I have found that you can make the Bible say whatever you want it to if you are creative enough, and at the end of this video we are going to share an example of how bad Bible study can make you say some weird things. So we want to be really, really careful with God’s Word and try to figure out what God is saying from His Word. It is His Word, not ours, and that is what Bible study is about. Hello, church. Today’s lesson is the third lesson of a 20-part Bible study series. You can check out the last two videos we have already posted, but in today’s lesson I want to talk about what the Apostle Paul thought was the best idea for encouraging the next generation to love the Bible, and then we will look at some of the objections people might have to Bible study. I recorded this video over a year ago for an extension ministry of a Bible college, so it might look a little different than normal. Our channel is primarily for our church, but if you are new here and trying to grow in knowing Jesus better, well, we hope this is a blessing. My name is Ryan Rench, pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California. With that introduction, enjoy this week’s video on Bible study.
Faithful Men Who Shall Teach Others
Okay, welcome back. This is class number three, and I am excited about today, because we are going to get into a little bit about why Bible study matters, and why careful Bible study matters, and even how Jesus did it, and we will look at some of the Scriptures around that as well. So I am going to start our class with the Scriptures, in 2 Timothy 2 verse 2. Second Timothy 2:2 says, “And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.” So when we are talking about Bible study, we are talking about the Apostle Paul’s vision to pass on, like he says here, “the things that thou hast heard of me.” Well, that same thing, what is he supposed to do with it? Commit it to many witnesses? I am sorry: “thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men.” So his life is going to be one of teaching others. It is internalizing it himself and teaching other faithful men, but teaching it in a way so that these faithful men are able to do what? “Who shall be able to teach others also.” So it is a generational kind of focus of Bible study. We are focusing not on some allegory we came up with, using our imagination to pull random things out of the text, but we are approaching the Bible so that it can be passed down from generation to generation, and so that each generation can then obey the Scriptures. Here is what the Bible says about that: “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.” Luke 11:28 says, “But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.” And then Psalm 119:105 says, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” So we are called by God to be people of the Word of God and to focus on the Word of God, so that we understand it and try to live it, so that we love the Bible and try to live it. Last time we said maybe that means you say amen in church, you bring your Bible with you, you stay awake, you sit up, you do not talk, you pre-read texts, you allow the Scriptures to change you. But that is still along the lines of what the Apostle Paul was teaching Timothy.
Passing the Baton
If you have your Bible, you can go to 2 Timothy chapter 4. I will put those verses up on the screen here as well. Second Timothy 4, and I will scroll down to verse number 5: “But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry. For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.” Paul is saying, “I am about to die. My departure is at hand.” So I thought, man, how do we get people to love the Bible like the Apostle Paul loved it? How do we get people to want to endure to the end like he did? And I do not know a better way than what the Apostle Paul seemed to indicate to Timothy. There is no motivational speech I can give. “You know the Scriptures. From a child you have known the holy Scriptures. They make you wise unto salvation. Timothy, the answers are in the Scriptures. They are inspired by God. They are able to make you perfect.” So the only thing the Apostle Paul told Timothy was in verse 2: “Timothy, preach the word. Whether people like it or not, whether it is popular or not, be instant in season and out of season. Whether people are inspired by it or not, you just preach the Word. You allow the Word to change you, and you preach it, and trust the Word of God to change other people.” So if you are a Bible preacher or a Bible teacher, that is good advice: just focus on the Word of God and allow it to change people’s lives. That has to be the thing that drives Bible study. You are driving yourself in Bible study, and you are allowing the Scriptures to change you and work through you, and you are like a sponge that wants to soak it all in. That kind of passion has to come from us. We cannot heap to ourselves teachers. We cannot only love the Bible when it is in season, or when it is popular, when it is something we enjoy doing. The Apostle Paul is telling Timothy, and it is almost like he is saying, “Look, I am at the end of my life now, Timothy. You have to make it. You have to be as passionate about the Word of God. You have to commit that same thing I taught you to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.” It is like the Apostle Paul had been running forward his whole life as an apostle. He had been giving so much of his attention and time and energy to the passionate preaching of the gospel and the Word of God. For him it was not just a job; it was a calling. It was something he gave his life to. It was like he was saying, “Man, my whole life would almost be wasted if you, Timothy, do not carry the same passion from one generation to the next.” Is that not kind of what he was saying in the Scriptures we read? Look at verse 6 up there: “I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course,” or my racecourse; my leg of the journey is done; “I have kept the faith.” So, Timothy, it is your turn. It is your turn to take your leg of the relay race. It is like he is saying, “I have made it, and so, Timothy, you have to make it. You have to be passionate about the Bible. I have fought my fight. I am about ready to pass on. I cannot keep fighting anymore.” Just physically speaking, these old bodies wear out and they die. So Paul knew that he was at the end of his journey, but it is like he had a baton in a relay race, and he is saying, “I am passing the baton off to you and to many of the others I have tried to train up, and my leg of the race is done.” If you ever watch the Olympics, or you watch relay races like that, you know that the job of one leg is to pass the baton to the next runner, who grabs it and runs the next lap with that baton, and they pass it on to the next person. In those relay races, those baton races, the runner in front takes off and the runner in the back is running full speed trying to catch up to him. Neither of them stops and says, “Okay, yeah, here is the baton for you,” and then the next one starts running. No, the relay race means that it is in full motion while it is running. The lead runner has to be running, and the trail runner has to be running full speed ahead. And Paul is saying, “Boy, I have done my lap, and I am worn out. My time is just about done, but I am still going as strong as I can, all the way to the end. But you know what? You have been running alongside me for a while, and your hand is out. You are just about ready to take it. So I am passing you the baton. You can do this, and I am relying on you to do this.” The Scriptures themselves have to continue on through a whole lot of problems, because look what he says in verse 10: “For Demas hath forsaken me, having loved this present world, and is departed unto Thessalonica; Crescens to Galatia, Titus unto Dalmatia.” Well, that is a shame. Verse 11 says, “Only Luke is with me. Take Mark, and bring him with thee: for he is profitable to me for the ministry.” Boy, Paul seems kind of lonely here. Verse 14 says, “Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil: the Lord reward him according to his works.” It is like he is saying, “Man, there are a whole lot of people falling out of the race, and you have got to stay in the race. You have got to keep on going for the Lord. You have got to love the Scriptures and let it be a lifelong pursuit.” It is like Paul is telling us that still today too. I am a young man, just getting off the starting blocks in some senses in my race, and maybe there are some out there who are young like that, or even younger. Maybe there are some kids and teenagers who are inspired to keep on going, and I encourage you to keep on going. There may be some who are of an older generation, and you may not have as much time ahead of you, but you still have got to be running all the way to the end. Do not pass the baton off until you are right at the end of your race. The Apostle Paul says in verse number 17, “Look, I might feel alone, but,” verse 17: “Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me; that by me the preaching might be fully known, and that all the Gentiles might hear: and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion.” So his whole life, he said, “Man, my life has been about preaching the gospel, and here I am at the end, and God is with me.” I am so thankful for the Apostle Paul’s passionate example. I am very glad that he was passionate about the Bible, so that we can be passionate about the Bible too. I love the Bible. I love that it is so life-changing. I love that we can study it and it transcends all of time and every culture. Even if you are in a completely different culture than mine, you can still take the Scriptures and be challenged and helped by them, and be challenged by the Apostle Paul’s endurance. The Word of God is the thing that is going to endure. The Word of God is going to be the way that Christian servants can continue for the long term. The Word of God is the only thing that is going to be passed from generation to generation. That is the only thing that is going to endure. All of our mentors, all of our bodies, are going to shrivel up and die. I mean, that is just the way life is. But the Word of God will endure forever. We can focus on the Word of God. So the Apostle Paul tells Timothy, “You just preach the Bible. You just preach the Word, and you study the Scriptures, and you love the Scriptures.”
Hermeneutics
You might have sat through these three lessons and thought, “Man, I want to study the Scriptures. I want to get into it. This is what I want my life to be about. So how do I study the Scriptures? How do I really trust the Scriptures?” That is where a little bit of study is required. That is where some thinking is required. It goes a little bit beyond just reading the Bible. Being a Bible student, being somebody who studies the Bible, means we have to attach some thinking to it as well. You might say, “Well, it has come through humans, hasn’t it? What about that? I cannot always understand it. Do I have to be a scholar in order to study the Bible? Do I have to go to Bible college? Do I have to learn Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic? Do I have to study for fifty years before I can really understand it?” The answer to all those questions is no. You can understand it as you are right now, but it does take some thinking. You do not have to be a scholar. You do not have to know the original languages if you have a Bible in your language, and especially for those of us who speak English, we can open up the Scriptures, and in what we are reading we can hear God’s thoughts, and we can put our minds to those things. But it is not just open to whatever our interpretation of it is. That is where there is a big word called hermeneutics. That is where hermeneutics, the science of Bible study, comes in: the rules we follow in order to arrive at the conclusion God wants us to arrive at. Later on we will talk a little bit about the history of interpreting the Bible, but when we are talking about the Scriptures, we want to know, okay, what does this passage mean? What is the interpretation of this text, whatever text you are in? You want to know exactly what you are reading. You are not reading something into the text; you are pulling something out of the text that is already there. You are not putting your meaning into the text, but you are trying to uncover what God is trying to say in the Scriptures. In Luke 24:27: “And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” Well, that is interesting. Even Jesus Himself expounded the things in the Scriptures concerning Himself. So Jesus Himself did Bible study. What Jesus did was go to the Old Testament Scriptures, and when He was conversing with somebody, He was not just quoting the Bible, but He was expounding. He was explaining. He was unpacking those Scriptures in order to uncover their meaning. It says He “expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” He was showing the people, through a Bible study, that He, Jesus, was the meaning, the reason, for those Scriptures. When Jesus expounded unto them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself, the word expounded there is from a Greek word, hermēneuō. It just means interpretation, or understanding, or unpacking, or translating, in a sense. It is helping us understand what the words mean. The word is also used in John 1:38: “Then Jesus turned, and saw them following, and saith unto them, What seek ye? They said unto him, Rabbi, (which is to say, being interpreted, Master,) where dwellest thou?” So the word interpreted is the same word. It is kind of where we get the word hermeneutics. It is just a big word to say, what is the meaning of the Scripture? In Bible study, when we focus on the Scriptures, we are trying to find the meaning of the Scripture. We are trying to understand what the Scripture is saying to us. We want to know what God said. We do not want to twist the Scriptures to say what we want them to say, but we want to interpret them clearly. In 1 Corinthians 12, when there was no interpreter, they were told, well, then these gifts cannot be used. Interpretation means there has to come understanding along with these gifts, so an interpreter was necessary. It means that the goal is for people to understand, so that people can read the Scriptures and understand them. So if you hear me use the word hermeneutics, it is just a big word for the understanding of Scripture, the study of Scripture, the interpretation of Scripture, or, as I will probably most often say, the meaning of Scripture. What does this text mean? What is the meaning here?
Why All This Study?
We say, well, why do we need to do all that study? Why do we need to find the meaning, and how come we need to study so hard about the meaning of Scripture? Well, I do not know about you, but this is not my word. This is God’s Word, and it kind of scares me that I am going to have to face God one day and give account of how I handled His Word. I do not want to put my thoughts into the Bible when He has already given us His thoughts. I want to handle His Word the way He intended. He had a specific thing He was trying to get across when He conveyed His Word. So we are going to face God for how we handle it, but then we also want to obey it. We want to obey the Scriptures, and we want to know what the Scriptures have to say to us. I am so thankful for the Bible. You look at these false religions out there and the false gods, and the worshipper never knows how to appease his gods. If you look at a witch doctor or some kind of temple priest, or some kind of rabbi or teacher, it is like they are always trying to find a way to appease the gods. If there is a death in the family, they think, “Well, we do not know why, but maybe you have to offer this sacrifice or that sacrifice.” They are so unclear. They just do not know. The gods seem to be so fickle and always changing their minds, and they never know how to please their gods. But we know how to please our God. We just have to read the Scripture and know what it means to please our God. We can trust the Scriptures, and we can read the Scriptures to know how to be right with our God. We do not have to guess, “Do I have to give a sacrifice, or do I have to…?” We do not have to guess at that. He has already shown us from His Word. Somebody might say, “Okay, I understand that it is good for us to read it and obey it. I want to be careful with it. But why all this study? How come we have to put so much effort into studying it? Can I not just read it for myself? What is all this about hermeneutics and big words? Isn’t it obvious?” Some people would say it seems pretty obvious: “Why do I need a whole class on how to study the Scriptures?” Part of that is true. We do not have to complicate the Scriptures any more than necessary. But it is not true that every passage of Scripture is just automatically obvious. We do not just read it and conclude that whatever it makes us feel must be the answer. That is not the answer.
What About the Holy Spirit?
Somebody would say, “Well, doesn’t the Holy Spirit interpret it for us? We have the Holy Spirit, don’t we? So again, why do we need to study so hard if we have the Holy Spirit?” Well, to that I am thinking, in my language, here in America, in the year 2022 at the time of this recording, if I did not have a Bible dictionary, I would never have known what the word phylacteries means. If I am reading through the Bible and Jesus is talking about making broad their phylacteries, that is not language we use in our culture. We do not have phylacteries. I would not know what a phylactery is. And it is not like we should expect the Holy Spirit to be a dictionary in our mind: “Okay, Holy Spirit, give me the definition of phylactery.” The Holy Spirit does not work like that. He is not a dictionary for words we do not understand, for example. He is not downloading information into our minds that helps us understand Jewish culture, or the Pharisees’ culture, in the days of Jesus. That is not what the Holy Spirit is for. The Holy Spirit is there to illuminate Scripture, to convince us that the Word of God is the Word of God, that when we are reading the Bible we are reading the words of God. He convicts us of sin, and yes, He illuminates Scripture. He helps us see it from God’s perspective. In that sense He helps us understand; He shines a light on the Scriptures when we are reading them, to convince you that they are true. He helps you grasp the message, but not necessarily comprehend the message. He is not a dictionary; He is illuminating the Scriptures. The Bible tells us, “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” So that spiritual discernment to understand the Scriptures comes from the Holy Spirit. In these things that are spiritually discerned, the Holy Spirit steps in and helps us embrace the meaning of the Scriptures, but it is not necessarily that at first glance we understand the interpretation of the Scriptures. If we are just relying on somebody who says, “Well, I have the Holy Spirit,” that opens you up to a whole lot of false teaching out there. There are a whole lot of people who claim, “I am following the Holy Spirit,” and yet their teaching is completely different from the Bible’s teaching. So how do you square those two? Which one are you going to trust? For me, I am trusting the Bible. I am just going to verify everything from the Bible. There are those, like the Mormons, for example, who would say, “I have got to have a personal understanding. I read the Book of Mormon, and I got a burning in my bosom, and that is how I know it is real.” Well, we say, “Okay, how do you know Jesus is real?” “Well, because I felt this and that.” If you are going to have an argument or a discussion about that, we cannot discuss feelings. Your feelings are not the same as my feelings. So we have got to come back to a starting place. We have got to be able to look at some words together and say, what do these words mean about Jesus, and what do these words mean about God? We can read the same book and come to a conclusion based not on feelings but on some objective standard. That is the whole point of what we are trying to do here through Bible study, to say, “Look, we want an objective starting point.” So when we believe the Scriptures, that means there are going to be a few rules for interpreting the Scriptures. We are not just going to read our thoughts into them, but we want to follow some of the rules, so that we are not just saying, “Well, the Holy Spirit told me.” No. If it does not follow common language rules, then we are going to be really, really careful about that, and not just trust somebody who claims to be an expert. We will give some weight to somebody who has poured some time into the Scriptures, who has given his life to the Scriptures, and that is where your church comes in. That is where your pastor is going to be a big help. That is where a class like this is going to be a big help to you. I needed to learn from people who were experts in the Scriptures, so to speak. I still do. I read books from people who have given their lives to studying the Scriptures. I study the Scriptures more than I study their writings, but I still use their writings to help me. So we will need to have that as a resource, as a tool, as somebody who can help me understand ancient Israel, or help me understand what a phylactery is. If the Holy Spirit is not going to tell me that, then I have got to be able to have a dictionary, or a Bible atlas, or a Bible resource book to explain to me what a phylactery is, for example. So I am going to rely on those things, and that is where Bible study comes in. That is where some of the hard work of Bible study comes in. We have to be willing to say, “I am not an expert in this field. I do not know everything about this. When I read the Bible, there are a few things that are a little bit confusing. I am misunderstanding some of it, and I need to put some extra work into this.” That is where hermeneutics comes in. Finding the meaning of a passage, the interpretation of a passage, means that it is going to be a difficult task. It is going to require a little bit of extra thinking. It is going to require some study.
Words Change
Language itself has changed, even in my time. I had a grandma who was born in 1920, and in the span of her lifetime words themselves changed. A car and a plane were completely different instruments of technology when she was a baby compared to when she was an old lady. In the span of one generation there were major, major changes. A phone was something corded and stuck to a wall, and now it is a device in our pocket, this computer in our pocket. So in the language from the 1920s till now, when you talk about a phone, are you talking about a 1920s phone or a 2020s phone? We have to understand, okay, when was this written? What was the society like in 1920? What was the culture like in 1920? What did these words mean back then, as opposed to now, in 2020? If somebody says “cool” or “sweet,” sometimes those words have different connotations and different meanings. The word dude might be a cowboy dude, or “dude” might be something a surfer will say to somebody else, as though he is saying that was a fun activity, or getting his friend’s attention. So words themselves have different meanings throughout time, and hermeneutics is kind of like what we do when we are conversing with somebody who is older than us, or somebody who is much younger than us. We are trying to figure out, “Okay, where are they coming from? What does that word mean when they say it? What that word means when they say it and when I say it are two different things, but I think I understand where you are coming from.” We try to deduce the understanding based on word definitions and generations and all of that. Someone might approach the Scriptures and say, “Well, I bring my meaning to the Bible,” but that is going to change with every generation. I would rather interpret the Bible not by my own standards of interpretation, not by the words I use today. I was a youth pastor, and the teens were always coming out with something, and I am the college director now at our church, and the words are always changing. They always have some new word. It seems like every couple of months there is some new weird word, and they change the meanings of words, and I cannot even keep up with it. I am talking about the span of just a couple of years, and words are changing. So I am not going to interpret the Bible based on words from my era. They are constantly changing. I want to interpret the Bible based on the words God was trying to say. So we are going to be careful with the wording. We are going to be really careful with the Scriptures and just try to explain what they say. Now, each of us will approach the wording in a different way. If the Scriptures say something like “white as snow,” and you grew up in a place where there is a whole lot of snow, if you are a snowboarder and used to being in the snow, then you are going to have one understanding of it. But if you grew up in a place where there is no snow, you will need a little bit of explanation of what snow is. So hermeneutics is just explaining what snow is, for example. We have to understand the words as they are meant to be understood. We have to understand the words that are there. We cannot bring our own meaning into it. That is the summary of the whole lesson today.
Put On the New Man
One lady, dead serious, wanted to divorce her husband because she read the words in the Bible, “put on the new man.” I mean, that is absurd. It is an absurd misuse of Scripture to read “put on the new man” and think, “This is God’s sign. He is telling me to divorce my husband.” No, absolutely not. She needed better hermeneutics. She needed to understand what the Scriptures were saying, not force her words into the Scriptures. So when we study the Scriptures, we are approaching them as though, “Man, this is God’s Word. This is His authority. Whatever God says, we are going to discern it, we are going to understand what He is saying, and then we are going to obey it. We will do what He says.” I hope that is a blessing to you. We will see you in the next lesson. Well, thank you for watching this video from our 20-part series on Bible study. I realize this kind of content, or our Baptist perspective, might not be for everyone, and I do not want to waste your time, but if you did find it helpful or enjoyable, would you subscribe to our channel? We are releasing videos every Monday at noon Pacific Standard Time, and I just want to help you bring the Bible home. So we will see you maybe in person this Sunday at our church. That is it for now. God bless you, church. Grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
