8 - Biblical Hermeneutics, The Importance of Context

Well, welcome back to the Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Biblical Harmoneutics. We are glad that you are with us yet again. Actually, we're kind of glad any of you students returned, really.

But for the tens and tens of viewers, we're glad you're here. We want to welcome all the new students that have joined us. We welcome you, but really you're supposed to start at the beginning of class, like start from lesson one, so go on to YouTube and make sure that you're kind of watching from the beginning because, well, if you start in the middle, you lose some of the, um, what's that word?

Oh, context. That's right, and that's actually what we're going to be talking about today. Context, context, context. That is going to be today's lesson, the importance of context. I'm also going to give you a little bit of secret of how I get to answer so many questions that people ask me about the Bible and make myself look really, really smart while knowing next to nothing.

I know knowing next to nothing doesn't surprise some of you. You were surprised that I said that some people think that I look really, really smart. Therefore, if you watch, I'm going to teach you how to look really, really smart while knowing next to nothing.

It'll be easy. I do it all the time. So if you have your syllabus, we won't use it today. Well, okay, maybe we'll kind of peek at it toward the end, but I doubt it. If you remember, and if you need a syllabus, actually, you can contact us at the website that's below my chin, yeah, down there, and you can get your syllabus so that you'd be able to follow along with us.

We, last class, looked at ways that you should not, not, N-O-T, not interpret the Bible. Yeah, it's those ways that most people actually do use. Remember, isolationism, proof texting, and spiritualizing.

Those are the three keys to not follow in interpreting the Bible, but unfortunately, it's the three that are most often followed. But we understand that some people like to do it the wrong way. We are here to learn how to do it the right way, and that's what we're hoping to do.

The Importance of Context in Bible Interpretation

Now, what we're going to talk about in this class is the importance of context. We ended the last class in talking about context. We mentioned some different types of context that we're going to dig into a little bit deeper this week.

And so, we're going to look at some different types of context for you to keep in mind when you are interpreting the Bible. Now, here's the simple thing that I do all the time when people ask me what a passage means.

We looked at this last week. We looked at Jeremiah 29, 11, and so many people seem to be using that one lately as a promise. And if you remember what I had said, was that if you just read all of Jeremiah 29, you end up learning that this has nothing to do with you and I.

It was a promise to Israel. And so, if you just go like a few verses past verse 11, you'll see that God actually says He's going to promise things like a sword and judgment. No one wants that as a promise.

You see, the context is important. And so, what I end up doing when someone asks me a meaning of a verse of the Bible, usually all I have to do is read the verses before it and the verses after it and that usually tells me enough to answer it.

And I just say, well, what do you think this is talking about? And they read the part before it and after it and they go, oh, well, I think it talks about this. And I say, yeah, you know, I think I agree.

And they go, wow, you're really, really smart. And they walk away thinking, I'm smart and all I did was read the book. You should try it sometime. You know, we actually suffer from a case where we have a mindset that has been given to us by doing the reading of the Bible, kind of like people read the daily bread.

And if you read the daily bread each day, I'm not, you know, condemning it and saying it's a horrible thing. I'm just saying what that does is takes one verse and then tries to pull out of one verse, give it some meaning.

And people read their Bible one verse at a time and that's not really the right thing to do. The Bible didn't have, and when it was originally written, it didn't have chapter breaks and it did not have verse breaks.

Those are something that came much later. The Bible was meant to be written book by book. And this is important for us to remember because we tend to want to break our devotions up maybe by a couple of verses or look at just one verse that supports something we think.

And that's not the way that the Bible was meant to be read. The way we are supposed to read it is book by book. I mean, read all of it, the book. That helps us. You know, one of the things that I found very, very valuable when I was going through a systematic theology book, and I really wanted to learn my systematic theology as I was starting out in seminary, was I actually practiced what I mentioned last week with Greg Kokolow, he says, is don't read a Bible verse, but to read the context.

What I actually did is if I had a Bible verse that mentioned John 3, 16, I read all of John 3. It helped me to see the context, to see what was being discussed in a broader picture, and to understand how this one verse fit in.

Sometimes I found that people were misusing the Scriptures that way. Sometimes I got a better understanding of the Scriptures that way. Very, very valuable thing to do. Another thing that's really valuable, if you have a pastor who preaches verse by verse through books of the Bible, what I strongly encourage you do is as you learn the lessons that we're going to be teaching throughout this class, strongly recommend that you practice using these principles with whatever passage your pastor is dealing with in his sermon.

In other words, if your pastor is, say he's in Luke chapter 3, and he just started verse 1 through 5 this week, and next week he's going to pick up at verse 6, say you look at it, maybe he's going to do 6 to 10, I don't know where those breaks are, I just happen to be throwing those numbers out, but maybe you should start looking at verses 6 to 10 before Sunday.

Here's what you're going to end up finding. You're going to get a better understanding of the sermon that's being proclaimed. You're going to have a better understanding of it. You're going to understand the interpretation.

You're going to know where he's going in his sermon probably, if he's going verse by verse and expounding each part, each verse, but you're going to understand how that fits in the broader context. Very valuable thing to do.

I remember starting to do that when I was very early in my seminary career, just to practice hermeneutics. So I would study with what my pastor was studying, and what I'd actually do is I'd ask him what he was going to, what passage he was going to deal with by that next Sunday, and I would study it out.

I got a whole lot more out of the sermons when I started doing that. It became a very valuable lesson, and one that I try to continue even to today when I'm sitting under other pastors and other men who are preaching.

So it's a really good thing to do and to practice, all right? So what we want to start with is the first context that we want to deal with. The first context is historical context. Historical context.

Now part of historical context is going to involve understanding the history at the time. This is going to be valuable because when we see passages that talk about say, the confusion that people have often with Jesus Christ being called the son of God, they assume son of means offspring, and it doesn't always mean offspring.

Sometimes son of has a different meaning to it that could mean essence of. Now wait a minute Andrew, can you support what you just said? Historically? Well sure, let's take a look at this verse. In Mark chapter 3 verses 17, we see that James, the son of Zebedee, and John, the brother of James, to whom he gave the name Boregis, that is, now notice what it is, sons of thunder.

Ooh, sons of thunder. Now how do you get a name sons of thunder? I mean, were you really, really good? I mean, what did you do to deserve that title? Sons of thunder. Well, the issue there is we see that that is saying that they had the essence of thunder.

The big, bolsterous guys that would, you know, sit there and really give what they were saying and, you know, a lot of, basically probably they were good open air preachers, right? These thunderous kind of guys maybe.

They had these voices. They were, you know, kind of jumping on people at the time, and the two brothers were actually trying to say to people, hey, you're not with us, you know, you got to be away from us type of thing, and they got the nickname sons of thunder.

Now, how many people who want to say that son of God means that Jesus is some sort of some offspring of God? How many of those people do you think are going to take that passage and mark and go, oh yeah, two lightning bolts kind of, they got together and they smashed into each other and the result was James and John?

That'd be a little bit ridiculous, don't you think? That's right, because that's not what the meaning of the word is. At the time, historically, we understood that son of had the idea of essence of. So, sons of thunder means they have the essence of thunder.

And so, we see when we look at that, that this is something that as we look at the history of it, that this was something that came about historically, okay, because of the fact that there was, you know, the idea of an essence of and an attribute of identified with individuals.

So, when we look at the historical context, we see that this term son of has a different meaning. Now, that plays into an interesting thing because, you know, when we talk about son of God with Jesus, we often think that He most often, you know, had to be convinced, we had to be convinced He was a God.

In our day and age, people question the deity of Jesus Christ, but historically, we have to understand that that wasn't the case in the first century. Actually, in the first century, His deity was clearly understood, it was His humanity that they had questions about.

And His humanity was what they questioned. That is why we see often in the early century, in the time of the writings with these Gnostics, believe that anything material was evil and anything non-material spiritual was good.

They knew Jesus was good, they knew He was God, therefore, they questioned His humanity. Let's take a look at a passage, 1 John 4, the first three verses, it says, Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God.

For many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God. And every spirit that does not confess that Jesus is not from God.

This is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you heard is coming and now already is. So, do you see that? This is showing here that the issue at the time that John was writing was that people denied Jesus came in the flesh.

People don't often question that today. Well, some do, but they're just kind of being ridiculous. I mean, they so want to deny God, they deny all history that points to the reality that Jesus Christ was a human being and lived on earth.

But nowadays, people question the deity. But that wasn't the case in the first century. Historically, when we read that verse in 1 John 4, we have to understand what was being taught at the time. This Gnostic thought, this belief that men, that Jesus couldn't be a man because He was good and believing He was just God.

So, we have to understand its historical context. Along with the historical context, after that we have to understand a second type of context. That second type of context is a grammatical context. A grammatical context.

What's a grammatical context? This is a context of the grammar. This is the meaning of the individual words, the tense of the words. Sometimes, whether a word is in the past, the present, or the future can make a difference.

There's some times that you see where God will speak in the future, or sorry, in the past about a future event. And you go, well, that seems kind of strange. Well, it seems strange to us because of the fact that what He's doing is He's trying to make sure that we understand that something is so secure, so absolute, that He's using it in a way of saying, this is so kind of a done deal, we would say in our vernacular, that He speaks of it as a past thing, even though it's still future.

All right? We have sometimes where words can make a difference. Let's take a look at this one. We see here in 1 John 5, it says, I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may, look at that word, know that you have eternal life.

Keep that for a second. See that word know? Know is in what tense? That's in the past tense. So what you have there is the reality that God is basically pointing out to us that if we believe in Jesus as the Son of God, then we already have eternal life.

We have it already. It's something that we possess, something that we own. We know, past tense, that we have this. Well, that fits in well because actually if you look in John, the book of John, you'll see that eternal life is not living in heaven.

It says the eternal life is this, that you would know God. That's what eternal life is. Eternal life is not as so many people argue. So many people think, oh, eternal life is living for eternity in heaven, and having eternal life is not that, but actually what it says in the book of John, in chapter 17, verse 3, is, and this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ in whom you've sent.

So that is what eternal life is, which is fitting for the passage we just saw. You may know that you have eternal life. That is the importance of that past tense word. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, you already have eternal life.

So, let's look at one more, and that is John 18, verses 4 to 18. John 18, 4 to 18, sorry, 4 to 8. What did I say, 18? John 18, 4 to 8. Then Jesus, knowing all that would happen to him, came forward and said to them, whom do you seek?

And they answered him, Jesus of Nazareth. And Jesus said to them, I am, look at that next word, he. Most of your Bibles, their literal translations, that will be in italics. I am he. We're going to come back to that.

Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with him, with them. When Judas, when Jesus said to them, I am, look at that, he, they drew back and fell to the ground. And he said to them again, whom do you seek?

And they said, Jesus of Nazareth. He said, I told you that I am he. So, if you seek me, let these go. Now, hold it up for a second. I want you to look at that. The I am is what he actually says. If, in my Bible, I crossed out the word he, because when you look in the original, the he is not there.

Now, it's perfectly fine to translate that, I am he, and to put the he in there, because that helps in an understanding of the passage, so we understand what he's saying. But there's a different connotation.

You see, when he says, I am, they fell backwards. Why did they fall backwards? Was he so loud in saying it that they're blown over by the volume? Did he say it was such force that they fell over by the gust of wind from his mouth?

I think more what it is, is he was claiming to be God, and they fell over themselves in shock because they were thinking he was committing blasphemy. Or that just by him claiming his name, a supernatural event, by him claiming his name, they fell over.

But you see, there's a very distinct theological difference in saying I am and I am he. The grammatical context, it becomes important because in here, I think we've added an English word to help in understanding the meaning of the passage, but it may actually change the theological context.

The grammar might be read better as I am. Who are you seeking? And they said, Jesus of Nazareth. And he said, I am. That's the special name for Yahweh or Jehovah in the Old Testament. I think that his claim was a claim of deity, and they understood that.

So they went, whoa, hey, wait a minute. This is something different. He's claiming something special here. And I think adding that name in there makes it a change that we have to understand. Now, when we talk about this and we talk about the grammar of things, we have to understand that we're going to have to see that there's different ways to take these things.

And we have to be careful with the grammar because we're learning from a different language than what we might be reading. We may read in English. But we have to remember that the Bible was not written in English.

It was written in Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic. So we have to understand it in that context. And in understanding it in that context, we get a better understanding of what it could mean, okay? So we have to be careful with it.

We have to be really careful to understand what the grammar was and how it was used. There are times where translators put words in to help flow into the English or maybe a Spanish or French or some other language that may lose some of its meaning, okay?

So that's why we always want to go back to the original, all right? Let's look at one other passage out of Deuteronomy chapter 6. Well, let's hold that. All right, let's go to, before we do that, we'll go to spiritual context.

Literal Interpretation, Spiritual Interpretation, and the Shema

The third type of context is called spiritual context. Now, with spiritual context, what we have here is the idea that there is a context that could have a spiritual meaning that could be different than the meaning that we have.

Now, when we look at this, there's three different things that I want to point out when we talk about spiritual context. There are some different ways to interpret the Bible, okay? There's, I think, three different ways to interpret a passage.

When we come to spiritual context, this becomes important, all right? The first way is a literal, literal interpretation. Now, literal interpretation means that you're going to take a verse and you're going to interpret it word by word exactly as it means it.

And that could cause some trouble, as we're going to see in a few moments. So, we're going to look at one, let's look at an example of a literal, where literal interpretation can be, give us a different meaning.

If you look here, we have Deuteronomy chapter 6 verses 4 to 10. This is called the Shema. This is known by every Jewish person. If you go to a Jewish home and you see on the edge of the door, you might see a device called a mezuzah.

And a mezuzah is something that has this verse in it. It's something that every single Jewish person would know very well because it is so important to them. But I want to also tell you what they do with this.

So, let's look. It says, Here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.

You shall teach them diligently to your children. You shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up, or when you rise. And you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be on the frontlets between your eyes.

You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. And when the Lord your God brings you into the land that He swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you with great and good cities that you will not build.

Now, when you see here, we see this great part in verse 5 that you will love the Lord your God with all your mind, heart, soul, and strength. Right? So, we're going to love the Lord. These, I think, are the words that God wants us, the command that He wants us to put on the heart.

But what the Jewish people actually do is they take them, verses 7 and following, and they take them literally. In other words, as I said, when you go to a Jewish home and they put them on their doorposts.

When you see them say that on the frontlets of their eyes, what a Jewish person does when he rises in the morning is he's got these verses in a little box that he puts on his forehead and he ties it up and he puts it on his wrists and he ties it up.

They're called phylacteries. So, this verse, this command that God gave, well, it's kind of impossible for us to put on our heart and live it out completely. To love the Lord your God with all your mind, heart, soul, and strength, kind of difficult to do.

What's easier to do? Take those words, stick them into a little scroll, put them on top of your doorpost or at your gate, or put them in a little box and wrap them to your wrist and your forehead. That's something we can do.

So, what do they do? They take it literally, and I think they missed the meaning of the passage. Passage is not that we should literally bind this passage to our head and our hands and put it on our doors so that we would be teaching it all the time.

It's why the Shema is one of the most recited passages. It's recited often because it is to be taught when you're rising up and when you're lying down, when you're at home sitting and when you're walking by the way.

That's what, as Jewish people, we would do. So, we have to remember that it's not to be taken literally because that was, if you read the context, the emphasis is that we should put God first and foremost in everything that we do.

That's the point. When we're lying down, we're standing up. When we're walking by the way, we're sitting at home. Everywhere we go, it should be right in front of our minds. It should be at the forefront of our mind.

That is a literal translation that could cause some trouble. Well, what else do we have? Well, we can have a spiritual interpretation where the literal translation is going to be taking it very, very literally and not put it into a context to understand that.

This gives it a spiritual meaning that the text may not actually have. Now, I hate to do this. No, I don't. Actually, I kind of am glad I'm going to do this. I'm going to ruin the way that some of you evangelize because you take a spiritual interpretation.

Well, some of you. I know not most of you. Some of you are very good students of the Scripture and you know better. Thank you very much. You're going to read these verses in their context and therefore you're not going to fall into this trap of spiritual interpretation.

But I know some of you don't know better. Some of you maybe are just learning these lessons and this is going to rock your world and I'm sorry about that. I know that after this you may not share the Gospel the same way again and that's probably a good thing.

It's better to be accurate with the Word of God than to teach something just because it preaches well or sounds good, right? Many people use this passage here and I'm going to give you the whole passage so we get the, what's that word again?

Oh, that's right, context. We want to make sure we get the context because the context is going to explain why you shouldn't use Revelation chapter 3 when sharing the Gospel. You see here we're going to see that it says, verse 20, it says, Behold, I stand at the door and knock, and if anyone hears my voice, I will come in and eat with him.

And so many people use that when they talk about sharing the Gospel, come to Jesus and He will open the door, He stands outside the door of your heart waiting for you to come in. Oh, that sounds so good but read verse 14.

What does it say? And the angel, and to the angel of the church, do you see that word? Wow, the church of Laodicea. This isn't talking to unbelievers. Who is it talking to? The church. You don't believe me?

Well, keep reading to verse 22. And he who hears Him, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. Oh, the churches. Notice what people do is they spiritualize this. They take verse 20. Behold, I stand at the door and knock, and if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him.

And they say, this is Jesus standing on the door of your heart at salvation hoping that you'll open that door and let him in. But look at the context of it. Let's read the whole passage. Revelation 3, 14 to 22.

And the angel of the church, the church of Laodicea write, the words of the amen and the faithful, the true witness, the beginning of God's creation. I know your works. Whose works? The church's works.

You are neither hot nor cold. Would I that you were either hot or cold? So, because you are lukewarm, I will neither, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. Now, let's hold on there for a second.

I'm going to come back to this. But I'm going to deal with this because this is another spiritualization that people do in this passage. What's the hot and cold talking about? People go, oh, I wish, God wants us to either be on fire for God hot or just cold and dead.

But it's because you're lukewarm that He's got an issue. This is not talking about that. Okay? In its historical context, what people do is they spiritualize that by saying God wants you either hot on fire for God or cold, dead.

It's a, you know, but He'd rather, I mean, God does not want anyone cold. Okay? He doesn't want anyone in the church that's cold. Okay? He wants everyone on fire for Him. All right? But what's He talking about?

Well, if you understand the area historically, culturally, you're going to learn that in its historical, cultural context, Laodicea had two types of springs. They had a hot or there were two types of springs in the area.

There was a hot spring that would come up and bubble up and was good for medicine. It was good for, you know, just being like in a hot tub. It was soothing and relaxing to the muscles. They also had a cold spring that would come in.

And that cold spring was refreshing. Good, cold glass of water. But you see those two springs actually intermixed. And where they intermixed, they were lukewarm. And the lukewarm, when you drank that water, it wasn't good to drink because of the heat.

It would, you'd spit it out of your mouth. It wasn't good for medicine because it was, it was lukewarm. It wasn't good for drinking. That's why you'd spew it out of your mouth when you drank it. This is what the context, the historical context of what he's talking about.

And sometimes people take this because they don't understand the historical context. So what they do is they use a spiritual interpretation to explain this verse. Let's keep going. Now that we understand that, I want you to know that verse 15, I want you to know, I know your works, you are neither hot nor cold.

Would I, would that you were cold or hot. So because you are lukewarm and neither hot or cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered and have need of nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked.

I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich and, and white garments, so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen. And slay, salve, salve for your, anoint your eyes so you may see.

Medicine, some of that medicine again. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline. So be zealous and repent. Now who, who's doing the repenting there? It's not repenting unto belief. It's repenting of the church who are not, who are depending on self and not God.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him and he with me. The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me at the throne.

And as I also conquer and sat down with my father's throne, he will, he who has an ear, let him hear what the church, what the spirit says to the churches. You see, he's not knocking on the heart of an unbeliever.

He's knocking on the door of the church. The church, the believers, those who are professing to know Christ. So what we see there is when we look at that, some people spiritualize something and sometimes they do it as in this passage, sometimes they do it because they don't understand its meaning historically.

And because they don't understand its historical context, or maybe its grammatical context, or maybe, and therefore they try to give it some spiritual context that it doesn't actually have. There are passages to the scriptures that do have a spiritual meaning, but it doesn't mean every verse has a spiritual meaning.

We have to make sure that we're reading it properly, reading the scriptures and giving it a spiritual meaning where God gives it a spiritual meaning. When people start to spiritualize what the Bible says, they can make the Bible say anything that they want it to, and they call it spiritual.

So there are times we take it literal. There's times we take it spiritual. When do we know? Well, I would argue the way to do an interpretation is a normal interpretation, or a literary interpretation.

In other words, we take it normally where we should. We take it spiritually where we should. When do we take it spiritually? When God tells us to take it spiritually. In other words, when God says, out of Egypt I've called my son, and he's speaking of Israel in the Old Testament, but it's attributed spiritually to Jesus in the New Testament, that is a spiritual meaning that is being given.

When Jonah is in the belly of the fish three days and three nights, and that's a literal context that literally happened, but then Jesus says that that had a spiritual meaning that the Son of Man would be in the belly of the earth three days and three nights, now it has a spiritual meaning.

Why? Because God gave it one. In the other places what we do is we take a literal meaning to it where it should be, but not always. Literarily, there's times where we understand things to have different meanings.

In other words, if I say I'm so hungry I can eat a cow, hope you don't think I can eat the entire cow, but you understand that it is a means of me saying that I'm very, very hungry. And so we have idioms that are used, but idioms are different between cultures.

So there's times where God would say in the Proverbs an idiom like, six things I hate, yea, seven the Lord hates. Well, what we're having there is when he says six things the Lord hates, yea, seven the Lord hates, it is to emphasize the seven.

And then he gives seven things. It's not that the Lord can't count. It is an idiom for emphasis. In other words, he's putting an emphasis on this list. This list is not just six, it's seven. It's greater importance is kind of the idea there.

So we have to understand what the literary interpretation is. In other words, when we want to understand its spiritual context, we need to understand the literary context to have an understanding of it.

Because that's going to play a role. Let's take a look at a kind of a longer passage and see how people give a spiritual context to something because it's what they experienced. That I think, and this one's questionable, so if you disagree with my interpretation on this, it's perfectly good.

There's good grammatical reasons to do this. But if we look at Romans chapter seven, this is kind of a longer verse and we may not have the time to read the whole thing. So you may be familiar with this.

And when we look at this, it says, What shall we say then that the law is sin by no means? Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the laws did not say what you shall not covet.

Actually, I want to look at up to verse six here. The context was in the present tense. At this point, in this passage here that we have in front of us, the context actually switched and went to the past tense.

And so when he talks about this, he's talking about the law. I believe this is the law written in his heart, that he came to understand what does it mean to covet. The law told him you should not covet.

So he knew coveting was wrong. Therefore, he coveted. Okay, so I think this is actually Paul coming to salvation. He says, if you look down to verse 19, For I do not do the good that I want, but evil that I do not want is what I keep doing.

Now, if I do what I do not want, it is no longer what I want it, but the sin that dwells in me. I find it a law in my heart. I want to do right. Evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inner being.

But I see in my members another law, waging war against the law in my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am, who will dwell for me in this body of death?

Thanks be to God, our Lord Jesus Christ. So then I myself serve the law with my heart. But with my flesh, I serve the law of sin. And then after this, it goes back to the present tense. So here's what I see.

This is the passage many of us experience, right? We have a love for God, but what do we experience? We keep going back to that sin that we hate. So the things we don't want to do, we seem to keep doing.