Knowing Scripture III: The Science of Interpretation

Welcome to The Whole Council Podcast. I'm John Snyder, and with me this week is Ron Franks. Good to have you, Ron. Thank you. We're looking at the topic of knowing Scripture, and we're using a little book by R .C. Sproul, by that title, where he walks us through in a number of chapters how to approach the Scripture in a way that's not just earnest, but wise.

In other words, I think most of us, and Ron, you probably feel the same way, that when we think of the privilege of having the Word of God, generally I feel I need to be more earnest, or I need to work harder, or read more.

And the thought of more is not bad, but it's also I want to be wiser, how to approach it in a way that my angle of approach is in agreement with what the Bible would have us do. So we don't want to waste our time just reading more.

We want to do it in a way that's beneficial, and that really is critical for the believer. If we think about it, of all people on the planet, there is one religion that has a God who is the living God and who speaks to his people.

Moses talks about this in Deuteronomy, when God has brought his people out of Egypt, and he's made this covenant relationship with them, and they're heading toward a promised land, and then, of course, the 40 years result of their rebellion.

But right before they go into the promised land, Deuteronomy, Moses gives them three very intense sermons to prepare them for life in the promised land, and one of the things he says to them is that they, of all people, have a God who has given them his word.

And so we as believers understand that that applies to us as well, and we want to be careful with that. There are a lot of ways to approach the Scripture that are not beneficial, and there are ways that we can approach Scripture as Protestants that are not beneficial.

As Protestants, we believe in sola scriptura, so the Scripture alone is our ultimate authority. There are other things that help us to understand Scripture. There are other things that have a derived authority.

We think of church leaders and, you know, teaching in that context. Well, there is a derived authority. As long as they are teaching what the Scripture says, then we take that seriously. But the Scriptures are the authority.

If we're not careful with the principles that we use to approach Scripture, then it seems to me that we can say sola scriptura, all that we want as Protestants, but then really we've slid towards something else.

One would be, you know, going back to depending on the church leaders to tell us everything. Well, if my preacher says it, it must be true. And we don't search the Scriptures. We don't try to understand better.

You know, we don't use the sermon on Sunday as a springboard to spend the rest of the week to really diving into what the Bible says about that as a whole. Another option is we come to the Bible carelessly, and instead of using good principles, we kind of slide into the, you know, this is what I feel about things, kind of an emotional response to a passage, and because I have an emotional response to the passage, that's the pinnacle in my mind of interpretation.

So those are dangers that we face, and we're grateful that there are good principles that we call hermeneutical principles, principles for approaching any written text, but of course we're applying them to the Word of God.

So that's what we'll be looking at today, and our chapter today is called, Hermeneutics, the Science of Interpretation. Before we jump in that and look at the key points, Ron, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Well, I've been in pastoral ministry for several years before I came to Christ Church. I went to Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary, where you went as well, and then I resigned to church, moved down here, been here about 10 years, one of the pastors here now, and I don't know, just find a great interest and a great love for Christ stirred up by the Word itself, the things in the.

Word of God that comes alive to our hearts. Yeah, so you had been working as an engineer, and then felt the call to preach, and then went back and got a master's from the seminary. So we've had different people join the podcast for this series, because we wanted people from different backgrounds, some people who find reading easy and enjoyable, and they love books, and some people who find reading a bit of a struggle, some people who have had no religious education, and some people who have had a lot, and so you're in that category.

You've had a lot of religious education. We talked a little bit before the podcast, I think that there's always a possibility that I wasn't paying attention, but I do not remember anyone sitting us down on the seminary level and walking us through basic hermeneutical principles.

But you did take a class on hermeneutics. I didn't actually take a class, I think, on hermeneutics. Probably, I would say that we were taught hermeneutical principles in general, just in the way that we studied in classrooms, but I didn't know what they were.

What was your experience in seminary.

When it comes to hermeneutics? Went through the book, studied, as I mentioned, I took a summer course. I found there are some principles there we're taught, but I think once you get out of seminary and involved in the lives of people, shepherding souls, that a lot of those things go by the wayside, at least theological thoughts, but I find many of them that you're doing naturally.

If you take the analogy of faith that he talks about, Scripture interprets Scripture, that's something most people are doing and they don't know that they're doing it.

Yes, even if a person is just using the cross references in the Scripture to see what other passages say about a certain thing, that is a hermeneutical principle, and we just don't use those words. We don't go to school or we don't go to work on Monday and say, I've been really considering hermeneutical principles, and people would look at you and think, well, what's that?

So what are the right principles for approaching Scripture? And these are really drawn from Scripture itself. In other words, how we see other writers in Scripture understand the Bible itself gives us kind of a path to walk, and I want to hit just the high points because he gives a number of them.

Let me give you the list of what he mentions in the book. He mentions the analogy of faith, which, Ron, you just mentioned. He mentions interpreting the Bible literally and what that does or doesn't mean.

He mentions the grammatical historical method. I do remember talking a lot about that in seminary. And he mentions source criticism, which we won't spend a lot of time on because I think that for the average person reading through the Bible, that has very little benefit for them.

I mean, I feel like it has very little benefit for me, but you might run across this topic in certain commentaries if you're reading a particularly academic commentary. It's basically just saying we see that there are sources that the writers of the Bible are borrowing from to write their books, and a lot of that has to do with the gospels.

So what are the eyewitness accounts that are behind the writing of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Which gospel came first? Do we see a pattern in that? And probably the key application of that would be you do see that different writers are taking the same historical material and they are making a different emphasis, but you don't have to understand source criticism to see that, where you can see that there's a different emphasis and we understand why.

And finally, authorship and dating. Does understanding the author and the time that it was written in and the situation that the author's in, does that provide significant help in interpreting the passage?

All right, well, let's just jump in, and we can hit the high points of these. So Ron, we'd been talking earlier, and you mentioned the analogy of faith as one that you felt was particularly helpful. So what is it, and why do you find it helpful?

Well, basically the analogy of faith is Scripture interpreting Scripture. As you mentioned, cross-referenced Bibles. When I got converted around the age of 30, I got converted by reading my Bible, by going through the book of Acts, and just continued looking.

I don't look like these people in the Scriptures, even though I would have said I was a Christian. But you know, look at that, and you get to read more, and I would read a ways, and things weren't clear, so I'd cross-reference other things.

Someone encouraged me to get a Strong's Concordance and a Vine's Dictionary, and I would just look every word up, and I would look back and realize that there's much to be said, just like Jesus and Paul, both in their writings, or let's Jesus talk, not his writings, but they're using Old Testament verses, and what they're wanting to put across.

So I think of that, Sproul referred to the philosophy of second glance. Basically, you read something that doesn't sound accurate, you go back and read it again, then you align it with other Scriptures that help interpret it.

For me, the analogy of faith is probably what everyone's doing that they don't know they're doing. The earnest studier that's reading through their Bible daily, they're comparing other things with what they've read before.

It's helping them interpret it, it's helping them give the correct references of what.

Actually the Scripture is pointing us to. Yeah, I think one way we could picture this principle is, if you imagine that you're doing a complicated jigsaw puzzle, you know, one of those that have thousands of pieces, and maybe you lay it all out on the table, and you've got them kind of arranged by their color groupings, and you think, okay, you know, if I knew the big picture, it would help me to understand where this individual piece fits.

So most puzzles, they come with the box with the picture on it, and usually with a picture inside. So you look at the lid of the box, and you see the big picture, and then you look at the individual pieces, and that helps you and guides us in knowing, okay, well, in general, where does this piece belong?

And if I try to fit this piece where it doesn't belong, even though I might be able to kind of cram it into the spot, when I look at the box lid, and then I look at the picture that's forming, I think, wait, this isn't right.

This belongs somewhere else. We can look at individual texts, and we can feel so convinced that we have the right interpretation, but if it contradicts what the rest of the Bible teaches, then that's where the analogy of faith really protects us.

It sends us back to the Bible, like you said, the second glance, and say, okay, wait. We know that the Bible is a book that's written by men, but guided by God. That means there is no contradiction in Scripture.

We have paradoxes. We have a lot of paradoxes, but those are only apparent contradictions, and there are things that are sometimes difficult to understand, and we feel like we can get kind of the edge of the truth, but, you know, it's like looking at a mountain.

The clouds hit it about halfway up when we think, I'm having trouble seeing the whole picture at this moment, but I can get something of it. So we're not saying that scriptural study is always a breeze, but if we look at the big picture, what does the Bible teach as a whole on each of these topics?

And that, of course, is something that we're always growing in, you know, as we read our Bibles. Our big picture is becoming more complete, and as that is informed by, you know, years of reading and studying and listening and learning, that picture becomes more clear, and that helps us to be more careful with individual things.

One problem, I think, with the analogy of faith is that it does require that our idea of what the Bible teaches as a whole really is informed by the Bible. So, for example, your analogy of faith could be based on what your church says or, you know, the tradition that you're in, your denomination.

So, you know, you could read a passage. I remember reading passages that talked about God's bigness or God's sovereignty, and I kind of just glossed over those, because I thought, well, it can't mean what it seems to say it means, because I grew up in this kind of church, and we believe this.

So my analogy of faith, my big picture on the box, was formed by the tradition of church that I grew up in, and when a certain verse didn't fit that, then I thought, well, that verse must not mean that.

So it really is on us to be careful students of the Bible with all the principles so that our big picture, our analogy of faith, is biblical, and then it informs the individual passage. Otherwise, our analogy of faith is based on something other than Scripture, and it becomes a lens that warps individual passages.

The next, interpreting the Bible literally. I think that that's something that we struggle with, not that we are liberal and we say, well, every passage, it's just kind of a, you know, it's whatever you want to make of it, but when he talks about interpreting it literally, he talks about a number of things that go into that.

So if you were to just sit someone down and say, a baby Christian, and say, you know, when you're reading the Bible, we need to interpret it literally, how would you explain that in everyday talk? I guess, you know, first,.

Like you said, the analogy of faith and the literal interpretation and genre analysis, along with grammatical historical method, all rest upon having the presupposed or the understanding is the Word of God is exactly that, God's Word, inerrant, infallible.

So you start there with literal interpretation. I think I would explain to someone like, you look at other writings, you know, you look at other type of literature, you know, there's poetry, there's novels, there's historical books.

You don't read a poem and try and interpret it the way you would a historical book. Literal interpretation is looking at the Scriptures, what does it say? What does the text say? You know, you look at each, basically, letter of Paul's epistles, we know he's written those to certain people and certain things are going on.

There's historical information there, but there's also the fact of what he's saying. So you look at the Psalms, it's poetry, music, basically. So it's written with other things in mind to bring across to the reader, to the hymn singer, to say, here's the message about God that I'm putting out.

So I think literal, just that, that you look at it, literally, what does it say in context of the book, in context.

Of the whole Bible? Yeah, Sproul says it's the plain and evident meaning of a text. So, you know, I think it's a really helpful emphasis here that he says that this is a divine book, but as you mentioned, Ron, it is a writing.

It's a book. And so it's a book that God has given us, but He's given us it in, you know, it's a book written for humans, and we read it like we read other books in many ways. We have the same kind of basic tools that overlap.

And so if we approach this book, and we think that because God is behind the book, it has some kind of magical quality that just transfers knowledge to us without hard work or without understanding, like you mentioned, the different genres or the different types of literature, and how that affects the way we approach them, which I think most of us do, but it's good to know why we do it, and it's good to be aware of that.

So when we approach a book that has either law or history, prophecy, you know, it has letters written, as you mentioned, to individual churches in special situations, it has poetry and proverbs, it has parables.

All of those require that we read them from a different angle because of the type of literature they are. And if we skip that and think, well, it's just a magic book, then, you know, we get in trouble.

Also, when we approach a text, we don't come at it expecting that while the text seems to just be a narrative, you know, so we're reading history or reading, you know, a list of Old Testament laws, we say, well, but because it's a book that God gives us, there's probably some secret meaning behind it, you know, like the Da Vinci Code kind of thing, you know.

And I have had friends approach me and say, well, you know, what about when we come to the Bible and we assign numerical value to different letters, and, you know, and if you do that, you come up with this amazing hidden message.

And I think, well, what about the amazing obvious message, you know, because I don't actually think that approaching it and trying to assign these numerical values, you know, I don't think that that's what the Scripture would have us do.

What is the plain and evident meaning of the text? And Ron, you mentioned the fact that that does require, not that we read it kind of literalistically, you know, where you read the book of Revelation as in the same way that you read, you know, the sermons of Isaiah, that there are different types of literature.

So you could think of it this way. Interpreting the Scripture literally includes understanding the type of literature. So we are literal in our interpretation, but according to the type of literature.

He mentions a number of things that are helpful here that, you know, that let's kind of throw in and hit. He mentions the use in poetry of personification or anthropomorphisms. That's where the poet describes non-human things or beings using human descriptions.

So, of course, the main one that comes to mind would be God Himself. You know, the poet, the psalmist might say, you know, that God has turned His back on us, or, you know, talk about the hand of God or the face of God or the ear of God.

But we know when we read the rest of Scripture that God in His absolute form, in His absolute perfection, doesn't have a body like us. So we understand that this is symbolic, and it's referring to when it talks about the ear of God, God listening to us, God aware of us, responsive to us, but it's not saying He has a human ear.

So that's helpful when we think we're not being unbiblical, we're not doubting the Scripture. When the Bible talks about God's arm stretching out or God's arm being shortened or God's ear being dull, as Isaiah says, we're not saying that God has a human body.

But when we say that, be careful not to say, well, therefore it doesn't mean anything. Well, it does. You know, it is talking about God's hearing, it's talking about the hand of God, God's activity, and it's saying it in a way that humans can't miss, you know, that we can understand.

I just think in the fact, you know, he's talking about things being literal, and some scholars, some liberal-type people, have a problem with miracles. Did Jonah get swallowed by a fish, or is that just folklore?

And I think you look at it in a sense of literally looking at it as historical evidence from the Scriptures. You know, the texts tell us that all Scriptures God breathed, that it's all inherent. So we look at that, and we read it, and then we see, here are things we can build upon in our understanding.

It's not the whole work of the Bible simply for God to disclose himself to mankind, you know? So I think sometimes not getting caught up in, you know, he talks about genre analysis, you know, you can break it down, but I mean, does that really, does that put you ahead of anyone else, you know?

I mean, other than simply taking the text in and seeing it, literally looking at Luther used the idea of just literally taking it for the letters, not Paul's letters, letters that are written, you know, one after the other.

So I think it's helpful to see. I think also it's encouraging to know that the everyday person can look at the Bible and read it and understand it, you know?

Yeah, these are common approaches to reading anything. You know, when we read Shakespeare in school, we read it differently than I would read a user's manual for a coffee machine that I get, you know?

I mean, we know that they're different, and so we approach them expecting differences. A lot of Scripture uses metaphors or similes, so these are symbolic comparisons. When Jesus says, I am the door, or I am the way, we understand what he means.

He's not saying he is a door, and it's not being liberal to say, well, the Bible says he's the door, but, you know, but I don't know if he's really the door. Well, that would be a very, you know, immature approach, and I use that just as an obvious example.

There are aspects of Scripture where there are symbols, and, you know, when you think about parables, they require special treatment as well. So a parable is a story used to teach. It's an illustration, and it's the kind of thing that you don't have to be religious at all.

You don't even have to believe there's a God to understand the parable. It's an everyday event that's used to illustrate or to drive home a spiritual principle. But as we're reading those, it's tempting sometimes to make a parable say more than Christ meant it to say.

So the general rule for a parable is there will be one overriding message, one point, and in some parables, that point will be emphasized from a number of angles, but still there's one major point, and it's dangerous if we try to press the parable to say a lot of things.

You know, we take each aspect of the picture in a parable, and we make kind of a mountain out of a molehill, which is something we have to be careful with. Also, one last thing under the literal interpretation of Scripture, there is in Scripture a very significant tool that we call typology.

So there are types, and then there are the fulfillment of types. We call those antitypes. A type is a symbolic representation of something. It's something that's real, but its value is it's pointing you to something else.

So there's the symbolism. So a type is something that is real, but is pointing us or preparing us for something greater. It always precedes the antitype or the fulfillment in time, so the type always comes first, and the type, which is pointing to something else, the antitype, the fulfillment, is always greater than the type, and this is something that we need the Scripture to tell us this is occurring.

Otherwise, you know, we've kind of fallen into the trap, especially when we're young Christians. We're so enamored with our Lord, and we just read the Scriptures, and we think, I see Jesus everywhere.

Well, yes, but are we being careful? And so, you know, does the Bible give me any indication that this thing that I'm looking at, let's say in the Old Testament, it's a real thing, and it has value in itself, but its greater value is in what it's saying about Christ or, you know, something to come.

So think of the Passover lamb. That's a pretty obvious one. The Passover lamb was real. It had value in itself in that day, but when we read the Scriptures, later the Bible makes it very clear that it's a picture also of something much greater than itself.

The fulfillment of that ultimately is the Lamb of God, Christ, and so as we go back read the Old Testament with that New Testament clarity, we go back and we see the New Testament tells me to understand that this is also a picture of Christ, and when we read the Old Testament looking at that type, then it helps us to understand Christ better, and when we look at Christ, the fulfillment of the type, we understand He's not just the Lamb of God or a Lamb of God.

He is a Lamb par excellence, you know. He is so much greater than anything the Old Testament, you know, sacrificial system provided. So it does help us have clarity when we look at the types and then the fulfillment of the types, and it helps us to get the right measure.

The anti-type, or the fulfillment of that Old Testament picture, is far greater than the original picture, and sometimes the pictures are pretty great, and so that helps us get a good measure of the fulfillment.

Well, let's go on to the last one, and that's the grammatical-historical method, and you mentioned a few things that go along with this, so Ron, why don't you hit kind of what goes into the grammatical-historical method?

What are we talking about?

Okay, I think the grammatical-historical method is probably used by most pastoral people that are scholarly studiers. I mean, the everyday church member probably doesn't think about this, even though they use some of it, but, you know, it takes more time.

It takes resources. I mentioned in Divine's Dictionary and things earlier, but I switched over to the Logos Bible software because there's just more there, but those who are willing to study and look into, you know, the original Greek and Hebrew, I like word studies.

I like seeing what the original word means or stands for. Looking at that, you kind of have to know English grammar well. That probably leaves me out, but in the sense of that, you look at the grammar that's laid out, the structure of the sentence, historical, then we're going to get into at what time.

Did Paul write this letter from prison? Did he write it from another place? You know, when were these? We'll talk later about authors and date, you said, but you know, who wrote it, what's the date, what's the intention?

I think the grammatical historical method is good, it's helpful. I think if you're willing to put the time in, it's definitely necessary. A lot of work's been done for us by good scholars that's gone before us.

Yeah, and this is an area where a good commentary on the book that you're reading. So if you're, let's say, you're walking through, you know, the book of Acts, and you say, well, as I'm reading my Bible, there are times where, you know, a passage may come up that I really find that difficult.

Then you look back and forth, you're using cross-references, or you said, like, the Strong's Concordance. Maybe you're looking up individual words in their original language, and Strong's gives a very basic definition of that.

And, you know, you can do that work, but you can also have a good commentary. And with the good commentary, you do get the benefit of an expert, so to speak, who has done a lot of scholarly research and boiled it down to the fundamental things that we need to help us understand more clearly.

And there are different types of commentaries. So there are very devotional commentaries like Matthew Henry, and those are good. Those are commentaries that, I would say, they're kind of sermonic. So when you read Matthew Henry, it's like having someone give you a devotion for the morning.

And so it's warm-hearted, there's a lot of application there for you. It's not just saying, this is what this phrase means, and this is the way that the Greek or Hebrew is structured, and this is the, you know, this is what other people say about it.

So it's very devotional. It's like a pre-made meal, and all you do is throw it in the oven and pull it out, and there it is, you know, it's all been put together for you. Then there are commentaries on the very far edge, the opposite of that, we could say they're very analytical or critical commentaries, and these are heavy on the academic side, a lot about the original language, a lot about arguments among some scholars and why we believe that they're right or wrong.

And those can be helpful. Those also can be pretty dry. It's like someone just handing you all the ingredients, all the spices that go into a meal, and saying, well, how was it? You know, and if you just...

Ron, you do a lot of... you do work with meats and smoke and grill, and so if you invited people over and you handed them raw meat and raw vegetables and spices and said, well, eat up, and can you imagine them, you know, grabbing the raw meat and grabbing spices and just throwing... well, of course not.

You know, they expect that you've done the hard work to put it together for them. So those commentaries can be good. My favorite category of commentary, though, is, I would say, kind of in between those, and that would be a commentary that does deal with what is the passage saying and why do we know that's what it's saying, and here's the history behind it, here's the grammar, here are some very helpful things, here are some answers maybe to some hard questions, here are some other places that help us to understand this passage, but it is still given to you in a way that you believe that the writer is a Christian and not just a professor somewhere.

So that it's like the heart is warmed, but you have to take that and you still have to do some work before it's a meal for your own heart, and I think that that's really helpful. So much of what we're talking about with the grammatical historical method is done for us in a good commentary, and we can use those.

When we think about going back to the original language, a couple things I think we have to be aware of. One is that when we look up a word in its original language, and Strong's Concordance probably is where we all have gone to most.

It's a very simple way of doing it. You know, you look it up in the Concordance, this word, so we'll say, you know, the word witness. Well, this word witness appears in this verse. We find that in Strong's, and then there's a little number there, and it sends us to the back of the big dictionary, or the Concordance, and it gives us a dictionary, Greek or Hebrew, and it tells us what that word means.

But most words have multiple meanings, and so we have to remember that the ultimate guide for understanding that Greek or Hebrew word that we've just looked up is context. So if it doesn't make sense in the context, then you probably picked the wrong definition of that word, and Strong's is good because it's simple.

But that's also the weakness of Strong's. You could look at that and say, well, this word means this, because that's what the dictionary told me. Therefore, it always means this in every context, and we forget that there's a few thousand years, you know, in the Bible, and words are used in different ways.

That doesn't mean it's a free-for-all, and it doesn't matter what the Greek or Hebrew dictionary says, it just means that we understand that words have sometimes different meanings, and the context helps me understand which meaning plugs in here.

One good rule is, if you did a little word study, and then you came back to the passage, and you've come up with an amazing new understanding of this text that nobody has ever had because you just did your word study, then you probably have missed it somewhere.

Word studies, I find, help shine maybe brighter light, or it's like holding a passage, and I think, you know, when you've preached at the church here, Ron, you do this for us. You hold up a passage, and then, you know, we have the general teaching of this passage, and then you rotate it in front of us, and so we can see it from different angles using the word studies, and that gives greater clarity.

One very simple thing to do also with good Bible translations that we have today is you could read a passage in multiple translations. You know, I like the New American Standard. I also like the New King James, but I think the ESV is also a good translation.

So, you know, you use these types of translations, and you look at it from different angles because the translators had done all the hard work for you, and they may come maybe, you know, emphasizing different things because the Greek or the Hebrew, you know, could be validly interpreted that way, and so that gives us a good picture, and I find that is an easy way for those of us that aren't Greek or Hebrew experts, and though we took Greek and Hebrew, I would certainly not feel like I could look at a Hebrew passage and say, well, that's what this word says here, but the grammar of the passage, you know, how it is arranged, I think that's probably beyond me, so I lean a lot on good commentators there.

You mentioned authorship and dating. That's also really helpful, but I do think, like you said, it kind of falls into the historical aspect. You know, sometimes who it is that writes this and when they write it is so significant for understanding it, and sometimes we're not given that.

You think of, you know, so many of the psalms, we're not told who wrote a psalm, so we don't know when it was written. So is the psalmist talking about one particular event in Israel's history? Are they talking about one particular event in a believer's life?

We don't know, and those are very helpful, because we know that they have such universal application. You know, look, any believer can take this and go to God. Others, we do know something of the background, like Psalm 90, that wonderful psalm that talks about the transient, short life of man and the eternal, unchanging life of God, and that's a wonderful psalm.

It teaches us so much, but on top of what we read directly, we know that that was a psalm that Moses wrote, and he wrote it during those 40 years when Israel was traveling through the wilderness, and Moses, his job is to shepherd people while they die because of their rebellion against God, and it's at that point, you know, that heartbreaking 40...four decades of your life is going to be shepherding people who are in a terrible situation because of their unbelief, but he doesn't become bitter.

He doesn't blame God. He doesn't despair, even though, you know, the land is being filled with 100 ,000 graves, but he says things about man and about God at that point in his life, and knowing that makes Psalm 90, you know, just so much more helpful for us.

Well, any strengths or weaknesses as we close, Ron, of the chapter? Anything that kind of jumps out at you?

Not really. I enjoyed Sproul's writing. I think it's helpful to rethink it, to look at the avenues, and it's also helpful for the everyday believer not to feel pressured to, like, I have to go the grammatical historical method, or I won't get it all.

I mean, just simply, like you said, good commentaries written by good, solid people. I think, for me, again, I keep going back to the analogy of faith. Scripture interprets Scripture. You know, Paul said we need to rightly divide the word of truth, spending time in the word daily, using what helps you have, looking, you know, the internet, online resources, because you have to be careful, you know, but Mediagratia offers up lots of good answers for things, other good websites out there of other good pastors, but I think as far as Sproul's book goes, I thought he put it together well.

He kept it relatively simple, some areas a little bit technical.

Yeah, I think that's always been Sproul's genius, you know, that he can explain difficult things in a way that all of us can get, and, you know, he does throw in a few academic phrases that are in the Latin, and, you know, those always, I think those always are funny to read Latin now, and you think, I mean, I took Latin, but I can't read any, I don't remember any of it, you know, but usually, you know, there's the translation, so if you don't know Latin, you're fine.

It's the books that give you a big Latin paragraph, and I always look for the, I see it's Latin, and I think, okay, no hope there. Where's the footnote? And if there's no footnote, I think, well, why'd you do it, you know, but those are usually Puritans that do that to me.

So a lot of basic principles, and again, like you said, they're not, it's not rocket science. You don't have to be perfectly clear about every point and sub-point. You don't have to say, well, I could have written that chapter, but to just get a general handle on it, we look at the historical and the grammatical aspects.