18 - Biblical Hermeneutics, Topical Bible Studies

Topical Bible Study and the Importance of Context

Well, welcome to the Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Biblical Hermeneutics. We are in lesson number 18. We have been looking at how to interpret the Bible, and we have finished up on most of that, and now what we're in this week doing is, last couple weeks and the next couple weeks, we are looking at different types of Bible study.

Now, that doesn't mean we don't get to use all of what we've already learned. In other words, we should always go back to the beginning of this school, this class, and start at the beginning, and learn everything that we've already kind of went over.

You don't want to jump right in in the middle, but for those students who are enrolled in the Academy, you can get your syllabus out. We're on page number 29. Page number 29, if you want to enroll, you go to the website down there, and you sign up and enroll as a student.

What are the advantages? Well, you help to support us. We're putting this on for, well, no cost to you if you're watching it on Ustream or YouTube, but it does cost us money to do, and you get a syllabus, among other things that we kind of give out throughout the year, but that's what you can get, and when you have the syllabus, you can follow along.

You can have all of the notes that we have, so you can go back to it later and take your own notes and take a look at the stuff that we have there, follow along as we go, and we hope that you are actually kind of following along.

It's usually good. As we've been discussing as we've gone through this class, some things that we have discussed is things like context, things like a historical context, a literary context, a cultural context, and those things come into play when we lay out the Word of God.

We have to make sure when we use certain terms, certain words, that we understand what they meant at the time in which they were used. Now, today's lesson that we're going to get into, we're going to look at topical Bible studies, topical Bible studies, and what we are hoping to have is to be able to look at if we want to study out a certain topic of the Scriptures.

Now, we can look at a lot of different topics and be able to see a lot of different things, and one of the things that when we want to study out a topic is you always have to remember that whatever topic you're studying, it's going to have to still apply to all the proper interpretation rules that we've already looked at.

Now, you see, it's very easy to take something out of its context. We gave some examples earlier of ways not to interpret the Bible and that was to isolate passages of Scripture or to proof text, if you remember those, and those usually dealt with taking something out of its context.

The Meaning of 'Unicorn' in Historical Context

Well, I want to give you an example of something this week where people often, and not people as in Christians, but if you're ever out evangelizing and you go around some people that have been on atheist blogs, once in a while you get this thrown out at you and sometimes for many Christians they go, huh?

And it's this. You see, about nine times in the Bible, it mentions unicorns. That's right. Now, it's only one translation of the Bible, authorized King James Version. That's the only translation that uses the term unicorns, at least that I know of, but it is mentioned about nine times.

So, are unicorns in the Bible? Now, when we say unicorn, this is what we have an idea of. Now, is that the unicorn mentioned in the Bible? Is that the one that we're thinking of? See, when people say the Bible mentions unicorns, this is what they have in mind.

That's not what the Bible has in mind. No, see, a unicorn is not a single horned horse, a horse with a horn coming out of its head, though that is how many people like to use the argument as saying, well see, that proves the Bible is a bunch of fairy tales because it mentions a unicorn.

Now, I want to take this example and use this to say, how should we properly interpret this? So, the way to do this is this way. What we do is we take the word, in this case unicorn, and it's only in one translation.

That should give us an indicator or something. We should go, wait a minute, maybe it's something with that translation, and actually it is. If we go back to the time when the translation was translated, and we look up the word unicorn, say in a dictionary of the time, like in Noah Webster's dictionary that was in, say, even the 1800s, you're going to see that in Noah Webster's dictionary, the word unicorn is not this mythical creature, but instead this non-mythical creature.

Now, you notice anything with that rhinoceros? If you look, he only has one horn. Or maybe that rhinoceros. Again, only one horn. You see, that is called a rhinoceros, but it was also known as a unicorn because it only had one horn, where this guy has two horns.

You notice that? That's the difference between a unicorn and a binicorn. That's right. That was a definition of what we would call a rhinoceros, and we wouldn't signify between a single-horned or a double-horned, but back in that time they did.

And they distinguished between a single-horned rhinoceros, a unicorn, or a two-horned rhinoceros, a binicorn. So, when the Bible refers to unicorns, it's speaking of a specific animal that we know of today.

And I just showed you some pictures of them. They're called rhinoceros. I think that is the proper plural of rhinoceros, right? Rhinoceros. Would it be rhinoceri? I don't know. But a rhinoceros is a unicorn if it has one horn, and if it has two, it's a binicorn.

So, when the Bible nine times referred to a unicorn, it was referring to a rhinoceros because it only refers to a translation of the Bible that was back in the 1800s when that word unicorn did not mean a horse with a horn coming out of its head.

It was a rhinoceros with only one horn. Now, this is an important lesson for this reason. You see, what people do is they take a word out of its historical context and they say this is what it means because they're referring to it in 21st century terminology.

That's not a fair way to interpret anything. I've used this example before. I'll use it again, though, because it helps to understand. You know, there was a reporter that referred to FDR as being a gay man.

He wasn't saying he was a homosexual. He was saying he was happy because the word gay at that time meant happy. That's not how it's used today. And so, we have to make sure we understand its context. So, when someone says, well, the Bible mentions unicorns, yes.

One translation, the King James translations, mentions unicorns and they exist today. We call them rhinoceros, okay? So, this is an important thing to always remember whenever studying anything out and when we're going to look into studying a specific, in this case, specific topic, we want to go back and make sure that we understand what that topic meant when it was written, okay?

Defining the Topic and Text for a Topical Study

We're going to use throughout, well, I'll get to what topic we're going to use throughout this class or this lesson today, but when we want to do a topical Bible study or sometimes called a conceptual study, we're going to want to look at a first thing is a topic, right?

That helps. We're going to want to, and if you look in your syllabus, you're going to see it's the first thing you want to define your boundaries and the first boundary you want to define is the topic.

So, the topic may be as general as, say, the study of Christ. That's a very broad topic, but as specific as a topical study of Christ's witnessing methods. So, it's going to be as wide or as narrow as you desire.

John MacArthur did that by taking a look in his book, The Gospel According to Jesus. What he did was look at the way he shared the gospel and went through all the gospel accounts and looked at the way Jesus had addressed when he would talk to unbelievers about the gospel, how he went about doing it.

And so, you can do it as broad or as narrow as you want, similar to what we said when we looked at the biographical studies. You want to make sure you don't go too broad. It means you're going to put a lot of work in.

The topic that I'm going to use as the example in this class today is something that happened back when I was in college. I know, yeah, it was just after the flood. Yeah, I get it. But they had colleges back then, okay?

But when I was in college, I had a friend of mine from college, his name was Dan, and he came out to church with me. And I asked him how he enjoyed church after service. And he had an interesting comment.

He said to me, well, you know, Andrew, I really didn't like it that much. There wasn't that much worship. Got me thinking, well, what did Dan mean by worship? And that was just before the end of the school year.

And I started to realize, you know, what does he mean by worship? I started thinking about that as I was on my summer break. I started to think, you know, I think what he meant, because when I asked him what he, actually I asked him what he meant at the time, he said that he didn't feel really uplifted when he came out of service.

And he was talking a lot about the music. And so I kind of was thinking, like, what really is the meaning of worship? Being raised Jewish, I was raised to understand worship to bow down, that you bow down.

Actually, in Hebrew, every time we would say the word worship, we would bow down. You go to see pictures of people at the Western Wall where they're praying, and you see them bowing down, okay, to daven.

So they're saying the word worship, and they're bowing their head forward. And that is the act of worship, is this motion that you see. Am I getting you seasick? Am I? Yeah? I can keep going. All right.

So, but that's what it would be. You'd see them bowing as they are praying. And that was my understanding of worship. So I spent a good portion of the summer, basically whenever I wasn't at work, and what I did was I started to study out the topic of worship.

This was back when the worship wars were just beginning, you know, the whole contemporary Christian music type of thing, and what, you know, people arguing that worship had no morality, or music had no morality, and therefore anything kind of goes, and all those kind of arguments.

But people typically started referring to worship as the music that is used in church. So what ended up happening was I started to look at that and say, well, what actually is worship? So what I started to do is I looked up all of the words in the entire Bible, both Old and New Testament.

I took out my Greek and Hebrew, the concordance, and started looking up into the Greek and Hebrew, every single word that referred to worship. I used all those tools that we looked at earlier in this class.

And I started to look up every single passage. And then I started taking everything we learned on interpretation and applied it to every single passage. I think there were like 80 or 90 different passages of the Bible that I had to spend the time to do all this work to interpret.

In other words, when you do a topical Bible study, it's a lot more work. That's why I tend to like to just deal with one verse at a time and work my way through a book, because I'm keeping the same context as I go.

It's a lot easier to preach that way. No, I'm not lazy. I heard that comment from the classroom. No, what it is, is actually I find it helpful in teaching to teach through that. But there are times where we're going to deal with a topic, and it is a lot more work to do.

You've got to put a lot of study in. So, before September came and I was going to be teaching at college again, teaching my Bible study, I decided I was going to teach what I was studying that summer.

And I had to get all the work done, the core work. I was still going to have to prepare each lesson throughout the year, but there's a lot of upfront work that I had to do. In other words, I had to go through every passage of the Bible and look up every one of them.

I had to develop my outline. Well, I had a real simple outline. What worship is, what worship is not, and what worship looks like. Pretty simple outline. And so, that's what I had chosen to do. And so, what I did was I looked up everywhere where worship was.

You know what I found out? That every word in both the Greek and Hebrew, except for one, worship meant to bow down. There was one, I think it was in Kings, that referred to worship as service, as an act of service.

But I ended up realizing that the word itself means to bow down. Ha! I felt pretty good about that. Us Jews, we got it right. So, we got it because of the meaning of the word. You see, in our culture, we've kind of redefined it and we've made worship more about music styles.

Organizing a Topical Study by Chronology, Scripture, and Subtopics

Okay. So, what we end up doing is we want to pick up a topic. So, we'll use the topic of this class. I'm going to talk about what I did that summer in my study of worship. And what you want to do then is after you have your topic, you want to grab your text.

So, now what you do is you grab a text. Now, here you're going to want to grab, you may want to limit your study to a certain portion of the Bible. This is similar to what we did with the biographical Bible studies.

For example, instead of doing a study on the Holy Spirit in the Bible, you may want to do a study of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament or in the Gospels. You're going to see that the Holy Spirit had a different ministry in the Old Testament than He did in the New Testament.

And so, we want to look at maybe those things. So, we want to first get the topic, then get the text. And again, with both of those, it's going to be a thing where how broad or how narrow we want it. But always keep in mind that the more narrow you go, you want to make sure that you don't misrepresent what the Bible says.

You don't want to have the Bible say something it doesn't say. In other words, you want to make sure that you don't take your text so limiting that you miss something big. And so, that becomes a thing.

An example would be as I was to take worship, just say in maybe the book of Exodus, I may get the idea that building a cow and golden calf and setting it up is a proper way of worship maybe because that's how they worshiped.

You know, if I just take that section where Aaron, you know, creates the calf, it's like, wow, okay, that could be a problem. And so, we want to make sure that we grab enough of a text or at least refer and look at the other texts to get an idea what's happening.

So, after we define the boundaries of the study, the next thing we want to do is we want to organize the information. Now, so, looking up at the topic, we're going to do all that interpretation for all the passages that we have to deal with.

We're going to ask those five questions, who, what, when, where, why, right? We're going to do the investigation. We're going to do the interpretation. We're going to do the identification of each of those texts.

We're going to do all that. We're going to organize the information then, okay? I told you how I was organizing the information. I was organizing my information on worship in a real simple way of what it is, what it is not, and what it looks like.

You may want to organize the information chronologically. Now, some areas, worship is not a good topic to do chronologically, but it could be. You might want to look at worship, how it changed from Old Testament times to New Testament.

That may be fair. It might be an interesting study. But, if you're doing something like the life of Christ, that's chronological. Maybe if you want to look at eschatologically, if you're looking at end times, the study of end times, that may be something you want to look at chronologically.

The development of the church, something like that, you want to look at chronologically. Things changed a little bit, and so you want to look how, you know, church started out really focused just to the Jewish people, and then it moved to something more toward the Gentiles.

So, there's a shift that happened, a transition. You may want to study that transition out. That's something you may want to organize chronologically. How do we know the chronological order? Well, one way is if you have a good study Bible, if you remember from those earlier lessons we did, some of those study Bibles tell you when the books were written.

Or, you can get a chronological Bible where it's kind of organized all in chronological order, and that way you can look that way. That's an option. So, we want to look at these things to see whether or not we have something that can be done chronologically.

Maybe that doesn't fit. Maybe you want to do it by the development of Scripture. You want to see how the Scripture is. So, you want to organize the material according to the Scripture, placing the information into the categories that fits.

In other words, it could be you want to study something, worship in the Old Testament, worship in the Gospels, worship in the New Testament, worship in the End Times, or whatever your topic is. Maybe you want to look at comparisons of Old to New Testament, or you want to take a look at prayer or something like that, and you want to look at in different time periods or different sections of the Bible.

Maybe you want to take a look, something I've always kind of wanted to do is to actually preach through the Bible in the order in which it was written. Because one of the things that's interesting is as you go through in the earlier books that had been written, many of those books were more focused on the Gospel, getting the Gospel right.

What was the Gospel? And later books deal with some of the other issues that came up later times. In other words, dealing with the nature of Christ, His humanity, His deity, things like that. Having to deal with the issues that came up later of Gnosticism.

Those things came up in the later books, and so it's something that you end up seeing later on. This is something that becomes an interesting study. You may want to do that. You may want to look at it through different books.

Putting the books in chronological order might also be a way of doing both chronologically and doing it by the book study. So, this type of organization could be beneficial studies like Ministry of the Holy Spirit or the means of the presentation of the Gospel.

How was the Gospel presented differently in Old Testament versus the New Testament? Book of Acts, that's different. That's that transition period. So, you know, you have things like that that become an interesting study.

You may want to, number three, you may want to look at subtopics. Subtopics are going to be taking the topical Bible study and breaking it down into related themes is another approach. This is where you are going to take a look at what you have.

You're going to look at the main topic, and your main topic may break down into some smaller subparts. Maybe worship, like I had said, I may want to look at what worship is not. If I'm going to look at what worship is not, I'm going to find that when I look at what worship is not, I get into a thing where you see that worship is described as like with the golden calf.

They're worshipping the true God, the God of Israel that took them out of Egypt. They were just worshipping Him in a wrong way. They're worshipping the true God, but using an idol. So, if you want to look at different types of prayers, say you want to look at the prayers of Thanksgiving, prayers of praise, things like that.

You may want to do stuff like that to get a different idea of different types of prayer. Then what you want to do is you want to systematize, you want to do a synthesis of the organization. In your syllabus here, I have an example of chronological study of the life of Christ.

How would you go about taking the life of Christ and organizing that? Well, one way is you could do it by His early life, His birth and His childhood. There's not as much there, but you can organize it that way.

You may then want to go into the ministry of Christ, that three-year period that we have recorded most of the Gospels. Even within that three-year period, you have a year and a half that's known as public ministry and the second year and a half known as private ministry.

So, you could find those subtopics. If you do a sort of thing like this, if you do something in a broad sense like I did with the topic of worship, what you end up with is a very broad topic where you have a biblical study or a biblical theology on worship and you can see what the Bible says about a topic.

Wrapping Up the Lesson and Looking Ahead

Now, if you end up, we're going to wrap up in the next couple of classes. We're going to wrap up the syllabus in the next class where we'll deal with analytical Bible study and then we're going to wrap up one more lesson.

So, we'll have two lessons left in this school and then we will be back to studying or get to the study of the systematic theology which will be the follow-up class to this one. But if you have any questions about anything that you've been seeing throughout this class or even in this lesson, feel free to email us at academyatstrivingforeternity .org.