5 - Biblical Hermeneutics, Commentaries and Encyclopedias

Striving for Eternity Videos

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September 2, 2019

6 - Biblical Hermeneutics, Computer Software & Websites

00:22: Well, welcome back to the
00:32: Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Biblical Harmonetics.
00:38: We are almost done wrapping up all the lessons on the tools.
00:44: We have two more lessons left to look at the different tools that we use, and then we're going to dig in with a lot of enjoyment into the different keys to interpreting
00:54: God's Word. I hope these are helpful to you. We welcome any of the new students that we have with us.
01:01: We do know that we've been able to touch base with folks all around the world through these classes.
01:08: I spoke to someone from Canada who just this week had said that these lessons have been very valuable to him and his study of God's Word and how to use the tools.
01:21: And so, we're glad to be a blessing to others through this technology that we have to be able to offer these things to you without any cost unless, of course, you want to purchase the syllabus, which we encourage you to do.
01:37: So, we are here today, and we would like to welcome you to actually get your syllabus out if you have a syllabus, if you've enrolled in the
01:48: Academy. And we're going to get to the syllabus in just a moment. But first,
01:55: I want to go spend a little bit of time going into some harmonical principles that are so important that we're going to be returning to this principle over and over and over again because it takes a while to understand it.
02:11: And I want, by the time we get to the keys of interpretation, that by then you're already starting to recognize this in the way people interpret.
02:21: There's two different ways, basically, that people interpret
02:27: God's Word. The first way is that people, and this is the most common way, that people interpret
02:33: God's Word based on their experience. In other words, either what they have experienced in life or what they believe to be true.
02:42: They read the text and they give it a meaning from their own reasoning, their own thinking, their own belief of what they wish the
02:50: Bible would say. That's the most common way. And the other way is to use the principles that we're going to look into, the rules, basically, of interpretation.
03:01: And that's what they are. They're principles to interpret. And this is the thing many people don't realize, that there's actually a means of interpretation.
03:08: This is why so many people say, well, there's many ways to interpret the Bible. You can make it say anything you want.
03:15: Well, you can if you're going to be dishonest. In other words, you can make the Bible say whatever you want it to say as long as you're not going to follow the principles of interpreting language.
03:26: We would like to follow the proper principles. Therefore, we're going to look at this and look to see how we can best understand what
03:35: God's Word actually says. Now, one way that we do this is by first putting our own views aside and taking a look at what the text actually says.
03:51: We have to make sure that we're trying to be honest with the text and not try to read something into the text.
03:58: Let me give you some big words to impress your friends at a dinner party. We're going to teach something called exegesis.
04:05: Ex means out, so it's out of. So, we're going to take out of the text the meaning versus eisegesis is to read in, read into the text.
04:17: So, it's two different ways of understanding God's Word. One is we open God's Word, we look at what it says, and we pull the meaning out of it.
04:24: Another is that we use our experiences, our own thinking, and we read that into the text. It's two different ways of interpreting.
04:30: And so, those are the two main ways that you'll see that people will interpret
04:35: God's Word. We want to teach you the right way, which is to exegete, to pull the meaning out of the text.
04:45: A friend of mine, Greg Hochul, tells the story that he had gone to a church and he was sharing with them that he had known of a church where someone wanted to make a decision.
05:02: They were struggling with a decision. You see, they were in an adulterous affair with someone else.
05:09: They were married, and she wanted to know what she should do. So, she turned to the
05:14: Word of God, hoping for an answer. And what did she know? God gave her an answer, just the one she was waiting for.
05:23: She opens to Colossians and reads, Put on the new man. And she goes, that's it.
05:30: Ditch the husband that I don't like. Marry the new man. I should put on the new man.
05:36: Thank you, Lord. Praise Jesus. I got an answer from God. I hope many of you are like going,
05:42: No, that's not how you interpret Scripture. And that'd be a good thing to do, because that would be wrong.
05:49: But he was telling, Greg was telling that story in a church. And someone said, you know, a similar thing happened in this church.
05:55: But it was with a single man who was interested in another single lady in the choir.
06:01: And he was the choir director. And he'd looked to God's Word for an answer on what to do. And sure enough,
06:07: God gave an answer. He was reading, and it said, Grace be unto you. Yes, and that's right.
06:14: The girl in the choir's name was Grace. And so he read it and said, Ah, God gave me an answer.
06:20: I'm to marry Grace. Now, I hope that you're not looking at that first one and saying,
06:27: Wow, that's really wrong. But not saying the same thing with the second, because they're both equally as wrong.
06:35: Not because of the act. It's not that one, the adultery is the issue, and the one's the two single people getting married.
06:42: That's not the issue. The issue is how they came to that conclusion. Saying that God gave them a
06:48: Word. God gave them a Scripture. God gave them a meaning. You notice that?
06:54: They're going to the Scriptures and saying, This is what God says to who? To me.
07:00: Most often when people read God's Word that way, they're reading exactly fitting to their own desires.
07:07: That's why when people say, The Lord spoke to me. The Lord told me. And usually what it is, it's their own desire telling them.
07:13: They never seem to have a word from the Lord doing something that's against their desire, it seems.
07:20: But you see, the issue there is the way that people come about reading
07:26: God's Word and understanding its meaning. We need to make sure that we're faithful to an understanding, a proper understanding to the
07:36: Word of God. And so if we're going to do that, what we must do is make sure that we are reading
07:43: God's Word following the principles of interpretation. Now, so far what we've been trying to do is go through the different tools that you have to help you interpret.
07:55: Now, I had someone this week, when I was at one of the Ivy League universities on an
08:01: Ivy League tour, someone who tried to say that, you know, we need to just stick to God's Word and not add extra biblical things like man's word.
08:17: That sounds pretty spiritual. I mean, it sounds really good.
08:23: I rest on God's Word alone. I don't look on extra biblical man -made things.
08:30: But when you interpret God's Word and you tell me what you think it means, you're giving me the words of men.
08:38: You see, you cannot understand God's Word or explain
08:43: God's Word without man -made thinking because we're not God. We have
08:49: God's Word, but we're going to interpret it based either on the proper principles or our own feelings, our own reasoning and what we wanted to say.
09:01: So, when someone, you know, sanctimoniously says that they only rely on God's Word, what they're really doing is they're saying,
09:09: I rely on myself. And if you're the only one that's, you're getting understanding from the interpretation of God's Word about, you could be in trouble.
09:20: Okay. There are people who think that God speaks directly to them different than other people or that somehow
09:28: God speaks to them and they can't be wrong. God does do, the Holy Spirit's ministry is to illuminate the human mind to an understanding of God's Word.
09:41: And we understand that. And so we do have a notion where God does speak to us.
09:48: I grant that. But what we have is that we're looking at God's Word as something that we have to dig into.
10:00: Study to show yourself approved unto God, rightly dividing the
10:05: Word of God. That's what Scripture says we ought to be doing. It's not something we just come to and read and go, ah, that's the meaning.
10:14: We're 2 ,000 years at least removed. In some passages, 3 ,500 years removed.
10:20: Very different cultures that we live in than the culture of the first century or even the nomadic tribes that the
10:27: Scriptures were written in, the Old Testament tribes. You see, you have a vast change in culture, in history, in language.
10:37: Even our own English language has changed within just the last 20 or 30 years. So we have to take this into account when we do these things.
10:47: So I say these things so that we would be careful to make sure that we are not coming to God's Word and reading into it.
10:57: Because that could be dangerous. Because then you're making God's Word mean something that it may not actually mean.
11:03: And we want to know what God says and not try to tell God what we think He says.
11:11: Now, with all of that, we're going to talk about one of the tools today that's going to actually come with a warning.
11:21: And it's going to seem strange because I'm telling you not to rely on yourself and the warning
11:26: I'm going to give you is to not rely on this tool. So it might seem contradictory, but let me explain as we go through and I hope it'll work out that you'll understand the warning.
11:37: But I do want to make sure that this point is clear, that when we come to the study of God's Word, we are going to rely on the works of other people.
11:48: We're going to rely on these tools that we've been looking at. These different dictionaries and English translations and Bible studies and all of these things.
11:59: We want to look at all of these things because we want to have a proper understanding of God's Word.
12:07: Okay, and these things are going to help us. It would take us a lifetime to devote to the original languages, to the culture of the time, to all these different things.
12:19: This is why we have like Bible encyclopedias and dictionaries and things like that because these tools that we have allow us to basically learn from the wealth of knowledge of other people.
12:33: You see, these other people have studied specific areas for many, many years and they become experts in those areas.
12:41: And then they take that and provide it to us in these different tools. And so we take the study of many men over many years to help us.
12:52: Now, sure, it would be great to do original source material on everything, but that would take forever.
12:59: I mean, it would take a long time to really know what God's Word says. So we need to be very careful.
13:05: We need to study. We need to look at what we're studying. All right. So with that, I want to encourage you to get your syllabus out.
13:12: All right. In your syllabus, we're going to be on Roman numeral number five there, other helpful tools.
13:19: You can get a syllabus from strivingforeternity .org.
13:24: You can get it at our academy and you would be able to follow along. I encourage you to do that so you have all of the notes.
13:33: Everything that we go over will be in there. All right. Now, as we go through this, this first one that I said we're going to have comes with a warning.
13:44: Okay. The warning is this, and this is going to be biblical commentaries. Biblical commentaries.
13:51: That's going to be our first tool that we're going to look at today. Now, commentaries, let me first define them, tell you what they are.
13:57: A commentary provides the student of Scripture with insight from those who have studied
14:03: God's Word in its entirety or within a specific section, maybe a book or something like that.
14:10: All right. Now, why do I say this comes with a warning? It comes with a warning because before you come to use a commentary, it's important that you first do all of your background first on the author of the commentary.
14:23: Make sure you understand where he's coming from. You want to know his theological background.
14:30: He could be someone who has a very bad theological background but has some very excellent points that could still be made on the text that you have.
14:41: And so, you want to know the author's background. But also, the way the person interprets certain things will influence his or her theological conclusions based on their background.
14:56: All right. So, you need to understand where they're coming from when they come to the
15:01: Scripture. Not only do you have to understand where they're coming from, but you have to be careful not to trust, put too much trust in one individual person.
15:12: What I mean by that is this. When you come to the study of God's Word, what I want to encourage you to do is when we go through these keys to interpret which is coming up in the next 10 or so lessons,
15:26: I want you to dig into God's Word, understand God's Word from the text before you read a commentary.
15:35: A commentary is some other person's understanding of God's Word. Now, that's the same as you'll find in your study notes in a study
15:44: Bible. It doesn't mean that it's bad. What it means is that you have to always know that that's a person's interpretation, and they may not necessarily be correct.
15:57: Okay. They're going to be right in some areas, and they're going to be wrong in other areas. Okay. I rely heavily on many commentaries.
16:08: But one of the last commentaries that I read is the one that I'm probably most influenced by, and that's the
16:15: John MacArthur New Testament commentaries. Why? Because I've read so much from him and heard so much from him that it's influenced the way
16:25: I think. And so I want to be careful not to read what he may say and think that because he said it, he's right.
16:33: There's areas I've disagreed with his conclusions. Why? Because of my own study of God's Word, because of my own looking into God's Word and coming to a conclusion.
16:43: Does it mean I'm right? Well, of course it means I think I'm right, but it doesn't mean that I'm right.
16:51: I hope that makes sense to you. But that's what we have. We have to be aware that we could be influenced by individuals, especially if it's someone who we hold with high esteem.
17:04: Now, we have two. So that's the warning. When we look at commentaries, there's two different types of commentaries that we have.
17:13: I want to first explain before we look at some examples. You have an expositional commentary and a homiletical commentary.
17:24: I know, those are big words. I just want to impress you that I learned them. No, but so if you hear these words,
17:32: I want you to understand what they mean. So what I want to do is not just use these words, but when you hear people speak, you want to understand the meaning of them.
17:40: So a homiletical, homiletics is the study of preaching. It's the style of an understanding of preaching styles.
17:49: So a homiletical commentary is going to be one that's based off of someone's preaching.
17:55: John MacArthur's commentaries are based off his preaching, off his messages. So those are going to be dealing with, it's going to be someone's sermon.
18:03: So you're going to get their interpretation. You're also going to get applications, illustrations all wrapped up.
18:09: It is very, very, very, very, very, do you get the point, very bad to take someone else's sermon, to take a homiletical commentary and just take that and teach that like in a class without studying it on your own.
18:27: They may not be right. You've got to do your own study. And there's some people who get a little lazy.
18:33: I can't believe that they actually have websites for pastors to pay to buy sermons.
18:41: Pastor, do your job. Your job is to interpret
18:48: God's Word and provide to the people the interpretation and understanding of God's Word. That's your job.
18:56: That's your primary job if you are the preaching pastor. And if you've got to find time to do other things, you find time to get those other things in.
19:08: Pastoring is not easy. It's hard work. Okay, I'll get off that soapbox.
19:14: I'm saying that as a pastor, so please understand I'm not being hard on pastors. I understand the difficulty of pastoring.
19:25: But we want to look at homiletical type commentaries to get a good idea if we want to take a text of Scripture, understand it, see applications, illustrations.
19:37: That's something you can just read. You're doing your own devotions. Great to get a good homiletical commentary and read along with your devotions just like you would in a study
19:47: Bible. When you've read your study Bible and you want to go beyond that. And remember, these tools that I give you, they build on each other.
19:54: So we're building up. So these are getting more and more, you know, the tools you're going to want to buy or use after you gain an expertise in the first ones.
20:03: Okay, the second type of commentary is going to be the expositional. This is where you're going to be exposing, exegeting
20:12: God's Word, pulling that meaning out. So this is less looking at, less trying to understand the applications and illustrations, but more trying to get to the meaning.
20:30: Now, with expositional commentaries, you have a couple different kinds. Some will give you, like, for example, the
20:37: Word Biblical commentary set. That one is going to give you details of the
20:45: Greek of each word and how it's used and give you a better understanding of Greek and Hebrew, I should say.
20:52: So you understand the world behind the text. The NIV application commentary is one
21:00: I really enjoy because what they do is follow the principles I'm going to be teaching you. They break their commentaries up into three sections.
21:10: The first section is understanding the meaning at the time that the text was written.
21:16: So trying to put that mindset, that author's intent from the time it was written.
21:21: What was going on? What was happening? Why was the author writing? What was the culture he was writing to?
21:27: All of that, trying to pull that out. Then they have a second section, which is bridging the gap. Taking the meaning, the interpretation from when it was originally written and understanding how that plays out throughout history.
21:39: And then the third section is today. That's more application of saying, okay, now we've seen the original meaning.
21:46: We see how that has played through throughout history and now how do we apply that? I really like that.
21:52: That commentary is actually kind of a mix between both because it has the exegetical, has the applicational, and so you kind of get both in one commentary.
22:05: So those are the two main types. Then you have another way of classifying commentaries.
22:14: Whole commentaries or individuals. Whole are going to be maybe like Matthew Henry's commentary on the whole
22:22: Bible. And you can get that in just one volume. It covers every book of the
22:27: Bible in one volume. Some may be like the
22:32: Matthew Henry, which is five volumes and it still covers the whole Bible. So you're going from Genesis to Revelation, but it's a commentary set covering the whole
22:42: Bible. But then you have partial ones, such as individual books.
22:49: Gave you the John MacArthur New Testament commentary series. Did you get the hint there? He doesn't cover the
22:55: Old Testament. He covers all of the New Testament. He's got several volumes just covering the New Testament.
23:00: Some people only have on individual books. Or maybe they cover the minor prophets.
23:08: You know, things like that. So you have commentaries that cover the whole Bible. Some that cover the whole
23:16: Bible in one volume. Some that cover the whole Bible in several volumes. And some commentaries that are just individual books.
23:23: Some authors focus on just a single book and what they do is create a commentary set where they take some of the best commentators of individual books and pull them together into one series.
23:37: Okay? And so let's take a look at some of them. The first that I want to bring up is the
23:42: Jamison, Fawcett, and Brown. This is often referred to as JFB, obvious reasons.
23:50: Okay? So the Jamison, Fawcett, and Brown commentary is a very good commentary on the whole
23:57: Bible. And mostly I'm trying to give you ones that are for the whole Bible. And I'm doing that only so that you will see ones that you would get to cover the whole
24:10: Bible. Okay? There's tons and tons of commentaries.
24:16: I mean that literally. They weigh tons. Okay? You can get a lot, a lot of commentaries.
24:23: Different commentaries from different people. And that's fine to do. And so what you're doing when you do that is you're getting commentary sets.
24:33: We could be here all day going over different commentaries. Okay? And so I don't want to deal with all of them.
24:40: But I want to give some, just ones that if you want to get, you can look at to have.
24:45: So this, the Jamison, Fawcett, Brown one is very good in the Old Testament.
24:51: It's really what I use it for is when I use it, it's for the Old Testament. Next is the Expositors.
24:57: Which way do I go? Nope, I go this way. Okay. Go this way if you want to see me. Next time we should make those pictures a little smaller.
25:05: So this one is, and if you look actually on this, you see it says Matthew and Mark.
25:12: So this is just two books. So this is from a series of commentaries.
25:18: But this is the Expositors Bible Commentary. This one's going to be more exegetical.
25:24: This one's really good when it gets into some of the, some, giving you some information about backgrounds and helping the meaning.
25:33: But one that's very good and applicational is called the Bible Knowledge Commentary. It is put out two volumes, one for the
25:40: Old Testament, one for the New Testament. Put out by some guys over at Dallas Theological Seminary.
25:47: This is pretty good, but it's surface level. I mean, keep in mind, if you have a book that's this thick and it's covering all of the
25:54: New Testament and one that's that thick covering all of the Old Testament, it's not going to go into a whole lot of detail.
26:00: But it's going to give you more than you're going to get in your study Bible. Okay. So this one's good in giving some background, some application, some things like that.
26:10: So I bring this up to say, if you're going to go somewhere, you're going to go beyond your study Bible, this might be a good one to have in your office or in your desk.
26:20: You have others that are mentioned in your syllabus. I've mentioned some that aren't in your syllabus that you could write in there.
26:27: But there's many, many different commentators, people that are writing commentaries now.
26:33: And so I encourage you to check those out and see what they have. Okay. And as we look into next week, when we look at software, you're going to see there's a lot of commentaries.
26:45: Maybe I'll just show you just what I have in my Bible software so you can see how many commentators, commentaries there are.
26:52: But you can go to commentaries from Martin Luther. I mean, you can go to commentaries from the
26:58: Puritans, commentaries from people that are alive today like John MacArthur. You can go to James Boyce started a set of commentaries.
27:08: I mean, many, many different people who are writing commentaries. And so you just always have to remember who the author is, what their theological background is.
27:17: Okay. And keep all that in mind and do your own study. So commentaries are very helpful.
27:25: I just, I really want to encourage that you make that your last thing that you're going to do in your study.
27:32: Now, I know for some people, they are teaching a Sunday school. They only have about 10 hours a week, 20 hours a week to devote to their
27:42: Sunday school. And that's, in my mind, 10 hours. If you're teaching a Sunday school, that's the minimum that you do.
27:49: All right. In our church, we used to have a policy that if you taught
27:54: Sunday school, you had to commit to 10 to 15 hours a week minimum in prep for Sunday school of all ages from kindergarten up to adult.
28:07: You had to commit to putting 10 to 15 hours of work of interpreting
28:13: God's Word, of doing the study if you're going to teach. All right. That's a hefty commitment and that's really what we should be doing.
28:21: But I understand that for some people, you know, life gets in the way and Sunday still comes and you struggle and you go to a commentary.
28:31: I'm not saying that's bad. At least go to several of them if you're going to do that to try to get gleamings from several different people.
28:39: Okay. All right. Let's move on to the next tool that we're going to look at today and that's a Bible geography or Bible atlas.
28:47: All right. The objective of a Bible geography book or Bible atlas is that these tools provide maps which correspond to certain
28:57: Bible events or graphical descriptions as well as archaeological information.
29:04: All right. Let me show you the two that we have and then we'll talk about how these get used.
29:11: One is, here's the Macmillan Bible Atlas and another that I'll bring up is the
29:18: Moody Atlas of Bible Lands. Those are just two. There's many others out there.
29:23: You have some that will be provided in your Bibles if you have a study Bible, different atlases.
29:30: These provide you with several different things. One thing it provides you is a layout of where things are.
29:37: We forget that people didn't have cars in biblical times. So to us, 20 miles may not be a big deal if you have a car but try walking 20 miles.
29:49: See, these people were used to walking though. A day's walk could be about 15 miles and they were used to walking long distances to get from town to town.
30:00: And so we have to remember what things were like. And so not only do you get the distances but say for example you look up the
30:09: Sea of Galilee and if you have a good Bible Atlas, you're going to see it shows you where the ridgeline is for the mountains.
30:16: Well, you're going to see that the Sea of Galilee is in a valley. So when we see these storms that come up out of nowhere, it's because they couldn't see when they're looking up, they can't see over the mountain range.
30:28: So a storm would just come up seemingly out of nowhere. So when we see the disciples on the
30:33: Sea of Galilee where they were used to fishing and used to having big storms come out of nowhere and they're very afraid of the storm, the
30:41: Atlas helps us to understand why that is. That means that's a pretty big storm because they're used to being in storms like that.
30:49: They're used to being caught off guard with storms. And if they're afraid, they know that's one serious storm.
30:57: So we keep that in mind when we look at it, all right? There are certain events.
31:05: When we look at, say, Jonah, some people preach that Jonah was inside of this fish for three days and this fish spits him up onto land and he walks into Nineveh white as a ghost coming from the digestive juices of this fish, okay?
31:26: That preaches really well until you look at a map and realize how far Nineveh is from where he picked up the boat in Joppa.
31:35: You're talking like a three -day walk. He didn't just, this fish didn't just spit him up.
31:43: I heard one person preaching said the fish spit him up right into Nineveh. Well, do just a little bit of work with an
31:50: Atlas and you're gonna realize that would have had to been a supernatural spit. I mean, when
31:56: God would have had to do something supernatural with this fish to vomit Jonah up and he flies like 70 miles.
32:04: I mean, that's some serious, you know, projectile, you know? The reality is he had to, after coming out of that, he had a three, maybe four, five -day journey to Nineveh.
32:18: He had some time to think about what just happened to him and the prayers he made and the promises he made to God inside of that fish, all right?
32:27: So, we have to understand that. We have to accept that. So, we look at this, we understand that these tools help us, help us to give us some background.
32:38: You know, some of that you'll see archaeologically is that it talks about David having taken the town, you know, what we know of as Jerusalem and there's talk in there where there's a well that David used to sneak underneath.
32:53: And, you know, people actually for years thought that that didn't exist until they discovered that pathway that had actually existed.
33:02: So, you get archaeological information that can help you with an understanding, all right?
33:08: Let's move on to the next one. We have two more that we're gonna look at.
33:14: So, let's look at the next one. That's a Bible encyclopedia. A Bible encyclopedia. Now, a
33:19: Bible encyclopedia is basically your Bible dictionary on steroids, okay?
33:25: It's your Bible dictionary on steroids, all right? Where a Bible dictionary is gonna be one volume covering a series of topics, your encyclopedia is an expanded version of a
33:37: Bible dictionary, typically printed in more than one volume. So, some examples, one of the better ones is this one and that may be a little hard to read, but it's the
33:47: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. Also referred to as ISB, I -S -B -E, the
33:56: ISB, International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. And that one is very good, gives great information, several volumes.
34:05: The second one I'll show you is the Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible. This one's gonna give you more pictures, hence the name
34:12: Pictorial, that are going to help to actually see the sites and see the locations.
34:20: So, those are two really good ones. Now, those are enjoyable just to sit and read
34:26: God's Word, to look at things in there. You're gonna get a lot more information than you would just from a
34:34: Bible dictionary, but it's gonna be very good. It's fun just to open up anywhere and just read a small passage.
34:40: It's good to do that. You make that a habit of your day. You're gonna learn a lot of the
34:46: Bible and how to understand the Bible just by reading these different things. I would do that sometimes is just open up my encyclopedia or Bible dictionary to a different topic each day and just read a short section and learn different things and that learning builds up over time.
35:03: Next week, next class, I should say, when we look into software,
35:09: I'm gonna show you that some of the software does that for me. So, now I don't have to open up. My software opens up randomly for me.
35:16: All right? That's very helpful. And so, an encyclopedia is more expensive to use, but gonna give you more detail.
35:26: So, if you're trying to save money, you get a Bible dictionary. If you use something online, then go to the encyclopedia and get something that's gonna give you more information.
35:34: Hence, it's gonna take you a little bit longer to read, but it's worth it. All right? Now, let's go to one more type of tool and this will be the last type of printed tool that I'm gonna give you.
35:47: Next week, we'll look at software and websites which are, you know, not printed, but based off of all the other tools that we've gone over.
35:56: The last one is called Books on Manners and Customs.
36:08: Typically, on the home life, money, trade, schooling, all these different things during Bible times.
36:15: Now, note that much of this information is also found in Bible dictionaries, encyclopedias.
36:22: So, if you are going to sit there and want to say, there's one that I really may not need, this may be the one you don't need so much.
36:30: But this is gonna be a focus study on some of the specific areas.
36:38: One that we look at here is the Handbook of Life and Times by Thompson.
36:45: And so, this goes into, like it says, the life and times of the Bible. Another is today's
36:50: Handbook on Bible Times and Customs. And so, this one is another one that you have that goes into looking at all the different, basically, it's gonna give you some background to the culture of the time that the
37:07: Bible was written, okay? So, this is gonna go into more detail in some ways than your encyclopedia even, but it's gonna be in specialized areas.
37:18: So, if you look up, say, the Jewish festivals, you're gonna get a whole lot more in this than you will in your encyclopedia, even though your encyclopedia is gonna cover some things.
37:29: When it comes to family life or, you know, the culture of the time, these are gonna be the things you want to turn to.
37:36: If you ever listen to me preach, you'll see that I bring a lot of that into the message. I'm constantly trying to understand the culture in which it was written, the historical cultural setting, and bring that into the meaning, all right?
37:49: These are very important tools to use. And they're necessary. And now, so we've built up this list of tools, we have them, and we want to be able to use these tools consistently, regularly.
38:05: Now, some of the ones that we went over today, the nice things about the ones that we went over today are that they could be used not only along with your devotions in understanding
38:14: God's Word, but like I said, a Bible dictionary, a Bible encyclopedia, or the manners and are books that you can just open up to almost anywhere.
38:24: Just read a small section. If you get in the habit of opening these type of books up regularly and just reading one small section every day and understanding it, you're gonna learn a whole lot of things so that when you get to be my age, you know, as old as dirt basically, you get to build on years and years of knowledge of study in just small sections.
38:53: Please make that a habit. Make it a habit to make small study of this stuff so you can apply it later in your study.
39:01: There's things that help you to understand that when you understand it, it opens God's Word up to you where you understand it in a greater way and you're not reading into the text.
39:12: But when you're under the pressure of preparing a Sunday school class or a
39:18: Bible study lesson, you may not have the 40 hours it takes to put together a message.
39:25: Yeah, that's how long it takes. 30 to 40 hours. On average, I spend about 30 hours per message, okay?
39:34: That's how much time it takes to properly, I believe properly, put into doing a careful study of God's Word and understanding it to read everything that you can to get a good understanding of God's Word.
39:47: But one advantage I do have over years of study is that some of the background now has been ingrained in my mind from reading one piece of an encyclopedia or Bible dictionary or manner and customs every day.
40:03: By doing that every day, you start to build up a wealth of understanding and knowledge on those things.
40:09: And it really, really, really will help you to understand God's Word better, okay?
40:15: So that you can see the differences. Why does Paul make such a distinction between the Pharisees and the
40:20: Sadducees? You know, he does this really crafty thing. He's being charged by the Pharisees and Sadducees.
40:26: They're both coming and charging him before Rome. And he says, well, the contention was over an issue of the resurrection.
40:33: And you may not realize why. What he did there was just such a crafty move.
40:40: But you understand that only if you understand the differences between the Pharisees and the
40:45: Sadducees. See, the Pharisees believed in a resurrection and the Sadducees did not.
40:51: So all of a sudden, what Paul did in saying that was caused infighting within the group that was charging him.
40:59: And the Romans look at this and go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. These guys can't even seem to agree on what they're charging
41:05: Paul with. You see, he was able to take something that he knew. He was being honest.
41:11: He wasn't lying. The contention was over the fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
41:18: But you see, the Sadducees denied resurrection altogether. He turned it into having them argue amongst themselves probably over whether resurrection actually exists or not.
41:28: And you see, when you do this kind of study, it helps you inform your mind to the study of God's Word.
41:36: All right. I hope this is helpful. And then next week, next class, we are going to look into different Bible software and different websites that you're going to find very helpful to you.
41:49: And we're not going to be able to cover all the software and all the websites because they keep growing.
41:55: All right. The list keeps growing. We do hope on our website, which is down here, if you go to strivingforeternity .org
42:06: and you go to our academy, you will be able to hopefully, when we get it up and running, have a student portal that you'll be able to get that will have a list of these.
42:18: Maybe we'll even have them just on our links page. If you do have questions, though, on anything that we've taught, we encourage you to email us at academyatstrivingforeternity .org,
42:29: academyatstrivingforeternity .org. Do remember, if you could, to not just email us, but join us on our
42:38: Facebook page, the Striving for Eternity Facebook page, so that you can get involved.
42:44: And we throw our questions out there, some thought -provoking questions to get us thinking and studying together and iron sharpening iron with one another.
42:52: I encourage you to go out to our Facebook page. Also, keep in touch with what's going on.
42:59: One of the things going on is coming up very shortly is the NorCal Fire. If you're anywhere in the
43:05: San Jose area, either by train, plane, or automobile, get out there.
43:11: I am very excited about this one. This conference is going to be one where we will be, this is going to be
43:19: September 20th and 21st of 2013 in San Jose.
43:26: We have these every year. So, if you missed this year, you'll want to get next year.
43:31: But this year's is going to be great. The theme is going to be getting
43:36: Christianity right. We're going to deal with the major doctrines, where the false religions get it wrong, how we as Christians get it right.
43:46: We're going to go through and study all that. It's going to be great. It really is going to be a great study. What you're going to see there in that,
43:53: I hope, and really learn is so much theology and you're going to learn a lot about different religions.
43:59: We've got Matt Slick who's going to start us off with talking about why it's important to get
44:04: Christianity right. What are the major doctrines? What are primary and secondary doctrines?
44:11: He's going to cover that. I'm going to deal with the Word of God. That's our starting point. Why do we know that we have the
44:16: Word of God and the Koran is not, the Book of Mormon is not, we're going to cover all that. Then Saturday morning
44:23: I'm going to start us off with understanding of the Trinity, specifically the deity of Jesus Christ.
44:29: Big contentious issue. Then Tony Miano is going to, so Matt Slick is from CARM, Creation Apologetics Research Ministry.
44:41: Tony Miano is from Cross Encounters Radio. And so Tony is going to deal with the nature of man, specifically sin, and then he's going to deal with one on the nature of salvation.
44:53: And then we're going to wrap up with Matt Slick giving us one last session on how to answer atheists.
45:03: There will be some, during the last two sessions, there's going to be some training, evangelism training that I'll be doing, training those who don't know how to evangelize in our method, in the
45:14: Striving for Eternity's method, which is called Ambassador Evangelism. We'll show you what that is, we'll talk about it, and we'll do some mock witnessing.
45:22: And then what we end up doing is going out on the street and practicing what we learned. So I encourage you to come on out to that norcalfire .info
45:31: to register. Register now, you want to make sure you register so those that register get the free resource bag.
45:38: So in other words, if you registered seven people, your seven friends are not getting the bag. So they're all going to want one of the books or things that are in there.
45:47: So you want to make sure you share. All right, so we always want to encourage someone on this show. We like to encourage you to encourage others.
45:55: I don't know of any other program that does that. I don't know of any other program that tries to build into it a heart of encouragement.
46:03: Okay, and people often know those big celebrity types. We want to encourage you to encourage those that you may not hear about any other way.
46:12: People either that are close to our ministry or people who just we get an email that says, hey, can you encourage this person?
46:20: Here's why. And this week we want to ask you to encourage Erin Coghlan. There's her, Erin with her wonderful husband
46:26: Michael. You can encourage both of them and that's her Facebook page. But Erin is a wonderful sister.
46:34: We want you to encourage her. She's now carrying Michael and Erin's child as she is pregnant and moving along with the pregnancy.
46:45: I believe, I'm maybe speaking after her, I believe they have a baby boy, but I think, but this will be their first child together.
46:55: And we ask that you encourage her as some may know that when you have those last stages of pregnancy, you can get those last weeks, it can be rough.
47:05: And Erin, while pregnant, when she first was discovered she was pregnant, had gone and she actually was helping us with Ohio Fire, hosting many people, serving many people in her home, cooking, doing many things at the church to help for the
47:24: Ohio Fire and discovered that very weekend that she was pregnant. Michael, you can encourage, he's going to be coming out to NorCal Fire and he's going to be running it.
47:36: We're really trying to get someone to run these different events to do all the behind the scenes work and that's what
47:43: Michael is going to be doing. So you can encourage the two of them. They're a very sweet couple, great to get to know.
47:51: I want to encourage you to not only encourage them this week, get to know them if you can.
47:58: They're wonderful people. Don't let the encouragement stop just with this week. We want to get you into a regular habit of encouraging people.
48:07: You know when we say the most encouraging things about people? Yeah, when they're dead and they can't hear it.
48:14: Let's tell people the things we wish we could tell them after they die. Let's tell them that now.
48:21: They would be encouraged. Don't you want encouragement sometimes? Well, you know what you could do?
48:26: You can, if you need encouragement, email us at the academy at academyatstrivingforeternity .org
48:32: and maybe we can get everyone to encourage you at some point. So let us know if you need encouragement or you know someone that needs encouragement.
48:41: But let's go out and encourage them. So next week we're going to deal with computer software and different websites.
48:48: It's going to be a really exciting lesson because we're going to dig into these things a lot and we want to encourage you to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.