14 - Biblical Hermeneutics, Implementation, Part 1 Addressing the Women's Role in the Church

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15 - Biblical Hermeneutics, Implementation, Part 2 Addressing Homosexuality

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Well, welcome to the

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Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Biblical Harmonetics. We're glad to have you with us.

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It is always a pleasure to have both of you, three of you, okay, maybe five of you at most that are with us.

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It's always good to have you. For the tens of tens that watch, okay, maybe that's being too good, huh?

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Okay, so for the two of you who watch, we are glad you're here. We welcome those new students who have joined.

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We know that some new students have joined, and I hope that you have gotten your syllabus in time for class this week.

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But if you do have your syllabus, it's the thing over there, and it is basically where we keep all the notes.

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If you want to follow along and you want to take your own notes or you just want to have all of the notes that I basically teach from and some that I don't always get into and some that is only in there, so you'd have that there.

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It is a valuable resource, and you can get it from going down there and enrolling in the

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School of Biblical Hermeneutics. That's how you get that. Otherwise, you just watch this talking head for free.

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I got a good face for radio though, right? Yeah, that's what I thought. So, some of you are just getting that now, yeah.

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We are looking through our How to Interpret the Bible. We've been going through, so far, four different keys to interpreting

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Scripture. And we are in the last one now. We have looked at identification, and if you remember, this is where if we were in a classroom

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I'd give you a pop quiz and ask you what the four keys are and what the importance of them are.

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But, oh well, since we're not. The first key is identification.

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Identification is where you want to identify the type of literature you're dealing with.

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If you remember when we went over those lessons, we discussed the fact that each style of literature has its own rules of interpretation.

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So, something that is instructional, say the writings of Paul, which are instructional in nature, or the writings of Peter, are going to be easier to interpret than, say,

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Revelation. Right? Two different ways. Another one that takes some study is wisdom literature, where you have lots of poetry and Hebrew poetry being based on the idea of parallelism.

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Well, when you start to know that, you know to look for the type of parallel that it is, and that's going to help you to understand the meaning.

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That's the first thing, so you kind of know what set of rules do we use. Second thing is the investigation.

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If you remember with that, there were five questions we asked you to do. Who, what, when, where, and why.

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You take the text that you're studying, and you look into those five questions.

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You want to keep asking yourself. Not every text is going to have that, but you want to ask yourself in the investigation phase, who's this being talked about?

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Who's doing the talking? Who's being discussed? Where is it happening? When is it happening?

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Why is it happening? What is happening? I mean, all those sort of things you want to ask yourself.

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That's the investigation. That actually goes a long way in really understanding a lot of the scripture, and that's where you're going to dig in in that part, and in the interpretation part, you're going to dig into all those tools that we looked at in the first part of this class.

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You're going to look at your Bible dictionaries, and word dictionaries, and encyclopedias, and all these different things.

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So you're going to identify the type of literature. You're going to do your investigation, then you're going to do your interpretation.

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That's where you're going to start trying to understand what the text meant before, what the text meant after, what the text itself means, taking that investigation, looking into the different tools to understand its meaning, starting to outline, looking for the key for each sentence, and doing your outlines, doing block diagrams.

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We talked about all that, so that you gain the strength of understanding what the meaning of the text is.

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What's the main point? So we want to make the main point the main point, because I don't know about you, but I find that people are really good at making something that's insignificant and making that like it's the main point, when it's insignificant, but they don't realize that.

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So we want to make sure the main thing is the main thing, and saying that means that we want to do our interpretation.

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And here's the hard thing, we want to do the interpretation and trying to put our preconceived ideas kind of to the side when we do that, so that we have a better understanding of what the text actually is saying and not coming to it with preconceived notions and thinking this must mean this because of we experienced something.

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We're going to talk about that in a few minutes. The big mistake people make, because most people don't follow these principles in the order that I've just laid out.

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Most people actually start with that fourth one down there, the implementation. In other words, they...

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Okay, I was told that it just froze up. Gotta love the technology.

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Anyway, so what we have here is this. We are looking at the fact that when we look at the implementation, many people take the implementation and do that first.

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In other words, they read a text of scripture and in reading that text, they assume a meaning.

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They're taking a meaning that they read through it kind of quickly, they figure this must mean what it is because of whatever.

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This is how they were taught, this is what they think it means. For example, someone reads the word round in Isaiah.

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Isaiah says that the earth is round. This is real popular with the atheists when I point out that the

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Bible actually says that the earth is round. They go, well, round, well, round means something that's, you know, was from, you know, is a flat surface because they're using a mathematical term that was done in, you know, they're using a 21st century mathematical term to apply to something written 750

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BC in Hebrew that wasn't trying to prove mathematics.

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So you'd have to put it in its context to understand what the author was saying. Was he speaking in a mathematical geometry terms and that's what he was trying to prove?

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No, that's not what Isaiah was trying to prove. And so what we don't want to do is just read this and maybe read into it something that it doesn't say.

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There's two ways of interpreting scripture. I'm going to give you the Greek for them so you can really impress your friends with these big words.

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No, it's just so if you hear it, you know what people are saying. Exegesis and eisegesis.

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OK, now, ex means out, eis means in. So exegesis is when you're pulling the meaning out of the text and eisegesis is when you're putting a meaning into the text.

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You know, unfortunately, the majority of people do the latter. They take a passage of scripture and they read into the scripture a meaning that they superimpose on that.

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And most often the reason people do that is because they're using their experiences to do the interpretation.

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They're coming to the Bible with certain experiences in life, experiences in the church they grew up in, experiences in how they read things.

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And they read, they use that to read into the text, the meaning, instead of following the interpretive principles that we have.

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The Bible is based on language. It follows a grammar. There's principles to interpret.

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And often what happens is I have people that will tell me that I need to be led by the spirit in the meaning of the text.

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And often what they mean is they want the Bible to say something it doesn't say and they don't like that the

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Bible doesn't say what it doesn't say. So they want to give the Bible a meaning that they want it to say.

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And how do they do that? They spiritualize and say, the Lord gave it to me. The spirit led me to believe this.

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The spirit doesn't lead you into error. I often find that people that do that. I had one gentleman who said that at work the spirit led him to lie to his boss to protect another employee so that guy could share the gospel with him.

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The spirit wouldn't lead you to lie. God cannot tempt. He cannot be tempted with evil, nor does he tempt with evil.

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So the spirit's not going to lead you to lie. Quite frankly, if you're lying to try to share the gospel with someone, the guy you just lied for, he knows you lied too.

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What does he think of your testimony? He thinks you're a liar. Not only is he less likely to trust you, he's probably not going to believe the gospel because you're just like him.

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Why would he need to change? Just a thought. So let's look in our syllabus.

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Fourth key, the implementation key. Now, in 1 Corinthians, we have a warning in 1

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Corinthians 8 .1. It warns us that knowledge puffs up, but love edifies.

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In James, it encourages us to be doers of the word and not hearers only.

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Now, these passages remind us of the goal that we have to study the scriptures, not simply for head knowledge, but it is for change in our lives.

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It is so that we might become more Christ -like. That is the goal. That is what should be driving us.

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It is for love's sake and not knowledge's sake. You see, many people who study the scriptures so that they can somehow claim they have a one -upsmanship on other people, there's people who study the scriptures so they can feel pride and superior to other people.

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That's not why we should be studying the scriptures. We should be studying the scriptures to show ourselves approved unto

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God for love's sake, for humility, to be made more like Christ.

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We should study the scriptures so that we know God more, know the one whom we love better.

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It is out of a love for Christ that we want to study more. It is out of a desire to know

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God better. If you have a good marriage, then you love to spend time with your spouse to get to know them even better.

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I'm going on 20 years of marriage soon. I know I got married when we were five.

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And so we were married very, very, very young. Arranged marriage must have been because we were only five.

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But after 20 years of marriage, I actually want to spend more time with my wife now than when

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I first married her because the love that I have for her has grown.

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And the more that I've gotten to know her, even after 20 plus years, the more

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I want to know her. Same is true with God. The more we know

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God, the more we should want to know him. We're going to have eternity getting to know him.

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But we should have this great desire to want to know more of him. And that's why we should be studying.

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So the first point in your syllabus there is that we should be first evaluating our strengths and our weaknesses when we do this study.

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We're done with this interpretation. We want to see this is where true life happens.

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We take the scriptures that we've interpreted and we examine ourselves honestly to identify our aptitudes, our vulnerabilities, our strengths, our weaknesses.

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We want to study the scriptures to see where we need to improve. What things do we have in our life that need to be corrected?

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Much better to have it corrected by the Lord through his word than kind of through other people or some public thing, right?

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But the reality is that we want to study the scriptures so that it helps us look more like Christ.

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So this is the point where after we've done our interpretation, whatever passage, and it may not always have a direct correlation to be applied to our life.

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I mean, you're reading, you know, so -and -so begot so -and -so begot so -and -so begot so -and -so and you're not going to be saying, well, how does this apply to the strength and weakness in my life?

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Okay, and not every text may. There may be things that we learn that help us understand other backgrounds and things like that to scripture.

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But the goal is life change. So the Bible is a living book, right?

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It's something that's eternal. And we want to study. That goes back to the very first lessons that we did when we described the nature of the

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Bible. It's something we want to study to grow ourselves. We should always be changing and growing and maturing.

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Aren't you glad that God is not only the author but the finisher of our lives?

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He's not done with the work in us and he uses his word to change us. Therefore, we need to study his word.

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Now, that's how we apply it to ourselves. In the broad sense, this next sense we apply to ourselves in our own life and study, but it also applies if we're teaching to others.

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This is important to remember because some of us are teachers directly and some of us are teachers indirectly.

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But all of us are teachers. Some of us may teach a Sunday school class and therefore we study, we have a lesson and we prepare a lesson.

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We come to class, we teach that class. Or a youth group or maybe you're a pastor or something.

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Maybe you teach a small group Bible study, whatever it is. Maybe you teach your children, but you are in a role where you're teaching.

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Well, clearly you're going to want to find a way not only to apply this to yourself but to your students.

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There's another way that you're a teacher. That's not by what you say sometimes, but what you do. People are always watching, especially if they know you're a

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Christian. One of the things that used to happen when I'd work in a secular world is people would learn that I'm a

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Christian and they'd learn that I actually believe what I say because I try to live it out. And they'd see me ask forgiveness of people and do things that, you know, the

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Scripture says. And I would say to someone, God calls me to do such and such. I shouldn't be doing this because that would offend

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God. And so when people would go out to the bars or something after work, I wouldn't go do those things. Why?

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Because it doesn't glorify God. So what you see is that you look at that and people go, oh, you know what?

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This guy is a Christian. And you know what I used to find? People used to watch their language around me. If they used foul language, they would apologize.

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I never had to. I never asked them to watch the language. Why did they do that? Because they were watching me.

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I had someone that I once had, I did ask him not to use the Lord's name in vain because that did offend me.

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If he curses, that's, you know, I don't that doesn't bother me. When you use Jesus Christ in place of foul language, it really offends me because that's the one

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I love and care for. And so he stopped doing that around me. One of the other guys that professed to be a

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Christian at work noticed that. And he said, you know, why is it that you don't use

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Jesus's name and curse around Andrew, but you don't mind doing it about me? I'm a Christian, too. And this guy actually turned to this professing

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Christian and said, well, the difference is, Andrew actually believes what he says. Ouch.

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How did he know that? He was watching. I was teaching, not by what I said, because I really hadn't shared the gospel with him more than I did once with that gentleman.

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But I never did it again. We worked together and we talked about work. But he was always watching.

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You're always being watched. And so you want to read the scriptures to change your own life for your own testimony sake as well.

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But the thing is, if you are a teacher, you need to make sure that the Bible is first going through you as a teacher before you teach students.

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I don't care if you're teaching three year olds. Make sure that you're studying the

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Bible to interpret, to impact your life first. Because the reality is, if you do good study, your students are getting just a portion, just a fraction of your study.

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And you're getting a whole lot more. That's why I love to preach. I love preaching because it gets me into studying

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God's word. The reality is, most of the people only get half of my study if that, because I put a whole lot more study in than I can possibly preach in a 50 minute period.

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So I get a whole lot more out of it. So some of the things we want to do when we're going to implement the interpretation that we've done is we want to look into different areas of our life.

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Some of the areas are social life, our family life. If you're married, are you single?

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Do you have children? There's different texts that deal with those different things. And so we need to look at those things to say, okay, what is it that we're going to study?

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We're going to look at a controversial issue in just a few moments when it comes to family relations and then the church.

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We're going to talk in a couple of minutes of taking an example of pulling our interpretation together and how to answer the question of church with women's role versus men's role.

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And that's a controversial issue. We'll stay tuned in a few moments. We're going to go through a passage of scripture and see what the scripture actually says on that.

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I know some of you are going to get tomatoes ready and your eggs ready. I know. Too bad

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I won't feel it. I guess that's one thing, you know, when you're open air preaching, people throw things at you.

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You can feel it, but I can't feel it through. You don't have a webcam. And even if you did, it's not going to hit me.

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One advantage of online. So look at your social life, your family life, church.

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How does it apply to church? How does the text apply to work? Your relationship with God, your finances, your emotions, your physical life, your thought life.

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Wow, that's a tough one. Some people don't want to think about how the scripture affects their thought life because their mind's in the gutter and they like it that way.

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Get your mind out of the gutter. You need to look at things like your thought life.

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Your physical life, you know, and Timothy Paul says, hey, you know, exercise actually is good, but spiritual exercise is better.

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He's not knocking exercise. There is some things you can learn. You know, there's different things that we can learn.

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He says, take a little wine for your stomach's sake. Wine meaning something to be a disinfectant, to kind of kill the dysentery of drinking straight water.

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You get sick. In other words, they would say that, you know what, we shouldn't be sitting there and saying that, all right, we're going to take no medicine because we're going to live by faith.

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That doesn't help. OK, that's not how the scriptures would say is it's

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OK to take some medicine, just like it was OK for Timothy to take a little wine to to solve his dysentery.

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OK, recreation and time. How do you use your time? Scriptures will talk about that.

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So these are just a few areas of life where you want to do your interpretation so that you look at these different areas and understand their meaning, understand how this ends up applying to different areas.

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And what you're going to find is even if you do interpretation of one passage, you're going to find maybe 10 years later you're in a different stage of life and the same passage gets applied differently because you're growing and you're constantly learning and something that maybe didn't mean something, didn't have an application at one point does at a later point or it did at one point.

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It doesn't anymore because you've matured. We constantly want to be in a stage of maturing.

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OK, that's number three. There is you want to determine the principles for life from your study.

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Is there anything that you can learn out of life that you can take from this study that you've done and put into application?

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With this, the next thing is you want to be honest and humble in your findings. This is a tough one for some people.

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The reality is, is that a lot of people are prideful. They struggle with pride. It's a big issue.

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And because of that, they come to the scriptures and they're looking for how others can understand the passage.

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In other words, they study it out to go, well, let me study this because so and so has a problem and I need to correct them.

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Or this passage, this would be great for that other person. I remember doing a passage on judgment.

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I did it on Halloween and the message was Halloween to celebrate or not to celebrate.

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Is that the question? And actually what I did was I dealt with a text to say that we how whether we should be judging our brothers by whether why things they do like celebrating

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Halloween or not. I ended up saying at the end of the message, if you think this message is really important for someone else, in other words, you think someone else has an issue with Halloween and they need to know, then you're not paying attention to the message because the message wasn't for you to tell someone else.

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It was for you to stop judging. I told people, if you feel that you have to know my position as your pastor on Halloween, whether I'm for it or against it, then you missed the point of the message.

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Stop judging people on whether they celebrate it or not, because that was the point of the message.

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And you know how many people I had? Three people come up to me like, Pastor, I need to know what your position is on Halloween. I'm like, re -listen to the message.

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But you see, we have to be honest. We have to be humble with ourselves to realize what the scripture actually says.

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Sometimes we don't like what scripture says because, well, it is a double edged sword. It pierces our innards, gets right to the heart of the issue sometimes with us.

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And we don't like that, but we need that. And so with that, we must make sure that we're studying the scriptures, being honest with our findings, being humbled by our findings.

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And then what we want to do is meditate on the truths that we learn. Think about them. Meditate is the idea, basically, it's kind of disgusting, but it's the same word in Greek that where cows eat, they kind of chew the grass and they put it into one stomach and they regurgitate it up and bring it into a second stomach and they keep doing that.

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In other words, it's the idea of just mulling over something and just keep re -chewing it and re -chewing it. That's what you want to do. Keep thinking through it.

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The more you think about it, the more you're going to see there and the more you're going to see how that applies in different areas. And then maybe what you want to do is start doing some writing down of ideas from that or memorizing key principles or verses.

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That's a really good thing to do. It's really good to take notes with it. You should have been doing that all along. So let us take a look now at how we pull all this together.

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We're going to do this this week and next class. We are going to take some passages scriptures and deal with some controversial issues to see how to take these things and kind of bring it all together.

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Well, let's take a look. I said we'd deal with a topic and I know there's some people who have differing views on this.

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And I don't mind. If you disagree with me, that's OK. Email us academy at striving for eternity dot org.

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Academy at striving for eternity dot org. Just do me a favor and disagree with me with scripture and principles of interpretation, not your experience.

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I remember when we dealt with this issue, a friend of mine and I and he had his friend there. And this one individual was arguing that women absolutely could be pastors because his mother was one.

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You see, if I was to say that a woman doesn't have the place to be a pastor, what he was doing was saying that his mother was in an unbiblical position and he didn't like that.

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This is where we have to be honest there. The scriptures may tell us things that we have to change.

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OK, and so let's take a look at what the scriptures actually say. Well, here we go.

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If you look at this passage is the clearest passage that we have on it. This is

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Paul. He's writing to Timothy. He's been writing this whole book on Timothy on on the church.

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And so let's read what this says. Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness.

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I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man.

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Rather, she is to remain quiet. OK. Now, when we look at that passage, some people just read it kind of quickly and they go, well, see what

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Paul's saying is a woman must be silent in church. She shouldn't say a thing.

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OK, let's practice what we've been studying. Who's Paul writing to? Why is he writing?

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Let's look at all that. Well, Paul's writing to Timothy, his son in the faith, someone that he's left behind in a church so that he can be the pastor of that church and to build it up.

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He's writing to a community of people that are used to Jewish modes of worship and a

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Jewish mode of worship even carried out to today in Orthodox circles is that men and women do not worship together.

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OK, you would be in a totally separate room than the women. If there was one male teacher, the rabbi would be teaching in the middle sometimes or just where the men are.

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And there'd be a curtain running down so that the men cannot see the women and the women cannot see the men.

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And usually the rabbi would only speak to the men and the women just over here. But they would usually be in separate rooms.

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One of the things was that we end up learning from the time one of the issues when they started having combined services, in other words, men and women worshiping together, the women were more used to interactive, kind of like your

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Sunday school where you ask questions, you speak out, and the men were more used to this style of lecturing.

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And so the women seem to be chatty, shall we say. That it became an issue as some scholars seem to think with Timothy that Paul had to deal with was women that were being chatty during service and they weren't sure what to do.

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And so some think that this is what the silence meant and they mean absolute silence, but it meant that they have to have a silence during the message, during the sermon, that there's a time and a place for teaching and learning.

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That wasn't it. That's kind of thought there. And so when we look at that, we look at the background of why he's writing, we see some things now as we go through the interpretation here that we see that he says very clearly, if you look at the passage again, he's speaking about women and he says he's not permitting them to do two things, teach or exercise authority over a man.

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Now, one thing may be, what age is a man? That's a good question.

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Can a woman teach children? Obviously they can. Paul commends

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Timothy's mother and grandmother for teaching him when he was a boy. And so in that time, it would have been 13 years old is when a boy became a man, kind of with that point of bar mitzvah.

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In our day and age, it would really be more like 18. So I would say if you have someone that's under 18, when our culture accepts that they're a man, it might be

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OK for a woman to teach a boy. But at the point that they're a man, this passage seems to say that a woman should not teach a man or have exercise authority over a man.

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Now, the teach is a general instruction. It is not preaching at a pulpit.

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It's a general instruction where the exercise authority is a forceful authority.

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And so this is where we have to look at this and understand what we have.

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We cannot, according to this passage, let's put it up again, OK, notice that it's a woman must learn quietly with all submissiveness.

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That is speaking of how she learns. That's the context that she's to learn in submissiveness, learn quietly.

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It's talking about we would think maybe what goes on within the church.

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But then he makes this point, he says, I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man. Rather, she is to remain quiet.

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This is still tied to the learning, per se. But is this cultural? That's how many people argue it.

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Well, this is a cultural thing. I mean, Paul's saying he doesn't permit it, but that changed.

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I mean, times are different. Well, let's practice what we've been learning in this class and make sure we understand the context.

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Let's keep reading. Look at the very next verse because he gives the reason why he doesn't allow a woman to preach or teach, sorry, to teach or have authority.

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Look at the next verse of verse 13. What you see here is that Adam was formed first and then

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Eve. What is this talking about? This is discussing the headship issue.

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In other words, this is the creation order. God made Adam first, man, and then

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Eve, woman. Now, I know this is going to be really radical, but Paul wrote this about 2 ,000 years ago.

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Adam and Eve were created about 6 ,000 years ago. Who is

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Paul closer to, us or Adam and Eve? Yeah, us. I mean,

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Adam and Eve's culture is totally different than Paul's, which is different than ours.

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You see, if this was a cultural issue, Paul would not make the argument based on creation order.

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It'd be based on culture. But he bases it on creation order, but not just creation order.

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Not just once does he go back to Adam and Eve, but twice. Let's look at the next verse. In the very next verse, in verse 14, again, he goes to Adam and Eve and talks about another ordering.

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It says, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.

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So, this is addressing not the creation order, but the sin order.

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Again, this dates back to Adam and Eve. So, what do we have? We have a case where Paul is rooting this teaching in the creation order of man being made before woman, and the sin order of woman sinning first, being deceived, and sinning first, and then man.

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This is the purpose of this instruction. The purpose of the instruction is not a cultural one, but it is one that is based in God's created order.

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Now, here becomes the question. What does this mean for the church? Well, when you read elsewhere in Timothy, just another chapter away, he's going to give instructions for who can be a pastor.

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And you'll notice it is specifically written to men. Well, if you look at that along with this passage, you'll see that it's clear that Paul does not account for or give allowance to a woman being a pastor.

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Now, some people argue, well, that's just Paul's opinion. Well, if you want to believe it's

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Paul's opinion, you've got a problem because I believe God inspired that text of Scripture.

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And if you believe God inspired that text of Scripture, then

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Paul, it may be his opinion, but God supports it because God is giving that instruction and He's giving it based in the creation order and the sin order.

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Okay? So, this is God's Word, not just Paul's opinion. And therefore, it carries a different weight to it.

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So, clearly, I would argue a woman cannot be a pastor. It would be a sin for a woman to be a pastor.

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Second, that can a woman serve in a teaching role or an authoritative role within the church?

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Well, according to that passage, it seems quite clear that she is not to have that role of authority or teaching, at least in the church.

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Now, the question is going to come up, what outside the church? Let's get to that slowly. But you see how we're applying this.

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We apply it to the clearest things first and then we move out from there because not everything always applies everywhere.

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Let's deal with what's clear. What's clear from this passage is that a woman should not be a pastor and a woman shouldn't be in a instructing or authoritative role over men in the church.

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So can a woman teach a woman's Bible study? Yes. There's all women there. Can a woman be the pastor of an all -woman church?

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Well, I guess, but they don't have all -women churches. I mean, maybe if it's in a female prison, that would be a case where a woman can be in that teaching role, but that wouldn't really be a pastor.

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But in that way, yes. Can a woman teach a children's church with little children?

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Yes. Can she be in charge of a ministry?

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Well, she could be in charge of the ladies ministry because she's under the headship of the pastors of the church, the men, but she has whatever authority the men have given and she's over the ladies.

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She can't decide what the men's fellowship is going to do or something. So this is the thing within the church.

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It's very clear. Now, what about outside the church? Well, there's two ways of looking at this.

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One way is to say that this is, because it's based in the creation order and the sin order, that this is universal.

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In other words, if you take this text to be applied outside of the church, then it must be a universal thing.

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And therefore it must mean that, guys, you can't work for a woman because if there's a woman in authority over you, that would be an unbiblical position.

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And that's a tough call in our day and age, isn't it? Because there's a lot of women in high positions that have authority.

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Now, just because it's difficult doesn't mean that the Bible wouldn't say that.

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There's people who sit there and say, well, that's ridiculous. Why is it ridiculous? Why would it be ridiculous if God ordained this based on the creation order?

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Why would it be ridiculous not to work for a woman? That's what God says.

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That's what God says. It was ridiculous for Israel to keep kosher. It was ridiculous for them to keep all those laws.

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There were laws that didn't seem to make any sense. The mixing of threads and all of these things.

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But God had a purpose for that, and that was to keep Israel separate from the nations. God had a purpose even if man didn't understand it.

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So if this is something that God has in the created order, it doesn't matter how difficult it is for us to live by if this is what the text says.

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And this is where I say you have to come to it humbly and accept what God's word says, not using your experiences to interpret.

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In other words, just because it may be a difficult thing to say, I can't work at this company because I'd be working for a woman.

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Well, if that's what scripture says, then you're going to have to trust that God's going to provide for you a job somewhere, somehow.

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And that could be hard. I know. But living according to God's word is hard.

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Now, the other interpretation that some take is that this text is limited to the learning in church.

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That's a fair interpretation. Why? Because that's the context. He's saying, learn quietly and submissively.

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You are to be learning this way. You see it in both verses 11 and 12.

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The context there is how the learning process is. So it would be a fair interpretation to say this is limited to the learning process of the way we learn in the church.

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I really struggle between both these. I'm not sure which one, how we interpret this.

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It's not so easy to pinpoint it. And this is now where we get some gray area.

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Does this apply outside the church? If it applies outside the church, then it must apply everywhere outside the church.

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Ladies, you can't have a guy come over and to do construction on your house and give him instructions because that's instruction.

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You wouldn't be able to do that, OK, because it wouldn't be biblical. Some people may say that's being ridiculous.

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If that's the meaning of the text, then that's the meaning of the text. And this is what you and I have to learn when we come to these lessons, that we have to come to the text looking at what it says, not what we want it to say.

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You've been hearing me say this throughout this class, letting the principles of interpretation do the interpretation and not our experience.

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It doesn't matter how hard it is to live by. Just because it's difficult doesn't mean we don't live by it,

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OK? So what we end up having here is we're looking at taking this now and figuring out how we apply it.

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We definitely see how we can apply it in the church. Outside the church, I think it's a gray issue. We've got to be careful not to judge our brothers and sisters in how they do things outside of the church based on our conclusion on this, because I don't think it's clear enough that we can really say dogmatically.

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So we give a little bit of grace in this area, OK? If a woman doesn't want to give instructions to a contractor, a guy doesn't want to work for a female,

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I'm not going to condemn him. I'm not going to be like, hey, get over it. And if someone feels that way, if I feel that I can't work for a woman and someone is like, get over it,

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I'm not going to judge them and say, man, you have to mature. You're you're in sin if you work for a woman. I'm not going to do that.

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I'm going to show some grace, OK? So what we see in this issue, and if you disagree, again,

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I'll say email us at academyatstrivingforattorney .org. We'll look to answer your question.

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But again, give us Scripture and good interpretation. Don't give us your opinion and experience.

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Don't say, well, my mother was a pastor, therefore it must be OK. That's what I've heard. And that's not a really good argument.

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It matters what Scripture says. And so I know that this has become a thing where people say, can a woman be out on the street, open air preaching because it's preaching?

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And they argue that preaching is authoritative. No, that's see, that's a twisting of the

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Scriptures. That's trying to make an experience something you already believe in. You're reading it into the text.

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That's not the meaning of that text. It's not talking about the preaching. The style,

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OK, it's talking about general instruction. So if you believe this applies outside on the street corner, then that general instruction would say that a woman cannot give general instruction to a man.

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In other words, a woman cannot share the gospel with men. That's what it would mean.

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Now, some may say, well, that's being ridiculous. Of course, a woman can. Well, it may not be ridiculous if that's what

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God says. You see how these things are? We have to say, what does the Bible say?

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Not what does do I wish it to say? OK, and so we don't want to play gymnastics with the

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Scriptures to make it fit what we want it to say. That's why we have so much division, because many people do that.

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Twist the Scriptures to mean what they wish it would say, because they have a belief and they want the Bible to support their belief.

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I don't care what my belief is or your belief. I care what the Bible says. That's what's accurate and that's what we got to study.

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So next week, we're going to deal with another hot topic and see how we take the

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Scriptures to apply to that. And that's the issue of homosexuality. How do we take different passages of Scripture and rightly divide the word of God so that we will understand what the

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Bible says on homosexuality, another hot topic issue that seems to be quite controversial.

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So make sure you're with us next week. We'll wrap up this last key next week, and then we're going to get into different styles of Bible study.

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So again, if you want to enroll in the Academy, go to the website down here and make sure you enroll.

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And if you have any questions, you can email us at strivingforeternityacademy .org.

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And as we like to do each week, is we like to find a brother or sister in Christ, someone that we want you to go out and encourage.

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Because quite frankly, you and I don't encourage people enough, and you and I need encouragement.

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So, you know, I always find it interesting when we put someone's name up that everyone wants to get to know, people are like, oh yeah, let me encourage that person because, you know, they're well known.

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Well, we want to give you people that may not be well known, but need encouragement anyway. And so this week we have a friend of the ministry, and that's

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Marv Plementasch from 1milliontracks .com. Marv is a dear friend of mine.

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He is a wonderful brother. He produces tracks and other publications, like making nothing off it.

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I mean, you know, he really doesn't make money at his business because he doesn't want people to cost too much.

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So he makes tracks. Right now is a great time. He's running a sale right now on gospel tracks, you know, for the holidays.

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So you want to get some holiday tracks, go there now and grab some tracks for the holidays.

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He always does a great, great job. If you have seen the tracks he produces, very high quality, excellent work.

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They are top notch and he'll customize them. If you always wanted to write a gospel track, he'll print it for you.

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He'll put it together. He'll help you. But you know what? A lot of people take advantage of that.

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They're always trying to, let's see how we can work a better deal with him. If he's willing to work a deal, the guy's not making money off it.

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Don't take advantage of him. But, but you know what? Here's a guy who I know goes out of his way for other people.

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He doesn't toot his own horn. You, many of you probably don't even know him. You probably, maybe you've been at events where he's been and you didn't even meet him, didn't, or didn't even know him because he just fits in.

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He's not, you know, up there speaking or something. But I'll tell you this. You get a chance to know

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Marv and you've met someone really special. He's, he's the kind of guy that's just, when

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I think about a guy that's humble, I think of Marv. Marv is a guy that just, he's always just got a very humble spirit about him.

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And you and I can learn a lot from a guy like that. And so I want to encourage you to encourage

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Marv. One way you can encourage him is go to his website down there and buy his tracks.

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Look at what he, what he's selling. And that would be a tremendous benefit to him and help him out.

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So we want to, to encourage you to encourage him, want to encourage you to make sure you come back for next class.

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We deal with this another topical, difficult issue, and that is dealing with homosexuality.

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Maybe you have some friends that practice homosexuality or family relatives as I do.

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That's okay. We can show love to them and we're going to look through the scripture to see what it does say on that topic next week.

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Make sure you enroll in the academy so you can get a syllabus. And until next week, strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.