Bible Study 101 (part 2)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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For those of you who weren't here last week, I'm just going to quickly go over some of my notes, and then we'll get into the rest of the material.

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But what we were talking about is the importance of Bible study and the importance of understanding words and meanings.

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And we got a little heavy into a few areas, but we really were talking about how words have meanings to the author or what's considered the authorial intent, what the author intended to get to the audience.

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But then there's the audience reception of those. Now, we're not, again, trying to say words are relative and all this other stuff and try to get into these strange, my truth is my truth, your truth is your truth.

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But there are times where you might receive a message from somebody else and you don't fully understand it, and you may just kind of try to, yep,

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I agree, you know, the eyes glazed over and yes, I understand. And we talked a little bit last week, it would be similar to someone talking quantum physics to me, my eyes would glaze over and I would probably be going, okay, yes, mm -hmm, mm -hmm, and wouldn't really understand what they were saying.

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It may be fascinating, but in the end I probably wouldn't understand. And then there's some other areas where we run into things with even culture and language issues and other things like that.

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So we talked about why should we study the Bible? Why should it be important today?

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And we talked about how we are really to take God's word serious. And I took it so serious, it's in my bag over there.

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I don't even have my Bible up here with me. Thank you. So we're to take this book seriously, right?

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God commands us things out of this book that we are to do and obey, and yet if we don't understand it, how can we obey what

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God is commanding us to do? So it's important to know that, right? So it allows us to gain information about God, right?

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That it's the only text that was given to us by God that we can fully understand

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God, right? There are other materials out there where people who are much smarter than myself and just about everybody else in this room that have gone through the scriptures, and we can learn from their writings, and we can learn from their understandings, but this itself is the true word of God directly from him, right?

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So this is what we want to study first, and then we can take that other information and we can learn from that other information, right?

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That other people have already done. So it really gives us information about God, right? God in himself.

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That's why we read the scriptures, we want to know about God. And in that process, it gives us the ability to worship

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God. Again, these are all kind of just things I'm touching on that I'm going over them quick because we've already gone over these, but I just wanted to kind of pull this together so we get some of the highlights again.

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It's to worship this God. So once we read about God and we go, wow, what a great God he is. He saved me out of death, out of sin.

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I was his enemy, I wanted to kill God, and now he's turned around and he showed me in this book how much he loves me and I should want to worship him for what he is.

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And even just worship him as a creator, to sit back and say the billions of stars that have been created and the beauty and the color and the food and the taste that we get in life, it's something that we could really sit back and just worship and say,

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God, what a great creator you are. It helps us solidify our doctrine. As you know, there are different ways that people have tried to interpret scripture and it really helps us to solidify doctrine and understand what is it that we should know, what are the things that we should obey.

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It helps those who are wanting to preach, right, to proclaim God's word. It helps us the ability to open

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God's word, study God's word and proclaim it. And the most fearful thing for a preacher should not be, am

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I gonna make a mistake and are people gonna think I'm an idiot as most of you probably do while I'm standing up here now. But, you know, it's not to say, am

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I an idiot because I made a mistake. The biggest fear someone should have when they're preaching God's word is, what does

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God think about what I'm preaching, right? That's the most important thing. It shouldn't really matter what you all think.

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Now, I should present it properly and it should be something that makes sense. But what makes most critical and what scares me the most about preaching

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God's word is ensuring that what I'm doing is God's word. And I'm not telling you something else.

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So the study of God's word allows us to preach. Those who don't preach specifically, but it gives them the ability to teach.

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And on a teaching side of things also leads to evangelism, sharing of the gospel, sharing of the message, right?

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Critical. And in that we have even caring for others, right? We all have had either aging parents or grandparents or sicknesses or illnesses.

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And God's word is the comfort that we can have to bring to others that either don't know the word or even those who love

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God's word. There's so much comfort. There's so much hope. There's so much to gain that we can share with the world.

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So it helps us to care for others. And we talked briefly about what are some of the requirements, right?

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Upfront, what were some of the requirements in studying God's word? And the first was just a reasoned knowledge, right?

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If I start throwing out theological words that none of you understand, that doesn't help you at all to understand what

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I'm trying to teach, right? I wanna not dumb things down as a lot of people try to do or use slick words or other things like that.

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But at the same time, you have to have a somewhat of an understanding when I'm teaching about what

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I'm teaching, right? Again, if we go back to the analogy of quantum physics, and I think last week what I used was, if you were plopped in the middle of a semester of quantum physics and then told to take a final exam afterwards, you probably wouldn't do too well on it because you really don't have that background.

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You don't have the knowledge. You don't have the understanding of what is required. So there's some knowledge of faith is required, right?

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Obedience to the word. One thing that we really need to understand, and we talked briefly about it is that we are under God's word.

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God's word is over us, right? So the filter that we use is that God's word is over and above.

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It's not that we push our things onto God's word, but we take out of God's word.

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And all this doesn't come by our own will or our own desire. All this comes from God's Holy Spirit and him illuminating us through the spirit to understand the word.

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So, and we talked briefly about it, that just about anybody can pick up a book, right? I could pick up a book on quantum physics and read it and get some head knowledge about it, but I might not fully understand it.

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Yet the word of God says that it's not something that can be understood by the non -Christian. They can understand, you know, the history as we talked a little bit about, and they could probably understand some of the poetic language, and they can say, this is a great piece of literature, just like any other piece of literature, right?

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It's just like if you had something, you know, Shakespeare or some of the other literary greats that are out there, anyone could pick up God's word and understand it probably from a literary perspective or words and how they're used and oh, what great sentence structure and other things.

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But only the Christian through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the scripture says, can we truly understand and have in our heart what

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God has intended his children to know, right? So that's a requirement.

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So illumination of the Holy Spirit. We talked about church membership. And again, I liked the word church membership because we have a membership class coming up as Pastor Harry Dennett had said, and it's important, but from a church membership, what

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I really meant in this portion of the text was that it was for accountability, right? Learning and studying something, if you've ever done it in a bubble or being isolated is something that you can get kind of wacky in what you wanna teach.

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And a lot of times with theology, it can be the same thing. If you're doing it inside your own little bubble and you're not bouncing it off other people and going, am

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I understanding this right? Maybe I don't have a full understanding and being able to interact with other people, it makes it very tough to understand something that maybe you don't have a lot of knowledge of.

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So church memberships gives that accountability of brothers and sisters in Christ. And lastly, we talked about use of appropriate methods.

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So we wanna have appropriate methods in studying God's word. And that's really some of the stuff that I wanted to get into.

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And then as I talked last week, we're gonna get into maybe some of the fallacies based on time that we have that people use when they kind of go wrong in their understanding.

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So we got into the area last week about what were some of the challenges. Anyone here remember what some of those challenges were?

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When we wanna study God's word, when we pick up God's word and we just open it up and start reading it, and what are the challenges?

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A has reigns in Judah. What are some of the challenges here? Geography, right?

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Judah, where's Judah? Huh, now most of your Bibles, I don't think these do, most of your

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Bibles will have maps in the back. There's great atlases, there's great books written just on geography.

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Understanding that when they say they went up to Jerusalem and you go, but they went up and they were South. Well, you have to understand

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Jerusalem was up as in it was elevated up. So everywhere you went, if you were

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North, you would go up to Jerusalem. If you were in the South, you would go up to Jerusalem. If you were East or West, you would go up to Jerusalem.

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So when you're reading the scripture and you go, well, that doesn't make sense. They were North and they went up. We always think of North up, right? In American, you look at a map,

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North is up, right? But an understanding of geography helps. What about, again,

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I just opened this up now. What about, again, A has reigns in Judah. What are some of the other issues we have?

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Yes, yeah, yeah, we even talked about, at the very beginning, we talked about word differences, right? And even when we had our music today, if you were here this morning, they talked about reigning and they were saying, well, it's not reigning, right?

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It is reign, it is to be a king, right? So reigning, word variations.

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And we talked a little bit last time about things like course and course, dear, dear, and so forth, that there are gaps in just words.

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What other issues? What other issues? Charlie.

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Time was a big one, right? Again, we got here, A has reigns in Judah. Well, who's A has? Where's Judah?

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Wow, when did he reign? When did that happen? Can we go back in history? Is this book, in most instances,

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I mean, what we're reading here, is this a historical book? Does this give us history? Yeah, of course it does, right?

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So we can go back and we can verify, A has reigns in Judah. Well, when did that take place? And we can go back to historical records and we can find out when that was, right?

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And based on time, as even Charlie said, we have issues, I have issues with what I ate for breakfast this morning, let alone going back, you know, 2000 plus years and try to understand various aspects of life even back then.

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So time was a big issue and we need to understand that when we're looking at scripture.

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What happens with time? Why is time a difficult thing sometimes? Cultural backgrounds, right?

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Very big in time. So you have to understand culture based on the time it was, right?

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That changes. Other things that change over time, cultures do.

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What else? I'm sorry? Language, yes, yes.

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And someone who speaks additional languages understands that, right? Again, we talked a little bit about last week that there are whole dictionaries bigger than the size of a regular dictionary that just contain words that are outdated or obsolete in English.

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I'm sure there's dictionaries that do the same for other languages, but I didn't know there was such. You know, I like the ones that teach me how to spell, you know, misspelled words most because I'm a terrible speller.

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But there are dictionaries full words that are no longer used. They're arcanic words. They just aren't used anymore in our day.

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And what's gonna be interesting is looking, you know, another 2000 years and maybe another 50 years from now, we're gonna see the things that are now being added to the dictionary like Facebook.

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What was that? You know, and friending and some of these other words are now adding that you kind of go, what?

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What was that? Google, right? What was that Google thing? I don't know, my parents used to always talk about Google. I'm a

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Bing guy now. So there's time, words change, right?

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Language changes. We've got the barrier there. What's another one that we talked about? I talked about another one, a little more difficult one, a little more, conceptually a little more difficult.

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But context is key, yeah? What kind of, I'll start off, there's two different words.

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They both start with pre, pre. What's pre mean? Before, right?

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Pre. So pre, presupposition, presuppositions.

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So you suppose things, presuppositions, based on how you were raised, your culture, various other things, you just presuppose things.

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Right? When you talk about things like presuppositional apologetics, it's really around things like, we just assume

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God exists. We don't have to prove to a person God exists. If we presuppose something, it is, we just know it, right?

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And there are presuppositions that we bring to the text when we're reading God's word. So there's presupposition, and there's one similar to that.

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Anyone know what that one is? Presuppositions or pre, they're almost synonyms in some ways.

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They're used a little different as I've read, but, did I hear one? Pre -understanding, yeah.

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So you have presuppositions and you have pre -understanding. So what do I already understand? How was I raised? How did my mother treat me?

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Right? All the things you get to blame on your parents as you get older. You know, these are all pre -understandings.

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And based on just how you grew up, right? Did you grow up in a very wealthy family? Did you grow up in a very poor family?

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It's gonna make you understand things differently. Did your father beat you and abuse you when you were younger? And now you're reading the scriptures and you're talking about this loving father and you go, well,

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I can't comprehend that. It's something that my father never did these things for me.

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These are areas that people have struggles with when they read God's word. Now, I don't think we got into the goals of Bible study.

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The goals of Bible study. So I'm gonna briefly talk about some of these and I have a couple of questions.

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But, you know, what should one's goal be for Bible study? What should your goals be in Bible study?

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Yeah, grow in the grace and the knowledge of our

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Lord Jesus Christ, right? That's what you said. Everyone agree with that? Anyone disagree with that?

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I'll talk to you afterwards if you did, but true. Yeah, yeah, to grow, right?

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And in that growing and in that reading, right? We are to understand the meanings God has for us, right?

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The words that are here, the sentence structure, the paragraphs, the letters as they're laid out even, just everything that we have in the word of God here is really to give us the level of meanings, what the author intended, right?

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So I won't throw out that question of, you know, who is the author, right? Because there's always the fun that comes with that.

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But we can discuss that for another Sunday school. But Brother Bruce, to have our mind renewed.

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Yeah, how does it renew our minds? How does the word of God renew our minds? Yeah, very different, right?

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Oftentimes it's very different, but the more we're in it, the more we grow in our sanctification, the more we understand

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God's word, right? The more we're hoping to be more and more like him, right? Yeah, yeah.

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And we even talked, I think last week a little bit, it may have been when I was preaching on Sunday, but as we grow in our sanctification and as we grow more and we study

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God's word and we understand it deeper and we get a better knowledge of it, we start to see even the smaller sins, right?

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We actually see that we sin more oftentimes because we acknowledge and we're saying how

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God sees sin and we see, gosh, I'm sinning in these areas. So now you've got to fix those. And as you get more sanctified, you see there's even more sin.

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And you see that because you're growing in holiness, you're seeing these sins that you never thought were sins in your past just as you grow, right?

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So these levels of meaning, right? What should be when we're studying God's word, what should be the one question you should be asking yourself when you are studying a passage of text?

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So what? So what from, I thought I heard so, did you?

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Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry, I didn't mean to give you the look then. If that was, how dare you, no. Yeah, so what,

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I'm sorry. So that's kind of the third, but I agree.

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And that's critical, but that's one of the things we kind of want to take afterwards, right? That's the, how do I apply this to my life?

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What are the two that go above that? Yeah, yeah, so what is who trying to get across?

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Well, we got God, but let's just take it back. I'm going to go up a little higher, but not above God, but I'm saying. Yeah, what is the author's intent, right?

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As we talked about authorial intent. First, we want to sit there and as we read the text, we want to say, you know, we understand that God wrote it and the

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Holy Spirit illuminates it, but it was men who penned it by God's hand. And we want to understand what is

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God and what is the author telling the people, right?

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So that's the critical part, what is being said? Because I can make a verse say anything I pretty much want it to say, if I just pull it out of context, right?

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We talked about context a little bit last time. So we want to know what the author's intention was.

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What's another important thing we want to understand? Charlie. Yeah, what was the audience's understanding, right?

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So you have things such as the Beatitudes is a great example, right? You have Jesus who's preaching and you have people of all races.

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You know, a lot of times we had fishermen and farmers and we had, you know, not very wealthy people oftentimes, but you have a different culture of people that Jesus was speaking to.

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And this was throughout most of the text, right? How did the audience receive that? How would they have understood what the author was saying to them?

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So it's critical we know the author's intent. It's critical we understand the audience's understanding of what the author was saying.

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And then I think to your point, right? Now, how does that apply to me? How do I leverage this information between both what the author's saying in time, in context, right?

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Geography, I mean, all this stuff I need to kind of put into the blender, mix it up and say, now, how does that apply to my life?

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How can I use this information that God has given to me, right, out of his own grace, that I can learn more about him?

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And again, it sounds difficult and I don't wanna make it sound hard, it can be. I mean, again, it's one of those things that, you know,

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I try to use the analogy. If you're a new Christian, you can dip your toes, you know, at the very beginnings of the water and kind of put your foot in the entry part of the kiddie pool, right?

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Or a theologian can be just digging into the words and the Greek and the history and all the other stuff that, you know, so I don't wanna say that for every time you study the

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Bible that you're gonna go through all these steps, but if you wanna study God's word and really richly get information out of it, these are some of the steps that a lot of people take.

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And a lot of times people don't understand, these are the steps that, you know, Pastor Mike, Pastor Steve and the elders take when we're preaching a message.

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It's not an easy thing, right? It's not a Saturday that you kind of wake up and say, oh, I wanna, you know, eeny, meeny, miny, moe,

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I wanna preach on this subject. There's a lot of work that goes into it, right? A lot of work.

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I'm hoping you understand that. Again, it's not for a pat on either of our backs, but it just is to make sure that what we're teaching and preaching is what

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God's word is saying. We wanna ensure that that's what's being taught from the pulpit. Yes. Yeah.

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Because a lot of times we take it for granted what people tell us, right? Because it's hard to study. It's hard. I like easy.

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So it can be very difficult. And I think most of us, I mean, we've got hard lives. We've got a lot of stuff going on in our lives and it's difficult.

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But our desire should be that we truly wanna understand God's word as best as we can. So the application we talked briefly about, again,

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I'm just looking at my notes here, so bear with me, but application we talked about, right? What does the word speak to me and what do

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I need to do in response to my study, right? How does it affect me? And again, it's not a me, me, me, but these are just some of the words you need to understand as you're doing it.

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You wanna see how does it affect my life, right? How does it apply to my life? What are some principles?

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Sometimes it's very, very difficult, right? Again, let me just grab a text here, right? Jesus's mothers and brothers in Matthew 12, right?

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Jesus's mothers and brothers. Well, how does that apply to me? How does that apply to me? Now, not every text is gonna have principles that we can pull out of it, but there's history here.

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There's information about the characters here in our text. There are things that we may be able to apply to this about even relationships.

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And again, we're not trying to squish things, squinch, new word, squish things into the text.

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We're not trying to do that. We wanna make sure we're taking out of the text, right? Charlie, yes.

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Yeah, you saved me two pages out of my notes here. So thanks, appreciate it. No, no, that's true.

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So Charlie was talking about prescriptive and descriptive. Before I get to you, what does that mean? I mean, maybe you heard it, maybe you didn't, but what should that mean to us?

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Descriptive, it's being described. What's something that's descriptive? Give me a type of literature that's usually descriptive.

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And what is that kind of, from a textual perspective, what is that called? What type of text is that? What's that, historical?

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Narrative, yeah, it's a historical narrative. So it is, yeah, look at that tag team over here, right?

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We talked about wrestling even at the first service and now you're tag teaming. No, that's good, that's good.

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That's what brothers and sisters are here to do or to help one another. So yeah, so with descriptive, right, we have the description of things.

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This is just history, this is information, but it's usually historical information and it describes events, right?

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Prescriptive, I have to go to CVS and get a prescription after the service. What does it mean?

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Yeah, yeah, take two of these a day for the next 30 days and you'll be okay, right? It is prescribed.

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So in our text, as Charlie talked about, we need to understand as we're reading, is this something that is descriptive?

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Is this something that's just describing what's going on? Or is this prescriptive? Is this something that we are being told that we have to do, right?

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Commands are prescriptive, right? Narratives, in most cases, are gonna be descriptive.

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But there are times where there's a mix. I'm not saying all narratives are just descriptive. You had a, yes.

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Yeah, here we go. Correct, it's for me, agreed.

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Yeah, and again, we talked a lot about context last week. If you weren't here last week, I apologize, but we really talked about context, context, context, context, right?

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You always wanna take whenever someone, especially when they have a verse and it says something like, he said to them, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, grow together until the harvest.

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Hey, we need to harvest, we need to grow. It's all about Christian harvesting. It's not at all that we're talking about here, right?

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But oftentimes, you'll see people who will, and what's interesting, it fascinates me all the time. Get outside of my notes and I'll usually get in trouble.

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But what fascinates me the most is when you have no other book in literature is ever treated the same way our

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Bible is, right? No one else would go, Shakespeare, and just, oh, let me see.

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And read a portion of Shakespeare and even take it out of context and go, oh, that must be that it's talking about whatever, whatever, right?

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I can't even really quote one, but to be or not to be, right? That's Shakespeare, right? To be or not to be, oh, wow, what does that mean?

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What's it for me? I mean, no one does that, right? No one does that.

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Yet, the scripture is, it's done all the time. Both believers and unbelievers, right? Unbelievers use it in what way?

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Matthew 7, 1. What's the verse? Yeah, what are you judging me up here?

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You guys are meanies, right? And then we look down a little bit further, what's 15 say? We're to judge, right?

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We're to judge, we're to judge rightfully what is being said, right? So, you know, people go, well, that's not in that, right?

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That's not in the Bible. But I know, don't judge, don't judge, right? It's used out of context. And non -Christians love that.

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My mother's a famous one, she loves that verse, right? Every time we talk about it, it's don't judge me. Yeah, Charlie.

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And anyone who wants to pull all their belongings and give them to me, that's fine. I'll take them, but I will make sure that it's out of context.

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And as Charlie said, it is a descriptive that people are trying to use prescriptively, right? And they're saying,

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God says we are to sell everything and essentially go live in a commune with a bunch of other people.

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Again, if you know your history and you understand the traveling that people had to take and some of the other things that were required of them, right, that's how people survived back then, right?

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Very different from our culture today. Again, a day where you were not, you know, exchanging or trading or doing something else with other, you may go hungry that night.

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And if you go hungry a couple nights in a row, you may starve and die. I mean, it wasn't the nicest of times.

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And you understand that when you study the history side. So let's see.

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So how do we know we're doing it right? How do we know we're studying God's Word right? Bearing fruit.

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Okay. Yeah, if you look at Pastor Harry's next message, it says new and improved.

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No, I'm just kidding. Sorry, Pastor Harry, if you're listening to this. No, and you're right, right?

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If you're in a, oftentimes in a bubble, right? You're in isolation and you're reading a text and you go, ooh,

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I never saw that. I bet no one else ever saw that. And you just think, ooh, new and improved. And you go to preach it and teach it.

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If you find anything in the scriptures, again, as we talked about, the words new and improved with scripture are not a good thing.

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It may be for your Hoover vacuum or it may be for your blender at home or whatever else. But new and improved, when it comes to a text that's 2 ,000 years old, is not something that we would say is a good thing.

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But we need to also understand that there are challenges, right? I mean, that's really what we talked about the first half of this and even last week because there are a ton of challenges when we come to studying the text.

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And again, I don't want it to scare any of you off. If you're newer as a Christian here, I don't want you to, again, think that you have to know all this stuff before you can jump into God's Word.

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If I've made that, you know, if I've impressed that upon you, I don't want that to be. But I want you to understand how important it is that we even understand

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God's Word, right? If you're a new Christian here and you just start opening up your text and you're reading and maybe you don't understand something, well, maybe you do study that in depth.

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Maybe you spend more time, right? But it should be a desire that we understand God's Word and understand it rightly.

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So the first is really, you know, an attempt to understand and overcome our challenges. So we need to first understand that we have challenges and I'm hoping that we've described that through most of the session that we've talked about today.

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Second was to learn that there are processes and there are procedures that can be followed like anything else, right?

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You know, I'm hoping that if I were to have brain surgery that my brain surgeon has processes and procedures, right?

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You're hoping your doctor has processes and procedures. You're hoping your mechanic has processes and procedures to fix your car.

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They just don't go, oh, I got a wrench and I got a hammer, right? And I'm going to go fix the thing that's making the noise. I don't know what it's called, but I'm going to go fix it.

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You would go, I'm sorry, and you would drive away, right? I hope you wouldn't. You wouldn't leave your car with someone like that. Yes.

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Yeah. Yes, he is. My mother likes that one too.

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Yeah. Yeah, and in context, what's interesting is, you know, if you really struggle with something, you know, sometimes context can be answered very quickly.

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Usually if you read the paragraph below and the paragraph above, context can usually be answered, okay?

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Just for your own sake. So if you read a passage, you go, oh, I don't understand that. Go above, read it, and reread your text, and then read below, and you might go, oh, okay, that answers my question.

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I understand. If you don't get it there, go to the chapter. If you don't get it in the chapter, go to the book, right?

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If you don't get it in the book, how does it apply across Scripture? How do we see it throughout

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Scripture? And that's critical, and it's important to understand, because the context will be there.

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I'm not saying that there aren't passages that are difficult that theologians continue to struggle with. But again, those passages are not passages that change our salvation in any way or means.

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So there are difficult passages. So we're not going to get the answers to everything. But we definitely want to have processes, practices, procedures that will aid us in our study.

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So now we understand what we don't know or our issues. Now let's go at it with a specific approach.

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And then lastly, we can learn from others, right? We can learn from others.

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I mean, you might not have liked it in school, but when you read a history book, someone wrote that.

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Someone studied it. Someone spent maybe their life and devoted themselves to a text or a time in history or whatever it might be.

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And for them, they found it important to then write that down so that others could read and hopefully have the same desire, right?

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That they would get that same passion about it. They would have answers to their own questions. So we need to learn from others who came before us.

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And oftentimes, that fixes the issue where when you're in isolation, and you turn around and you say, wow, what have the

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Puritans thought of this? What have maybe modern theologians thought of this? What have, you know, maybe even as much as I hate to say this, what have other maybe even more liberal people written about this?

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What have more conservative people written about this? Because you really want to get a breadth of understanding as you go through studying

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God's Word. Does anyone know what the word is for the process of studying

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God's Word? It's a big word. I know Charlie knows it.

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I know a lot of others that know it. What? Hermeneutics. Hermeneutics.

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Hermeneutics. Yeah. Anyone give me a definition of hermeneutics? Great one.

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What was it? Louder. The art and science of studying God's Word. Hermeneutics.

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Is that what you're going to say, Charlie? You had something to add to that. Yeah, the art and science of interpretation of God's Word.

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That's right. So why do we have an art and a science? Sounds kind of wishy -washy.

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Yeah. You can't.

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You can't take that and say it's, you know, apocalyptic literature. Song of Solomon.

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I mean, we won't go there because I'll get in trouble. No, you're right.

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I mean, you can't apply various forms of, you know, just like a mechanic. Again, I might not use the analogy right only because I'm not a mechanic.

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If I was a computer guy, I'd probably tell you a computer analogy. But you have a mechanic who, you know, there's a different process when you're working on a, you know,

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Toyota Corolla compared to when you're working on a, you know, a

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Prius. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because, I mean, on a side note, I have a brother -in -law who's an on -call firefighter, right?

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And over the years of cars, right? Charlie, you made me think of this. Over the years of cars, it's always been the same, right?

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When a car gets in an accident and they pull out those things, you know what

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I'm talking about, right? Right? Jaws of life, right? And what do they usually use the jaws of life for? Cut the metal.

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What do they usually take first? Yeah, the roof, right? They chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp, right?

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Pull off the roof. They pull the people out. How did that change when the Prius came about? Anyone know?

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Anyone know? 30 ,000 volts running through those bars that come there.

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Guess what? Use the jaws of life. Right? Not a good thing.

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You get hurt. You get hurt really bad. So there are processes and procedures that when you approach something, right?

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If a firefighter didn't know what he was doing and he grabbed the jaws of life and went to the Prius, if someone else who was more experienced in that saw that, what should they do?

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Stop. Right? How unloving is that? Right? How unloving? Stop. You're doing it wrong.

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Stop. You don't understand this passage. You're studying it wrong. Right? Stop. What? Are you judging me?

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Are you judging me? Huh? I want to cut the roof off. I was told to do that.

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Right? Are you judging me? So it's important, right, that we have the art and science.

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So there are processes. That's the science part. There are steps that we're to take. And then we've got the art where we have to, one, understand and say, there are different processes for narrative.

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There are different processes for apocalyptic literature in the way that you interpret it and understand it. What are some of the challenges with apocalyptic literature like the

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Book of Revelation? Images? What? That it's easy.

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Go easy. Why would you want to go easy? Go easy.

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Right? You want to take an easy approach at it. But what are some of the challenges here? Symbolism and metaphor, right?

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Now, what do a lot of people like to take symbolism and metaphor and apply it to other types, right?

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They want to take that and go, ooh, you know what? This really means, right? Every single word means something different, you know, in Matthew or in, you know, some historical literature.

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You can't do that. There are these processes and procedures that are required. I'm going to run out of time again.

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Yeah, Charlie. No, no. No, you're actually helping me because, again, you're taking away two or three pages at a time here, so you're good.

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Yes. Correct.

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They like to use the snippets and use them as proof text in their own little ways and say, well, this is this type of literature and just this section and it will prove my point.

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Yes. Excellent. Excellent. Another two pages down. Thanks. Appreciate it. All right.

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That's four. So let's see how much time we have. Actually, we are just about out of time.

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But let's see. Why do we use it? Why do we use hermeneutics?

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Again, we're in the subject of hermeneutics, the art and science of biblical interpretation. Why do we use it?

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Simple question you should be asking yourself. Charlie, you can't answer this one.

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You got too many already today. Yeah, it comes down to what we were talking about from the very beginning, right?

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What is God trying to tell us through his word? And we do it in a way that isn't just haphazard, right?

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Again, you don't want the brain surgeon just going, I wonder what this does and that, right?

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It's not this haphazard nature, right? But if you've ever watched these medical shows, right?

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Again, I love some of these discovery shows and things like that, right? The heart surgery and all that stuff. When they open up patients, sometimes they go, oh,

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I didn't know that was there. Or, wow, that's in a different spot, right? There's a science, but you also have to be prepared that there is some of the unexpected, right?

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And there's the art that comes with that of, oh, wow, that's very different than what I thought, right?

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So there is some of that that comes into it, but we want to approach it with a very systematic way. Now, there's something that most of you have heard or when you were in school, right?

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You have the scientific method, right? This is really kind of the scientific method of studying God's word in a lot of ways.

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And I don't want to get into this yet because this gets into more stuff that Charlie will talk about next week, I'm sure.

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So why don't we do this? It's already 1045 and my iPad actually lasted on me. Thank you. Why don't we go ahead and pray.

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Any questions out of just what we covered today? Any questions? I mean, it's relatively, again,

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I don't want it to sound so weighty and I don't want it to sound so academic in that you can't enjoy reading your

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Bible unless you do all of these things. But if you're going to preach or you're going to teach or you want to even evangelize, right?

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You want to be able to study this because, you know what? Those out there that are the atheists and those that are out there in other ways are going to use the text against you.

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A lot of these guys study the word and they study it in depth, not for the right reason. They're looking for all the, hey, you don't know about this way, this is translated or I'm going to do this and use this verse and don't judge me and, you know,

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God is love and all of those other things. They're going to try to use things out of context. And unless you know your

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Bible, right? Did Jehovah's Witness come knocking at the door? Yeah, anyone have that happen? Jehovah's Witness come knocking at the door, right?

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Yeah. Do they keep come knocking at the door? Good. If they don't keep come knocking at the door, you're doing right.

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Yeah. So they are going to first pull out text and they're going to try to show you where their

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Bible is right and your Bible is wrong. And if you don't have an understanding, you just take it for granted and they show you, you know,

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John 1 .1 and you go, oh, I didn't realize it meant that, right? What's even more funny is you pull out your, you know, your

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Greek concordance and you go, oh yeah, oh yeah, look at this. No, this is what it really says, right? And you show them in the Greek and then you move them into the

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Hebrew and you, you know, throw a little Aramaic in there on the side and you really impress them and then they would leave.

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But no, that's not what it's all about. But in essence, being able to show that no, the Scripture is clear and there is ways to interpret it because the way that they've interpreted their own translation of the

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Bible is oftentimes out of context, historically incorrect.

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All the things that we talk about from a time of presupposition and all these other areas, they're very different for most of the cults, if not all the cults that do have their own translations.

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Any other questions? I'll just keep talking if I don't end.

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So that's part of my consultant nature. No? Okay.

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Why don't we go ahead and we pray and next time I get to teach or next time Pradeep is sick,

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I'll have the third part here. So let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank you.

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We praise you for this time that we have now to have just gone through some of the things,

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Lord, that we need to or we should be understanding and practicing if we don't. Again, Lord, I'm not here to condemn those that do not follow these processes.

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But, Lord, it just helps us to really understand you in a depth that oftentimes we don't understand if we don't do these types of studies,

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Lord. But we should crave the milk. But, Lord, once we've matured in ourselves and the milk has come and flowed,

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Lord, eventually we need to strive for the meat. And this is the study that really allows us to pull the meat out of your word.

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And we just thank you and praise you for those who are here today that are willing to learn and desire to learn various ways of studying your word,

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Lord. And we thank you and we praise you for this day that we have. We pray that you'd be with Brother Pradeep in his illness, that you would continue to give strength to Pastor Harrington as he preaches now for the second service, and,

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Lord, that you would be pleased with us in the things that we do as we get to know you better. We ask all this in your holy and precious name.

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Amen. Any other questions you can come up and ask me if you'd like afterwards. Apart from that, you are dismissed.