16 - Biblical Hermeneutics, Biographical Studies, Part 1

Well, welcome to the Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Biblical Harmoneutics. Wow, that's kind of like a mouthful. Wow. What is biblical harmoneutics? Well, it's those big words you use when you want to impress your friends at dinner tables.

No, no, no, no. It's actually, harmoneutics is the art and science of interpretation. Interesting thing that came up, was asked this past week about these classes we do, and someone asks, do you have to use harmoneutics?

You don't have to, you just do. You see, every one of us applies harmoneutics. We all interpret everything that we see, that we read, we interpret that. The question is, how do we go about interpreting it?

In other words, when we come to the scriptures, people are going to understand the scriptures by the way they interpret it. The problem is, not everyone really follows good biblical principles in how to interpret, and that's what this class has been all about.

We have given you a lot of material up till now in teaching you how to go about using different tools like Bible dictionaries, concordances, encyclopedias, manners and customs, handbooks, all these different things to see how to use these tools properly so that we can help in the interpretation of scripture.

So, we've gone through all that. Then we went through some keys to interpretation. What are some of the things that we need to do whenever we come to interpreting something? It would be really good right now to give a pop quiz.

I wish I could hand out paper to be able to give you guys a quiz, but here we go. Ready? Here's a pop quiz. Let's see. Maybe those in the chat room will take this one, but what are the four keys to interpretation, to harmoneutics that we've gone over?

Now, it's easy. They all start with the letter I. And so, this should be easy at this point if you have been in these classes. Why? Because we've gone over it and over it and over it kind of like a broken record.

Yeah. Okay. I just dated myself. I know some of you guys don't even get that joke. Okay. Record that goes on a turntable and when it had a scratch in it, it would kind of go back to the same point. So, a broken record is kind of because it just keeps looping around and around and around.

Okay. You know, you young kids, you have to explain these things. You don't even know what a record is probably. You know, it's like CD. That's it, right? You know, you know what an eight-track tape is.

The Four Keys to Interpretation: Identify, Investigate, Interpret, Implement

Okay. Now we're really dating ourselves. Forget that. All right. So, we first want to identify, that's the first key, identify the type of literature we're dealing with. Then we want to investigate. That meant where we're going to ask those five questions, who, what, when, where, why.

We want to look into those things to do the investigation with each text. We're going to start looking into some of those tools that we talked about earlier. Then this next is the interpretation. Interpretation is where we're actually start pulling these things together.

We start outlining everything. We start kind of graphing the text and as far as looking for the complete thought, the noun, the verb, all that stuff, you know, the sentence structure. We're going to graph that out or block diagram that out.

We're going to then go into those tools and say, okay, let's look at the different people that are mentioned and start studying them out. Look at the places, the festivals, all those sort of things. Then the last one, did you catch that?

I said the last one, not the first one, is implementation. That's where we apply it. Why do I say that? Well, I say that because unfortunately a lot of people start at the end. A lot of people, what they do is they start by looking at how they apply the text of Scripture to themselves.

Then after they're done applying the text, they say that must be its meaning. Had an individual this week that contacted us at the ministry. I had been a part of an interview with him. It was kind of a group interview, group panel interview.

He contacted me after the show. We had a good dialogue after the show. Afterwards, we got into a long email exchange, he and I, where he's trying to argue his point on a particular theological position.

The thing that I kept going to him is that when I show him what the Scripture says and I give the context, the meaning of the words, the background to the text, and I give all of that, he always relied back on his experience.

He'd say, but how do you answer this? This is what I had happen in my life. What are you saying that is about? When he does that, I kept going back to saying, I can't argue about your experiences because I can't argue experience.

I don't know what you experienced. I don't know the source of things. All I know is that when you have the Scriptures and the Scriptures are disagreeing with your experience, but you put your experience above the Scriptures as the authority in your life, then your authority is not God, it is yourself.

That's a dangerous place to be. Unfortunately, many, many Christians are in that place. We've spent so much time talking about the difference of interpreting by experience versus interpreting by principles of interpretation.

We want to follow the rules of interpretation. That's what we've been about teaching here, so that you may know what God's Word says, not because you feel it in your heart or you can argue you've been led by the Spirit, which, by the way, when people say they were led by the Spirit, it sounds really spiritual and usually what they mean is, I have no idea what Scripture actually means.

I just know what I wish it means. And so, they give an interpretation that they really don't know because they haven't studied. They're just led by what they say the Spirit. They don't know if it's the Holy Spirit or their own Spirit.

Because how do you know if you're led by the Spirit? Well, the Spirit is going to lead according to His Word. So, when someone comes to me and says they were led by the Spirit on a certain interpretation of a text of Scripture, and then you look at their interpretation and you look at Scripture and the two don't match, they're not led by the Spirit of God.

Maybe some other Spirit, but it's not the Spirit of God, just saying. So, if you have your syllabus, which you get when you enroll as a student, and we are in section 4 now. This is the last section that we have for this book, and we are going to be looking at this section, at some alternatives to different types of studies that you can do.

So, we're going to look at, now that we have spent the time in looking at how to interpret a passage of Scripture, we want to now say, okay, what are some different ways that we can study? We're going to study by taking every passage of Scripture and following all those principles that we've just gotten done reviewing.

We're going to look at its context. We're going to ask questions. We're going to think critically of it. Now we've done all those things, now we want to pull that stuff together. So, in this section of our syllabus, it's going to provide you with three different avenues by which you may study the Scriptures.

An important truth needs to be emphasized concerning any type of study, and that is any study must be based on a correct interpretation of Scripture. So, just because we're doing one of these types of study doesn't mean we get to bypass the work, okay?

And so, we want to go through and make sure we're following all the principles that we've been looking at throughout these. So, what are the three types? We're going to look at biographical studies this week and probably next week.

Then we're going to look at topical and then analytical. So, those are going to be the three studies that we have left to look at, and what we're going to do is we're going to start with the biographical studies.

This is studies of individuals. This is going to help us when we look at an individual person that we want to study out maybe their life or something about them. So, when we do this, if we're going to take a person that we're going to study, say the life of David, you want to study the life of David or the life of Jesus.

Well, you may not want to be so broad in your study because that is going to take a lot of work because the broader the subject, the more interpretation you have to do with every single passage, okay?

As you go through every passage you're dealing with, you need to take the time to study each one out, and it takes time. It's not something, this is not something that you could just jump in and say, ah, I could just quickly get the answer to what is the meaning of someone's life or everything about their life just by reading a couple of verses.

No, you have to read the verses that are referenced and study them out. Now, if you take a very broad subject like the life of Jesus or the life of David, you're going to have a lot. You may want to limit it, maybe the prayer life of Jesus.

Take a look at the prayers that we have of Christ in the Bible or the sermons that He preached. Maybe you want to look at just Jesus' calling of His disciples. There's a lot you could study there, the individual characters that make up His disciples.

Now, you're going to do that, you're going to have a lot more material on Peter than you will some of the other disciples like Thaddeus or Bartholomew. There's not a whole lot on him. Andrew has a whole lot less than Peter, but there's quite a number of verses that talk about him and you may need to look into that.

Andrew's a cool dude. Oh, sorry. So, what you may do is you may look into Andrew and realize his name is Greek for manly. Okay, so I don't live up to my name. Fine. I admit it. You guys got me. But you may learn there's a whole lot more to someone's name, and we're going to get to this, but there's more to someone's name than just a name.

See, names had meanings back then. So, let's get ahead of ourselves, but let me finish that point up, I guess. You know, when someone was called Peter, for example, his name wasn't, he wasn't born with the name Peter.

Jesus renamed him Peter because he was going to be the rock. Paul is renamed. He was Saul, he becomes Paul. Barnabas, that becomes important. If you're going to study the life of Barnabas, that was his nickname.

That was a name given to him. Why? Because it means son of encouragement. Does that tell you something about Barnabas and his personality? He was such an encourager that they called him the son of encouragement.

No, it doesn't mean that encouragement somehow got together and gave birth to him, right? So, what you have is you have a case where when people have names in the Bible, the names had meanings. Jacob was named Jacob because he grabbed the heel of his brother, okay?

And so, names would have certain meanings. So, you want to think of that. So, let's begin by looking at our syllabus, and you look at the biographical studies. The first thing is to choose a character.

I mean, no, not a character like me. Yeah, I know I'm a character. You know, we got some really rambunctious students in this class, I'll tell you. But you want to choose a character that you're going to study.

And again, when you do this, you want to be careful how broad it is, but you want to locate all the revelation, cross-references, you want to look in concordances, you may want to look in Bible dictionaries to find out more about the character.

So, this could be done, for example, with the life of Abraham. Abraham, there's going to be a lot of references. Where are they mostly going to be? A lot of them are going to be in Genesis, right? So, you're going to focus much in Genesis.

But Abraham's kind of mentioned throughout the Old Testament. Even in the New Testament, you see it. So, even though a lot of it is in Genesis, you're going to see that there's a lot throughout. Abraham is mentioned in the Old Testament, the New Testament.

He's mentioned in Leviticus, in Exodus, Numbers, Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Hebrews, James, 1st Peter. I mean, 20 different books out of the 66 mention Abraham.

So, you see, if you just say, I'm going to study the life of Abraham, you're going to do a lot of work. He's mentioned a lot of times. So, you need to think about who you're going to select and figure out how much you want to study them.

You may want to be a little bit more limiting in your study. But if you want to do an exhaustive study, it's very good to do. I had done a study of the life of Joseph just through the book of Genesis.

I didn't look beyond Genesis. But you can limit it to a book. So, I have, looking at the life of Joseph. Now, what I was doing in the life of Joseph was I was looking specifically at one topic. I was looking at Joseph as a model of perseverance.

I was looking at his life, what we have recorded in history, in Scripture, to see how he persevered through some very, very difficult times. Joseph went through a lot of things and you'd see him rise to a level where you'd say, oh, he's risen to a level of privilege.

And then he'd be thrown down into a new trial. He'd have new temptations thrown at him and he'd have to persevere. And it was interesting because some of the things I had noticed in the perseverance of Joseph really helped me understand something about bitterness.

You see, you don't see anywhere where Joseph was bitter. In studying the life of Joseph, I kind of was asking myself the question, you know, you probably asked yourself with his brothers. So, Joseph's brothers come to town, what was Joseph thinking?

You know, we don't see any signs of bitterness with him. And there's a reason for that. Joseph was a forgiving man. We saw it at the end of his life when the brothers come and apologize and say, oh, you know, our father said not to harm us.

But he says, you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good. See, he was fixated on God. And therefore, he could let things go because of where his focus was. Okay. And I noticed in there that when studying that out, that the solution to bitterness in your life is to be living a forgiving lifestyle.

I started asking myself, you know, whatever happened to Potiphar? We don't know. But can you picture how Potiphar might have feared when all of a sudden he's pretty high ranking in Pharaoh's guard? And then all of a sudden, if Potiphar was still alive when Joseph is set free and set up as the number two man in Egypt, I mean, if Joseph wanted to pay back Potiphar, he probably could have.

We have nothing recorded that says he ever did it. And so, and someone's asking what Joseph's name means. And I'm not sure what Joseph's name meant. I didn't actually look at the meaning of his name. So, sorry.

I don't know. But we could look it up. A good place to look that up would be in a Bible dictionary would tell you. So, we could look that up. So, that could be a good homework assignment for that student that asked.

But when we want to study the people out, we may want to limit our study. So, we choose an individual that we're going to study. What is it we should be looking for? What are the things that we want to be looking up and examining?

Well, we're going to want to look at dates. Okay. You're going to want to look at certain features. One of the features is the dates. All right. Bible studies or Bible dictionaries are going to help in this area.

You may also want to notice any references to times dealing to these biographical characters. Mentioning of months or years or rains, feasts, holidays, things like that. Nehemiah gives us some indicators like that.

Nehemiah tells us not only that he was serving in the Medo-Persian Empire under Xerxes, but he gives the months, Nisan. And so, we can now identify certain dates. We actually see that he gives a four-month period between the time that he hears about what was happening in Israel and the time he goes before the king.

And so, we could kind of assume that he may have been fasting for that long of a period of time, praying and fasting for the people in Israel. And so, that may be something that helps us to understand what's going on, the times, the season, things like that.

You want to try to appreciate the historical setting of the character that you're studying and what they're experiencing. Picture, for example, Nehemiah. Put yourself in the position of Nehemiah. Think through as you read through Nehemiah.

What might be going through Nehemiah's mind? I mean, he's being told by the king to go back to Israel and to rebuild. And one of the things is, I think that during that four-month period, Nehemiah was probably figuring, hey, if the king lets me go and rebuild or lets somebody else go and rebuild, what kind of things are they going to need?

You know, they might need some letters from the king for materials. How do we know that? Well, that's actually what Nehemiah asked for. When the king said to go, he wanted some letters from the king. What were some of those letters?

We know that he got letters for materials to be used. So, the king was basically saying, I want you to have materials to rebuild. So, here's where you get me. So, here's the letter for that. But there's also, Nehemiah seems to be very forward thinking because he had letters that seemed to indicate that he knew he was going to have some problems with some people, that Samballot and others were going to cause some issues.

And so, he had letters from the king that basically said that what was going on because they tried to argue that they were going to write letters to the king saying that he was undermining the king. But see, I think he already kind of knew that and he prepared for that and that's why he has this already set up.

So, what you do is you look at this and go, oh, here we see something about Nehemiah. He's a forward thinker. He gets there. He gets to Israel. What does he do? He doesn't tell any of his guard what he's doing.

He gets out on horseback and he rides around the city. He does his own evaluation. You see, it's telling us a little bit of the character of the man. Put yourself in his position. What would be going through his mind?

What was he thinking when he made the decision when people were worried about their homes and the enemies attacking them and knocking down the walls that they're building and they're having to build the walls with a sword in one hand and the tools to build the wall in the other.

He says, hey, why don't you build by your home? Why would he do that? What do you think? Maybe because he knows that his men are going to be worried about their homes. So, if they're by their home with their sword, they feel they're more focused on what they're doing.

They're less worried about things at home where they can't get to. You see, if you're working near your house and you see that your house is not under attack, you're not worried about it. But if you're five miles away and you don't know what's going on at home and you may think your home is under attack, you're going to worry about it.

Or maybe your area is under attack and you think home is as well. You see, it's pretty smart thinking on his part. It tells you something about the man, Nehemiah, right? And so, looking at dates and times, we can start to see some of those things, right?

How about family? Parents, wives, children, other family members? I mean, when you look at family, that can become very important. For example, I have in your syllabus there an example of the life of Abraham.

And we see his father was Terah. His wife was Sarah. His children, Isaac, Ishmael, plus others. Plus others, yeah. And he has a nephew, Lot. Okay? Carefully examining the scriptures, you're going to realize most people think of two sons of Abraham.

Ishmael, the firstborn, but he's not called the firstborn. Isaac is the firstborn. And we don't realize that later on, I think it's Genesis 25, after Sarah died, Abraham remarried and had six more children.

Well, there's some interesting family dynamics in that family. And so, you want to notice carefully the positive and negative interactions of these relationships. For example, when you look at the family, you'll see that there's some favoritism that gets played.

I mean, Isaac is favored over Ishmael. Esau is favored by his father over Jacob, where Jacob is favored by the mother. You see, favoritism was passed down. You see some things like Abraham lying about his wife being his sister.

And then we see his son following the same thing. We see things in the family dynamic that plays in things. You know, it's an interesting thing that why is it important to see that Abraham's father was Terah?

Well, here's an interesting thing. It's interesting to note that because Abraham was commanded to go where? To Canaan. Is that where he went? Many people talk about it that Abraham was told to go to Canaan and he just picked up and there he went, you know, with his nephew Lot and off they went.

But that's not exactly what happened. See, they were with their father, well, with Abraham's father Terah, and they first went to a land of Uzzah, which is interesting because what we see is that his father had worshipped some pagan gods.

It seems that they went to an area that also followed the same pagan gods. So kind of looking at that you go, hmm, it seems to be that maybe, just maybe, Abraham didn't go right where he was supposed to right away.

He actually waited until after his father died and then he went to the land of Canaan. You know, so we think of Abraham as this great man of faith. Oh, you know, Jewish people always talk about him as being the father of faith and yet you look at him and you look at the relationships he had with his family and he doesn't strike me as a man of great faith right out of the gate.

I don't know about you, that's encouraging to me because there's times where I feel like I don't have a whole lot of great faith and it's encouraging to realize that, you know what, Abraham struggled also.

He ended being a man of great faith but he didn't start that way. You and I didn't start that way either but, you know what, we can end that way. We often think of the man George, why am I drawing a blank on his name?

George Mueller, thank you. George Mueller and he wrote an autobiography and he said he wrote it because people knew him as this great man of faith and he wanted people to realize he didn't start out that way.

The faith was built little by little. I mean, when you look at Abraham, he starts out being sent to Canaan but he doesn't go to Canaan. He goes somewhere where his father's going to be comfortable and then he goes to Canaan after dad dies but he has his wife and, well, he's scared that people are going to kill him over his wife so he lies not just once but twice.

Didn't learn his lesson and he lies about who his wife is. That's not what I'd say is a lot of faith in God. Then, you know, it's like, well, hey, you're going to have a child. He says, well, hey, I'm too old.

My wife's too old. So, you know what? I'll do it my way. You know, they plan to have a wife by, you know, his concubine or by his wife's servant who becomes his concubine. You know, it's like you're looking at these things and go, man, this guy does not seem like the man of faith that we hear about.

When you look at his family, you start to realize these different nuances of things to maybe put off and some things to put on when you look at, like the life of Joseph, we said, the things that you could put on from his lifestyle.

So, these are some of the things you want to do when you're looking through this. You want to examine these people's lives and see what's happening in their life, their relations with different people.

This helps us to see exactly, you know, what's going on and who is who and something about their character because these things go into it. Take an example, the family dynamic with Samson. Samson says to his parents, hey, go get me this Gentile woman to marry and they're like, aren't there any good Jewish girls?

I mean, I could picture them with, you know, I picture them with a good Brooklyn accent, you know, aren't there any good Jewish girls you could marry? You know, but I could pick, you know, maybe like Fiddler on the Roof, you know, if you've ever watched that movie, right?

So, you know, they're saying to him, find a good Jewish girl for you. And he or she goes, no, I want this pagan girl from this country that, you know, we're supposed to be, you know, at war with or our enemies and I want one of them as my wife.

And what do the parents do? They go and say, okay, okay, we'll give it to you, Solomon. You know, Samson, we'll give you, okay, okay. I mean, you get the idea that Samson was maybe a little bit of a spoiled brat?

Yeah, I could picture that. Why? Because the way his parents treated him, you know? So, what we have is we look at this and we say, ah, here we see the character of an individual and we see that this is somebody who is, you know, kind of living and you'll see they're living a way of going, you know what?

They're not really someone that we're going to want to follow after. You know, Solomon, Samson's, you know, selfish pride kind of got him into trouble, didn't it? He lost all his hair over it, literally, led to losing his eyesight.

Not saying if you get a haircut, you're going to lose your eyes. Read the story. Read the book of Judges. You'll understand more. But you'll only understand more if you understand what the vow he took.

See, a Ninevite vow is what he had taken. And so, a Ninevite vow was something where you didn't have your haircut. You didn't touch dead things and you didn't drink anything of the vine. Three things.

Oh, that's interesting. Because if you want to do a background on the life of Samson, you're going to notice that he not only took some honey out of the carcass of a lion, a dead lion, oops, he touched a dead thing, but he got drunk.

He got so drunk that he passed out. He wasn't supposed to have any wine. And he lost his hair. He wasn't supposed to get a haircut. And that was the source of his strength. Well, no, not really. The real source of his strength was God.

But it was in his Ninevite vow, breaking that vow. So, if you're going to study Samson's life, you've got to understand what a Ninevite vow is. That's something where you're going to want to look into a Bible dictionary and learn what a Ninevite vow is.

Conversion, Ministry, and Vocation in a Biographical Study

Okay. So, maybe letter D there. Next thing you want to examine is their conversion. How did they get conversion? Note the circumstances, the results. These, however, are not often mentioned in Scripture, but some are.

Say, for example, if you want to study the life of Paul or you're going to study Paul, you're going to see his conversion story appears three separate times in the book of Acts. That becomes helpful because we have a lot of his conversion and we can see his conversion story.

His conversion is kind of neat because he was a Pharisee who became one of the leaders of the group he actually was trying to put out. So, looking at things like a conversion story is very helpful. You want to look at what happened, for example, with Paul.

You hear that he saw a bright light that blinded him. He heard the Lord speaking and the Lord said to him, why do you persecute me? And he says, who are you, Lord? And he said, Jesus whom you persecute because he was on his way with letters from the Pharisees or from the Sanhedrin to go and put into prison any of those that do not follow after Judaism, any of those who follow after what was called the way, Christianity, after Jesus.

And so, when we look at that, we see that becomes neat because when you look at the other accounts, see the other men that were with him? They couldn't hear what Jesus said. Only Paul did. And they look and say, oh, they heard something, but they didn't know what it was.

Some saw the light. Some just heard a rumbling. They couldn't understand it, but Paul did. And so, you see differences to looking at the conversion story of different people. Now, some people we don't know when they were converted.

We assume that the conversion of Isaiah was in Isaiah 6 when he sees the Lord high and lifted up on a throne. But his conversion seems kind of weird. I mean, you talk about grace alone, by faith alone, through Christ alone, but this is before Christ.

Okay, we'll go by grace alone, faith alone. But here, how is he, his sins forgiven? By taking hot coals from the altar and burning his lips. Well, that's not how you get saved. But that was talking about, if that was his conversion, there was something more going on there, an illustration of purification.

So, when we look at this, we see that the conversions of the different people, we're not really sure if Isaiah was converted then. See, some of the people were not sure, Peter, when did Peter get converted?

I mean, some people want to think that Peter got converted, like after Christ rose from the dead, because if not, I mean, you know, boy, oh boy, you'd think he really has foot and mouth disease, doesn't he?

I mean, every time he opened his mouth, it was only to switch feet, because he kept shoving his foot in his mouth. That's an illustration to mean that foot and mouth means when you open your mouth and say something stupid, and Peter did a lot of that.

I mean, he said things that you'd say, boy, he just never understood what Jesus was saying. I mean, he lived with the guy and didn't get what he was saying. Some people think it's because Peter really wasn't saved, so there was a veil covering him.

That's what the scriptures say, is that to the unbeliever, the scriptures are veiled, and so they don't understand what is being said. And so, some say that he wasn't really converted because he just didn't get it.

And then by Acts chapter 2, we see he got it. I mean, Acts chapter 1, he's still asking dumb things. I mean, he's like, okay, Lord, we see you've risen from the dead. Are you going to bring the kingdom now?

He still didn't get it. But in Acts chapter 2, he got it. What'd he get? Oh, the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit indwelled him. And then he preaches a sermon that shows he understands all of history and how it relates to Christ, all of biblical history.

And so, when we look at that, we go, you know, there may be something there. There may be some things that we want to examine there. So, that's something we want to take a look at, some conversion stories, and we may not know when they got converted.

Okay, just keep that in mind. But if we do have their account, it's good to study it out. Paul is the best example of that. Maybe we're going to look at their ministry or their vocation. Notice any type of ministry or lack of ministry that your character has.

Note the positive and the negative aspects of their ministry. And what do we mean by a lack of ministry? Can you say Jonah? You want to talk about the king of lack of ministry? I mean, here's a guy saying, okay, Jonah go this way.

Where does he go? That way. I mean, if you're going to study Jonah, you want to study it with a map. Study Jonah chapter 1. Look at a map. Look at the direction he was, where he was. He goes south east, sorry, southwest when he was supposed to go northeast.

I mean, whoop, wrong direction. Okay, he was trying to get as far away as he can. And so, you want to look at their ministry, their vocation. You look at a man like Jonah, he's a prophet. Okay, he's supposed to be prophesying for the Lord, and yet that's exactly what he's not doing.

So, we have to be careful of the things that some follow, do, administer, or don't do that they should be doing, right? So, in Jonah's case, we don't want to be doing the things that Jonah was doing in that sense.

But there may be different men who, you look at the life, I mentioned Isaiah 6. Read all of Isaiah 6. See, some people read Isaiah 6 and it preaches so well from missions conferences. And we have a message at the ministry on what defines success in ministry.

And, you know, that we talk about, whether it's evangelism or ministry or mission, what defines success? Because a lot of people preach out of Isaiah 6 and they stop at verse 8 because, oh, does that sound so good?

You know, the Lord says, you know, whom shall we send or who will go for us? And Isaiah says, here I am, send me. And the Lord says, okay, you got it. And they stop there. Why? Because when you read verses 9, 10, 11, and 12, not so good.

What's his ministry? What's his vocation? Oh, okay, Isaiah, here's your ministry. This is what God says. I want you to go out and preach to the nation of Israel. And I want you to preach judgment. Excuse me, Lord?

Yeah, that's right, Isaiah. Preach judgment on these people. But Lord, they're not going to like that message. Yeah, you're going to preach and you're going to keep preaching and they're not going to like it.

Lord, how long exactly do I have to preach this message? Oh, you have to preach until they stick their fingers in their ears. They cover their eyes. They don't want to see you. They don't want to hear what you say.

They go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They just talk over you. Oh, hey, great, Lord. Thanks. That's exactly what I'm looking forward to. I'm looking forward to preaching until they're sick of hearing it.

Uh, you sure about this, Lord? Yeah, you're going to keep doing this, Isaiah, until there's only a remnant of people left. I mean, the masses of Israel are not going to want to listen to you. Actually, they're going to hate you for it, Isaiah.

They're going to despise you. They're going to stick their fingers in their ears, close their eyes, talk over you, not going to listen to you. They're not going to like what you say, and you're going to keep preaching until there's only a few, a small remnant left.

Sound like a good job? Woo-hoo, sign me up. Not. That's not, you know, that's not Joel Osteen's message. I mean, he's all about comfort, and you know, that's not what Isaiah's message was. So, was Isaiah successful?

Sure. You know why? There's only a remnant that He preached judgment, and they hated him, and he preached what God told him to preach, and so what ended up happening? There was only a remnant left, and the rest went into judgment.