10 - Biblical Hermeneutics, Identification, Part 2

Well, welcome to the

Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Biblical Harmonetics.

We're glad that you're with us and we are hoping that you will enjoy the class tonight.

We will be continuing where we left off last week as we look into different types of literature.

So I hope you enjoy that. I hope that you have a syllabus over here.

I can't quite grab it. But if you get your syllabus out, those are for students of the

Academy. What is a student? Well, you're a student if you're watching. You're an enrolled student if you pay and get a syllabus so you could pay better attention.

In other words, so you could take notes and things like that. You do want to take good notes.

It's a good thing to do. We want to welcome all of those new students that we have with us.

We're glad to have you with us and glad to have you hopefully in your syllabus paying attention and enjoying the class.

So we are going to be in the syllabus. Basically, we are on page 20 of your syllabus.

We're going to just kind of do a little bit of a review first though just so that we can figure out where we are and then we'll pick up from there.

So if you'll remember, we said that we are looking at four different keys to interpreting

God's Word. And that is what harmonetics is. I may not have given the definition of that in some time. Harmonetics is the art and science of interpretation.

Now why an art and science? Well, I guess because the art part of it is that there are some things where you don't have, the rules can be a little fuzzy.

There's things like idioms and things that we have to interpret a little different. But the science is that we follow the rules.

And so there are rules to interpretation and that's actually what we're learning. We're learning the science, the rules, the principles that you should follow when you're going to interpret

Scripture. Keeping in mind, there's only one interpretation of God's Word, many applications.

The right interpretation is the one that God agrees with. You and I may not always get it right, but that's okay.

Our job is to study to show ourselves approved unto God. So a workman who is rightly dividing the

Word of God is going to be one that's going to be diligent and put a lot of time into the study. And that's what we're hoping to teach you in these classes.

So we're glad that you're with us and we're going to do a little bit of a review from where we were.

The first key that we are on is the identification. We're going to look at that and finish that up this week.

Identification deals with identifying the type of literature that we have before us when we look at the

Scriptures. Second is going to be the investigation. We are going to learn in during investigation.

There's several questions we should be asking ourselves to make sure that we are investigating

God's Word correctly. We'll look at those five key questions next time.

Then we have the interpretation. Now see, most people jump right into that one.

That's not the way to do it. You are to start with identification, investigation, then you look at the interpretation.

And then lastly is implementation. The real fault that we see in most people's interpretation or handling of Scripture, I should say, is they jump right to the last one and they go to the implementation.

In other words, applying it to self. And then they look to see how, what they believe it says by their application, what does it, they make that, say that.

That's not a good way to do it. So we want to follow the principles in the right order so that we can get to a right interpretation regularly.

All right. We first looked at historical narratives. Historical narratives cover most of the

Old Testament, many of the first five books of the New Testament. So you'll see historical narratives as in the

Gospels, in the Book of Acts, Genesis, first five books actually of the Old Testament, you know, and even beyond that, all the way up really till we get to the wisdom literature is a really all historical narrative.

So both Old and New Testament starts off with the historical narratives. Now, if you remember when we looked at historical narratives, we said that with historical narratives, we don't always take everything as being something that God condones.

Okay. Just because God records accurately what happened in history does not mean that God condones nor condemns certain behavior.

It means that it records what actually happened. It's a very important lesson to remember when it comes to interpreting historical narratives because many people take things that are in historical narratives and take it as if it's instructional and it's not.

Then we looked at Hebrew poetry. And Hebrew poetry was one where we said that it is poetry not the way we have poetry that's based on rhyme, but this is poetry based on basically having parallelism.

So either one verse extending the second verse or being the same thought as the second verse or being an opposite of the second verse or further explaining the second verse or illustrating the second verse.

However it is, we saw several different ones last class. You can go back to YouTube and view those. But we see that there's differences when interpreting those.

Because of the poetry, we're going to first try to figure out what type of poetry is, what type of parallelism it is.

That's going to help us in following the rules of interpretation when it comes to poetry.

The poetry is going to be different again, as we said, because poetry is going to have a different style.

It's more picturesque. You're going to see more of the art in that. Because you're going to have things like, as a deer pants for water, so my soul longs after you.

The idea there is that the deer is, we're not panting literally, but the idea of the description of a deer panting is the way that we should be longing after God.

A deer that is thirsty and panting and breathing heavy, desiring water, that's the desire we should have for God.

So it's illustrative. So we want to make sure that we're interpreting illustrations as illustrations, instruction as instruction.

That's really the thing that we want to focus on. So with that, that is where we were last class.

I hope that wasn't new to any of you because being good students of the Striving Fraternity Academy, you've been taking notes, you've been following along in your syllabus, and I'm probably on drugs for believing that.

Yeah, you're probably just sitting in the chat room, like talking about everything but class, like, you know, what color you painted your toenails today or something crazy like that.

And everyone else is talking about that. And none of you are paying attention. Yeah, I have high expectations for my students.

All right. Let's look this week at wisdom literature. Now, wisdom literature is going to be a little bit different than poetry, but it's still a difficult one to interpret at times for some of the same reasons.

So first off, some of the books that we find in wisdom literature, they're all they're kind of next to each other is mostly is the book of Job.

And by the way, that's not the book of Job. When I first became a Christian, I didn't have anyone teaching me these things.

So I just read it the way I read it. And I thought it was the book of Job. What did

I know? Little Jewish boy reading the Bible, you know, because in Hebrew we call it

Yob. So, you know, what did I know? So the book of Job, the book of Proverbs, the book of Ecclesiastes would be three of the books that are primarily or mostly all wisdom literature.

Now, throughout the historical narratives, you do have cases where you have books that are that do have small sections of wisdom literature in it.

So, again, just because you're in a book that's mostly historical narrative doesn't mean it's all historical narrative.

It could contain sections that are poetry or wisdom literature. Keep that in mind.

And same, there's parts of the book of Proverbs that actually would fit more into narrative, historical narrative in small sections, but they're there.

All right. So let's look at some keys. If you have your syllabus, we'll look at some keys to interpreting wisdom literature.

Ready? Okay. First key in interpreting wisdom literature is that wisdom literature is advice from those who have learned valuable life lessons.

That's why Solomon speaks so much on the wisdom. And he was the wisest man that lived up to his time.

He had a lot of things that he had learned and he taught. And so we see that in practice.

So we know that this, the purpose is a generalism that's to teach a lesson.

So it's not a promise. We're going to look at some of these, but many people get some verses wrong.

They take them as promises and not generalities. So it's not a generality.

It's a generality, not a promise. Wisdom literature uses maxims or short statements of truth, which is what

I mean by generality. Number three, wisdom literature uses a variety of devices.

One is parallelism that we saw in poetry. So we're not going to deal with that one, but let's look at one that's comparison.

We see here that this is going to be wisdom literature that is going to use comparison to make a point.

So if we look at this, Proverbs 22 and verse one says, a good name is to be chosen rather than great riches and favor is better than silver or gold.

Now notice the comparison there. The comparison is between a good name compared to riches, the, and the favor versus gold and silver.

So you see that you see those two. Now, when you look at those two, what you see is that that is a comparison between those.

So we are not to take this as a literally, um, in other words, having great riches is not a bad thing.

Having gold and silver is not a bad thing. Okay. Uh, it's not money. That's the root of all evil.

It's the love of money. That's the root of all kinds of evil. Okay. But, um, the point being is that when you look at this, uh, there's a comparison between the good name and the riches or, you know, the, the favor versus the silver and gold, there's a comparison there.

So the lesson to be taught there is it is better to be a person of a good reputation, a person who has a favor with others.

You know, one of the better known examples of this was Bill Gates, one of the wealthiest men in the world.

And all of his money didn't help him when he was being mocked by people like Ted Turner for not giving his money to other people.

At the time, Bill Gates made money and he kept it for himself. Uh, and he had not really done many foundations and things like that to, to take care of others.

And so people like Ted Turner, who gives a lot of money away to different organizations, uh, and other people were kind of, well, publicly ridiculing

Bill Gates and Bill Gates realized he was getting a bad name. All of his money couldn't repair a bad name.

So what he did was started to give away some money and start doing things with his money to take care of others and started a foundation and he actually ended up giving up,

I think the day to day operations of his own company, Microsoft, to, to run his charitable organizations.

Uh, but the idea there being is that he, a good name was of greater value than the riches.

So one style is comparison. And when you see a comparison, you got to understand that what the two points are that are being compared.

Next is contradictions. This is going to be a little bit of a longer passage that we'll look at. This, we'll see some of the comparisons here.

And what I've done here is color coded it. I hope you're not colorblind, but if you are,

I'm sorry, you'll follow along. But, uh, if you're not, you can see that there's different comparisons here.

Now, because of this passage I chose, there's a lot of contrasts in the comparison, this, these are comparisons, but comparisons of contrast.

So look at the different color coding and you see there that with the different color codings,

I have the first compare or contrast in red and the second in blue and the third in green, just so that we can see this comparison, how there's many contrasts within this short few verses.

So in these 14 verses, you see that there's many contrasts in them. So let's take a look.

Uh, it says the Proverbs of Solomon. Okay. A wise son.

Now notice wise son, that's going to be compared to just in a little bit, if you look forward, a foolish son.

So a wise son compared, contrasted with a foolish son. A wise son makes a glad father.

Notice the contrast of glad to sorrow. So wise son makes a glad father.

A foolish son is a sorrow to his mother. Notice those three different contrasts, wise to foolish, glad to sorrow, mother, father to mother.

Okay. Within that verse, you see three different contrasts. Okay. That's why

I color coded those so you can notice that. Let's look at number two, verse two.

Treasures gained by wickedness. Now notice the wickedness in red there, uh, does not profit, but righteousness delivers from death.

Uh, actually I should have color coded profit and death as well. That should have been blue, but you notice the contrast between wickedness and righteousness.

You see actually a contrast between, uh, gained and delivered and then profit or treasures and death.

So you see there's a contrast there. Verse three, let, uh, the Lord does not let the righteous go hungry, but he thwarts the cravings of the wicked.

So you have the righteous and the wicked are in red. They are contrasted.

You also have hungry versus cravings. They're not so much a, now notice that's a, in a sense, go hungry and thwart the craving.

Um, you, you see some, some contrast there, but not really. So I didn't change those, but you notice the idea here as you're seeing the real contrast throughout this passage is between a wise, the wisdom and the foolish or the righteous and unrighteous or righteous and wicked.

You see, you're going to see that throughout. Uh, verse four, a slack hand, slack is going to be compared to diligent.

Uh, causes poverty and poverty being compared to rich. So a slack hand causes poverty, but.

Uh, the diligent, the hand of the diligent makes rich. So what you see there is hand is used in a, in a, uh, parallel way, but the contrast is between the slack and the diligent, the poor and the rich.

Verse five, who he who gathers the gatherers is compared to is contrasted with sleeps.

He who gathers in summer is prudent, but he who sleeps in the harvest is a son who brings shame.

So notice a prudent son versus a shameful son. You see that contrast.

Verse six, blessings, which will be compared to violence. Blessings are on the head of the righteous, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence.

So verse seven, the memory, which will be a comparison, uh, sorry, contrasted with rot, a memory is you have a memory of someone after they die, but, and so the, the wa the memory of the righteous is a blessing.

Okay. But then the name of the wicked will rot. In other words, people remember a righteous person, but someone who's wicked, people forget about, they don't give thoughts of them.

Verse eight, the wise of heart will receive commandments, but a babbling fool will come to ruin.

So a wise person receives commandments, but that's the wise is compared to the babbling fool.

Okay. And the receiving commandments is compared to ruin. So I hope you're seeing, uh, you know,

I don't know that I, I need to go on with these. Well, we'll, okay. We'll finish. We'll finish this up. Whoever walks in integrity, integrity is contrasted with crooked.

So whoever walks in integrity, uh, right. You see it. They walk securely and securely is contrasted with being found out.

So whoever walks with integrity, walks with, uh, walks with integrity, walks securely, but he who walked, who makes his ways crooked will be found out.

So you notice in each one of these, these each verse is a short little Maxim, a short little general generalization.

This particular one, you notice it's meaning by its contrasts. Okay. Someone who walks in integrity, uh, they have integrity so they can walk securely.

They don't have to worry about being beaten up on the streets because they're walking securely.

Why are they walking securely? Because of the fact that they have integrity, but someone who's ripping everyone off, those people can be found out when they're found out to be ripping people off, they have to watch their back.

Okay. So, um, continuing on notice the next little

Maxim, uh, this one now notice here, whoever winks the eye causes trouble and a babbling fool causes ruined.

Now, here's a question for you. There's nothing here that I have color coded in verse 10.

What type of literature is that? Or, or, or which one of these wisdom literature, uh, devices is this?

Is it a parallelism? Is it a comparison or is it a contrast? Well, if you take a look at it, whoever winks the eye causes trouble and a babbling fool.

Well, the, the fool and the, the person that causes trouble is kind of the same.

Uh, they'll come to ruin. So this is sort of a comparison.

Whoever winks the eye causes trouble and a babbling fool will come to ruin. But you could also see this as a parallelism.

Notice that the second verse extends the first.

Okay. So what you have there is that it's the same. It builds on it, which is the, the type of, uh, synthetic pattern that we, a parallelism that we saw last week.

Let's look more at the contrasts. Uh, the mouth of the righteous. So righteous will be compared to wicked or contrasted with wicked is a fountain of life and that's, that's contrasted with conceals violence.

Verse 12, hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses.

Okay. So hatred stirs up or creates strife contrasted with love that covers offenses.

Okay. It doesn't mean that love overlooks them. Okay. But it's not stirring them up.

That's the contrast. All right. It's a generality. Uh, let's look at the last two verses on the lips of him who has understanding.

That's going to be contrasted to him who lacks sense on the lips of him who has understanding wisdom is found.

So wisdom, uh, is found, but a rod is for the back of him who lacks sense.

So wisdom is being actually compared to a rod. Rod is a device used for spanking.

Wisdom is something that would provide no need for a spanking. All right.

Lastly, the last verse, the wise lay up knowledge, but the mouth of the fool, uh, brings room, brings ruin near.

So you see, that's the idea of contrast. When you look at contrast, what you're seeing there is that part of the verse contrasts with the other part of the verse.

Okay. Real simple. So that's what we see when we see, uh, wisdom literature that's, we looked at parallelism.

We looked at comparison and part of a comparison can be, can have some parallelism and contrast has some comparison in it as well because you're, you are comparing two things, but they're specifically being compared for opposite purposes.

Okay. Uh, next you have things like metaphors and similes. Let's look at a example of a metaphor and simile.

Uh, and that is here in Proverbs chapter 26, verse 23, like the glaze covering of an earthen vessel are the fervent lips with an evil heart.

Now, do you see how one of the ways, you know, it's a metaphor or, or simile is this word like, uh, or as that you'll often see in English, uh, as a metaphor.

So notice like a glaze covering an earthen vessel are fervent lips with an evil heart.

So what you have here is something that's a metaphor or simile used to describe the issue.

So what's the real issue? It's the, the, the fact that you have, uh, fervent lips with an evil heart.

If someone that has an evil heart and they have, they, they're quick to, to, uh, do that, to speak about that.

Um, and so what you have there is it's being described as this glaze covering, uh, an earthen vessel.

All right. So what you have there is you have metaphors. There's a lot of metaphors in, in the scriptures and wisdom literature, and you have to recognize them as that.

Okay. When Jesus Christ says, I am the door, he's not speaking of a literal, that he's a literal door.

So keep, keep that in mind when, when we see wisdom literature. Uh, another one that we'll look at is portraits.

Uh, portraits are, uh, like in Proverbs, uh, two where wisdom is given, uh, described as being a person, uh, being a woman.

So let's look at a different one though. This is a lengthy one, but, uh, one for, uh, all the, uh, for all the guys to pay attention to.

Now I start in verse 10 of verse 31 because the first nine verses are actually historical narrative.

This is one of those passages, like I said, where we see a historical narrative, um, as a, uh, as a, uh, uh, within the wisdom literature, even though Proverbs is mostly wisdom literature.

And here you have a little section where it is described differently. Okay. And you have historical narrative, but here you have wisdom literature.

That's a portrait. So where, uh, the, the wisdom described that I said in Proverbs two is somewhat of a simile or metaphor, an extended metaphor.

Um, we can look here at this one where it's a pic, it's a portrait. Okay. This is a portrait for all people, for, for, for all men to look for in an excellent wife.

Verse 10 says an excellent wife who can find her. Now it is going to give a portrait of my wife.

Okay. It's going to then describe in here, the rest of this is going to describe my wife.

Okay. In case you didn't know that God speaks of my wife, here's the passage.

An excellent wife who can find her. And, and I raised my hand and say here

I did. I did. I found her. Okay. I did. I married up.

I admit it. Okay. Uh, she is far more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her and he will have no lack of gain.

She does good and not, she does him good and not harm.

All the days of her life. She seeks wool and flax and works with willing hands.

So she's not afraid of work and she's happy to do it. She is like a, the ships of the merchant.

She brings her food from afar. She rises while it is yet night and provides food for her household and portions for her maiden.

She considers a field and buys it with fruit from her hands.

She plants a vineyard. She dresses herself with strength and makes her arms strong.

She perceives that her merchandise is profitable. Her lamp does not go out at night.

She puts her hands to the distraught and she, and her hands hold the spindle.

She opens her hand to the poor and reaches out her hand to the needy.

She does not, um, she is not afraid to show, um, to, she is not afraid of snow, sorry, for her hand, for her household, for her, for all her household are clothed in scarlet.

She makes, and scarlet, by the way, is a, would require a dye. So it means it's expensive. She's taking good care of the people in her household, her servants and whatnot.

She makes bed coverings for herself. Her clothing is fine linen and purple. Purple was a color of royalty.

So you see that she, she has, she has the best, but she, she does for herself. She's not expecting others to do for her.

Her husband is known in the gates when he sits among the elders on land. She makes linen garments and sells them.

She delivers sashes to merchants. Strength and dignity are her clothing.

And she laughs at the, at the time to come. She opens her mouth with wisdom and her teach, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.

She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and call her blessed, her husband also, and her pray, and he praises her.

Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all. Charm is deceitful.

Beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. Give her the fruit of her hand and let her works be in the gates."

So in this passage that describes my beautiful bride, you see here that this is a lesson, a portrait that is, serves two purposes.

One for women, this is the model to follow. If you'd like, if you're a single woman and you'd like to be married and you can live out that type of woman, that picture of a woman, any man would be nuts not to want to marry you.

If you are married and you act that way, you're, that's how you're known. You're not like a nagging wife who's getting on the case of, of your husband trying to get your way by nagging him to death.

He's going to praise you. Okay. Excuse me. So if you're a man and you're single and you want to know what to look for in a woman, there it is.

That describes it. That's what you should look for. And being someone who's been married for 20 years,

I'll tell you something. When you marry a woman like that, you love her more and more every day.

The more you're with her, the more you love her. That's the beauty of marrying a woman like that, gentlemen.

If you're married already and that doesn't describe your wife, don't read that passage to her every day.

Don't stick that up on the refrigerator as a hint to her. Okay. But man, if you're going to love her the way

Christ loved the church, it'll be kind of easy for her to act that way toward you. All right. Makes it easier for her to submit to a man who loves her.

Just a little hint, guys. I mean, so many guys that want their wives to submit to them. I think you should submit to me.

I should be the authority in this house. Dude, if you weren't trying to push it, if you were loving her like Christ loved the church, she probably would.

And that's actually, I think the right interpretation of the end of that passage in Ephesians that I'm quoting or paraphrasing.

Okay. I think it actually says that it's the man's responsibility for the wife to submit.

So how could that be? I think that passage hints to the fact that it could be that the man is supposed to so love the wife that she will submit.

So where are we? We are at the vignettes. One last one that we'll look at, and that is

Proverbs 27, the vignettes. This is kind of what a little vignette is a little section that we see.

Well, let's read this and we'll go through it. It says here, know well the contradiction of your, the condition of your flocks and give attention to your herd for riches do not last forever and does a crown endure all generations when the grass is gone and the new growth appears and the vegetation of the mountains is gathered, the lamb will provide your clothing and the goats, the price of the field, there will be enough goats milk for your food, for your, uh, for the food of your household and the maintenance of your girls, what you have there is a, where most of these you've been seeing, they're just these small little verses, just one, one verse is really the, the proverb is, is all of it in one, the generalized thing, the vignette is a little bit longer, all describing the story.

You, you see that a little bit in Proverbs 2. Now, when I say that a proverb is a maximum, not a promise, okay, it's a principle, not a promise.

All right. And I'm saying that for a specific reason. There are many people that take some of these and they interpret them as promises from God instead of seeing them as principles, general principles that they should be.

One example of that would be this. Uh, many people take the proverb where it says that, uh, raise up a child in the way he should go and when he was, is old, he will not depart from it.

And what they take that to mean is that if I train my children up in the teaching and admonition of the

Lord, even if they walk away from the faith for a period of time, they take it as a promise that sometime later in life,

God will return them to the training of their youth. And that is not what that passage says.

Okay. It's not a promise that you can hold to saying, I can hold on to this because this is true from God because, you know, of this general principle.

And actually most people interpret that principle backwards. That's right. If you look at the principle,

I think in the Hebrew, what it actually argues for is this, train up in the child in the way he will go.

In other words, train the child in his desires, give him everything he wants, spoil him, let him be selfish.

He wants something, give it to him. He'll never depart from that. In other words, you raise a spoiled brat.

He'll grow up to be a spoiled brat. Okay. That's really what it's teaching.

If you, if you take a child and you raise them to be selfish, they will be selfish and they'll never depart from it.

That is why we must instruct against selfishness to train them against that so that it's harder for them to follow a selfish path.

So the general principle is true that if you raise up a child against the principles of his selfishness, he may follow in a more righteous path, a more moral path, maybe.

But the principle there is actually, if you train up a child to be selfish, he will be. Go look at those mothers and,

I mean, we're living in a generation of very selfish people. People have been told, don't spoil your children, don't spank your children, and therefore we have a bunch of spoiled children that are now adults and they act like it.

That's why we have people that call 911 when McDonald's runs out of chicken fingers or whatever it was.

You know, they called 911 to call the police, to arrest somebody. What, at McDonald's because they didn't cook their food fast enough?

Really? But that's what a spoiled brat does. All right, let's move on. So we looked at wisdom literature.

Let us now look at prophetic literature, prophetic literature. Okay. Prophetic literature is probably one of the more difficult ones to interpret.

And this is most of your prophets, basically Isaiah all the way to the rest of the

Old Testament and then the book of Revelation is all prophetic literature.

Revelation is going to be more difficult. We have, why is it easier for some of those

Old Testament ones? Well, because some of those prophetic literature has been fulfilled. And so with the fulfillment of the

New Testament, we can go back and read the Old Testament prophecies and see how they were supposed to be interpreted.

Okay. So those make it a little bit easier, but still think of prophetic literature as like a political cartoon.

You don't get all the details, but you get the main thought of it. All right. So the keys to interpreting prophetic literature is that in order to understand prophetic literature, these issues must be addressed carefully.

One, you want to identify who the prophet is. You want to, second, you want to, the reason why the prophet spoke.

Third, who his audience is. And fourth, the time of his prophecies. Why? Well, for example,

Jonah, who is a prophet, he's writing to Nineveh. He's Jewish.

He hates Nineveh. You have to understand that to understand why he preaches the way he preaches and why he does the things he does.

So you want to understand that. You want to understand what was going on in Nineveh at the time. Because those things help to understand.

Each of these are going to be providing things like that. Revelation is a book where it's the closing of the canon.

And we are seeing, we want to know in a time when Rome looks like the

Romans are wiping out, you know, Christianity, John wants us to know

God wins. That's basically the conclusion of the book. All right. God wins. If you need an idea of what the theme is for the book of Revelation, there you have it,

God wins. All right. So we looked at so far, we've looked at historical narrative.

We looked at poetry. We looked at wisdom, literature, and we briefly took a look at prophetic revelation.

Lastly, let's look at the easiest one to interpret, and that is epistles of instruction or letters of instruction.

Now this you see some parts in the Old Testament that are within some of the historical narratives, but mostly where you see this is going to be the book of Romans all the way through the book of Jude.

Basically your New Testament are going to be mostly instruction. These are the easiest to interpret.

Okay. And so the keys to interpreting this style of literature is that the New Testament epistles are very special and vital for our faith for a number of reasons.

Two reasons. One is epistles are letters of instruction to the church. They're instructions.

So because they're instructions, you don't have to, you don't have difficulty trying to figure out the meanings of them and have to dig in a little bit deeper.

They, the purpose of them are to be clear instruction. Second, they were written by authors with, to a specific group of people that had specific problems.

In other words, when you look at these passages, these books, you have to understand that there were certain things going on.

People get into a lot of trouble when it comes to reading, say, 1

John, which is a letter because it seems to be very absolute. It just has this idea of everything's black and white, but you have to understand who

John's writing to. He's writing to people that believed in a thing called Gnosticism, people that would believe that they could, everything physical is bad, everything material is good or immaterial is good.

So soul is good, the body is bad. So what they would do is they'd go be with a prostitute and they would say, well,

I didn't sin in my spirit, so it's not a sin. I went with that prostitute in my body only, but I didn't go to her in my spirit.

Therefore, I didn't sin. You see, and that's the game they would play. And that's what

John is addressing. John is addressing things like that, where they're playing little word games. And when you play word games, to correct a word game, you have to be black and white.

So he says things that seem outrageous. If you have any sin, you're not a

Christ. It's like, what? That's how it seems to say. But in a generation of people that he's writing to or the culture of people he's writing to that tries to say that they're kind of only sinning a little, only in the flesh, that's where they have that problem.

All right. So that is basically the identification.

Now you're seeing, I hope, that the first thing of identifying the different types of literature is helpful, because when you first identify the type of literature that you have, you then know the different ways you need to interpret those specific principles to use to interpreting that specific type of literature.

Okay. Now, what we're going to do next week is take that from taking the identification, now start investigating.

We're going to start digging into investigating the different types. Now that we know different types of literature, what are the five questions we can ask ourselves to investigate the passage of Scripture and get a better meaning?

If you can remember what next week's lesson, it's probably one of the most important ones, because if you can follow that, what we do next class, you will learn one of the biggest tricks

I do in trying to understand what Scripture means. The first trick

I already taught you, which is to read the context. If you study the context, you'll gain the meaning much better.

Someone asked me this week when I was speaking at a conference, what does this passage mean? All I did was say, well, let's back up.

Let's start at verse one. And we read through verse one, got to the verse that we wanted to, then kept reading.

And the person said, oh, you know what? I think it means this. And I said, yeah, I kind of agree with you. See, they just took one verse, but when they read it in its context, it made more sense.

Okay. And so, first one's context. Second, most important one, well, that's a key for another class.

And that is the key of investigation. So you better make sure that you're here next class.

All right. If you have any questions for us, you can always email us at academy at striving for eternity .org.

You can go on to our Facebook, search Facebook for Striving for Eternity, the group, and you can join there where we have discussions on the classes and other things throughout the week.

So you can join that group. And you can always go to the website down here and enroll for the academy.

One of the advantages of enrolling is you get yourself a syllabus and then you can follow along. You get two syllabuses a year with a yearly membership and you can enroll for the academic year and that's what that gets you as a enrolled student.

So we want to make sure that you go and you do that. Now, one of the things we like to do with each of our classes is we realize that people need encouragement.

Okay. We know that we each need encouragement and you know, it's easy to encourage if you're, if you happen to know someone that, that, that is a well -known speaker, well -known and Christians seem to encourage those people a lot, but they don't say these encouraging things to one another until they die, right?

So we want to train you guys to encourage one another. So we have a brother of encouragement for this week.

So even if you watch this months from now on YouTube, you can go into our Facebook group and encourage this week's brother who is

Michael Markavich from repentamerica .com. He also is part of the

Christian News Network, a great source to get some news, Christian perspective on the news, see what's going on, see how the, the, the government is doing things against Christians, even in America, news that the general media won't talk about.

And Michael is putting things like that together. Repent America is trying to draw

America to come to repentance. He travels and what he's best known for and what he does very well is help with first amendment rights for street preachers and people on the streets to hand out tracts, evangelize and open air preach.

Michael is a vital asset for that. And you want to tune in to repent

America, get on their website, find out what the information he has, get to know him because what you'll find with, with him is that he's a guy actually,

I know lawyers that call him for advice on the first amendment. I've seen that happen because he's, he's that familiar with the law.

All right. He's been arrested many times and he's kind of wins each one of them because he knows the law that well.

All right. And he's helping many of us for our rights to be out on the streets and share the gospel.

So encourage brother Michael Markavage if you would this week. And again, next week we're going to, as I said, we're next week's class.

We will look into the investigation of the scriptures and how to do that.

And if I, some might were already asking, I'm told is that why do

I look like I haven't shaved? Because well, I didn't shave. All right. I was up,

I left Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam. So tired. I can't even think of it. I left

Greenville, South Carolina very early this morning. Uh, was, was up and out by four, four 30.

And, uh, so I was a little bit of a tired boy right now. And, uh, but, uh, put in a full day of work.

No, no rest for the weary, you know, had to put in a full day of work and be here for class tonight. So, uh, but you're, you students are worth me putting in the extra time and making sure that I try not to skip classes for you.

And so, uh, we encourage you want to encourage you each week and we thank you for your support.

You know, go out and watch the, these classes, uh, post them on Facebook, on social media, on Twitter.

And, uh, so that others can find out the great lessons that you also are learning. So until next week, we want to encourage you to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.