interesting picture because you can see how it would have been for David. Having someone who is literally, if he was my wife's height, literally comes up to the guy's waist, basically, I mean, just above the guy's waist, and if it was someone, if David was my height, okay, the guy comes up to, you know, about his midsection, okay?

So, Goliath would have been an intimidating fellow. David wasn't afraid. Why? Why do you have such courage? Because he already, his vocation, what was he? A shepherd. He had to defend the sheep against things like bears and lions, so he was used to taking on something that's scary, but he was more concerned with Goliath's mockery of God's Word, okay?

So, what you have there is you have a case where his courage is found in the offense. So, what we end up wanting to do there is look at the courage that he has. You could look at his submission to government.

Here he is, King Saul wants to kill him. King Saul is jealous. He wants to kill David. Okay, what is he going to do? Well, he's going to kill David in a cave. Saul goes to relieve himself, and he walks into this cave.

Look at David's soldiers. Those guys with David are like, David, the Lord is with you. Look, He has put your enemy in your hand. Kill this guy. Let's be done with it. Let's go back home. And these guys left their homes to be with David, and they want to get back.

What does David do? David goes up behind Saul, takes out his sword, takes Saul's robe, and just cuts a section of it off, and then goes back inside the cave and hides. Saul goes back down to be with the army.

He gets down there, and David cries out to him, says to him, King Saul, you know, because he said to his men, how should I, you know, not, how should I take the Lord's anointing? How should I harm the Lord's anointed?

Saul, you know, he recognized Saul was king. He was the Lord's anointed. He shouldn't do anything harm to him. David wouldn't do that, so what does he do? He calls down, Saul, Saul, see, the Lord put you in my hand, and I did nothing to you.

Here is a piece of your cloth, of your robe, and Saul recognized, David, you did right by me, and he goes back home, but not for too long, because he hears about what David's doing, gets jealous again, goes after him again.

So what does David do? David goes in to the town, or to the camp where they're staying, and he and just a few, one or two people go in and take Saul's, King Saul's javelin and water jug, and next day he calls to Abner, I think it was, and condemns him and says, hey, you're supposed to protect the king.

Here, I got into your camp and was able to take his javelin and his water jug. I could have killed him. But King Saul, I didn't do that. And so it tells you something about his character. It tells you he submits to government, doesn't it?

I mean, he would not even take the life of someone that's looking to kill him. Maybe that gives us a little bit of a different idea when it comes to some people that, some Christians that don't like the president.

Now, it may not be the current president. Sometimes you like the current president, but when it's a president you don't like, how do you respond? I mean, it's amazing how many Christians seem to want to call out, you know, damnation against the man that God has raised up, whether you want to like it or not.

It's the man that God has raised up to be your authority. That's it. So, how do you submit to authority? The way David did? Just ask yourself. It might be something you want to put on, some points to practice.

Now, you can look at his steadfastness in trials and you can look at the life of David and see many things to put on. But look at the next point in your syllabus, points to shun. You want to take, taking the example and notice some various things like in the life of King David, adultery, murder.

Those are things you don't want to be doing. I mean, not everything that a person does in his life you want to practice and model. So, you want to look at the things to practice and the things to not practice, right?

You see David and he goes off and he should be at war, but he decides to stay back. Maybe he was already having those sinful thoughts. Maybe he was already thinking that he really didn't want to be with the army where he should be because he had the ideas maybe already of Bathsheba.

Who knows? But either way, he goes to the rooftop and he looks over and sees her and decides a plan. He's going to have sex with her. So, he commits adultery. That's something you shouldn't practice. Not only does he commit adultery, but he tries to cover it up.

And when the cover-up fails, he decides to then take the life of Uriah, Bathsheba's husband, and then marry Bathsheba and just make it look like it was just natural. But he committed many crimes, many sins, adultery, lying, murder.

These are things you should not be practicing. They're not good. And so, those are things that you should be shunning when it comes to the study. So, you want to look at things to practice and things not.

If you're going to study most characters that have any depth of study, David, Moses, you're going to see a lot of things they do wrong. Noah, you see sins in their life. But there's three individuals in the Bible where we see an extensive amount of material about them and yet not one negative thing, not one sin that they commit.

Now, first you're probably thinking of is Jesus. And there's a difference in His case because He can't sin. So, there's not going to be anything that Jesus ever does to shun, to not practice. The other two are Daniel and Joseph.

Two men that did sin because they're men. But we don't have any recording of it. So, those are just two men that we have a lot written about and there's just nothing negative written about them. It doesn't mean they never sinned.

It just means it wasn't recorded. So, you want to look at things that your character does. And they're going to be things in two aspects. Things that they do that you can practice and things that they do that you want to shun.

And in doing this, you want to take a look at this and see what sort of things you can learn to both practice and avoid in your own life. What is it in your life that from studying this individual, this biographical character, what is it that you can glean to learn from in your life to give you a better appreciation of who God is or to live more God-like, more Godly, more Christ-like?

What is it you should be doing? These are the things that you want to do. You want to study your character not just for head knowledge. You don't want to be studying just for trivia so that you can win some Bible quiz.

You want to be studying the individual so that you can be living a life that is more in accordance with God's Word. And so, you're going to see that sometimes men do things. You can look at the life of David.

He thought he had covered up. I mean, he thought he had it good. No one knew what he did. I'm sure that some people might have known. But David probably figured no one was going to say anything except for Nathan.

See, Nathan was told by the Lord, Hey, go tell David, hey, I got a story for you. He tells him the story and says, guess what? You're the man. You're the one that did this bad thing. And so, all of a sudden, David has to deal with guilt.

Now, this is the point. We have to make sure we're thinking through these things to realize that as we deal with this stuff, okay, there's going to be things that we can practice when we examine someone's life.

And we want to start seeing the difficulties. You know, you look at a guy like Abraham, and you can learn even from his mistakes, the things he does wrong, the things he should shun. In other words, Abraham was known as a man of faith.

And people look at him and they say, Oh, what great faith. Look how he is willing to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, this long promised son. Look at the faith that he had. But that faith didn't come overnight.

We read the accounts of Genesis quite quickly. And we can have a tendency to think that they happened quickly. This happened over many, many years, 60, 70 years that he developed this faith. Remember, when Abraham went into a town, not once, but twice, he went into a town and lied about his wife, saying it was his sister.

And twice she was pulled in to the harem of the king of that town. Now, the harem would have been where the king would bring women in and eventually he would marry them or sleep with them. Abraham put his wife in a position where she was actually could have been committing adultery.

One of the kings says, you know, when he finds out he sees, you know, Abraham goes, This wasn't your sister. It's your wife. I saw you with her. You you're you're way too intimate. What are you doing?

One of our men, one of us could have committed adultery with her. And we would have been under God's judgment. You see, two different times, not once, but twice. Abraham lied about his wife. He didn't learn the lesson the first time.

But, you know, that could be an encouragement to you and I, even in his failure. Have you ever failed God? Have you ever had times where things didn't quite go well? Yeah, we all have. You know, George Mueller wrote his autobiography.

Many people don't understand why he wrote it. He said why he wrote it. Actually, he said he wrote it because he wanted people to understand that he was people knew him as this great man of faith. But the reason he published his diary is because he wanted people to see that that faith was developed over a long period of time with many small things, just building upon them.

So he had one small thing built upon another small thing. And so these small steps of faith. But that's sort of the thing with Abraham. He failed. He had some failure in the area of faith. But eventually he learned from those things to a point where he was known as that great man of faith.

So even in the things that we should shun, we also learn that there's things to practice. We should not lie about, you know, things like Abraham did, but we should learn the lesson that Abraham needed to learn.

I mean, it's far better to learn from someone else's mistakes than from your own. Right. I learned that lesson early on when I was a child. I saw that my brothers, I have two older brothers, and when they were old enough to drive, they had to be home by 11 o 'clock on weekends.

You know, I never asked my parents what time I needed to be home. Now, my brothers were known for constantly breaking the 11 o 'clock curfew. I mean, they'd come in at 1102 or 1105. I mean, they'd be close, but it was like they always just had to break it, which never made sense to me because they broke it one weekend.

The next weekend they weren't allowed to go out at all. So why break it? Just so you can be like, oh, I got, you know, I broke this curfew. Oh, it was just two minutes. OK, big deal. I never asked what time my curfew was.

I knew when I went out, I would go out. I'd be home. I planned enough time to make sure I was home. I saw that the excuses my brothers would give didn't work. You know, traffic at 11 o 'clock at night, traffic all over the roads.

It's like we don't live in New York City. Sorry, that doesn't work. You know, lost track of time, you know, got stopped at a red light. The car stalled out. I needed to get gas. I mean, they tried all these excuses and it never seemed to work.

So I made sure that I was home before 11 o 'clock. I mean, quarter to 11 is typically when I got home. So my parents never actually gave me a curfew. My sisters didn't like that. My sisters are younger and they didn't like that because they thought that meant they didn't have a curfew.

I was actually a senior in high school. I was allowed to be out till midnight during the school nights. Some of my brothers never had. Why? Because I learned from their mistake. They would make a mistake and I learned from it.

Now, unfortunately, I didn't learn all my lessons by other people's mistakes. I learned most of them by my own and I'm a little thick-headed. So sometimes it took a long time to learn. But we're all like that, aren't we?

And so we can learn from others' mistakes by looking in the scriptures and seeing the character of individuals and learn the lessons that God had for them so that we can see the things we should be practicing and the things we shouldn't be practicing so we can learn those lessons.

Letter J in your syllabus is life illustrations. What can we point out from the truths of the character that illustrate something in life? We looked at some of these already. We mentioned Abraham, his faith.