3 - School of Biblical Hermeneutics, Study Bibles

Well, welcome back to the

Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Biblical Harmoneutics. What is harmoneutics?

That's a good question, I'm glad you asked. Harmoneutics is the art and science of interpretation.

You say, well, what's the art part and what's the science part? Well, the science part is that there are principles to interpretation.

The art part is that there's art to it as well. So what do I mean by that? Well, there's certain principles as we're going to look at as we study through this class that we should be following when it comes to Bible interpretation.

But, there's also a part that's a little bit artsy. Why? Because there's certain things that you and I all know that when we speak, we use as phrases that aren't actually meant to be taken in a literal sense.

And so we have to understand it in a way outside of just saying this is a literal principle and we always apply everything literally because there's some things that aren't meant to be taken literally, which still follows the principles.

But why is this important? Why should you spend your time investing this time into understanding how to better interpret the

Bible? Well, quite simply, I should hope it's because you don't want to be wrong, right?

We don't want to say God says and not be sure if that's actually what God said and that's actually what a lot of people do.

A lot of people say that God says things that God never said.

That's why we teach you these classes. These classes are to hopefully enrich you in your

Bible study, in your time in God's Word to better understand God's Word so you can rightly interpret it and know what

God says. Now, one of the things I'm going to go over many times as we go through these lessons, and I'm going to go over many times because it's hard for people to understand and it is one of the biggest problems in American Christianity today and elsewhere, and that is that we have many people that don't follow proper principles to interpretation.

What they do is they allow their personal experiences or what they wish the

Bible to say to interpret the Bible. What do

I mean by that? What I mean is that what people do is they come to the Bible with something they want to believe is from God and then they will look for Scripture in the

Bible to justify it. They will try to find some way of using the

Bible to spiritualize their desires, which sometimes are kind of sinful desires. For example,

I had a young man who came to me with a dilemma. He had a job offer.

One was up north, one was down south. He had been struggling with this and he says, you know,

I just don't know what to do. I really want to take this job up north because it pays a lot more.

But looking at it, I said to him, yeah, but it requires a lot of hours. It's a big distance away from your family.

It wouldn't be the best choice. And it turns out that that's what all the other Christians told him, that he should take the job that may not have paid as well but kept him able to be with his family more.

The interesting thing is every unbeliever told him to take the job up north. What did he do?

Well, God spoke to him. He gave a verse just for him, so he says.

And he found a verse that said, go north. That was all he needed to read. And he said, see,

God wants me to take the job up north. Is that what that passage was saying?

Is that what he, I don't think so. God is not sitting there trying to hide

His will in His Word for us to try to find it like a word search.

Like if we put the letters together in a certain order, we're going to find God's will. That's not the way

God's will is done. And we shouldn't be reading the Bible that way as if we are looking for some personal interpretation just for us.

Because that's not the purpose of God's Word. And so as we study these lessons,

I want you to realize that what I want to instruct you in is the principles of interpretation so that you can properly apply those as you study the

Bible. So that you would be able to look at a passage of Scripture, do some interpretation of it, and know whether that's actually what it says.

Had a brother in the Lord just today, in a loving way, in a very caring way, wanting to encourage my heart, and quoted a very well -known passage to many, which is

Jeremiah 29 11, where the Lord knows the plans

He has for us, plans to prosper. I just asked a simple question.

What about the couple of verses later in verse, I think it was 14 and following or 17 and following, where He says,

I know the plans I have for you, a sword. Why don't we ever quote that one? Could they both be for me?

Why is it that my plans are only to prosper and not my plans for the sword? So I encouraged him to do this, to never read a

Bible verse, as a good friend of mine, Greg Kokel will say. Don't read a Bible verse. Read the whole chapter.

Get the context. And he read the whole chapter and came back and said, I think I see what you're saying. You see, that verse, though many love to quote it, is not for you and I today.

That was for the nation of Israel. And we can't take that and apply it to us just because we like it and we want to.

We have to interpret it in what it means. So when you get to passages like Matthew 18, we're going to get to that where it says where two or three are gathered in my name.

There I am in the midst. And so many people go, oh, that's such an encouraging passage. Because when we only have two or three people come to prayer meeting, we say this is referring to a prayer meeting and God is here with us.

Really? How does that fit with Matthew 28, where he says, and lo, I am with you always.

How many believers do you need for God to be present? Oh, one? Because he's with every believer.

Actually, none. Because God is omnipresent. Now we understand that people are meeting it in the sense of a personal presence, but it only takes one believer.

God is with every believer. You don't need two or three. And so people will say, well, that means it's a church service if you have at least two or three.

No, that's not what it's talking about. It's two or three are for witnesses to disciplining someone out of a church.

That's what it means. That's the context. Oops. Don't want that context, but that's the context.

You see, we have to interpret it in its proper meaning. And this is why we're going to go through and give you some tools for that.

And so what we're doing now as we go through these lessons, in this lesson here, we are looking at specifically in this lesson, some

Bible tools that will help us. Now, last week in the last lesson, we looked at English Bibles, different translations.

This week what we want to do is look at study Bibles. And so if you have your syllabus, that's if you are enrolled as a student of the

Academy and to enroll, you can go to the website down there and go to the Striving for Eternity Academy and you get the syllabus, one of the advantages of being a student.

And so if you pick up your syllabus, you will have that so that you could follow along with us and see some of the different, you'll have all the notes there and you'll see some of the different things that we have.

Now, we're giving you these tools in an organized way. If you are going to start studying the scriptures and you say, well,

Pastor Andrew, what should I get? I want to study deeper. What are the tools that I should get? We're actually going to walk you through in a pattern, in the way that we think you should buy the tools if you're going to buy them.

Now we're going to get later on to lessons where we talk about Bible software and internet sites where you can get on some of the internet, you can get many of these tools for free.

And so you want to take advantage of some of those things. Now, if you're an old fuddy -duddy like me, you like to have a book in front of you, not just the computer screen.

Besides, we stare at the computer screen too much as is. But we want to be able to have those books.

If you want to do that, this is the order we recommend you get them in. Because we're going to progress through these in a way that as you get used to using an

English Bible, you want to then look to move to a study Bible. And we're going to move through the different tools to help you in interpretation and teach you how to use those tools so that it will enhance your study of the

Scriptures. So that it's more than just opening a daily bread, reading a verse and a little piffy statement and go, okay,

I've had enough of the Lord today, let me get about my day. No. We want you to dig deep into the

Word of God, to dig richly into the study of the

Word of God so you gain a better understanding from His Word. That's our desire.

So we are going to look at some study Bibles. And there are many, many study

Bibles to choose from. So this is clearly not going to be an exhaustive study because if we did an exhaustive study on all of the study

Bibles, yeah, you'd probably shoot me because we'd be here too long. So here's the thing.

We are going to look at some of these study Bibles and go through some things that we think you might find helpful in them and some things to be aware in some of them as well.

So one of my, probably my favorite study Bible that's on the market today, so therefore

I'll start with that first because I did say it's in the order you should get them. So if you're going to get a study Bible, I'm basically saying this is the first one to get.

And the only reason to get this one first is because I haven't written one. No one would buy it anyway.

But I would go to the one, someone that already wrote it and wrote it better than I would. And that is the

MacArthur Study Bible. Okay, so if you have the MacArthur Study Bible, one of the advantages of the

MacArthur Study Bible, there's several, one advantage is that it is out in several different translations.

New American Standard, the English Standard Version, New King James Version, I hear there may even be a rumor that it may be coming out even in the

NIV. That one will be interesting. So the

MacArthur Study Bible has some advantages. One of the best things of the MacArthur Study Bible is its in -text study references.

And in -text is the fact that within the text of Scripture, let's see if this will show up on the screen here.

If you see, here's the Scripture passage here.

You see all this down here? I'm moving it the wrong way? Okay, there. Hey, that's even better.

It covers up my face. We should do the whole show like that, right? Alright, so you see all these notes down here at the bottom?

Those are the in -line notes. This happens to not be the MacArthur Study Bible, it's a different one, but we'll get to that in a moment.

But those are what the in -line notes are. So that at the bottom of the text, or sometimes on the side, you have notes that are referencing the text that you're reading.

And so those are in -line notes. I think the MacArthur Study Bible provides some of the best and most theologically accurate notes, okay?

And so that's probably the best reason to get that, is very helpful notes that are theologically accurate, okay?

The MacArthur Study Bible will have an introduction to each book, which helps to give some background, some overview of the book that you're going to study.

It'll tell you who the author is, when it was written, some different, an outline.

It'll also give you some different areas that are difficult in interpretation.

It gives you some historical background, some of the context, the culture, why it was written, who it was written to.

So you'll get some key information also in different texts, some aids, like some maps and things like that.

But the MacArthur Study Bible goes beyond just the text and offers kind of a mini systematic theology.

It talks about some, it has an introduction to the Bible, gives you an overview of the entire

Bible. It has a section on how we got the Bible, a nice overview of the

Bible itself and how, what's called textual criticism and kind of how we got it. It gives you a nice little section on how to study the

Bible. And some of the things that we looked at in Lesson 1 was from that same thing.

Now most Bibles that we know of have a concordance, we're going to talk about that later on today.

But what they have is a topical index. So if you're looking for a specific topic that you want to study out, that's something that you can go in their topical index and see.

And then the other thing that it has in the back is an overview of theology. So you kind of get this broad scope of theology and can get a big picture view of theology.

And so that's a really helpful thing to do or to look at.

So that's one of the ones that we have. Another one that we want to mention, and like I said, these are in order in which

I think that they are important to have, important to study.

And so this is the order that I would recommend that you study these out and look at them and research them because this is going to be the order.

If I'm going to get a study Bible, this is the order in which I'm going to get them probably. Now I say that because, well,

I already have them, each of them. So I kind of have them all that I'm going to talk to you about. So I don't know.

But let's take a look at the next one. So we looked at the MacArthur. Let's look at the English Standard Version.

That's the one that I just had up over here. Now this one has come out more recently.

MacArthur Study Bible, I think, has been out, I want to say, less than 10 years. The English Standard Version Study Bible is even newer than that.

Like the MacArthur Study Bible, this one also has some excellent in -text references and notes.

One of the things I really like about this study Bible, however, where it really is helpful is that it has over 200 full -color maps created with some satellite imagery.

There's more than 40 illustrations. There's over 200 excellent charts offering key insights into analysis.

It's really where the English Standard Version Study Bible really helps out is the fact that they really do provide some really nice charts and key helps where they put things into a nice context.

However, I do need to give you a warning theologically when it comes to the

English Standard Version Study Bible. And that is that if you read some of the early notes, specifically in the book of Genesis, you will see that they take an old earth view.

What does that mean? They do not believe that when Genesis 1 speaks of six literal days, that it means six literal days.

And that's just not too good. And so they believe that it could be long periods of time.

Now, I do know that some of the people that put together the ESV Study Bible have changed their position on that and have gone to a young earth position and accepted the biblical evidence for that.

But it still, in that study Bible, still does teach some things that I would say are not too accurate theologically.

So you just have to be aware of that. Now, the next one is a really neat study

Bible. It's one that I really think is kind of interesting and has its own thing.

Actually, you know what? Before we get to that one, because I said I'd do these in an order, so let me do them in this order.

I'm going to do it out of order from the syllabus. And I'm going to do the Ryrie. The Ryrie is very much like the

MacArthur. It's a little bit older than the MacArthur and the ESV Study Bible. This is by Charles Ryrie, worked on the notes for this, and it has, again, excellent in -study notes.

They have an introduction to each of the books, and again, they have the key information. But where their help is, in the back of the study

Bible, they have a Harmony of the Gospels. They have a Survey of Bible Doctrine, like the

MacArthur Study Bible. They have a background history to the Bible. They have some helpful hints, a topical index, a concordance, some maps.

The thing with the Ryrie Study Bible is that Ryrie is very good at simplifying theology, but he has been criticized because some see that his theology in the area of salvation leans a little bit too much on easy believism.

And for that reason, some don't like it. But where he is helpful is that he's helpful in the areas of simplifying some theological issues so that they will be easier to understand.

But I do believe some of these others are a little bit better. Now, the next one that I wanted to get to that's in your syllabus number 3 is the

Thompson Chain Reference Study Bible. This one's very neat, and it's a little bit unique, and that's why

I want to highlight this one. This one doesn't really have the inline notes like the others.

What this one has is a numbering system, and let me try to bring up that picture if we can.

There we go. And I hope you can read this. This is kind of a picture. It may not be the clearest, but you can go and study, and I want you to look at this to see what we have here.

What this has, this study Bible actually is set up with a whole numbering system.

If you see on the page there, you see on kind of the right side of your page, just under where that one says

Matthew, and you look below, it's kind of hard to read, but what you see is some numbers and then a topic.

What that is, is that gives you a linking. This actually is designed where it has a numbering system on the side margins there that are aligned to a topic.

So it's really a textopedia, they call it. And what it does is it allows you to study a topic that's in the

Scripture. And what it will do is lead you from here to the next verse in that topic.

So what you have with this is you actually have something that walks you through each topic.

So in other words, I want to study, name a topic, whatever it might be, the life of David or something,

I don't know, that may be a topic I'm sure. I mean, any topic you can think of, it's in there. And you can actually go to the back to this textopedia that they call it, and find the topic that you want, and start at the beginning of Genesis, and it will link you throughout the whole

Bible to every Bible verse that's linked with that topic. Which is really neat if you want to do a topical study.

If you're an individual who likes to study topics like prayer, say, you want to study the topic of prayer, and you want to look up every verse that deals with prayer, this is a really neat study

Bible. It's not going to be one that you're going to dig into to go, oh, give me all the interpreter's notes of what the meaning of this is.

That's not the purpose of this study Bible. That you can go to your MacArthur study Bible, your ESV study

Bible, your Ryrie study Bible. This one, however, is going to be one where you're going to dig in to see the topics.

And so, it's really a way of doing a topical search through the

Scriptures, and giving more of the cross -reference throughout. One of the questions that came up in the chat room just now is, is this like the

Strong's Concordance? No. And we're going to actually talk about a concordance today in this class, and explain how to properly use a concordance, but it's not like a concordance.

Because a concordance, as you're going to see, it gives you words. So we're going to explain that difference.

But it is by topic. So if I'm going to look up prayer, I might find in the beginning in Genesis, and I'm going to look up the passages, and I'm going to walk my way through all of the chains.

That's why it's called the Thompson Chain Reference Bible, because what it is, is chaining the topics together.

Now this also has some outlines, studies, and an introduction to each of the books, has some character studies, harmonies, and illustrations.

It has a nice, a little bit outdated maybe now, but archaeological supplement, and it does have a concordance, and things like that in it as well.

But the real neat thing of this one, and if you have a MacArthur Study Bible, or an

ESV, or a Ryrie, or one of those, where this one is going to be one that, okay, you have those, you have your

MacArthur Study Bible, now what do you do with, say you want to have a, this one, what would be the difference with this one?

The difference with this one is if you want to study by topics, okay? You're going to want to get this one.

Alright, now, I have another one that I recommend, and that is called the New Open Bible.

Now this one I recommend, and really like, for the very opposite reason that I like the

MacArthur Study Bible, the ESV Study Bible, and the Ryrie Study Bible. I like those three because they have some great in -text notes and references to help you.

But this one has very few in -text notes, and that's actually why I like it. And you say, uh, you're confusing me, dude.

Well, hey, I'm good at that. But what I'm saying is, there's a reason, because sometimes

I want to look at the notes that someone else has. If I'm studying something and I just want to get a quick idea of what someone that maybe

I trust, like MacArthur, would say on this topic, let me just take a look at that.

Or someone, I want to see what the ESV folks that wrote that one, what they're going to say on this. I just want to get a quick idea, see what they say.

I'm not digging real deep, it's just a quick question type of thing. That's fine. But when

I'm studying the Scriptures, and I'm studying to work on a message, or I'm in a

Bible study, and I don't want to be influenced by someone else's notes, I like this

Study Bible, because this Study Bible doesn't have all those in -line notes of someone else's interpretation of the passage.

It just has the Scripture there. But it does have some concise introductions to the books of the

Bible, has a lot of cross -references, it has 40 in -depth word studies, which is a nice thing.

This one digs into some of the words that are used. Not very often, there's 40 of them, but they're key things.

There's a lot of in -text maps and some things like that that help in understanding, really, the book itself without giving so much of the interpretation, it gives some of the background, some of the maps and things.

It does have a section on how to study the Bible, which is nice. This is a nice one to use if you want to not be influenced by someone else's notes, what someone else may say.

There's other kinds of Study Bibles, I'm not going to show these, but you have different comparative Study Bibles.

These come in different forms. This is a category of Study Bibles, actually. You have

Parallel Study Bibles. A Parallel Study Bible, or Parallel Bibles, are going to have multiple translations.

You may have one that has the New King James, the NIV, and the

ESV all together in one. Those are kind of nice if you want to see how different translations translated the same words.

They're laid out right there so you can just read. I have one on my shelf that is a King James, a

New King James, a New American Standard, and an NIV all in one. It's all across in four columns so that if I'm reading, say,

Matthew 5, 1 -7, I can read it in each of those translations right there.

Sometimes that becomes really, really helpful because what that does is that allows you to see how the differences are in the translations.

You'll find that as we get into the later lessons, that's going to be a helpful thing for you to better understand, get a better idea of the meaning.

It's one of the things that the Amplify does, is the Amplify tries to give that, sort of a thing like that where they try to translate the word with every possible word that could be.

You have things like that. You have some comparative study Bibles, comparative religion study

Bibles that go through and show you how different religions view things.

You have cult reference Bibles that will give you where the different cults or religions, each one of the passages.

They're going to give you notes specifically to, well, this is how this religion would interpret this, or this would be how this one religion interprets that.

And so, that becomes helpful for those if you want to dig into that. There's the apologetics study

Bible, which tries to give you some evidential apologetics into the study of the different, into the

Bible. Another one that I do think is kind of neat is the Reiss chronological

Bible, and I hope that is kind of clear what that is. It's a chronological Bible. In other words, if you looked, if you have a syllabus and you looked at, you have an outline of the books of the

Bible and how they're organized, and they're not organized in the way that they were written.

Well, what the Reiss chronological study Bible does is it actually starts from Genesis 1 to Revelation, but it actually puts the books or the writings in place of where they would occur in history.

So it's chronological in the sense that you could have the book of Job smack dab in the middle of the book of Genesis.

I think that's where it is, but it's, because historically that's where that occurs.

So you'd end up having these different books in places where you would be able to, be able to get an idea of the events.

Now where that really is helpful when you get to the New Testament, the harmony of the gospels, you get them in the order, so all the different gospel accounts in order, which is kind of nice.

And so that's a really nice one if you want to study it that way. Because we have to remember that we have our

Bible, we got it progressively. We kind of forget that maybe sometimes as if it all got to us.

It was at once, but it was all written over 1 ,500 years. So we have to keep that in mind when we go through and study that, okay?

So those are study Bibles. There's many different kinds of study Bibles. Some that are more written, as I said, for their inline notes.

Some that you want to look up that aren't for their inline notes, but for other purposes such as the Thompson Chain, which is a very neat one.

But not all study Bibles are good, okay? There are ones like the

Drake Study Bible, which is used specifically for charismatics that would have a lot of their theology explained in there.

And so if you don't believe in the charismatic movement and the things that they would teach, you're going to want to stay away from that one.

That's going to be the thing of when you want to look into a study Bible, you need to understand who it is that put that study

Bible together, where their theology is, where they're coming from because that's going to tell you what those notes are saying, okay?

And so some notes you're going to be able to trust and some you're not. Because remember, the study notes are by a human author, not a divine author.

They're not always going to be right, okay? So we just have to keep that in mind. Now, number two in your syllabus is a concordance.

This is the next thing you want to get. And most people use a concordance, well, improperly.

Most people use a concordance as a topic study in the back of their Bible. You see,

I know somewhere Jesus said something about money being, oh, where's that passage where he talks about money and not having two gods, you can't serve both

God and money. Where is that verse? Oh, I got an idea. Let me go to the back of my Bible, that part that says concordance, and I'm going to look that up and then see where it says the word money and find the verse.

Oh, there it is. That's actually not the purpose of a concordance, okay? That's actually the way we use it often to find some verse we can't find, that we're looking to find.

But that's not the purpose. The actual purpose of a concordance is to give a layperson, a person that doesn't know the original languages, to help them gleam from the original language without knowing

Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic. That's the actual purpose. And so this reference tool is used first, and we're going to look at an example of this, first by looking up the

English word as it appears in the text, and then we find a number it corresponds to that brings us to the back of the concordance, and then it explains the meaning of the word.

Now, we're going to use as an example the one that's most commonly used, which is the Strong's exhaustive concordance.

There's others. There's the Young's analytical concordance. There's the Cruden's concordance. There are some that I use in Bible software that is based on the

ESV. Now, the Strong's exhaustive concordance is based on the

King James Version. Now, that becomes a little difficult, because say you're studying either the

New King James or the New American Standard or my favorite, the Holman.

What do you have to do? You have to take the Holman, the English word in the Holman, bring it back to the

King James and figure out which word, this word, money in Holman, oh, that is mammon in King James.

Okay, let me look up the word mammon in the concordance. Then I go to there.

I go to the back. I find the number that refers to mammon, and I get the meaning.

It'll give me a description of what mammon is. Okay, you see that extra step you have to do?

You go from the Holman to the King James, figure out the word, then you go to the concordance.

One of the reasons I like the ESV for my study is because much of the tools like a concordance are now available in an

ESV, so that if I do my study out of the ESV, I save that step of having to go to the

King James. I go right from the ESV to my concordance. That becomes a way of doing that.

Now, let's run through an example. I love to use an example, so let's look that word up.

Let's look up the word love. Now, this is in using, again, we're saying that this is out of our

King James Bible that we're looking at. If you look here, this is a picture of all the words for love.

If you notice here, you'll see that everywhere where the word love actually exists, it's not there.

It just has an L. For the Strong's concordance, they tried to save paper. Remember, when they did this, paper was not exactly like it is today.

Paper was kind of a difficult thing to get a hold of. Printing was not like it is today where we can just throw things on the internet and it's out there.

This was done in such a way where you had to typeset it and all that, and every letter cost.

So, what you'll see is that the word for love is just replaced with an L because you know what word you're looking for.

Okay? So, how do we do this? Let's highlight something that we're looking specifically for. Let's take a look.

There we go. Look at that. There's the word we want. We want, now if you look at the highlighted, the verse that we happen to want is this verse in Matthew 6, 5.

And you see this word for love, it's number 5368.

And you say, okay, that is referred to as a Strong's numbering. Those numbers that you see down the right side of the screen, you have a little bit of the context on the left side of the screen.

You have the verse that it's used, so you can read a little bit of the context around the word.

So, if you are looking for a specific verse, you can find which one it was. Then you have your verse in the middle there.

The advantage of that is if I know that I want the word for love in Matthew 6, 5, I just have to look for Matthew 6, 5.

If I'm not quite sure, I might look. I know it's for they love to pray standing in the synagogue.

Well, I know that's the one. Oh, I'm going to look it up and I go to here to look this up.

Now, as I look this up, I see that it has a Strong's numbering. What I would do here is go to the back of my concordance and let's flip over to the back.

There we go. We find our numbering. Let's highlight our numbering if we can.

There we go. That looks better. Now, we can see, there it is, 53, 68.

What do we see? We see that that is the word phileo. This is based from another, you see it has another

Strong's number there, 53, 84. This word phileo comes from that.

It means to be a friend. It has the idea of such as affection, denoting personal attachment as of a matter of sentiment or feelings.

So you could see here, it kind of gives a description. Look at the very end. It has kiss and love.

That tells you now two different ways that that's translated. This is often translated as kiss or love.

So that becomes helpful because now you can see the difference in how to translate the word.

Now, I'm going to give you an area where this using a concordance can be not only helpful but very important when interpreting the

Bible. In the book of John, you have toward the end, after Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, he comes to Peter, and this is after Peter rejected

Jesus three times, you now have Jesus three times saying in the

English, Peter, do you love me? And Peter says, yes, you know I love you,

Lord. And Jesus says, feed my sheep. So it says, Peter, do you love me?

And Peter says, yes, you know I love you, Lord. Jesus says, go feed my sheep. A second time,

Jesus says, Peter, do you love me? Peter says, yes, I love you, Lord. Jesus says, feed my sheep.

A third time, the Lord says, Peter, do you love me? And Peter says, you know

I love you, Lord. Go feed my sheep. And a lot of people think that what's going on there is that there's three times

Jesus is asking about love because there were three times that He, for the three times that He had rejected

Jesus or denied Jesus in the previous chapters. But if you actually do a look and use your concordance, you're going to notice something.

That there's two different words for love in that passage.

And that difference makes all the difference in the world in interpreting that passage.

You see, the three times was not specifically because of the three denials, though that could be.

But the three times has a totally different meaning. Why? Because one word is agape, which is a self -sacrificing love, and the other one is the one we just looked up, phileo, which is that brotherly love.

Now what I'm going to do is I want to give you that same passage, and I'm paraphrasing it just for the sake of time, but I'm going to give you that same passage, but where the word agape is,

I'm going to use the word love, and where the word phileo is,

I'm going to use the word like. And I hope that you're going to see, just in doing that one

English change that you'd see from the Greek, if you use your concordance, that it has a different meaning.

Jesus comes to Peter and says, Peter, do you love me, agape? And Peter says, you know

I like you, phileo you, Lord. Feed my sheep.

The Lord a second time says, do you agape, love me, Peter? Peter says,

I love you, or sorry, I like you, phileo you, Lord. Third time,

Jesus said, Peter, do you phileo me, do you like me?

Now do you see what it says when the very next verse says, and Peter was kind of grieved, Peter was upset, because the

Lord said, do you like me, phileo? See, he's questioning even that.

You see, Jesus is saying, do you self -sacrificingly love me, Peter? Do you agape me?

And Peter's changing the word and saying, you know I have a brotherly affection for you, Lord. And Jesus isn't asking that.

So he asks the second time, do you absolutely self -sacrificingly love me,

Peter? And he says, well, you know I have a brotherly affection for you, Lord. But the third time,

Jesus questioned even that. He says, do you have a brotherly affection for me?

Do you like me, Peter? And so, there now what you have is, he's questioning even the liking of Peter's word that Peter's choosing.

So you see, Jesus is saying agape, Peter's using phileo, and all of a sudden now

Jesus is questioning his phileo. That's why he's grieved. That's why he's saddened. And he says,

Lord, you know all things. Okay? Does that help to give you an understanding of how digging into the originals can help?

And so a question is, can agape be rightly translated as unconditional love?

Yeah, it can be. It is the self -sacrificing, unconditional love. It is the greatest expression of love that there can be.

It's the strongest word for love. But do you see in a text like this, where going to your concordance and digging into the concordance can make all the difference?

It makes all the difference because what this then does is it allows you to see why was

Peter upset. See, Peter wasn't upset because the Lord asked him three times because he denied him three times.

Yet, that's how many Bible teachers on the radio and many pastors will do that.

Because what are they doing? They're taking it from the English, and the English is not helping in this passage.

Because the English is translating both words properly as love, because they can be both translated as love.

But there's two different kinds of love. One is a self -sacrificing, unconditional love, and the other is a brotherly affection love.

And the reason Peter was grieved is because Jesus was even questioning that level of love.

Peter, do you even like me? Ouch! Wouldn't that hurt if Jesus came to you and said, do you love me?

And you say, Lord, I like you. No, no, no, you don't understand. Do you love me? I really like you.

Do you even like me? Ouch! Do you see why

Peter would be like hurt? You know all things, Lord. You know my heart better than me,

Lord. That's basically what he's saying. This is where concordance properly used helps.

If you properly use a concordance, you will come to a more helpful interpretation because you're going to get into the

Greek and understand that meaning. Remember, we always want to go back to the original as best we can, but if, hey,

I don't know Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic, that's where concordance helps. Because it will give you just a high -level understanding of the

Greek and the Hebrew and the Aramaic. Okay? So, yes, a concordance is helpful when you're trying to find that verse that mentions,

I'd love standing, you know, in the synagogue. Where was that? They love to stand in the synagogue and pray, okay, well there's that verse right there.

That's helpful when you're trying to find a verse, but that's not actually the purpose of the concordance. The concordance is actually written to help you who do not know

Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic to learn to understand the meanings of those words. So it's kind of like a dictionary for language, and we're going to look at more in -depth ones like that later in the next couple of classes.

But for right now, if you're just trying to get a very high -level understanding, you'd want to go to concordance to do that.

Now, the concordance in the back of your study Bible is not going to be helpful for that because it doesn't have all the

Greek and the Hebrew, it just has where you're going to find different, it's really more like a topical thing. But you want to get a good concordance to understand the meaning of the words, okay, and you'll find that it's very helpful for that.

Now, next class, what we're going to look at is we're going to look into Bible handbooks and some

Bible dictionaries, alright? Bible handbooks and Bible dictionaries, and we're going to see how helpful these are in giving us an overview or digging into some specific things that we're going to want to look at when we want to dig into different topics.

And so it's going to be really helpful to understand how to use those tools when we want to do that.

Now, we talked about different study Bibles, and I'm going to spill the beans on something a little bit early just for you guys that are watching this before the

Jersey Fire, which I encourage you to register now. Jersey Fire is about 12 days away from the live recording of this show.

It is going to be July 12th and 13th of 2013 in Toms River, New Jersey.

You can register down there, wherever it is, jerseyfire .org. You have Dr. Jason Lyle from Institute of Creation Research.

You have Si Tim Brudenkate from proofthatgodexists .org. You have Eric Hoven and Paul Taylor from Creation Today.

You have Will Costello from Faith Bible Church, and then somehow I got in the lineup.

Oh, wait, I know how. I put me there. Well, hey, I like to think

I could at least be on a conference with all these brainiacs, but it's the only way

I get invited to it. No, but seriously, not only is it a great lineup of great speakers, the subject this year will be presuppositional apologetics, but here's the little secret.

Don't tell anyone else. All that everyone else is going to know is they see these big bulky boxes and what's in the boxes.

If you register for Jersey Fire, you know this site down here, and you register and you show up, now you have to make sure you register yourself.

If you registered like five other people, only you are going to get the resource bag. You better make sure all your friends register themselves.

If you're a married couple, yes, you're going to get one, but that'll be enough for you. What's in it? Well, we were talking about study

Bibles today, weren't we? Well, I got a news for you. Something, something, something is going to be given away free, something, just saying you want to get a free nice study

Bible. Hmm, just a little something that's going to be there.

Jersey Fire, part of the things that we have in the resource bags, there are going to be some gifts that are being given.

All of this is without cost. Jersey Fire is a conference to fire people up, to warn the lost of the fire to come.

It's an evangelism conference where we do a whole lot more than just evangelism. Saturday night, we will go out. It's a long day,

I'll grant you. We start Friday night at about 6, 630. We go through until nine o 'clock, and then we have some fellowship.

Saturday morning, when we start bright and early, 9, 930, we're going to go straight through until five, and then we go to the boardwalk until like midnight.

And then Sunday morning, we go to different churches where Jason Lyle will be speaking in Tom's River.

I'm not sure where some of the other guys are speaking yet, but we'll know that by next weekend. So I encourage you to go to jerseyfire .org

and sign up, register, to make sure you get your resource bag. If you happen to be in the

Jackson area, maybe for that weekend. You come into Jackson, or into Tom's River for New Jersey, and you don't have a home church, please come out with us at Faith Bible Church in Jackson, New Jersey.

It's a church replant, a revitalization that we're doing in Jackson, New Jersey.

That is going to be something that we're just starting up. We are building from the bottom up.

We've rewritten the Constitution. We're starting all new with membership and all. And so really want to encourage you with that to come out if you're in the area.

Especially if you're up for Jersey Fire, we pack out the place and we can have some fun.

One last thing that we always do on this show, we want to encourage people to encourage others.

We want to do that because quite frankly, if you're anything like me, because I'm kind of bad with encouragement,

I admit it, and this is why maybe I need to work on this, so I'm helping you to help me encourage others.

We often only encourage people basically when they're kind of like dead. We say all these great things that we never said to people when they were alive, and we say it to all their family and friends after they're dead.

We want you to encourage others while they're still alive because they can use the encouragement. We have someone we want you to encourage.

This is a brother who came to the Ohio Fire.

It was the first time he ever went to any of these events and he got so encouraged and enjoyed it so much that he went home, called me up and said, hey, can

I come up to New Jersey? And then called me the next day because he convinced a friend to come up and so what he did is said, hey, why don't you come up and actually partake?

And that is brother Paul Taylor. He works with Creation Today, but I give you there his blog site,

I think it's his blog site or website, but Just Six Days. He's got a new book out. You really want to encourage your brother?

Go buy his book on Noah's Boat, but Paul is, I had not met him before Ohio Fire, and I really, really was greatly encouraged by this brother, really just a sweet, sweet spirit.

We had a great time, had just really got to be able to just to talk, kid around.

He actually has a good sense of humor, but he also goes out on the street.

He was witnessing with us and really enjoying it. Just a quick story from Ohio Fire to give you a sense of his sense of humor.

I was busting on him. If you get to hear him speak, he speaks kind of, he's from that place over across the pond, the

UK, so he speaks with a British accent, and I kept asking the congregation if they needed an interpreter to understand him, because he's,

I don't know if people understand the language he speaks, and he was joking that he speaks English, from England, and during the

Q &A, I asked someone if they can get some water, because that's how we say it properly, water, and someone being from Ohio was like, what?

And so Paul Taylor gets on the microphone and says, let me interpret for Andrew. He would like some water.

And so everyone just laughed, because I properly deserved it. I was busting on him pretty bad, but he's a great brother who has really, does a lot to try to use the gifts he has for God's glory.

And so I want you to go out and encourage him, get to know him, and a good way to get to know him is come to Jersey Fire so that you can get to know him personally.

Just a thought. But we thank you for attending tonight. We want to encourage you to go out and strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.