Hermeneutics II: Careful Interpreting | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome back to the Behold Your God podcast. Again, my name is Teddy James, TJ, sitting in for Matt for this series.

John, we spent last week introducing, again, what my college professor would call a quarter word, hermeneutic methodology, or a method of properly approaching and interpreting and applying scriptures.

We hit two of the fundamental principles last week. We talked about, remember that the Bible is a progressive revelation.

It is revealing Christ. You can think of it like the old silhouettes that used to sit on top of fireplaces.

We see just the outline of the character of God or the person of Christ in Genesis with creation.

We can learn things about God that are true, but not quite complete. As we walk through the scriptures, it's getting to this climax where the full revelation of Christ in the book of Revelation and glory.

We also discussed the second principle of the context is king. We never want to take a short passage or just a few key words out of a text and say, now we understand all of it.

We need to look at the context. Again, about context, imagine walking into a room, hearing two people talking, and one person says one sentence and you walk out.

That sentence sounded really strange to you, maybe a bit extreme. You would not walk out of that room and go to another room and say to people, do you know what they're talking about in there?

I heard it. You heard one sentence. You cannot understand that one sentence unless you get the conversation.

We want to look at all the context. That brings us to a third principle. We're going to talk about some principles now.

These are phrases that we don't normally use in normal life, so don't let those throw you. I don't want us to feel like we walked into a room and we're looking at all these strange things and we think, that's it,

I give up. It's not as complicated as it might sound. We're hoping to, in a future episode, we're hoping to go ahead and take passages of scripture and walk through some of these principles.

Maybe just think, it's like walking into a carpenter shop that you're not familiar with their tools. You see all these tools and you think,

I don't know how to use those, or I know a few of them. Hopefully, we'll be able to, in future episodes, we'll take down the tools and use them on a few texts.

In using them, maybe they'll become particularly clear. Third principle, what we call the analogy of scripture.

That is this, because the Bible is written by one great author, one mind, we believe that the best interpreter of scripture is scripture.

The Bible is its best interpreter. We like commentaries, we're thankful for teachers in the church, but the best interpreter of scripture is other scripture.

The analogy of scripture, based on that understanding that God is the author of the entire book, says this.

That I can approach the more difficult and maybe obscure passages that I'm finding hard.

I can approach the difficult passage and interpret it by going to a passage that talks about the same thing, same event, same doctrine, but it's written in a way that I find more clear.

I go to the clearer passage on the same topic and use the clearer passage, and I come back to the more difficult passage, and that helps me understand it.

Really, the analogy of scripture is saying this. The clearer passages of scripture are like a lens through which you come to the more difficult passages, if they're talking about the same thing.

You look through the clearer passage, and once you have that lens in front of you, it does help you say,

Okay, I understand. That's why the writer said it in that way. That's such a good point, too, because what it helps us to do, if we believe and we trust that there's one author behind it, and look, this also just shows the magnificence of God who can take so many different writers and basically tell one story.

It really is. It's one story, the story of redemption. But what that enables us to do is to have faith in that writer.

Do you see how each of these principles that we're talking about, they build upon the previous ones?

Now, we're not going in any particular order, but each of these feed and strengthen and assist.

In other words, we talked last week about context as king. If you're understanding, because you just said, you've got to make sure these things are talking about the same thing.

If they are, then it doesn't matter if one text is in the Old Testament and one text is in the

New Testament. Because there's one author, we can trust that there's one message.

That really does help us, and again goes back to, we have faith in the same author will help us understand it well.

The next principle that we really want to focus on is the analogy of faith.

What exactly is that? It's very similar to the analogy of Scripture. We're stepping back from an individual passage, and even from its context.

We're stepping back, and we are using as a lens, this time, the great doctrines of the faith.

We're not talking about our faith, like I trust God, but the faith. You could say the analogy of the

Christian faith. The great, big doctrines of the Bible, we use those as a lens to understand specific passages.

If I'm reading through Leviticus, and there are a lot of unusual descriptions of sacrifices, and what's required, and what can we expect

God to do, and you think, I just don't really, I mean, is this what

I'm supposed to be doing? You go to the book of Hebrews, chapter 10. Hebrews, chapter 10, gives us a lot of truth about the doctrine of an atoning death of Jesus Christ.

You go to Romans, the atoning death of Jesus Christ, in chapter 3. So, we get the big, we go all around the

Bible, and we get this doctrine. Let's just take the atonement, the atoning death of Jesus Christ, and we fashion a lens from the reading of the whole

Bible. We take that lens, which we have gotten from the study of the Bible as a whole, so our doctrine came from the

Bible, and then we take that doctrine, and it becomes a lens by which we look at a difficult passage that's speaking of the same doctrine, and that large lens, that big picture of that doctrine, helps me to interpret the individual passage.

I want to make sure that my individual passage interpretation is not in conflict with what the whole

Bible teaches on this. So, if the whole Bible teaches one thing about the atoning death of Jesus Christ, and I'm reading a difficult passage, and I'm thinking it sounds like it's in disagreement with the rest of the

Bible, then by looking through the Bible as a whole, its teaching on that doctrine, it helps me not to misapply that individual passage.

In particular, we can think of the warning passages in Hebrews that have so often been said, well, does this mean you can lose your salvation?

Well, we do look to the entirety of Scripture, and we say, well, what does the one author of Scripture teach about the perseverance of the saints?

So, we take that big lens, and we use it to understand correctly a difficult passage.

So, this is a good example of that, but it also, I think, shows the need of humility that we have. Whenever we come to these things, we need to look to church history.

There's just a great need for that. I think that's one of the things that the Beholder of God studies in particular taught me when

I first started going through it, because I had no clue about church history, just to be honest.

I never really read the old writers. I had just really been apart from those things.

And so, when you come to these difficult passages, it is such a wonderful help to look back and to say, okay, what is the totality of orthodox

Christian doctrine on these things, and making sure that I'm right in line with those things.

Yeah, and one of the very handy tools for that, because a person might feel like, well, look,

I don't have the time to read all those books. I don't have that kind of a library that I have access to.

So, one of the major tools for that would be the confessions. So, probably the most famous confession for the

Western churches would be the Westminster Confession of Faith. And then the

Baptists, very similar to that, the 1689 Confession. And there are other good confessions.

There's the Heidelberg. But you look at these documents, and this was a collection of theologians who carefully considered the big themes of Scripture, and gathered from all of Scripture, gathered kind of concise summaries of the big things.

So, you know, if a confession had 50 major points, in a sense you're looking at 50 lenses, that you could take that lens, and you could look through that and understand.

Now, before we go further, though, this is where we have to be really careful. Your lens, your view of a doctrine, if it doesn't come from a careful study of Scripture itself, that lens becomes an inhibitor.

It's like putting a blinder in front of you, or something that warps it. You know, a dirty lens, where I think

I see it, but it doesn't look right. Well, it's because your lens isn't right. You know, when we think of lenses for glasses, the optometrist takes it, and they grind the lens, they polish the lens, they get it just right, so that it fits your prescription, it fits your needs.

When we think of our lenses, our big doctrines, we want, it's a lifelong task.

We never finish this. There's a lifelong task of always making sure, always adjusting, always polishing the lens, always, you know, shaping it according to Scripture.

So, what I think of the atonement today, at age 50, is not fundamentally different than I thought, than what

I believed about the atonement at age 25, when I was a young believer. But I hope that my lens is a lot more clear and accurate.

So, when I look at passages of Scripture on the atonement that maybe sound difficult to me, the lens, what

I've learned about the atonement over 30 years of being a Christian, my lens ought to be much more accurate and more helpful.

If you have a wrong view of a doctrine, and you look through your wrong view at a specific passage, and that passage doesn't match with your lens because your lens is wrong, then you will be tempted to bend the passage to fit your lens.

Let's think of one example. The doctrine of election is one. I grew up never hearing about the doctrine of election.

I read through the Bible, or my mom read me the Bible through as a child, and then I read through Ephesians many times as a young adult or as a teenager.

And I'd get to the word election, or choosing, or predestination, and I would just skip over those words like they weren't there.

You could have taken a whiteout marker and whited out those words on my page, and it would not have changed the way

I read it. So I had a lens that I got. Where did I get my lens from?

My analogy of faith, my big view of God working in salvation, I got it from the church

I grew up in. And it was a church full of very sincere believers. I have no complaints about that church.

But we weren't very careful with that doctrine. We just kind of never looked at it, so we skipped it.

So in my mind, my lens of how God saved people, it was not right.

It wasn't shaped right. It did not include anything about what Ephesians, or John 6, or John 10 was talking about, or Romans 8.

So when I then later read Ephesians, and I come across these words that don't fit my lens,

I was tempted to just say, I don't think that means what it looks like it means, because it doesn't fit my lens.

But as you mentioned, humility. Humility is taking our lens back to God with an open

Bible and saying, is my lens right? Where is my lens not accurate? Where can

I adjust my lens to fit the Scripture better? And I had to do that. And then when

I look at Ephesians, I think, what a wonderful truth if it's kept in balance. What a wonderful truth for us to see the magnitude of God's love and His faithfulness.

If we're going to use, and we all do, our understanding of the great big doctrines of the

Bible to help us to understand what an individual text is saying, if that's going to be one of our tools, we have to therefore take seriously our duty to make sure we're always adjusting our lens, our view of doctrines to what we're reading in Scripture.

Yeah, and is there a balance that we should strike between the things that we question?

Do I have a good grasp on this? Is my lens clear here? Because if we spend so much time questioning, like is this the right lens, then it can prevent us from really honing in and focusing on some of these truths.

So what's the balance between, okay, I know that this lens, although it can be polished and it can be clear, it's at least the right lens, versus I've got a lens over here that's just simple glass and it's really not focused on anything and needs that change.

Yeah, I mean, some truths in the Christian life are so fundamental. I mean, it's not as if you're not willing to go to God and say, you want me to change this lens out?

Like, so the deity of Christ. I don't go to the Bible and say, wow, Jesus says here the

Father is greater than Him. Maybe I'm not even, maybe He's not God. Maybe He's not fully God. Maybe He's a lesser

God. No, I know who He is from the Scripture. Those things are right. Those are so clear for us.

But I do have an opportunity when I read that passage to say, okay, so how can the God -man say of His Father this?

And it does give me a chance to hone that. And also this is where being a part of a healthy church, this is where having some good commentaries is a big help because you can go to those guys and see, okay, what do they say and why did they, how did they come to that understanding of that passage?

And as you're looking at that, you ought to be able to see, oh, I understand now where I was wrong or, yeah,

I'm right, you know, because of that. So moving on to our next fundamental principle, and it is our fifth one, and it is the scope of the

Scripture, or scope of Scripture. And so this is where we need to back up even further from the

Bible, not looking at one particular passage to help you understand.

So we're not looking at Hebrews to understand Leviticus. We're not looking at the doctrine, but we're backing up further and we're asking the question, what is the entire

Bible really about? Yeah, so the scope of Scripture, you could say the focus of Scripture.

Am I interpreting this text? And again, all of these tools really need to go together because if you just pick one, you're really likely to get off track.

So if you just pick the analogy of faith, I have my view of this and I read everything through that lens, you know, well, then you get warped.

But if you keep that in connection with progressive revelation and context and, you know, the analogy of Scripture, passage, interpreting passage, and then now we're talking about the scope of Scripture, what's the focus of Scripture?

When you keep all these tools together in your tool chest, it will help you not to get an imbalanced understanding, an erroneous understanding.

So what is the scope or the focus of Scripture and how does that affect the way

I approach a passage? Now, this is not one that we use as often, but I do oftentimes when

I'm studying a passage to preach, I have to ask myself, what is the Bible really talking about as a big whole?

The fancy word for it now is what is the metanarrative? Like what's the big story?

I still just say big picture. What's the big picture? So the focus of the Bible is who is

God? What is He like? And how do we see Him revealed? And the great, this whole scheme of redemption in which

Christ is the centerpiece. We are seeing God in the face of the sun, the radiance of His glory.

And then everything else plugs into that. Who am I? What is life about? What's marriage about? What's a kid about?

You know, what's money for? What's evangelism? What's worship? All that then, of course, fits into its appropriate place.

So we're looking at that. Now, if you come to the Bible and you look at passages that have truths in them and you divorce those specific truths from the great overarching scope or focus of the

Scripture, I'm not saying that those are no longer true. It's just it becomes a slippery spot where you can kind of make a passage, talk about things it's not really trying to talk about.

So, for instance, you could say it this way. One clear way to get a wrong answer to what is this passage talking about?

One really popular way to get the wrong answer is to ask a wrong question. So you come to the passage and you want to know, well, what about this?

So like you have a favorite doctrine, you come to a passage and you go, well, what about this? So you mentioned Hebrews. Hebrews has these warnings.

The warnings of Hebrews are meant to move these Jewish converts to persevere in Christ because there is no hope anywhere other than Christ.

And if you turn away from Jesus of Nazareth, you turn to hopelessness. But those warnings are not written to explain the doctrine of the eternal security of a believer.

They are written, they are like a road sign where the believer believes the road sign. It says dangerous curve here.

The believer believes the God that put the road sign there and stays as far away from that dangerous edge as possible and so perseveres.

The unbeliever doesn't believe the road sign just goes off the edge and proves they never did believe. Now, when you come to Hebrews, when

I preach through Hebrews, the question that constantly came to my mind is, in light of this, like this warning in chapter six, what's that say about election?

What's that say about the eternal security of a believer? What about the preservation of a believer? What about the perseverance of faith?

And the answer to that is, that's not talking about that. You're asking the wrong question of the text.

It's talking about something else. Find out what the text is talking about and then ask the right question.

So, the scope of the passage. But what about the scope of Scripture? Let me give you one example. In the book of Job, we find some pretty amazing descriptions of animals toward the end.

And God's saying to Job, and He points out some animals and says, Job, look at the behemoth, you know, and what can you do with this animal?

So, God gives a couple of examples of animals. And He gives these descriptions of them. And then if you go to a commentary, maybe the commentary says, well, that's a hippopotamus.

And you think, in what world is that a hippopotamus? I've never seen a hippopotamus look like that.

Is that an extinct version of a hippopotamus? So, when you read the passage, you think,

I don't know any animal that looks like that. Now, along comes the creationist, which

I agree, in creation and not in evolution. And the creationist says, I want to demonstrate that men, mankind, and the dinosaurs did coexist on the earth.

And the way we do that is, you know, we go into caves, we show that men drew pictures of these dinosaurs, so they did see them.

But also, in Job, these are obviously dinosaurs, not hippopotami, these are dinosaurs.

And so, Job saw dinosaurs. And so, they take that passage and they use it as a scientific explanation for how old the earth is and how long man has been here.

Now, what that passage says is true, no matter what it's talking about. But the question is, did

God give that as a scientific explanation of how old earth was and did men and dinosaurs live together?

Well, no, that isn't really the focus of the passage. The focus of the passage is this. Job, God is so big and you are so small that the animals that God made, you're not up to handling those.

You can't do anything with this animal. It's impossible for you to manhandle this animal. It's too strong for you.

And if that animal that God made is too much for you, then how do you think you're going to, you know, in a sense, correct

God? So, we want to, it's not that we can't point that out.

It's not that there aren't secondary applications of passages, but when you're having trouble with the passage, it's very helpful to say, okay, how does my understanding of that passage fit into the entire teaching of the

Bible about the person and work of God? So, there's one more fundamental principle that we want to talk about, and that's going to be types and anti -types.

But we really do think that that kind of deserves its own episode.

Yeah, because we have six sub -points when we come to talk about types. Types and anti -types.

Shadows and substance. Pictures and reality. Play into the heart of so many of the important doctrines of the

Bible that we want to give an entire episode to that. At every conference we attend these days, people stop by our booth to tell us how one of our studies or our films has helped or influenced them, their families, or their churches.

Eventually, we started asking if they'd let us record those stories and share them with you. This is

Jordan. Anthony Methenia, one of the contributors to the Behold Your God series, gave him a copy of Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty.

What it does, I think, very well is explains clearly the attributes of God while at the same time connecting them to these great men in history that we look up to and how they were held up by the attributes of God, by the knowledge of God, and then at the same time applying that to your own life in a practical way.

So, it's not just scholarly. It's not just historical. It's also practical, and it pulls them all together through the stories that Pastor John tells, through the workbook, through the sermons, and then through the application.

It does it all very well. I would say the Behold Your God series is the best series on the attributes of God as far as contemporary series go, especially with all the materials that they have.

No one's going to take you to the text more consistently. No one's going to connect it to history more consistently, and no one's going to apply it to your life more practically than Behold Your God.

For more information about Behold Your God, The Weight of Majesty, visit themeansofgrace .org

So, John, we've just spent two episodes talking about fundamental principles. We've got another one that's coming up, but let me ask you this.

What are the fundamental implications of these principles? Well, I think there's a couple that we...

Maybe we could put it in question form, kind of some searching questions, and I have to ask myself this, even as a pastor that deals with the

Bible all the time, but I don't want to deal with the Bible in the right way because somebody gives me a paycheck.

Spurgeon had a great quote. He said, never let the pulpit drive you to your Bible. Okay, I have to preach a sermon, so I've got to get a sermon.

Let your own study of the Bible drive you to the pulpit, and we could apply that. Let your study of the

Bible drive you to talk to your kids or drive you to witness to the friend at work or at school.

But a couple of searching questions. One would be this. Why in the world, if you're a

Protestant, why bother to be a Protestant and then neglect the Bible as if it's too confusing for you?

Use the right tools, depend upon the Spirit of God to guide you, humble yourself, and let an appetite, an anticipation of the treasure that's in this book draw you through those difficult times.

But do not pay lip service to the inerrancy of the Scripture and the sufficiency of Scripture and then just let it sit and gather dust.

Second searching question. What use is it to really work hard to read your Bible daily and have your quiet time and memorize verses if you then neglect the tools that the

Bible itself gives us for interpreting it? And all you do is get kind of a surface level, you know, devotional thought, a surface level emotional pickup.

Pick me up, you know, for the day. And you miss out on all the wealth that's there.

We don't let, we don't want to be careless stewards of such a treasure.