Interpreting Scripture

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

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ChumbaCasino .com No purchase necessary. Voidware prohibited by law. 18 plus terms and conditions apply. See website for details. Today you have a special episode.

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This is session 2 from Snatch Them from the Flames Home Edition. This is my message on interpreting scripture.

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This is something we do free of charge. You can go to strivingforeternity .org

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Check out the online events. And you can watch the full 7 -hour session of the

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Snatch Them from the Flames Home Edition. But for today, you can get session number 2 on interpreting scripture by, well, me.

01:37

The host of The Rap Report, Andrew Rapaport. Coming to you right now on The Rap Report.

01:45

1, 2, 3. Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rapaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

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This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org

02:06

All right. Well, we will get started again. I'm just going to switch my presentation here so we can get started.

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I hope you guys are enjoying this so far. Those of you who are watching, we just got someone from India.

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That's a new spot. Someone else that has popped in. So, again, just as a reminder, if you guys have questions, put them in the chat.

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Whether it's on YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter, you can put questions.

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If you put a Q and a colon, it lets the person who's gathering all the questions know you got a question for the

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Q &A later. And, again, if we're going to be choosing people between breaks or during the

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Q &A for who's going to win different books, I guess

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I'll let Laura know now so she can grab just two names at random.

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And before we take our lunch break, just grab two names at random that have asked questions already, and we'll announce that afterwards.

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Just text those to me, and we'll announce those as the winners. I'm going to begin with our...

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This is basically, this session right now is basically a part of a longer session that we have called

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Bible Interpretation Made Easy. We can come into your church and do this.

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It is a longer session. It usually runs about, well, it usually runs a weekend.

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We do this over a weekend, but we could do it just on Saturday. This is a shortened version of it, so this is the one -hour version.

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And so let us begin with a warning. I'm going to talk about this seminar that we're going to do.

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This actually applies more than just this session, but this really is going to apply this warning to the whole day, because I think a lot of this, as you may already see, that Justin has already been willing to name some names, and so it may get some things that apply for the whole seminar.

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But there's a high probability that this session, at least, will make you upset if Justin hasn't already...

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Whoop, wrong button. We're going to teach you how to interpret God's Word properly, and that could expose that you have many of your favorite

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Bible verses that you just knew wrongly. And we're going to try, I'm going to try in this hour,

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I'm going to be as condensed, very quickly, in 50 minutes, and I'm going to try to teach you how to interpret by rules, not experience.

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What do I mean by experience? Well, you already saw, Justin just talked about that when it comes to sufficiency of Scripture, that people talk about having dreams to interpret

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Scripture, or having some experience that interprets Scripture. It's very, very common, unfortunately.

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And there's also another way people use experience. They will use a systematic theology. They come to Scripture, they read what it says, and they go, well,

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I see this, but the problem is that I think that it can't mean this, because my systematic theology teaches something else.

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Well, your theology doesn't interpret Scripture. The Scripture interprets your theology.

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So if you're looking at the clear reading of the text of Scripture, and you kind of come up with a different idea of what the

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Scripture is saying, then your theology is bad. All right, we're going to get to some things with that, because I saw some of the questions already about Hebrew roots and things like that we may get to.

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And so that's a case of that. So the first thing I want to do is tell you that the book that you have in your hand, this

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Bible here, well, you don't have this one, but the Bible that you hold in your hand is the first tool that we want to use for interpretation.

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But not all Bibles are the same. Sorry. So when it comes to interpretations,

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I want you to realize that there's different types of translations that occur.

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And so the better books that you're going to use for study, if you're going to study God's Word, you want to be accurate with God's Word, then what

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I want you to do is I want you to stick to a word -for -word translation. It's called a literal or formal equivalent.

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So what they do there is they take one word, translate it, the next word, translate it, next word. And then after they translate all the words, they may have to reshuffle things because the fact that you have language that doesn't always translate well.

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So word orders may have to change. Sometimes you have to add some extra words to have it make sense in a different language.

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But what they're trying to do is get you as close to the literal words. Because remember, the

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Bible wasn't written in English or Spanish or German or, you know, Latin.

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It was written in Hebrew, a little bit of Aramaic and Greek. So the closer we can get to those words, the better.

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So this is going to be your New American Standard Bible, your King James, New King James, English Standard Version, your

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New English Translation, your Holman. Oh, wait, they don't do that anymore.

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But they now have it as Christian Standard Bible. It's not as good as the Holman was. And there's a new one coming out, if you don't know, called the

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Legacy. I forget if they're calling it Legacy Standard Version or Legacy Standard Bible.

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I think Legacy Standard Bible is what it's going to be. That's from Master's Seminary. Those are going to be formal equivalents.

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Then you have more of what's called free or dynamic equivalents. These are where people are going to try to translate sentence by sentence.

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So what you're doing here is you're taking the whole sentence as a whole, and you're trying to translate that one sentence at a time.

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Now, what happens? You're getting more of the interpretation and not so much of a translation now because now someone is taking the whole sentence and trying to translate that into the language that you're in.

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And so you're going to get more of an interpretation. This is going to be things like your

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NIV is going to have this. Now, is the NIV bad? Well, it depends what you're using it for.

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An NIV might be fine if you're just reading the Bible. In fact, when I preach,

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I will actually read every translation into English that I have to see how people translate it differently.

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Do I typically study out of the NIV? No. Would I encourage you to do that? No. Why? Because you've gotten away from that word -for -word translation.

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So I don't recommend that, at least in the English. I can't speak about the other languages, but I can speak about the

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English. The third, that is, is a paraphrase. And this is where they're trying to translate thought -for -thought.

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This is your message Bible. This is not to be used as a

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Bible. This is something that you could use as a commentary. That's fine. Use it as a commentary.

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As a commentary, it's okay. It would be as if you're reading a commentary off the shelf.

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Just don't call it a Bible. It really isn't. It's someone's interpretation. That's what it is.

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And if we recognize that, then we can deal with this a lot better.

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And so what I want to do is go into some models of interpretation, okay? Now, as we look at this,

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I want to focus in on three incorrect models of interpretation. These are the three that you will see most often.

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You listen to any of the clips that you just heard Justin talk about. You listen to the full clips, and you're going to see these three used over and over and over again.

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You basically watch almost anyone that's on Christian TV or on the radio, and you're going to see them do this.

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These are the ways not to interpret. But the way that's most often used to interpret is isolationism.

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And what that is is when people interpret a passage without regard for the context.

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They just take one verse. Now, you have to remember something. Those verse breaks and the chapter breaks didn't occur for 700, 800 years.

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So that was not in the Bible. God did not write the Bible as if it had to have verse breakdowns.

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So that is something that's helpful for you and I. By the way, how did they be able to identify, then, different parts of the

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Bible? Well, they actually memorized a lot of it. But you think about the Psalms. This may sound helpful to you.

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But what you end up seeing is they would recite the very first phrase, what we'd call the first verse of a

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Psalm to identify the whole Psalm. How's that helpful? What was it that Christ said on the cross?

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He sat there and quotes from Psalm 22. And what does he do?

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He says, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? You go look up verse 1 of Psalm 22.

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You're going to see that he quoted that. That's a way of referring to the whole thing. Keep reading that Psalm. What are you going to see?

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A description of exactly what Christ was going through. You didn't have chapter breaks and verses.

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And so it was easier, since that was added, to do this isolationism. People just take a verse.

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Justin just talked about where people will just open a Bible. They grab their Bible, just open it up, and point.

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And that's the verse of the day. This is why I'm not a big fan of Our Daily Bread. They take one verse, give you a short little snippet of devotion that usually has nothing to do with the verse at all.

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Or sometimes it's out of context. This is done commonly. I'm going to show you some examples of this.

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Proof texting is where you string a bunch of verses together, and they often are isolated. They're often ripped out of their context.

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And they're not given the meaning. And so what ends up happening is they take this. They isolate one verse, isolate another verse, slam it together because it has some word in common.

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And they say, See, this is talking about the same thing. Or sometimes people will say something, and part of it's in context, but they string it along with other verses that have nothing to do with what's being said.

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And in stringing those along, what they're actually doing there is they're actually proof texting.

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They're trying to make an argument for what they're trying to argue, and they just go through the

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Bible looking, Oh, this helps, this helps, this helps. Let me put these together. That's how you should not interpret the

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Bible. Spiritualizing is a way not to interpret the Bible as well. That's when you try to read into the

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Bible something it doesn't say, whether it's a historical or spiritual thing, that you try to read into the text of Scripture.

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And you already saw that in the last session as Justin is dealing with these passages, where if you just read them in context, you realize these people are trying to read something into the text that wasn't in the text.

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So let's take a look at some examples. This is the most quoted verse of our day now, at least in America.

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This has replaced John 3 .16, and it is Jeremiah 29 .11. For I know the plans

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I have for you, declares the Lord, plans of welfare and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.

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That just sounds so good, doesn't it? Oh, I mean, isn't it so good that God declares for me plans of welfare and not for evil to give me a future and a hope?

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You know, if I was to read the context, just a few verses later, let me just go down seven and eight verses later to this.

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Why is this on nobody's refrigerators? And no one shares this online as a verse to their life verse.

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Jeremiah 29 .17 and 18. Thus says the Lord of hosts,

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Behold, I am sending on them sword, famine, and pestilence, and I will make them like vile figs that are so rotten they cannot be eaten.

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I will pursue them with sword and famine and pestilence and make them a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth, to be a curse, a terror, a hissing, and a reproach upon the nations where I have driven them.

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Why is that no one's life verse? No one wants to claim that one, and yet that's within the context. I mean, wouldn't it be good if God told us who these verses are for?

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I mean, wouldn't it be nice if God would just let us know, who was he speaking about? Oh, oh, wait.

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Oh, he did. In Jeremiah 29 .10, many people didn't read just one verse before their life verse of theirs.

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For thus says the Lord, When 70 years are complete for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise to bring you back to this place.

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Oh, so if you live through the 70 -year Babylon captivity, that verse, Jeremiah 29 .11,

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that's for you. If you haven't, I'm sorry, it's not for you. It isn't. It wasn't meant for you.

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This was a promise as God was going to put Israel in a 70 -year captivity, and as he mentions, under Babylon, that he would remember them.

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He would bring them back. And just as he says he's going to have a time of welfare for them, there's also going to be a time there's going to be a hissing, and there's going to be a reproach.

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You see, is there something you and I can learn from Jeremiah 29 .10 -18?

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Yes, there is. God is faithful. You know what happened 70 years after Israel was taken into Babylon captivity?

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God fulfilled this promise. God brought them back. So what can we learn? We can learn that he is faithful.

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Here's another example that we see. Again, I say to you, if two of you agree on anything on earth about anything, they ask, it will be done for them by my

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Father in heaven. People use this all the time to say that there's agreement. If you have agreement, then we're done.

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We have this. And we're able to look and say, I had an example of this in college where I had a friend of mine that asked me if I'd co -sign a loan for him because his parents wouldn't even do it.

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He wanted a car, and I wouldn't do that. The next day he came up to me and says, I am going to get a new car.

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I said, really, how? Did your parents change their mind? He said, no. I got two other Christian brothers to pray with me.

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And where two of you agree on earth and ask anything, it will be done for them by my

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Father in heaven. And he expected a brand new car to be given to him. In fact, the very next verse is also misused.

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This is used in most small church prayer meetings. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them.

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I mean, here people say, oh, look, there's two or three of us gathered. This is great. We're able to have a prayer meeting.

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God is present. Well, if you were to look at Matthew 28, 19, and 20, what are you going to see?

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That Jesus Christ says, and lo, I am with you always.

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So how many Christians are really necessary for God's presence? Some of you are thinking one, based on Matthew 28, 19, and 20.

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Well, the answer is zero. God is omnipresent. He's everywhere. We don't need a single

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Christian for his to be present. No, the context of Matthew 18 is dealing with the issue of church discipline.

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The two or three are gathering for a purpose of saying, look, we've gone to them. We have witnesses that witnessed the unrepentance, and therefore we're going to go to the next step of church discipline.

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And he's saying, hey, no one wants to do church discipline, but if you've gone through these steps, the context says, you know, assuredly where two of you or three agree.

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In other words, we need that assurance to know we're doing the right thing. That's the context.

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Now, let me give you an example from Bill Johnson. This is from his message, staying on assignment.

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Now, you probably never thought in your life that you would hear Bill Johnson preach out of Matthew 7, 21, and 22.

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He doesn't go on to 23. I wonder why. But if you look in your Bibles in Matthew 7, 21 to 23, what you're going to see is

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Jesus speaking actually about Bill Johnson. That may be hard for some to hear, but yes,

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I think that's exactly who he's speaking to. So in Matthew 7, 21 to 23, this is what

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Jesus actually said. He says, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my

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Father who is in heaven. On that day, many will say to me, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and done many great works in your name?

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Bill Johnson doesn't go on to read the next verse. And then I will declare to them,

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I never knew you. Depart from me, you practice lawlessness. Bill Johnson, who teaches that he could do miracles and cast out demons, and he uses that to argue that he is a child of God because of it.

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And here's what he says about this verse. I'd like to suggest that there are actually two parts to the lesson

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Jesus is trying to instruct this crowd in. The first is concerning the will of God.

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He said, just because if you call me Lord, it has to be demonstrated by your obedience. He's saying you can't find your identity apart from obedience.

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Those who do the will of God, those who yield to the assignment, the commission that God has given, that's where we— it's like identity in Christ is like two -part epoxy.

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Obedience seals what was revealed in Scripture. Two parts to this. He said, just because you call me

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Lord, if you don't do the will of God, you can't call me Lord. You can't call me

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Lord and not obey, right? So what is the will of God? Well, the broadest definition is found in what we usually call the

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Lord's Prayer, which is your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. So it's the reality of that world changing.

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Now, do you notice how he just did proof texting there? That's an example of proof texting. He wants to explain something in one verse, jumps to another verse.

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And just because the word will, he ends up using that in both. But let's hear what the rest he's going to say.

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Affecting the reality of this world. Every other commission Jesus gave, every other assignment he gave, was actually an expression of that overall commission.

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The overall commission, heaven to earth. It became practical when he said, I'm going to send you out two by two.

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You're going to a home. Heal the sick that are there. Find the peaceful people. Minister them. Make sure deliverance comes.

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Cast out demons. Cleanse lepers. Raise the dead. That's very specific. So what is the will of God?

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If they're sick, heal them. All right? That's the will of God. So when he says, he says, don't call me

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Lord and you disobey me when I give you a commission. Pray for the sick.

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I'm not saying that's the only way we demonstrate the will of God, but don't ignore it because it's part of the program.

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Don't say he's my Lord and yet you don't pray for the sick. You don't confront somebody who's tormented with dreams.

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Well, I don't know how to deal with demons. Tell them to leave. Start there. Start there.

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Just pretend like you're standing in Jesus' clothing and his shoes and use his name and come against that demon.

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Tell him to break off that person's life. Just this nonsense of torment stops today.

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But, you know, the whole point was you can't call me Lord and not do the will of God, the will of my

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Father in heaven. The second verse, though, verse 22, he says, Many will say to me,

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Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name, cast out demons and done many wonders in your name? What group is that?

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Those are the people that don't have the relationship with God, but they know enough spiritual truths to demonstrate his authority and prophesy and heal the sick doing the will of God.

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So the first group, they don't even try. The second group, they try, but there's no relationship. Depart from me,

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I never knew you. So people will say, well, here, this is evidence.

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We're not supposed to pray for the sick. No, it's the opposite. Here's the deal.

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If people who don't have a relationship with Jesus can use his name and people can get healed, those who know

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Jesus have no excuse. So there you go, folks. I mean, he came close to a proper interpretation when you look at the context.

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He really did. He only missed it by a light year. Yeah. I mean, he even recognizes that he has the complete opposite interpretation from the context.

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He even mentions that. Anytime someone says they recognize what the common reading is, and then they say, oh, no, but it's the opposite, be warned.

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That's a problem. And so let us look at an important thing when it comes to the correct model of interpretation.

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The right way to do this is to use inductive Bible study, to be using exegesis, meaning pulling the text out of, pulling the meaning out of the text.

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You look at the text to get the meaning out of it. You don't try to read into it as you just saw in that example. He's sitting there and saying, oh, well, this is what it is.

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Let me stick this in. Let me stick this in. The reality, why has he got to do that? Because that passage condemns the very behavior that Bill Johnson does.

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He's one of these people who is going to stand before God, and the whole part of that passage is to sit there and say, people are going to say, look at all the great things

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I have done, God. I am one of your children. And he's going to declare, no, you weren't.

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That is the very thing that Bill Johnson, that passage is actually condemning a man like Bill Johnson.

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And yet he's going to preach that and give it a whole new meaning. Why? Because he ignores this very important issue of context.

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This is the most important thing when it comes to interpreting scripture. In fact, when

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I was on the streets in New York City, I would go out every week and preach the gospel, and people would challenge me, and people would ask me about a verse that they find in the

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Bible, and all I did was I'd open up my Bible, I'd turn to that passage, I would back up several verses, and I would read it in context, and the entire crowd would realize the context, and suddenly it's like, what's the problem?

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And the person, once the context was read, realized there wasn't a problem, and they had no answer.

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In fact, one of the guys who used to work for the ministry, Striving for Eternity, he actually met me on the street.

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He would watch me do this week in and week out. He was in a Word of Faith church. He started to apply that very same technique when he would sit in church.

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And I tell people when I disciple them, you read something in a book and it has a verse, go read that chapter.

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Don't read just a Bible verse. You read the whole chapter. Get the context.

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Well, this is what this guy was doing. He went to church. He's in a Word of Faith church. He reads the context, and he suddenly realized, wait, they're ripping every single verse out of context.

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And you know what he did? He left that church and got into a Reformed church. Why? Because he realized context gives the answer.

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So we have to understand that. Now, I'm going to argue for what I call a literal or normal interpretation of Scripture.

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What do I mean by that? I mean that we're going to see things that are figures of speech as figures of speech, and we're going to see things that are literal as literal.

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And I'm going to give you some tools of how to identify the different types of literature in Scripture to know what kind of rules apply for that.

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So first and most important is context. You have biblical context. Where is this in biblical history?

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You have historical context. You have cultural context. You have grammatical context, and you have spiritual context.

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So in the first, you're going to look at where the verse is before and after it. Where are we in history?

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What's the culture of the time? What's the grammatical setting that we have here? And where are we spiritually?

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Now, let me give you some examples. Let me give you at least one example of this. This is a verse I was very puzzled the first time

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I heard this preached. My pastor was preaching out of Matthew 24, 36. But concerning that day or hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the

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Son, but the Father alone. And my first pastor, he was preaching this. He spent about 20 minutes explaining this division between Jesus and his humanity versus his deity, and in his humanity, he could not know something, but in his deity, he could.

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I was very puzzled by that. Now, by the way, when you cause that kind of division in the nature of Christ, it's actually a second -century heresy.

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You must recognize that Christ is one being. He's truly human and he's truly divine, but those two natures are one.

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There's not a separation there. So Christ knows all things. How do we then divide this? I'll tell you why

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I was puzzled. I was puzzled, and I walked up to my pastor afterwards, and I said, I'm really not understanding why you spent so much time on that verse.

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He said, well, I'm trying to explain how Christ could not know something. I said, but that's an idiom. It's a Jewish idiom.

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It refers to a wedding. A Jewish idiom that would be what would happen in a Jewish wedding is you end up seeing that you have people who would, the father would tell his son, you're going to get married, get the house ready.

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He would start working on a house. He'd build an extension of the family house. He'd have that. When he's ready, he's waiting.

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All his friends would be like, hey, when's the wedding date? The answer, the idiom is no one knows, not even the angels, nor the son.

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Only the father knows. It's the idea of living in expectancy. And if you read the context there, you're going to see him refer to Noah and the days of Noah living in expectancy.

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The question being answered is the second coming. And he's saying live every day as if today's the day.

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Because when the father calls the son, he says, go get your bride. That's when the son knows.

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He runs against the groomsman, go get the bride. The groomsman run ahead in town so that the wife will know to get ready.

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And then they go and the groom will go get his wife and bring her to the feast. Well, this is a cultural thing.

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And if you don't understand the culture, if you don't understand the idiom of what's going on, you may miss some of that.

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Sometimes grammar makes a difference. Here you see in one example in John 5 .13, the grammar here is specific.

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I write these things to you who believe in the name of the son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.

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Notice the words in red that I put in there. These are past tense.

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You already believe, you already know, and you already have eternal life. That tells us that eternal life is not something we get when we die.

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It is something we have. So people who would say that you can lose your salvation, you have to lose that eternal life that God already gave you.

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Here's another example. This is a longer one, so I won't read this whole thing. But John 21 .15 -17, what do we end up seeing here in the grammar?

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Well, we see the word love. Now, I've color -coded this for you for a reason, because many people argue in this passage that the reason that Simon Peter was upset because Jesus asked him three times, do you love me?

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People argue, well, he was upset the third time because he denied him three times.

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That is in the context just before it. The denial of Peter was just before this event.

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So, yes, that is within the context. However, when we look at the Greek, I think we have something more.

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So I'm going to read this, but I'm going to put the word for agape love, which you have there in red.

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That is the word, the self -sacrificial love. I'm going to translate that as love.

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There's another word here in the Greek used for love that's translated love, and it is the word phileo, which is a brotherly love.

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It's not the same level as agape, and I'm going to translate that as like. And I'm just going to kind of skip through this, but maybe you'll get a better idea of why

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Peter was upset. Jesus says, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?

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Peter's response is, yes, Lord, you know that I like you. He said to him a second time,

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Simon, son of John, do you love me? And Simon Peter's response is, yes,

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Lord, you know that I like you. And he said to him a third time, Simon, son of John, do you like me?

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Peter was grieved because he said to him a third time, do you like me? And he says,

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Lord, you know everything. You know that I like you. You see, here Jesus is saying, do you have agape love for me?

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And he says, I have phileo love for you. Do you have agape love for me? I have phileo love for you. Do you even have phileo love for me?

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Now, after the three denials, it is a fair question to ask, but that's the challenge here.

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He was upset because the third time Jesus questioned the phileo love.

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Now, let me give you another example of how not to interpret in this sense. Now, if you go to Justin Peter's website,

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Justin had done a video where Sid Roth at the end of the year of 2020 had 20 different predictions of prophecies.

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And in that, what you ended up seeing was he had all these people that gave prophecies for 2020.

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That was their 2020 vision. And yet Justin went through and said, how did all these people have these prophecies?

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And nobody saw COVID -19, right? Nobody saw that.

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And here's what you have when you have someone that takes something out of its context and ends up trying to give it a meaning.

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This is Sid Roth responding to Justin Peter's, oh, he won't mention him by name. He doesn't want any of you to go see that video.

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Go check out on YouTube, Justin Peter's Ministries, and watch it for yourself. But watch what Sid Roth does with the idea of prophecy.

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We think of prophecy as Justin would explain in that video. Prophecy is something that's not going to fail.

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If God says this is what's going to happen, that's what's going to happen. Let's see if Sid Roth agrees with God.

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Most of the prophets I know, not all. I wish it was all. And by the way, there's a big misunderstanding of prophecy.

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I had someone pick a bone with me on social media and do a whole post against me.

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Yes, he said, Sid did this 2020 thing with 20 of the best prophets he knows, and some of them talked about things would be wonderful and some of them talked about things would be bad.

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Well, have you ever read the scripture that say we know in part, we prophesy in part, and why can't it be both?

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Why can't one part, one prophet see the part about the bad and another prophet see the thing about the good and both are right?

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I mean, so few people understand the gift of prophecy or tongues or any of the supernatural tools that we have.

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And the devil is having a field day with Christians as a result of that.

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Yeah, well, the thing is he just totally missed the point because Justin was talking about the fact that their prophecies missed

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COVID -19. That was the whole thing. So Sid Roth missed the whole point of the thing. But the reality,

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Sid, it wasn't about you. He makes it about him. It wasn't about you,

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Sid Roth. It was about the fact that people had prophecies. But do you notice what Sid does? He's got to figure a way to explain these prophecies that didn't come to pass.

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Well, you know in part and you prophesy in part. Okay, well, that has context.

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The context is actually, in my interpretation, is condemning what

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Sid Roth was just saying about the tongues because it says they will cease when the canon comes.

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Some people don't agree it's the canon, but I do. We could discuss that in Q &A. So let's go through the first thing.

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When it comes to interpretation of scripture, here's what I want you to do. First thing I want you to recognize is the different genre or type of literature in the

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Bible because each of these are going to be interpreted differently, and I'm going to give you those rules for how to. First, you have historical narrative.

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Okay, that's going to be, you know, in the Old Testament, those beginning books, Genesis, Exodus, those are historical narratives.

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They're giving historical accounts, and they're narrating that. You have that in the four Gospels and the

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Book of Acts. Those are historical narratives. You have Hebrew poetry. Think of your

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Psalms. That's Hebrew poetry. Job is Hebrew poetry. You have wisdom literature, which is going to be

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Proverbs, Ecclesiastes. You have prophetic literature. Prophetic literature is going to be all of the prophets in the

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Old Testament, the Book of Revelation. Then you have instructional literature. This is your epistles.

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This is going to be from Romans to Jude. If you're starting out interpretation, this is where to start.

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This is the easiest to interpret. Prophetic literature is the hardest. Don't start with the

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Book of Revelations if you're starting to learn how to do what this is called hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is the art and science of interpretation.

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That's what I'm teaching you right now, how to interpret the Scriptures. So the first one we want to look at, historical narrative.

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When you come to historical narrative, you want to recognize certain rules. Historical narratives do not directly teach doctrine.

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They're not teaching you that this is a dialogue. Instructional literature, yes. Historical narratives is giving you the history.

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Historical narratives do not always record what should happen, but they do record what did happen.

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We have to remember that. That's the difference here. Just because David had multiple wives does not mean you should have multiple wives.

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That actually happened. Historical narratives do not always include statements of whether the event is good or bad.

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If it does, then you know, but sometimes the Bible is not clear. Just because we have it recorded in history, because that's what the

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Bible says was history, doesn't mean we should do that when it doesn't have instruction on it being good or bad.

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Then we have to remember that historical narratives are not allegories with hidden meanings. This is the reason that so many of these

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Word of Faith guys, NAR guys, cults, they all focus on the Old Testament. What do they do?

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They take historical narratives, they find some hidden meaning for it, and they say, see, it's in the Bible. But they're misinterpreting it, because if it doesn't have a statement of whether it's good or bad or should or should not happen, then you don't know.

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All you know is this is what did happen. Let me give a for instance. This may be one that could be fun for Q &A, because I think it's one that Justin and I may disagree a little bit with, but what

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I'm going to come to in the book of Acts is I'm going to see the choosing of Matthias, and they're going to say, okay, here we go.

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Here's how we're going to determine the 12th apostle. You know what happened? Exactly as described.

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That did happen. Was that God's choice of a 12th apostle, or was it

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Paul? You see, scripture just tells you what did happen, not what should happen. So in my case,

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I argue Paul was the 12th apostle, and Matthias was something that men had chosen, not what God had chosen, just my theory.

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So, but, you know, people can disagree on that. But this is how we have to recognize and interpret historical narratives.

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Historical narratives have to remember that they are stories, first and foremost, about God.

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All right? Let me quickly go through some of these, the poetic.

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The Hebrew poetry, you have to recognize parallelism. Okay, you're going to have two lines that come together, and you have to understand what type of parallelism to interpret it.

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For example, this first one, if the second line is saying the same thing as the first line, but with emphasis, that is going to be synonymous.

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So they're saying the same thing. Well, you're going to focus on that second line where the emphasis is.

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What are they sharing in common, and what's the emphasis? That's going to help in the interpretation. Synthetic is going to be where the second line builds upon the first.

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So you have to recognize what's being the parallel there. What is the first line building on the second? How is that being done?

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The thing in common is the thing that you're going to look to. You have emblematic, where the first line is going to illustrate the context of a second.

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Then you have antithetical, where you have the first line is going to be coupled with the second, but it's going to be a contrast.

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In those, you want to look at what the contrast is. That is going to help you. The next is called climactic, and this is where the second line is going to complete the first line, but then expand on it.

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What you're going to focus when you see that is you want to focus on the expansion of that. Then formal is where you have the two lines expressing the same thing.

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Now, I don't have time to give examples of each of those, but on our YouTube channel, if you go to strivingforattorney .org,

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go to our academy. We have 20 classes for free. That's how we make our money.

38:57

Wait, no. Sorry. We don't make money that way. All right. We put all the courses out there for free.

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You can take our Biblical Harmonetics course. It's 20 classes. We go through this in detail.

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It's way more than if you have us to your church and we do the weekend seminar, the Bible Interpretation Made Easy seminar.

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We go into way more detail in the Striving for Attorney Academy class, and I go through all these examples.

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If you have us out to your church for this longer seminar, I can give you those examples, but let's move on to wisdom literature.

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Now, wisdom literature, you're going to have to recognize things. It is Hebrew poetry, so it's going to have the parallelism, but often what you're going to find in wisdom literature is comparisons and contrasts, and that's going to be very common.

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You want to look for those. Those may not be one verse and another verse having the comparison like Hebrew poetry, but it may be whole thoughts compared to other thoughts.

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Throughout Proverbs, you're going to see a lot of the wise and the fool. It's the very reason that when my children would misbehave, my wife and I would give them an assignment to write a chapter of Proverbs.

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We wanted that to get into them. We wanted them writing that book over and over and over again so that that got into them as they'd write it and think about it and think about wisdom versus foolishness.

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Sometimes you have metaphors and similes and portraits and vignettes, and those are all important to recognize when we're looking at wisdom literature.

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Again, I don't have time to get into all of the examples with the 10 minutes I have left and everything

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I want to go over. Prophetic literature. Now, this is, again, mostly going to focus on Old Testament prophecies where you want to identify the prophet, the reason for his prophecy, who is his audience.

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You want to be able to identify the time and location of his prophecy, and these are going to be helpful to understanding who he's speaking to.

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If you're looking at that, you're going to have to understand that some of the prophets are writing for different purposes.

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It's important to know this stuff before you get into trying to interpret it.

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Next, you want to look at instructional literature. I said this is the easiest. This is doctrinal in nature, so instruction is for the purpose of addressing specific issues.

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If you don't know the issues being addressed, such as 1 John, if you don't realize what Gnosticism is, this idea that everything that's physical is evil and everything spiritual is good, and therefore a man can go and be with a prostitute, as long as he doesn't give his spirit over, he's not in sin, because as long as it's just his flesh, that's evil and that's not a big deal.

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That's what they actually were teaching, and John is dealing with that, and he makes things in this black and white issue where it makes it sound like if you do any sin, you're not saved, and many sinless perfectionists use 1

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John to make their case of sinless perfectionism when they don't understand the specific issue being addressed.

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He's dealing with these people that are trying to make everything a gray area, and he's saying, no, you cannot have a pattern of life that is giving yourself over to sin and make some excuse for it.

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That's what they were doing, and that's what he was addressing. That's why he's so dogmatic on it.

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And so you have to also understand the instructional literature must be understood in the context of issues being addressed by the specific audience before applying it to today.

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So you want to know the people who's writing it, who they're writing to. What are the issues?

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Why is he writing it? Before you try and pull it into today's day, first understand in that day, you want to understand what's called authorial intent, which means what did the author mean by what he wrote?

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The fourth thing is when we get into investigation, you want to ask several questions.

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First, who? You want to ask these, and I have a sheet that we give when we do this seminar in churches that have these five questions on there for you to fill out when you are going through scriptures.

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And so you could do this on your own. Just write who. When you're coming to a text, ask who. Determine who the writer is.

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Determine who the recipients are. Determine any characters mentioned in the text, any details mentioned about the people, like their nationality, their occupation, their family, their character, any other specific things that are mentioned.

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After who, you want to ask where. Where was the author writing from? Determine where the recipients are.

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Determine any significant geological things mentioned. Determine the localities that are mentioned.

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And so why is that important? Let me give you this picture, and here is the

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Sea of Galilee. Now, Justin and I are going to Israel. If you want to join us, just go to 2021israeltrip .com.

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It is full, I will tell you that, but there is a waiting list, and if you can get on the waiting list, you don't have to pay the money up front, and if people drop out, you get in line.

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But we're going to go to the Sea of Galilee, and I will teach this when we're there. You see, at the Sea of Galilee, if you're looking at this, if you end up seeing a mountain range that's all around the sea, you can see that mountain range.

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What's true about a mountain range? Well, if you're at sea and there's a storm, you're not going to see that storm come over the mountain range.

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You're not going to be able to see it until it's over the mountain range. So if you have experienced fishermen that are at sea all the time, and they're in this sea, they're used to being at a storm.

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I grew up, I became desensitized to being at storms at sea because I grew up on a boat. I've been 25, 30 miles offshore, in international waters even, and been out there and been in storms, and we have to get back.

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There's only one time in my life I was scared. The one time was my father gave me the wheel to pilot because he had to go deal with something in the engine room, and he told me, go straight into that wave because if you go sideways, we capsize.

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We were about 15 miles offshore. We had to go into waves and try to slowly make our way back into land.

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Here was the problem. I was on the bridge. I am 25, 30 feet above sea level, and as I'm hitting the bottom peak of the wave,

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I am looking at the next peak, eye level, that I'm going to go into. I was scared.

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These waves were 30 feet tall. That was the only time I was scared at sea.

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Why? Because I had been desensitized to all the others. Why do I say that? Well, when we see that these disciples were in the

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Sea of Galilee, they're in a storm, and they're scared. This was not a typical storm.

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This was something more because desensitized men were scared. I see that just from the mountain range around this sea.

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This is in a valley. And so just knowing the where can help me pick those up.

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Ask when. Determine when the text was written. Determine any time of the year.

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If there's a mention a time of the day, any special festivals or holidays.

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Determine where the text fits into God's progressive plan. I mean, you think about it, Daniel 1,

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Daniel 6. It doesn't take long for you to read those six chapters, but that is 70 years' time that passed.

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That's a big deal. So who, where, when. Also ask what.

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Ask what are any key themes, any key events. What are the key indicators to the structure of the text?

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Determine any specific problems that needed to be addressed in here. Determine any quotations from other books of the

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Bible or any other non -biblical books. And recognize that just because something is quoted in the

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Bible doesn't mean that that book is qualified as scripture. It just means that the author's quoted non -biblical books.

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But you want to know what. After that, you want to know why. Determine if the author provides a purpose for the text or if he determines multiple purposes.

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Sometimes they have multiple purposes. If you go through the book of Leviticus, man, people sit there and say, who wants to read through that?

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I teach. I come into churches, and during a Sunday school hour, I will teach the entire book of Leviticus in one hour and make it fun.

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Leviticus is one of the best books in the Old Testament to see the gospel. You go through and just look for repetitive words, and you're going to see something.

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Because sometimes the author's going to give you a purpose, but sometimes the purpose can be found in repetition. And so when you see the repetitive words, and that's what you end up seeing, is this repetition that ends up showing that you just look.

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Go open Leviticus 18. Start there. Look for repetition. Just look for the phrase,

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I am the Lord. You're going to see it everywhere then. Determine if there's any principles that are provided, any specific time, culture, or people that tell you, help you understand what the authorial intent is.

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That becomes really important with this. You know, there are sometimes that some writers make it easy.

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John is one of them. John tells you why he wrote what he wrote. He says in John 20, 31, but these things are written that you may believe that Jesus Christ, Jesus is the

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Christ, the Son of God, and that in believing you may have life in his name.

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In 1 John 5, 13, he says, I write these things to you who believe in the name of the

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Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life. Now, all of that is what you do before you get into interpretation.

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We're not going to have time to get into how to do the interpretation, but what you should be doing is you get into, with interpretation, what you do is you start to look in Bible dictionaries and Bible encyclopedias.

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You have your who, your where, your when, your why, your what. You have all that written down on a piece of paper.

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Now dig into all of that to start looking at that. You go into the immediate context first before you go out.

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Always start with the immediate context, then go out. If you have a difficult passage to understand, you always start with the easier passages to explain the more difficult.

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When you get done with putting all of that together and you have the interpretation, only then do you use implementation.

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It's only then that you're going to do that. Don't jump into that. Don't jump too early into trying to give an interpretation or an application before you really have an understanding of it.

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Many people make the mistake of applying the text, implementing the text before they've interpreted the text, and they try to interpret the text before they even do the work of investigating the text, and they don't even take the time of trying to identify the text.

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So identify your text, what type of genre it is, know that up front. Then what you want to do is from there, what

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I encourage you to do is to then go into investigating it.

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Then when you have all those five questions answered, then dig into the interpretation, and only then do you want to look into implementation.

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So this is just some of what we have for you. If you would like us to come to your church and do this for longer, we could do that.

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We do have it available, and I could put up – let me see, I'll put that slide up for you.

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But we can come to your church. If you want us to do this seminar in your church, in your area, you have both

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Justin and I out. All you have to do is email speaker at strivingforeternity .org,

50:26

speaker at strivingforeternity .org, and we will come out to your church and be able to share with you more of this.

50:36

So with that, I'll bring Justin back in. He was eating, son.

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I caught him off guard. How rude. So, Justin, let's talk about something else just before we go to our lunch break.

50:58

You have – I'll share the screen again. You have a new website. I do.

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And it's only been a couple years. I think you and I talked about this website, what, like two or three years ago?

51:10

Yeah, going back to the Hoover administration, I think. We talked about it, and the funny thing with it is that I was trying –

51:18

I'm working on a second revamp of Striving for Eternity, and I was joking that I think that we're going to get our new website up before you get yours, but you proved me wrong on that, and you got it up first.

51:32

Yeah, David Hinckey, a friend of mine, who he kind of maintains the ministry Facebook page, he's done a tremendous amount of work, and others have as well.

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But it is up and live now. Yeah, and I'm excited about that.

51:47

Some other resources that we want to just mention to you, make available. Justin has a book out called

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Do Not Hinder Them. It is available at justinpeters .org slash shop. Just go and get it there.

52:00

Justin, could you talk a little bit about this book? Sure. So the title, Do Not Hinder Them, subtitle,

52:07

A Biblical Examination of Childhood Conversion, and basically the book deals with some of the precautions that we need to take with children before we rush them off into the baptistry.

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Of course, I write from a credo -baptistic position. In other words,

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I believe in believer's baptism. I do not hold to infant baptism. I definitely differ with our

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Presbyterian friends on that. But just because a child has made intellectual assent to some basic gospel facts does not mean that that child is ready to be baptized.

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So it deals with some of the precautions that we need to take with children and examines and contrasts the nature of salvation with the nature of children.

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The Bible actually has a great deal to say about the nature of children and some things to look for in the life of anyone regardless of his or her age.

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If true conversion has taken place, there should be some things in place there.

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You need to look for those in the life of anyone before they're ready to be baptized.

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But we are baptizing millions of children who are not truly regenerate simply because they've made intellectual assent to a few basic gospel facts.

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So this book deals with that. How do I know when it's appropriate and right for me to baptize my child?

53:30

But wait a minute, Justin. Justin, listen. The argument people give when you want to baptize their child is that you should not hinder them.

53:38

They say do not hinder them. You're using that as a title of your book against how they use that.

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Well, yeah, that's another verse that you could put in your hermeneutics class about how people take out a context.

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I hate to say the title is misleading. It's not misleading, but it is maybe a little bit counterintuitive because that passage has been taken by many to support baptizing very young children, four, five, six, seven years old.

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But that's not what Jesus meant at all in that statement at all. And I talk about that in the book.

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And actually, ironically, the way that we really hinder our children from coming to Christ is baptizing them before they're ready.

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And they think that maybe they grow up and they're 25, 30, 35 years old, and they think that they're saved because they asked

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Jesus into their heart when they were seven and were baptized. And now there's little, if any, evidence that conversion has actually taken place in that person's life.

54:42

Oh, but no, I'm okay because I was baptized when I was seven years old. I prayed the sinner's prayer. So if you really want to hinder your children from coming to Christ, baptize them before they're really ready.

54:50

Yeah. You know, one of the things for folks who may say, well, I don't have children, I'll tell you this.

54:56

This is an excellent book dealing with the subject of conversion because one of the things Justin does is go into defining what conversion looks like.

55:05

And so it's not just about children in that sense because it really does give a good answer on conversion itself.

55:13

I have a couple of books out. The first is called What Do They Believe? This was my first book.

55:19

It examines the six major doctrines of the six major Western religions. So what

55:24

I do in this is I cover six doctrines, and I cover what's their authority, their view of God, specifically the

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Trinity, view of Christ and his deity, man's sinfulness, salvation, and times. And in that I take each of these six religions and break them down by those six doctrines.

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So I look at Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Islam, the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter -day

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Saints, also known as Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, and Christianity. I break those six doctrines into each of them.

55:52

The thing that everyone says about this that's helpful is the fact that it really is something you can use as a quick reference.

55:59

People have told me that the way that I write is very easy to understand. I break down the complex in a simple -to -understand way, and that basically because of the way

56:08

I've written, it is a quick reference you could turn to easily. My second book is called

56:13

What Do We Believe? And this is a systematic theology of the Christian religion. It gets into details of what we believe.

56:20

Again, I've written in such a way that it could be used as a quick reference. Each chapter could be read independent, so if you want to focus in on an area.

56:27

I go through a systematic theology, but it's not super thick. It's only 200 pages, so it's not intimidating.

56:32

And with both of those, if you want to teach them in a Sunday school, we have study guides that go along with them. Then what we have with this, one thing about this book,

56:41

I should say, that I really think is important as an evangelist, as Justin and I are, it's without doubt that I'm going to be asked a question about the reliability of Scripture.

56:51

People who challenge that. I have a whole chapter dealing with textual criticism, and this is very helpful to answer those questions on the street.

57:02

We also have a book by Dr. Anthony Silvestro, who also was striving for eternity, and he wrote a book on the origin of kinds.

57:09

This is a unique book for this reason. There's many books on presuppositional apologetics. There's many books on creation science, and there's many books on evangelism.

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But there's no book that I know of that teaches these three disciplines and brings them together to show how they work together.

57:24

And so that's something that I find very encouraging. It's a very good book, very easy to read.

57:30

Again, only about 200 -plus pages. You can get all three of those at strivingforeturning .org.

57:37

Just go to our store, and they're available there. So what we're going to do is we're going to try to get a little bit back on time.

57:44

You know, it's amazing, Justin. I thought that we would not get off time because of the fact that we were, you know. I just thought because we don't have anyone here to ask questions at all and people waiting in the lobby to look at the books and things like that,

58:01

I figured, hey, it won't be a problem. But no, we still managed to do it. We're going to take a 45 -minute break for lunch or for you guys to grab something to eat.

58:10

And so at 15 minutes after the hour, okay, so right now where I am, it's 1230.

58:16

At 115, we'll start up again. But just do me a favor or do us a favor.

58:22

Share this on social media. Let others know you're watching if you're getting a lot out of this. And I will say this just as a kind of a plea, let you guys know,

58:34

I mean, especially for Justin, much of the way that his ministry runs is by having him travel and speak.

58:41

And COVID -19 has basically canceled everything. I'm canceled, I think, out to August right now with every event that I had.

58:49

So this is a time where there is need. People do need to continue giving to their church.

58:57

But if you have and after you give to your church, if you can, you can support both

59:02

Justin and I. And we have that as well.

59:08

And so I shouldn't have stopped sharing the screen. There's Justin's page that you can go for him.

59:16

Just go to justinpeters .org and consider supporting him. And it's striving for eternity.

59:22

You can just go to strivingforeturning .org slash donate. If you guys would consider doing that, we would appreciate it.

59:28

And we'll see you in 45 minutes. So we'll see you in a little bit. And we'll continue when we come back with Justin on discerning false teachers.

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