9 - Biblical Hermeneutics, Identification, Part 1

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10 - Biblical Hermeneutics, Identification, Part 2

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Well, welcome to the

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Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Biblical Harmonetics. We are glad that you are with us today.

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We hope that you will enjoy today's class. As we go through, we are in the ninth lesson in our

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School of Harmonetics, and we are going to be looking at the subject of identification, which is the first key of interpretation.

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So we are glad that you are with us. We welcome all of our new students that are with us today. We welcome you if you are new, but we do encourage you to go back to the beginning, you know, you don't start in the middle, but it's okay.

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You're here with us live maybe, but go back onto YouTube and watch from the beginning because you want to make sure you watch these classes in order, all right?

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Just trying to encourage you. But we want you to get your syllabus if you are an enrolled student.

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An enrolled student means you've gone to the website down there, you've enrolled as a student, and we have sent you, no, that way?

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Okay. Here. All right. Sent you the syllabus. I don't know.

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I don't actually see a syllabus out here. Try to grab it, but it doesn't quite work. But you could have one.

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I actually, I have mine right here. So that's where mine is.

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But we encourage you to grab your syllabus. We are on page 18 in the syllabus with our first key of interpretation.

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And so we want to go through what all four keys are just as a reminder so that you have these four keys in mind, identification, investigation, interpretation, and implementation.

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Do you notice they all start with the letter I? I'm a preacher. What do you expect?

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I'm trying to help you remember it. So if you can remember those four keys, those are the keys that we are going to go over.

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Identification, investigation, interpretation, and then implementation. And we're going to look at the first one this week, which is, very good class.

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You can read. Identification. I like when students actually pay attention in class.

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Excuse me. Can you stop passing those notes around? You ever hate that when the teacher would like catch you passing a note, like in school and they'd catch someone, they'd grab the note and it's like, you know, someone's asking someone out with the little, you know, do you want to go out with me?

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Yes or no check boxes. Like, how embarrassing. I know some of you probably had that happen.

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Yeah. I never was dumb enough to pass notes. I learned sign language.

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So, but we are going to look into the importance today and probably next class of the identification of literature.

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Okay. When we look into studying the Bible, the very first thing we want to try to understand is what type of literature it is.

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And in order to interpret correctly any passage, okay, a student of scripture must first recognize what type of literature they are investigating.

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There's basically five types of literature that we're going to look at. There is, out of these, there's historical narrative, which many of us are familiar with.

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We'll look at that, poetry, wisdom, wisdom literature, prophetic literature, or letters of instruction.

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And it's not, you could, parables can be another type that some people, that some people need to understand, they interpret a little bit differently when it comes to parables.

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We're not going to cover that, but if you have questions on that, we can certainly direct you in some good ways.

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But we're going to talk about these different types of literature. Before we do, we want to mention that what we're looking at is to understand what type of literature it is.

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We want to understand what the genre is. Now, what's a genre? Genre is the style. Some of you may, maybe you're familiar with, you use iTunes and they talk about genres of music, rock music, or blues music, or Christian music, or whatever.

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They have different genres, different styles. Now, each one of you understand the importance of genre when it comes to interpretation.

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I'm pretty sure you each do. Because each one of you probably go to your mailbox and you get a stack of this.

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It's your mail. And you use the genre of the mail to interpret the mail.

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Let's do a look at that. So we have the mail from today. The first thing that I find is, well, let's see.

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We have spooktacular snacks. What's this from? This is from ShopRite.

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I don't go to ShopRite. I leave that to my wife. And so she'll take this and start circling it all.

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And she'll do things like that. But I really, you know,

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I don't do the shopping. She doesn't trust me. Something about the fact that whenever I go shopping,

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I always buy junk food. Little hint, wives. My wife's,

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I hope, not watching. The reason we buy junk food is so that our wives would not tell us to go shopping anymore.

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Yeah. They think we're just really dumb and we don't realize and we just go and buy all the junk off the...

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No. It's so that we don't have to go in the first place. Because you just don't trust us.

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But see, when I get this, I don't even look at it. I just put it on a pile for my wife and that's that. I don't look anymore at it.

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I don't think about it. I don't give it any consideration. That's that. But next, oh,

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I got my acts and facts. This is a magazine I'm going to read. Now, this is not something I'm just going to throw on the side.

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But I'm going to spend a little bit of time. So this kind of goes into the pile of to look at later. Because this is going to take a little bit of investigation of studying and reading.

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That's going to be when I'm kind of relaxing at the end of the evening and I want to do some reading and just to meditate on things.

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So that goes into a pile that goes onto by my couch where I'm going to sit and read. We got something for my wife.

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And see, I don't even... This is something Samaritan's Purse. Don't even know what it is.

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But, you know, this says my wife's name. So I'll put that to the side. Oh, the mortgage.

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Yeah. So this one I'm going to hold on to, right? I got to make sure I pay the mortgage bill.

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So this goes on to a different pile than, say, this stuff. This I could kind of toss quickly.

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Oh, Republican National Committee. Garbage. Okay. But the mortgage, that's something

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I got to pay special attention to. So I'm going to put this on a different pile, right?

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What am I doing? I'm using the genre to interpret.

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You see, I'm taking the genre of what I have here. I don't even need to open the envelope.

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Just the fact that I can see that it's from the mortgage company, I realize it's a bill and I need to give special attention to it.

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This isn't junk mail. Like, say, this right here. Whatever this is.

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This is, what is it? I don't even know what this is. Big Brothers Big Sisters. Maybe you're involved in Big Brothers and Big Sisters.

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That's good for you. But for me, it goes right in the garbage. Nope, not going to look at it.

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Food for the Hungry. Some of you may be contributing. That's, you know, here it is.

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That's going to go right in the junk pile for me. New Jersey residents.

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Okay, here's someone looking for me to give them money. Garbage. Not spending any time with it.

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Ooh, here we go. What do you have here? Chinese restaurant. Yeah. Okay, we'll toss that too.

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I don't eat American Chinese food. Ooh, got something from George W. Bush. I bet he just wants what?

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Money. So we're going to toss that aside too. What are we doing with this? Each one of these things we're looking at, we're either saying it's something of importance, like the mortgage, or it's just junk mail.

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And if it's junk mail, we throw it away right away. Don't waste any time. If it's something like the circular, that goes to my wife and I spend no time on it.

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Not going to worry. So what is this? Ooh, now we get this.

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What are we going to do with this? See, this says, this is something that says from the Department of Defense. This I'm going to interpret a little bit differently, aren't

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I? See, this is in a sealed envelope. When I open this up,

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I find that it's in another sealed envelope. It's actually a double -sealed envelope.

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That's kind of scary. So what would that be? And then I get this big, thick document. Hmm. I'm going to read this a little bit differently than I'm going to read the junk mail, don't you think?

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I mean, when I get something that says it's from Department of Defense, and it's this thick of kind of documents and all kinds of stuff, hmm,

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I want to read that a little bit more carefully than I might want to the junk mail. You see?

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And here's the thing. When I'm going to do my bills, I'm not really looking at my bills per se. When I look at the mortgage,

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I want to just know how much I have to pay. I'm not really reading it much more into that.

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But if I'm going to read a big, thick document that's coming from the government, I may want to be a little bit careful.

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Why? Well, they thought it was important enough to put it in a double -sealed envelope, and they seriously sealed it.

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Look at this. I mean, it wasn't easy to get out. What are we doing when we're doing that?

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We're looking through the mail, and we are using the lesson that we're talking about here today. We are identifying the type of mail that we have.

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We're identifying the mail based on what we immediately recognize as its genre.

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So based on the type of literature, in this case, type of mail that it is, we are going to categorize it.

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Junk mail, circulars, bills, important, magazines.

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Maybe you have some other categories. Maybe you have a letter from a family member. You're going to interpret that a little different.

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What are you going to do? You're going to take that, and you're going to look at it, and you're going to maybe read that a little slower.

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Maybe it's a letter from someone that you're a long letter. You're not going to just toss that in a junk pile.

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I sure hope not. But you're going to read that a little differently.

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Why? Because it's important. So you immediately identify different types of mail based on their genre.

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We need to do the same thing with the Word of God. When we come and interpret the

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Bible, we need to identify the type of literature that it is because the type of literature that it is is going to help us to immediately recognize how to interpret it.

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Just like we interpret junk mail different than a letter from our parents or a letter from our spouse, we're going to interpret those immediately different just from the envelope.

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We know that we're going to apply different rules to interpretation, so we're going to do with Scripture.

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Each of the types of literature that we're going to go over has a different rule of interpretation, so we have to be careful to first identify the type of literature we're dealing with because if we understand the type of literature it is, it is going to help us to understand how to interpret or what rules we use to interpret.

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So let us look at the first one, and that is historical narrative.

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Historical narrative. Now if you have your syllabus there, you're going to see a list of all of the books in the

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Bible, both Old and New Testament, that are historical narrative books. Things like Genesis through Ruth or Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

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These are historical narratives. You have the full list in your syllabus if you have a syllabus, so I encourage you to get one, and you may want to take some notes throughout this and have that notes in the syllabus.

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That's good to have. So here's some keys to interpreting historical literature or historical narrative.

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One is that narratives do not directly teach doctrine.

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We're going to look at some examples here, and what we see is that the historical narratives are going to record history, not teach something.

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Sometimes they do teach things, but not always. Sometimes they're telling you what actually happens.

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All right. Second principle is that narratives do not always record what should happen.

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They simply record what did happen. The fact that the

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Bible mentions slavery doesn't mean it endorses slavery. The fact that the Bible mentions men who had multiple wives does not mean that it encouraged multiple wives.

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It means that basically this is what did happen.

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Third is that the narratives do not always include statements as to whether an event is good or bad.

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So this is kind of tied to the first one. Fourthly is that narratives are not allegories with hidden meanings.

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Remember we talked about spiritualizing, the ways not to interpret? People take historical narratives, and they try to read into its spiritual meanings instead of just taking it at face value and what it does actually say.

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An example of that would be when Jesus speaks to Lazarus, and he says to Lazarus, come forth, and he rises him from the dead, and people say, see, this is an illustration of the spiritual new birth that God has to speak to the dead for them to come to life.

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No, that's not what that passage is talking about. You know what that passage is talking about? That Jesus is calling Lazarus from the dead.

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He's doing the miracle. He's raising the dead, proving that he's God because he has authority over death, something he's going to then do in just a few days with his own life.

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Now, does God raise the spiritually dead? Yes, he does, but that's not what

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Lazarus was illustrating. And so when people try to give it a spiritual meaning, what they've done is distorted the actual meaning of what the text means.

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So narratives are not allegories with hidden meanings. Narratives are stories about God first, okay?

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So God has them in there for a purpose of trying to show something about himself and his nature because all of Scripture is for the glory of God.

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So let's take a look at some of these. I have an open Bible, something that you should have with you in class, students, an open

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Bible. Some students never come prepared for class.

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This was one that was brought up in discussion. In John 7, it says,

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After this, Jesus went into Galilee, and he would not go about into Judea because the

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Jews were seeking to kill him. Now, the Jews' Feast of Booths was at hand, so the brothers said to him,

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Leave here and go to Judea, that your disciples may see the works you are doing, for no one works in secret if he seeks to be known openly.

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If you do these things, show yourself to the world, for not even his brothers believe in him.

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Jesus said to them, My time has not yet come, but your time is always here.

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The world cannot hate you, but it does hate me because I testify about it that its works are evil.

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You go up to the feast. I am not going up to this feast, for my time has not yet fully come.

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After this, he remained in Galilee, but after his brothers had gone up to the feast, then he went up, not publicly, but privately.

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Some people get into the discussion of what's going on here. Was Jesus telling a lie? The issue here is that he's talking about the public ministry versus a private ministry.

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But when you have this account, some of the things to look at is, notice it says, After this, then after this, then after this.

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And so, Jesus is going up to the Feast of the Booths. It's a festival that you would, one of the festivals that you would go back to Jerusalem.

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There were three festivals that you'd go to Jerusalem for. It's a festival where, actually, would they go?

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I don't know if they'd go back to Jerusalem for this festival, actually. Let me think about that. I think this is not one of them.

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Festival of the Booths is when they basically live in a booth, you know, kind of. And so, it's a festival they'd have.

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But, you know, the issue is that Jesus is saying, Okay, I'm not going to go now. And then he does go.

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But what he's actually doing is, he's not going now publicly. That's the discussion.

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You see, it's not, will he go or not? It's whether he'll go publicly or not. And after his brothers leave, he goes.

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But I want to deal with one other one that's become very popular nowadays. I'm actually not going to have time.

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It's too long to read. But John chapter 4, maybe you're familiar with it. The woman at the well. Now, Jesus speaks to this woman at the well, and the woman goes out, and she ends up going out to meet with Jesus.

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Not that she was going to meet with him, but she sees Jesus there. And she ends up seeing that, believing in Jesus as the

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Messiah. And what does she do? She goes into her town. She runs around to people and goes, Could this be the Messiah?

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Now, some people argue that what the woman is doing is open air preaching to the townspeople.

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And they use this as an argument for women open air preaching. Now, regardless of whether you believe women can open air preach or cannot open air preach, it is wrong to use this verse to make the case.

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Why? Because it's a historical narrative. In other words, this isn't teaching a lesson.

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What the Bible is actually recording is that the woman went into town and spoke to the men about Jesus.

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It doesn't say she was open air preaching. But even if it did, even if she was open air preaching, the

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Bible is not condoning nor condemning her actions. It's just recording accurately what she did.

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She went through the town and told the men that she met a man and could he be the Messiah. We don't know what that contained other than that.

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And we don't know whether God approved or disapproved of what she did. Notice, if we remember those five points that we had.

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It's accurately recording what she did. It's not giving a teaching.

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It's not giving some instruction. It's saying this is an actual fact of what she did. And so, we have to keep that in mind.

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We're keeping this in mind so we remember that when we read a historical narrative, we're going to do it to understand the meaning of the text and what it means as stated.

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So here you have a woman going through town and talking to the men. God does not approve or disapprove that we know of.

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So if you use this as a proof text for some point of women open air preaching, you're wrong.

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Not on the issue of whether a woman should open air preach. You're wrong because you're misusing that text of Scripture.

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Now, I'm not saying whether a woman can or cannot open air preach. What I'm saying is, if you're going to use a passage of Scripture, make sure you first identify its genre, its type of literature, and you follow the rules of interpretation for that type of literature.

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And specifically with here, what we have is we have where somebody is, if they're using this, they're using something that's a historical narrative so that they can argue for something that really can't be argued.

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Why can't it be argued? It can't be argued because that's not the purpose of the text. What if she was open air preaching and the

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Bible's accurate in recording that she opened air preached but God didn't approve of it? Any more than He approved of Abraham taking his wife's concubine and having a child by her.

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Or of Solomon having so many wives. You see, the

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Bible doesn't condone that. But it does record that it happens. Do you see that? So I want you to see this.

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And this is something, when you talk to people on the streets and the atheists, they love to take historical narratives and make it as if it's proof that God is condoning this stuff.

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Therefore, it's right. The fact that the Bible speaks of slavery or polygamy doesn't mean that God approves it.

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The fact that God gives restrictions on behavior with slaves doesn't mean God approved it.

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This is the thing. They try to argue that this is proof that God approves these things.

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And you don't see that anywhere. So, the first one that we looked at was historical narratives.

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Let's look at the next one. This will be the last one that we're going to get to today. And that is poetry. Now, we're going to speak of a specific type of poetry.

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We're not speaking of the poetry that you and I may think of in English. You know, roses are red, violets are blue, don't you wish that someone loved you?

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You know? See, I don't write poetry. But, you know, our poetry is based on rhyme.

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Hebrew poetry isn't based on rhyme. Hebrew poetry is based on parallelisms.

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Okay? Parallelisms. So, your Hebrew poetry, if you look in your syllabus, your Psalms, Song of Solomon, something like that, and you'll see a list of those books in your syllabus.

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And so, what you have with poetry, Hebrew poetry, and Hebrew, you know, this also attests to God.

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He knew that the Bible would be translated in other languages. And if you take American poetry that's based on rhyme and you put that in another language, it doesn't really work too well.

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I remember a pastor, a Chinese pastor, who did a sermon based on a Chinese poem.

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And those of us that didn't know the Chinese, they had no idea what he was talking about. Because his whole message was basically using this poem as the illustration.

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But the poem didn't illustrate well because it translated differently because it was based on rhyme and meter.

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Where Hebrew poetry translates well because it's based on parallel ideas. Either ideas of the same kind or opposite.

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Now, this is important to know when you go through the book of Psalms. We're going to go through several Psalms to show you several different ways.

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And we're just going to do some of the more popular type of Hebrew poetry. Okay? I'm not going to give you all of them.

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There are books out there that will go into detail of each kind of Hebrew poetry.

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Because it is a class of itself and it is important to understand not only that you're having Hebrew poetry, so if you're reading the book of Psalms, not only is it important to know that you are studying something that has

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Hebrew poetry in it, which has this type of formalism to it that you have to understand when interpreting because this is going to help you to understand what's happening.

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But it's also you have to understand what type of Hebrew poetry. Because that's going to tell you how to interpret that specific type of poetry.

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Alright? So here's some keys when we look at parallelism. Let's look at what's called synonymous parallelism.

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Synonymous parallelism is when the second line says the same thing as the first, but for emphasis.

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So let's look at Psalm 3 .1. If you look here. Oh Lord, how many are my foes?

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So you have the idea. Many foes. Then look at the second part of that verse.

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Many are rising against me. Do you see how there's two lines there?

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Many foes, many rising against me. So you see that the one there has a greater emphasis.

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So the idea there is to have a parallel thought.

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Both of them deal with him having many enemies, many foes. They're rising up. So the second line emphasizes the first.

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It says the same thing as the first with more emphasis. So not only does he have many foes, but these many foes are rising against him.

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So what you see there is when you see that type of poetry, it's synonymous. And when you see that, what you're going to do is recognize that the second line is going to give a further, stronger point to the first.

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So it's a greater emphasis to the point. That is synonymous parallelism.

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Let's look at what is called synthetic parallelism. Synthetic parallelism, and all these are in your syllabus.

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Synthetic parallelism is when the second line builds up the thought of the first.

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So you have one line and then a second line. The second line builds on the emphasis of the first.

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Now, this is why you want to get the syllabus, by the way, so that you have these things to look in and just have it alongside your open

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Bible when you're reading through Psalms so you can recognize these things. Let's look at Psalm 95 and verse 3 because this is an example of synthetic parallelism.

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For the Lord is a great God. So what do we have here? The first line talks about the

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Lord being a great God. Well, if this is synthetic, then the second one builds upon the first.

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So for the Lord is a great God, what's the second line? And a great king above all gods.

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So you see how the first line talks about the Lord is a great God. The second one builds on that and says not only is he a great

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God, but he's a great king above all the gods. So you see, he's not just a great

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God, but he's a great God that's above, a great king that's above all the human -made gods.

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So you see, it takes the first point and builds on top of it. A third one that we're going to look at is emblematic parallelism.

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And this is where the first line illustrates the content of the second.

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The first line illustrates the content of the second. Let's look at Psalm 42 and verse 1.

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So the first line that we have here is, As a deer pants for flowing streams.

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Alright, so that's the first line illustrates the content of the second.

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So what's the second one? So pants my soul for you,

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O God. So what's the illustration here? The illustration is a deer that pants for flowing streams.

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And so the point of it is that my soul should pant for God.

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But how is it illustrated? As a deer that pants for a flowing stream. If you see a deer that's been running and it goes for water, it's panting because it has no sweat glands, right?

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So it has to pant to get rid of, it's just panting. That panting for the water is the same way that our soul should desire

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God. So it uses an illustration, it's emblematic, it uses an illustration, which is the first one, okay?

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So it illustrates the point of the second line, okay?

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Now, let's look at the fourth one here and that is antithetical parallelism. Antithetical parallelism is when the first line is coupled with a second line for contrast.

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They're antithetical, they're opposite. So this is where the first line is the opposite of the second, okay?

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Let's look at Psalm 1 -6. Psalm 1 -6, For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.

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Do you see the opposite there? You see the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked, okay?

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So you see the two different opposite views. This is antithetical. This is two lines that are contrast of one another.

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And so when you see this, you're going to interpret it that way. You're going to look here for the contrast because when you see the contrast, that's telling you the meaning.

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Actually, all of Psalm 1 is the contrast. Psalm 1, you actually see the first few verses is the contrast of the righteous man.

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This next two verses, so you have three verses for the righteous man, two verses for the wicked man, and then this verse that summarizes it.

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So the whole Psalm is actually broken up this way where the first three verses, okay, which have a

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Hebrew poetry within them, but the three verses is antithetical parallelism to the next two verses.

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And then the last verse by itself is one line and another. So you can even have where you have poetry within poetry, okay?

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And so you're looking here for the contrast. The contrast in this is telling you the point. The point of this is to show the contrast between the righteous and the wicked in their behavior and where they're going to spend eternity, where their end stage is going to be.

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So I want you to see that with an antithetical parallelism, the contrast is telling you the importance of the meaning where when you have something like synonymous parallelism, it's what's similar that gives you the understanding of the meaning.

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Do you see now how if you understand which type of literature you have, or sorry, which type of parallelism you have, that is going to tell you how to interpret this.

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And so we have to see that when we look at this, there's going to be different types of parallelism that even within the parallelism is going to tell us the specific meaning.

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Let's do one more. Actually, we've got two more that maybe we'll have time for. So let's do one more, and that's climatic parallelism.

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Climatic parallelism. This is where the second line completes the first by repeating part of it and then expanding it.

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So you have one line, it's going to repeat part of that line and then expand it and go further.

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So let's take a look at Psalm 29 and verse 1. Psalm 29 verse 1, and this is going to say, as we read here,

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Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings, Ascribe to the

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Lord glory and strength. So you see, Ascribe to the Lord is repeated, so it's Ascribe to the

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Lord, O heavenly beings, but then you see it repeated, Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.

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So it expands the idea of the Ascribing to the Lord. So he repeats it and then expands it.

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So that is what we have in this one. Ascribe to the

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Lord, repeated, and then expanded. Do you notice that? So what's the emphasis there?

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The emphasis is on the Ascribing to the Lord. That is what we have.

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So that's a climactic, it's building up to a more important emphasis.

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So we Ascribe to the Lord the glory and the strength. So the point is, it's a way of identifying to a reader,

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I'm saying this and then I'm repeating it for greater emphasis so you pay more attention to now what I'm saying. Ascribe to the

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Lord, Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. What's the importance? What we should aspire?

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That glory and strength. One last one that we're going to look at this week, and that is formal parallelism.

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Formal parallelism is when two lines express a thought or a theme.

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It's when two lines express a thought or a theme. For example, in Psalm 2, verse 6,

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As for me, I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.

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So what you have here is he says, I've set my king on Zion, my holy hill.

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So you have two thoughts here. Zion, the idea of a king on Zion.

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Zion is what? Zion is the name for the holy hill. So you see these two lines express a thought or a theme.

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Zion as the idea of a holy hill. So they're sharing in a similar idea, a similar thought.

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So you're seeing that that one's more formal. So when we go through these, let's review these.

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So we looked at the historical narrative. The historical narrative, we remember, is not teaching instructional things.

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It's just identifying what actually happened. It's historical. It's not condoning or condemning.

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Though sometimes it might, especially if Jesus, it's recording something Jesus did. If Jesus did something, he can't sin.

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So we're going to have to remember that. But when we have the

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Hebrew poetry, that's the second thing we looked at this week. There's different types of Hebrew poetry.

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So if you remember, we talked about first synonymous. Synonymous parallelism is where the two lines, line one and line two, they say the same thing for more, basically saying the same thing for an emphasis.

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Synthetic parallelism is where the second line builds on the first. So it's going to build on top of that.

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It's going to go beyond that a little. The emblematic is where the first line illustrates the content of the second.

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So the first one is going to be the illustration. The second is now going to be the purpose. Antithetical is where you're going to have a contrast.

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You're going to have two different meanings. Then you have climactic, where the one is going to build on top of the other.

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It's going to become where you have one building on the idea of this other. And then the formal is going to be where you have two ideas or thoughts.

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Each line is going to give a different idea or thought. So those are the ones we're looking at now.

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In the next class, what we are going to look at is the rest. We're going to look at wisdom literature.

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That is very different. Actually, we've taken some of the easier ones at first. Well, actually, the easiest one is yet to go.

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But you see a lot of historical narrative. That's going to be the largest that you're going to see in the

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Bible is historical narratives. You see a lot of poetry because, well, you've got the Book of Psalms, and it's pretty big.

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Wisdom literature is not as big, but you're going to see it a lot in Proverbs. It's a different style of understanding.

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You've got to understand that one clearly. So that one takes some understanding and looking at it. Also, you have prophetic revelation, which is the most difficult to understand.

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And then we have the easiest to understand, which is the letters of instruction, which is most of your

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New Testament. We are going to see those next week. If you have any questions with any of that, you can email us at academyatstrivingforeternity .org.

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academyatstrivingforeternity .org. And I encourage you to email us if you have any questions. You can email us if you have suggestions.

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You can email us if you don't like my shirt. I don't know. I mean, people come up with crazy things. Email us, and we'll try to get back to you.

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But if you do have any questions on these lessons, feel free to contact us. Someone will get back to you and email you back.

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But we want to encourage you to contact us. You can always contact us on our Facebook group. You can just do a search for Striving for Eternity.

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There's the Striving for Eternity page and the group. The group is more interactive where you can post some things, and we can go back and forth.

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But you can always email us. You can always find us on the website, strivingforeternity .org. That is where you can register, and you can get the syllabus.

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So that is out there. And so we hope these lessons are helpful to you so that you can dig into the

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Word of God and have a better understanding of what it says, what it means, all right?

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And so the first thing you want to do when you do that is you want to make sure you're understanding the type of literature because that's going to tell you which rules you're going to use because just like your mail, you follow rules of interpretation, okay?

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So we should with the Word of God. Follow the right rules of interpretation. Now, as we always do on this show because we want to encourage you to encourage other people, therefore, we want you to...

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Basically, you know, why? Well, we basically find that most people say the most encouraging things to people who are dead.

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And yet so many of us can use an encouraging word in our lives. We want you to be building a habit of encouraging people.

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So we're not asking you to encourage a person just for one day. We want you to actually try to encourage this person publicly and privately every day.

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Now, what we often do is we say you can go to the Striving for Eternity Academy's Facebook page and go to the page and you can encourage the person, the brother or sister of encouragement for that week and try to encourage them each day maybe, both privately and publicly.

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You can go on to the page and publicly encourage them. I do know that some of those people do contact me and thank me and then sometimes even thank you as we had last week because of the encouragement that you were.

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And this week's brother of encouragement is Ed Lease. He's on Facebook. You can find him there in our

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Facebook group. But Ed Lease is a brother who works for the effort of the gospel.

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He goes out to evangelize regularly, work with his local team, be active in his church.

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Why do I encourage you to encourage him this week? Well, because this is a very difficult week for brother

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Ed because this is the week of the Fall for Greenville. I encourage you to come out for the

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Fall for Greenville. You can do a search on Facebook for Fall for Greenville. He's got an event page you can register.

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Friday I will be speaking. You'll get a preview of the new book that I'm working on,

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Jesus Christ Claims of Deity. We are going to go through 140 pages and over a thousand verses in just 50 minutes.

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It's going to be a roller coaster. But we're going to go through a lot of material in a short period of time.

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And if you're out, you're really going to be encouraged by it. It's an outreach. So we're going to actually be going out in the evenings and outreaching to the tens of thousands of people that come out for Fall for Greenville.

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So basically, if you haven't put on a conference and been involved in organizing a conference, it's difficult.

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It's stressful. And I'll tell you from experience, around this time you just want to quit. I mean, it's like people don't register.

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People don't follow instructions. People just show up and that's what ends up happening.

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So what you want to do is you want to encourage Ed because probably right now he's just like, oh, all these questions

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I get and people. You know, you're repeating the same thing over and over sometimes and there's a lot of details and you're trying to remember it all.

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You're trying not to forget everything. You've got to pick people up from the airport. You've got to make sure people have rides. You've got to make sure this speaker's here and this speaker's there.

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It could drive you crazy. And that's probably how he's feeling right now. One of the best encouragements that you can do is register for Fall for Greenville.

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If not, you could at least donate to help support Fall for Greenville. I'm sure the church will not mind taking your support because they're putting money forth to do this.

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So I encourage you to make sure that you go out and register, support them, help them, and encourage

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Brother Ed Lease. He is a father who's raising many children.

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And as any of you know, when you're raising kids, it's not always easy. So someone has posted a thing for the

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Fall for Greenville in the chat room. It looks like the chat room is not here. Okay. So there's a link there,

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I'm told, for the Fall for Greenville. I don't know if that's... Oh, that's not for the outreach,

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I'm told. Okay. So it's the official site for the Fall for Greenville, not the event.

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All right. Just checking for those in the chat room. So encourage Brother Ed this week. Make sure you pay attention next class because we're going to finish up on some of the other types of literature to make sure that you follow, all right?

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So just remember to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.