Bible Study 101 (part 1)

All right, so the question I have is, we talked a little bit about, from a Bible study perspective, I want to get into a couple of things, and I have a couple of questions. Again, I want to make this as interactive as possible, and I'll have to say there are some right answers, there are some wrong answers, but oftentimes these are kind of opinion type of questions that I'll have, but feel free to speak up.

What Words Mean in Context

So the first question I have as we get into kind of this little bit of a study here is, do words have meanings? Do words have meanings? I heard a yes over here, would anyone say no? Do words have meanings?

Do words have ascribed meanings to them? So they may have meanings, but do they actually have meanings to them? This is going to be a class you're going to think a lot about, all right? So it's going to be a deep class in some ways, but do words have meanings ascribed to them?

Do we give meanings to words? If I say the word tree, most of you would understand what I mean. Now, some of you would be thinking of a different type of tree. You might be thinking of a dogwood tree, you might be thinking of an oak tree, you might be thinking of a willow tree, you might be thinking of a different type of tree, but just generally words have ascribed meanings to them.

So we see things such as tree as one of those. And also culturally, I failed at French in junior high, my only class I ever failed. So from a cultural perspective, cultures have meanings in words also.

So if I knew some foreign words, I would say some, and maybe some of you would understand what those words were that I was saying. Others may look at it just as confused as you look now. So there is meanings, but a lot of it is cultural and even professional.

So even in your own profession at times, even in whatever you do, I'm a security architect and I'm a security, data security guy, I'm a consultant, I've been in the field for a long time. And we use a lot of terms, a lot of technology that some of you would probably glaze over and not even care to hear or understand.

And the same with just about any other type of industry or trade. I don't know what accountants use for their lingo in a lot of ways. I just know I have to pay them when I need them to do something for me.

And they make that quite easy on how I should pay them. But there are words and they have meanings, but again, they can be both from a cultural perspective a meaning and even a professional perspective as a meaning.

Do words also have symbolic meanings? Can a word have a symbolic meaning? I see a couple shakes of yes. Again, interactive class here, interactive discussion going on here. I don't want to be the only one talking up here.

But do they have, I'm not saying every word, but do words have symbolic meanings? Yeah, they can, right? Not all words do, but they can. So words do have symbolic meanings in many ways. Another kind of difficult question, these are all leading up into what we're going to get into our study.

These are all just kind of, again, kind of questions to get ourselves going, get our minds going a little bit here. Do words, this is one of those kind of Catch -22 questions, but do words in and of themselves outside of their context have meaning?

If I say now, and they do, but can they have additional meaning based on their context? Can a word have additional meaning based on its context? Based on its surrounding words? Yes, sir? Yeah. And one of the examples, as I was teaching my daughter this lesson this morning on my way in, I'm sure she was happy about, but I even said something like, if I said, you know, dear Alyssa, that has context to it.

The word dear, as we know, can be used in various ways in our English language, but it has context around a salutation. Now, if I said, the deer was called Alyssa, there's a different context there, right?

Now we're talking about a furry, four-legged creature that eats flowers and oftentimes gets in trouble for doing such. So we see that words have not only meaning in and of themselves, but they can have a different meaning based on the context of the surrounding words around them, right?

As we read texts, and again, most of this is going to relate back to scripture as we get into it here. But again, this is kind of a general discussion just to get things going. So some say that context alone gives the meaning of a word.

Would you agree with that? Context alone? Words in their context give the meaning to the words. Got a shake no? Do we have any yeses? We want to fight here. Come on, someone. No. So, I mean, context is important, and you've probably heard this many times.

If you're doing Bible studies, you're doing any other kind of study, it's all about context, context, context, right? Kind of like location, location, location, right? And when we're dealing with words and Bible study and other such things, it's critical.

Now there are actually three types of meaning words can have. Any guesses what these three types are? When we talk about words have meanings, what are the three kind of high categories of what a meaning to a word would be?

We talked a little bit about context. But how are words portrayed? I heard literal from somewhere over here. Literally, so we have literal, figurative, metaphor, allegory, we have different symbologies to words and so forth.

But how am I portraying words to you now? Orally, right? We have oral written, but it's the intention I have. I have something I want to share with you, right? I, as a teacher here, have something I want to share with you, I hope is important.

But my desire here is to transfer information from up here, hopefully in words that I understand and words that you can understand. But my desire here is what's called an intended purpose. I have an intended purpose.

I have an agenda up here, right? So my intended purpose is to teach this material. Who's the second part of this conversation? The audience, right? So the audience themself may understand it to be told differently, right?

I may have an intended purpose. You may be thinking, no, that's a completely separate intended purpose. Now, I don't want to get into this whole thing about my reality, your reality, or any of that kind of stuff.

That's not what I'm talking about. But an audience in and of itself will receive information sometimes differently than even what the intended audience had or what the intended speaker was trying to portray.

And I'm probably causing you guys to do that right now. But so you really have two different parties here. And then if you wrap the third in, as we kind of briefly touched on it, the third is the contextual meaning within words.

So it is my intended meaning of words, your receiving of those words and processing them in your brain based on your own knowledge, right? Some of the words I may throw out, you may not even understand what they mean.

Or if I talked in security lingo or something else, you might, again, glaze over and shake your head and say, that's great, thank you, that's good. But not have an understanding at all what I had, what I was trying to portray to you.

So with kind of that background, let me ask you this now. So we talked about words having meanings and different types of meanings. The simple question I have then is, can words have more than one meaning?

Yeah, they can, right? And that's clear, based on the other information that we gave. And truly it is what I'm intended to portray. My words, I'm hoping you would not twist them and turn them around in a way that would meet your own agenda.

But in reality, you could receive information and you may not fully comprehend it and put it in your own words. So words do have intended meanings. And Operator, that whole game that everyone plays where you tell your friend, and then they tell a friend, and they tell a friend, and it comes back to you, and you're like, what?

I didn't say that at all. But that's kind of how things, over time, as they get transposed and people discuss things amongst themselves, they kind of get mixed up a little bit. And we see this in English.

What are some words that we see in English where words, again, by themselves, if I just said words to you, that you might be confused about? I mean, there's a bunch of words, but I'm thinking more of, I think it's homonyms and humblies and things of that sort, or what are some words that we oftentimes may get confused if we don't know context?

I said one of them earlier. John? Two. Two? Two? Two. Sun. Yeah. S-U-N-S-O-N. That's right. Sun. Bruce? Red. Yeah. Red. He read. He read the red book. Right? I mean, there's all sorts of areas. Yes?

Polish and Polish. Polish and Polish. All right. All right. I did not take Polish in school either, but Polish and Polish. We have deer and deer. And what? You're Polish. All right. Execute. Ah. And as a computer person, when you say execute to me, you know what I think of?

You push the enter key. You executed it. Not that you killed something. Right? I mean, that's what I think. Right? I don't want you to execute the keyboard or anything else, right? The mouse or whatever with a hatchet.

It's interesting, and I'll give kind of a side note. It's interesting. I had my sister who's about two years older than myself. She's now adopted. I think she's on her fifth child now that she's adopted from various parts of the world.

And it's interesting because the kids first came over, I'm going to get to Cambodia, I want to say. But they're in the car, and they have a little bit of English. And they're in Minnesota, and it's cold.

But the windows are fogging up. So what do you do when the windows fog up, usually, in your car? What's that? Well, you do draw on them, and I always got slapped for that. You're right. You know, it was always the hand came back from the driver's seat and hit one of us until we stopped drawing.

So you draw on them. But what does your parent tell you to do? Stop breathing is one of those. And that doesn't last very long, because usually your body tells you to pass out, and then you start breathing again.

But that's true. But what was it? Open a window. What's another word for open a window? Roll it down. Roll it down. What's another word? Crack a window. And guess what? She said, guys, crack your windows.

And they looked at her with these eyes that were about this big, like, what? You want me to what? And she had to explain to them, because it was a whole different language that crack a window meant something different to them.

Even though it was used in the English term, they were horrified, like, you're telling us to break your windows. And it was pretty interesting to see. But we see things even like coarse, right, a coarse or something that is coarse.

Lots of confusion can happen with words, and context is what really makes words what they are today. And to kind of talk a little bit more about the intended side of words, right, my intention in writing, and as we look at something like even the Bible, you know, that we have today, the intention of the author of the scriptures, right?

If I were writing a love letter to my wife, which I did many times while we were separated for about four years, East Coast, West Coast. But in writing that, do I have an intended purpose? Yes? Yeah, I have an intended purpose, right?

Does it always mean she's going to get the intended purpose? No. How many people here, and I'll raise my hand, I'll raise both my hands. How many people here have written an email to somebody, pressed enter or execute, right?

And it goes into the ether, and then you realize, oh, maybe I wasn't as clear as I should have been, right? Or maybe they're going to take it as, you know, something that was done out of anger, so we usually put a smiley face after it, right?

Or something to go, ha ha, just kidding, you know? But words can be taken very differently, especially in that type of communication, when you have email or some other means of written communication, you sit there and you may be going, what did they mean?

And all you can do is usually go to the original author and say, is this what you meant, right? And that's kind of critical. So if I wrote this love letter to my wife, right, I would want to make sure that I portrayed what I intended to let her understand, and I would write it in words that I would hope she would understand.

And the same thing we have with the scriptures, right? We have God has given us the word written by men and in a language that portrays an intention, right? So that's just a brief example. So why should...

Why Study God's Word

So let's get into a little bit more about Bible study specific. That was just general information. Let's get into Bible study a little bit more specific. So why is it important today? Why should we study God's word?

Why? I mean, you're here. You all, I think, have Bibles in your hands just about. If not, they're very close to you. But why should we study God's word? To know God, right? To know him. It's clear. Bruce?

Good. Any other reasons we should study God's word? He commanded us to, right? Yeah. He told us to. I heard something else. To learn, right? To understand our God, to learn more about our God. To learn about cultures we might not have been to.

All sorts of reasons, right? And how serious do we need to take the study of God's word? Is it something we should just nonchalantly, you know, pick it up and... And I'm not saying that, you know, we need to do word studies on everything when we read God's word.

But if we are portraying information in God's word to others, or even in our own minds, should we not take it somewhat serious? Is it not a serious thing that we hold in our hands? I know one author one time said, you know, it's amazing that today you can go and you can get a Bible, and I believe it was New Testament only, but you can get a Bible at the dollar store for a dollar.

And you think, wow, that's great. Someone can go and get a Bible for a dollar. But in many ways, if you think about it, it's really cheapened what we have in our hands today. It's lessened it to where it's only worth a dollar, people think.

So they think, why should I even spend time studying it? How serious is something if it's only a dollar? Where people lived and breathed and died for this, and many people would just take one section of text their whole life and just memorize it, because that's all they had.

They had just one piece of it, right? And yet we can hold it here. I've got probably 50 versions of the Bible on my iPhone, and I've got all sorts of other versions. I mean, it's gotten to the point where oftentimes we can be glib with it, but yet it is a very serious topic, right?

It's something that we really need to understand. And as we talk briefly, right, we can gain information about God here. The Bible is really God's mean of revealing himself to mankind. It's our central focus of God.

There's other materials about it, but shouldn't we go to the source and then go elsewhere after we've studied the source itself? And as Bruce said, it contains everything we need to know about God, right?

The Bible itself is everything we need to know about God. We also see that it gives us the ability to worship God, right? The Bible reveals to mankind the Creator and the acts that he has, his attributes within the pages.

It really shows us and reveals our Creator. So as we study the Word, we should be thinking about, wow, I get to worship this God. He's given me the privilege to worship him. What a great God it is, right?

It gives us a sense of worship. We don't study it just for the head knowledge, but we study it for the heart knowledge. It gives us that ability to worship him. And it's really there to solidify doctrine.

Why is it important to solidify one's doctrine? Why is it important? Separate truth from error, that's key, right? We need to understand what is true and what is false. What is error? What does God truly want from me?

What does he not want from me, right? I mean, it truly gives us that ability and we need to solidify our doctrines in that way and we can study God's Word and we can see doctrine throughout Scripture.

The other thing it does as we study God's Word is it allows us to preach God's Word, right? We can proclaim as we've studied God's Word and we've rightly studied it and we've analyzed it and we've gone through it.

It gives us the ability to then proclaim it to others. And not only from a preaching perspective, right? It can be a teaching perspective. It can be just a one-on-one, it can be a Bible study, it can be various means, it can be discussing in small groups, it can be just about any other means of teaching God's Word.

We need to study it before we can teach it, right? How many of you here, raise your hand. I hope there's none. Have ever taught something that they never studied first? Oh, wow. That's tough. That's got to be very tough.

I mean, there's times where as a consultant I've been thrown into a role where I might be... What's that? How much depth? Yeah. Yes. Yes. True enough. And I think what you find even more, it's interesting because I know with my wife and I we took martial arts many moons ago and, you know, it was a great time and you think right away, you know, boy, I know everything.

I know everything. This is easy. I know everything. But then as you go more through it and even God's Word, as you dig more into God's Word, right, you realize, I don't know anything. I know, you know, this much if even that much because you really understand the depth that is involved in something like studying God's Word and you just realize, boy, I'm just way over here.

I'm in the shallow end. I'm standing in the kiddie pool right now with, you know, and yet there's this whole Olympic-sized pool to swim in, right? I mean, it's just a powerful thing and I agree. I think there is that depth that there are times that we may come to something and say, boy, we know it inside out and we're ready to go and you realize just how deep you can keep going with something.

So it's true. It's true. And as an example, I've been thrown into positions as a consultant where the client has asked for one thing, we got on site and I was all prepared, ready to speak about something and they said, no, no, no, wait.

We really want to talk about this and talk about being able to try to spin your feet and really talk about something that I knew about, but again, I didn't know the depth that I should have known to really be talking about that.

What's another key reason? We're talking about teaching. What's kind of related to the teaching side? If you're not preaching, what else can you do with God's Word in a way of giving it to others? Kind of gave it away right there, but how else do we use God's Word and study God's Word?

Evangelism, right? It is the giving God's Word to those who don't know or have never heard maybe the good news and it allows us as we study God's Word to feel more comfortable. It's never easy to evangelize, but guess how much easier it is when we can go and evangelize and just understand God is there.

We've studied God's Word. We've done the best we can and now we are commanded to go out and evangelize. Lastly, I have a note here. It's really also to care for others. As I get older in life and I know as many of you others are more mature than I am and even some of the younger people here in the congregation have had to struggle or deal with people in their own families that are suffering with diseases or issues or facing life or death situations and I think that understanding and studying God's Word is key to being able to give hope and peace and just being able to care for others in that area, right?

That's where joy comes from, it's from the Scriptures. So let me ask you this question because you are all falling asleep on me. What qualifications are required to study God's Word? What qualifications?

Do you need a PhD in Doctrine or New Testament, Old Testament? Do you need to go to school? Bruce? Yeah, you need the desire, right? Where does the desire come from to study God's Word? From God Himself, right?

And we saw that clearly from the pulpit that it all is of God, from God, for His glory and His glory alone, right? That we are desiring to even study His Word, yes. Yeah, so how many people want to pick it up if it's foolishness, right?

They may pick it up and study it because you know what they often want to do when they do that? They want to argue it and debate it and find the contradictions as they talk about and they want to use it against you.

So it's a good thing to understand your own Scripture so you can go back and go, no, no, no, you don't understand. That's not how that's being used or that translation is incorrect or various areas. And again, it doesn't require you to have a PhD in Bible at all.

But it is a good thing to have a good understanding of God's Word so that you can be qualified to share that with others, right? What else is probably required? What other things are required? What other qualifications?

I've got one, two, three, four, five. I have five qualifications. Can you answer questions when you're on sabbatical? Are you allowed to do that?

Yes, correct.

Yes, so thanks for giving away my second qualification. But that's okay because we'll move into that now since Pastor Steve decided to steal my thunder there. But what I wanted to talk about, there's actually two in that same area, well, three really that all kind of relate to this, Steve, and I agree.

First is what is considered or what is better known as a reasoned knowledge of faith. So a reasoned knowledge of faith is one, even just understanding what the words are, right? As I talked to you earlier, I'm a security expert and I can tell, well, not an expert, but a security consultant, and I can talk to another security consultant.

We can chabber on all day long, right? All about security stuff, loving it, loving it, loving it, and someone can walk by and they go, I have not a clue what you're talking about, right? I know you've all been there because I've been there too when I've run into other areas.

And an example here is, you know, if you were to be picked up, now again, any quantum physicists here? I'm not, but just raise your hand if you're a quantum physicist here. Good. Then you'll all relate to this.

So you were now picked up and put into a level 500 quantum physics course and asked to take notes and then to give an understanding of what the teacher was teaching that day, right? And not only was it the first day of class, this is middle of the class, right?

So people already in the class have this great knowledge and this great understanding. They already are, they love physics and they desire physics and quantum physics specifically and time travel and all those other great things that come with it.

And you would be sitting there and you'd be like, one ceiling tile, two ceiling tiles, three, right? So to Steve's point, it really not only requires us to have the desire, right, the desire that comes from God to actually open the word and study it.

Anyone can do that. But we also, one, have to have an understanding of what some of this stuff means, right? If I start throwing out words, sanctification, glorification, justification, predestination, and you know, some people would be going, I don't know what any of that is.

Now again, those are larger theological words, but people need to understand the basics. Jesus, right? Jesus. What is that? Who is this God, right? I mean, the first thing in evangelism is who is God?

And if you have no understanding and someone just came into the subject and they had no comprehension of it at all, they'd be lost, just as if you were dropped into a physics class, right? A quantum physics class, to be more precise.

So there is a requirement that you have some knowledge of the faith, and that's something that continues to grow. If you're a new Christian here and you go, I don't know what half of these words are, it's that growing in your faith where you study it and you say, I want to know more about these words.

What is that? You may look it up in the dictionary, the thesaurus in the back of your Bibles or a study Bible, whatever it might be. It's important to have some knowledge of faith. And again, that grows.

Thirdly is an obedience to the word. You are not over the word. I am not over the word, right? I may be standing over the word, but I am not over the word. The word is over me, and I need to have obedience to the word.

So whatever the word says, it's not my job to make it say what I want it to say. And we'll talk a little bit about that later. It is that the word as an understanding from the person who's coming to study the Bible is the word is over me.

I must obey what the word says. I can't contort it in a way that meets my needs. So obedience to the word is a requirement to study God's word. And again, as Stephen said, anyone can study the word and not believe these.

I'm talking about study the word that, again, is not only the head knowledge, but a desire, a motivation to study God's word deeper to know who this God is. And then I talk here about the illumination of the Holy Spirit.

Again, these are all kind of areas where Steve has wrapped it in. We've got a reasoned knowledge of the faith, and that comes with those who are sitting here in this class, a desire to learn, or those who are listening to the preaching that comes from the pulpit, a desire to learn God's word.

Obedience to the word, that you are under it, not over it. We've got that discussed. And then the illumination of the Holy Spirit. So again, anyone can read the word, but can you truly understand God's word without the illumination of the Holy Spirit?

I mean, we can understand parts of it, right? We can understand the history. We can understand various narratives. But can we truly understand the meaning of God's word without the illumination of the Holy Spirit?

No, we can't. Scripture says we can't, right? Truly, we cannot. The last one I have here is really, you may say, well, wait a minute, that doesn't make much sense. Let me rephrase a little bit. But it is church membership.

Church membership. And it's more of not membership from you are required to be a member and you've signed the document and you've been brought up here and welcomed in as a member. That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about church membership in a way that you are accountable to others, right? So when you study God's word, if I were to be studying God's word and I said, ooh, this must mean do, do, do, do, do, because it says this and this, but I understand it really doesn't, there's an accountability with a group of believers, right?

There's an accountability that comes with church fellowship more than church membership, but the accountability is very important and to study God's word, that accountability must be there. And it's really there to protect what they call individualism.

You know, how many people left in a room to study something, come out with, you know, something that's new and exciting and, and let me be the first, I know it's been preached here before. Let me be the first to tell you, anyone who comes to you and says, I found something new and exciting in the scriptures, new and improved more than anything else, turn and run away because there is nothing new.

It may be something new to you, some new concept you may have learned or something great, but it can't go against what the pages of scripture already say, right? No new and improved. Run from that. And that's where church membership comes in.

It's, it's that accountability of brothers and sisters. It, it gets away from the selfishness or the self-serving thoughts or ideas and knowledge in a bubble is a bad thing. Having your own just knowledge in a bubble is a bad thing.

One of the other requirements is that, that we really use appropriate methods, right? There are methods to study words. There are methods to study texts. There are ways of studying God's word. So there are different methods that one wants to do and the desire has to be there to have it.

But at the same time, we, we, we want to make sure similar to like the scientific method by studying science and other areas, there should be methods for studying of God's word to ensure that what we are seeing or what we are understanding is right.

Challenges in Bible Study

It is what's the, what the author intended for us to understand as we talked earlier about. So what are some of the challenges? What are some of the challenges in Bible study? I have, I think, five, but what are some of the challenges?

I might have six. Challenges to Bible study, time, big, big, big issue, right? Why is time an issue? It's something we cherish, right? Something that we desire and want to do, right? It shouldn't be something that's forced.

There are times that we run into those situations where we are rushed or we, or we, you know, get through it just to get through it. I'm reading through the Bible in a year and I've got another, I've got to get this done so next, I don't get behind kind of an issue.

Now in relation to your discussion around time, because I want to hold on to that. How does time also though vary how we understand God's word? How does the difference of time, I'm talking about from today, right?

How does it change from today, 2000 years ago, Christ on the cross, and then if we go back, let's say, a couple more thousand years where we say, how does that change? How does time change the understanding or study of any text, sanctification?

In a more general sense, how does time impact that? Yeah, yeah, and in that same instance, do words change over time? Does everyone agree with that, right? I mean, there are dictionaries, did you, I didn't know this until I did some studying, but did you know there are dictionaries to just words that no longer exist in the English language?

There are complete dictionaries, and I'm trying to think of the term now, I'm drawing a blank, but that are essentially decommissioned words. They're no longer valid words, they're outdated words, they're not used anymore.

And there are full dictionaries, and I thought the regular dictionary was pretty big and this one is just about the same size. So words change over time, meaning of words change over time, and again, as we talked about earlier, not only do they change over time, but they can change multiple times over time, right?

In one instance, if the New Testament, words can be used in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, and even in current time, and they change, right? Words change, so that can complicate things, but we have materials to assist us in those things, right?

We can go back and we can look at historical words and how they were used and how that Greek word was used elsewhere and so forth. So there are methods, and one of those issues is time that we need to first understand when we're coming to the text, right?

Bible covers thousands of years between Genesis 1 through Revelation, and sometimes it's hard to understand a language in our own time, let alone another time, right? I mean, I could just talk to someone on the street and they might not even understand some of the words I use.

I know even kids nowadays, you know, my daughter uses some word that, to me, used to be groovy and cool, you know? She uses different words for the same thing, but things change, right? I mean, groovy to most of you who are around my age and know what I'm talking about.

Those who don't, you say, boy, you are old, right? So we have time gap. We also talked briefly about cultural gap, right? Cultures. The culture we live in is, how close is it to both the Old and the New Testament cultures?

How close is it? It's about as close as east is from the west, right? I mean, it was very, very different, very different in those times. And yet, in some ways, it's similar. But in essence, you had very Gregorian type or agrorian, right?

Agrorian? Agrarian. Agrarian. That's the word I want to use. Yes, thank you. We had farmers and fishermen. And we had, back then, kings and judges. And we have judges today, very different from the judges then.

We have some kings today, but not over us in our society. We still have fishermen and farmers, but it's a day of information, right? It's a day of technology. It's industry. It's all the great things like that.

Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Can you imagine if you took, you know, my strength comes from Facebook, and you try to take that back to a person back in history, and they would think, well, what are you talking about?

What is this? You know, it's very different cultures we live in today from back then and very different customs and different practices. So, when we read things, sometimes we'll go, well, that seems odd.

Why would they do that? But yet, we need to understand that there are differences in culture. Yes. Ajay. Yes. Yep. Yes. Yes. And I think, to your point, I think what we run into is, again, the desire why anyone would want to study God's Word, right, and that it isn't easy, right?

I'm trying to stress here that studying God's Word isn't easy. It does take time itself, right, as was discussed over here with Becky. It takes time. It takes, you know, effort. It takes work. I mean, yeah, I can pick up my Bible, and I can just read something really quick, close, and put it away.

But do I really understand it, right? I can say, checkbox, you know, I read my New Testament, I read my Old Testament, I read my Psalm and my Proverb, did it for the day, check, and I walk away. If my life hasn't changed at all, right, if the love isn't there for the reason why you're studying God's Word and you're not taking that extra effort to really dig into God's Word, and we have to be grateful for people who have come before us, right?