Well, the Bible says, “Mark the perfect man,” so people named Mark really like that verse. It also says, “Try the spirits,” and alcoholics really like that one. But is that really what those verses are saying? Hi, church. Today we are in lesson nine of our 20-part series on Bible study, almost halfway there, and we are starting to work through my book BIBS, Big Idea Bible Study, which I wrote for our teens over ten years ago, talking about the name Big Idea Bible Study. Today we are going into the video that describes the inductive method of Bible study and describes the big-picture goal we are starting with, observation. If you are new here, my name is Pastor Ryan Rench, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California. I recorded this video over a year ago for an extension ministry of another Bible college, and I just hope it helps you grow in knowing Jesus better. So after this lesson, get into God’s Word. With that, enjoy this week’s video.
The Inductive Method
Well, hello, and welcome back. This is class number nine of our series on Bible study, and I have just been having such a good time talking about the Bible. Now I want to actually start into some of the process I use, and some of the thoughts from the book I wrote for our teenagers. We had gone through a series just like this when I was a youth pastor at our church, and this is kind of the way I think of studying the Bible for myself. I love looking at things that have a bigger picture, and that is kind of where we are going to start today. We are going to use what is called an inductive method, which is not unique to me. Many of the Bible study materials you will find use the same method of observation, interpretation, and application, and so we have used that same structure here. The subtitle here is “How to Read and Understand Your Bible Using Observation, Interpretation, and Application,” and that same concept is what we are going to use today. We are going to start with what we mean by that bigger picture. Like we said, the title here is BIBS. That does not mean the bib you put on a baby. You are not a baby. I am not insulting anybody. I am just using that as an acronym, B-I-B-S, for Big Idea Bible Study. The whole concept there is that we are coming to the Scripture, and we are not trying to bring our ideas into the Scripture. We are trying to figure out what the ideas are that are already in the Scripture, and we are going to try to mine them out. We are going to try to hear what God has to say. The idea is, well, when you write a letter, you are trying to convey a thought. If you are writing somebody a note, they cannot put their thoughts into your words. You have something in your mind that you are trying to convey when you are writing to them. So the same idea is, man, in this Bible God was trying to convey something to us. He is the One who wrote it. He is the One who has the idea of what He was trying to say. God is the One who gave the words to the human authors, and the human authors were the ones dealing with certain situations, whatever the situation was. It might have been that they were recording history. It might have been that they were addressing some problem. For instance, in the church of Corinth there was just problem after problem, so the Apostle Paul was writing the letters of 1 and 2 Corinthians to correct those problems. But that was God trying to correct mankind’s problems, because the problems are common to everybody. So we are trying to get into the mind of God, in a sense, through the Apostle Paul. We are trying to hear what the author intended to say. So we are not going to use all kinds of really obscure methods. We are just going to try to read the Scriptures and understand what they have to say. In some of the past lessons I went over a little bit of the history of Bible interpretation, and there were seasons throughout history when people would approach the Bible allegorically. They would think that every bit of every story carried some kind of hidden spiritual meaning. I just do not think God is trying to hide His meaning from us. I think He used situations and men to expose the heart of mankind. I mean, we are all dealing with the same things all the time, so we can relate with people of 2,000 years ago, or 3,000 or 4,000 years ago. We can relate with them because mankind’s heart has not changed. So we just need to figure out what God said in the Scripture already, and then see what He is still saying to us.
The Man with the Cross-References
I was preaching one time from the book of Proverbs, and I finished the whole sermon, and somebody came storming up to me and said, “You did it all wrong.” I am going, “I did what wrong?” He said, “You did it all wrong. You did it all wrong.” And he showed me his Bible, and in the center column of his Bible there were these cross-references. We were in the book of Proverbs, and he proceeded to show me: “Don’t you see this verse here in Proverbs? The cross-reference goes to Second Timothy.” And this was an issue with the devil, and all these problems you preached about us having, well, they are not our problems; they are the devil’s problems. I am oversimplifying the story, but his point was, “You preached Proverbs wrong, because there is a verse in Second Timothy that says something else that is kind of related to the Proverbs, but it puts a whole different meaning on it.” I tried to say, “Well, wait a minute, wait a minute, hang on. Before Timothy was written, what did the proverb mean? What about the people who were reading Proverbs for centuries upon centuries? How did they read Proverbs before the book of Timothy came along? Was it obscure? Was it unknowable before that?” He kind of stormed off and would not really think along with me, but my point kind of stands. I mean, yes, Jesus Christ unpacks things from the Old Testament, and once we get to the New Testament we do have a fuller understanding of it, but we can still read the proverb, and we need to understand Proverbs first the way they understood it, and then we can unpack deeper meanings from that. The way I preached it was just with the original intention, the heart of God, and the focus of what was actually there. I did not go to the New Testament to try to unpack some hidden meaning, like he expected me to.
How God’s Revelation Unfolded
In a sense, that is how God’s revelation works, and we have to understand how things were laid out. From the beginning, I mean, it was just God and Adam, and you did not have to guess at what God had to say, because He just talked directly to Adam. So Adam had direct revelation. But then it was Moses. Moses received revelation from God and then would tell the people, for example, and that was how the people heard God’s voice. The more situations came up, the more it became codified into what we call the Law. It was the law for their people, so that Moses did not have to address every single situation anymore. He could just say, “Well, wait a minute. What does the Law say? God already spoke to this. Let’s look at the written Word. And if it is not in the written Word, then I will go to God, and I will seek the answer to your question.” So Moses received revelation from God, for example, and then we see the prophets throughout Israel’s history. The prophets spoke on God’s behalf. They received revelation from God and came down to present it to the people, and after presenting it to the people, they in essence wrote down their messages. So we have the burden of Isaiah, or the burden of the Lord through Isaiah and Jeremiah, and we have the messages they preached, the messages God wanted them to portray to the people. That is where the Scripture became so valuable. They preached the sermons, but then the people could go to the written Word and see what God said, and that He was still addressing His people and still revealing Himself in this way. So God’s revelation meant something to Adam, meant something to Moses, meant something to the original readers, but everything in the past also still meant something, and they could look back at what was in the past and read what God had already said, and it just kind of built on itself over time. There were psalms, there were poets and songs that were added to that and understood to be the inspired Word of God, and those were tested by who wrote them and all of that. I am not going to get into the canon of Scripture. But when we got to the New Testament, the same concept was there too. The apostles were the ones receiving the revelation from God, and they were there for a short period of time on earth, and they presented God’s thoughts to the people. For instance, the Apostle Paul received revelation from God and then spent time with the Corinthians, spent time planting churches with the Ephesians, spent time with the Galatians countering false doctrines and false teachings and all of that. Then when he would go on with his missionary journeys and spread to another part of the country, he would hear what was going on in the churches he had planted. Maybe he would hear about issues going on in those churches, and he would write letters back to them, or he would try to encourage Timothy and write a letter to Timothy, or to Titus, or to Philemon, and write letters to his friends. Those letters then were the inspired Word of God from the apostle, addressing certain needs of mankind. That is the idea of the revelation of God. Once the revelation of God was completely written down, it was no longer this question of, “Man, I really need to hear from God.” It was just as simple as saying, “Well, the Apostle Paul wrote about this issue to the church of Galatia. Let’s get the letter the apostle sent to the Galatians, and let’s read it, and let’s see if it applies to our congregation too.” Many times it does, because as humans we are dealing with all the same problems, and the Scriptures ultimately address every single one of those problems. So we are looking to the Scripture to find God’s ideas, to find God’s thoughts. This is where we get our direction from God. You do not have to pray for a vision. You do not have to pray for a dream. You do not have to pray for extra revelation from God. We realize that when we are opening up the Scriptures, we are hearing from God. There is no more extra revelation that is going to be given. Once the Scriptures were done being penned, and once they were spread all over the regions, and once they were passed down from generation to generation, well, we have God’s thoughts already. He does not need to, and will not, give us any more thoughts, according to Revelation and according to Second Timothy. So we are going to the Scriptures for all of our needs.
Why Call It the Big Idea?
Now, why do we call it the big idea, though? What is the concept behind the big idea here? Well, the concept is that every note you write has some kind of big idea, right? If somebody gives you a gift, you sit down and write a thank-you card. I just had my birthday, and several church members gave me such nice gifts, and I wrote many, many thank-you cards to them. In those thank-you cards I wanted to be an encouragement. I wanted to say something funny about their family, or have some kind of personal connection there. But the big idea of my note was to thank them for giving me a gift. It is the same thing for a letter of recommendation, or a business letter, or a love letter. You are writing something that has one intent: to express your love, or to express your recommendation, or to express your thanks. The Bible is written in a very similar way. It is going to have these big ideas. There are going to be big major themes for each book, for example, so you want to look for some of these bigger-picture kinds of things, these big ideas. The Scriptures are not just a bunch of unrelated thoughts. They are not just a bunch of sentences put together, but they are arranged in specific ways, and it is this beautiful big picture that emerges. A book has one big theme, one big idea. For instance, you might have heard Philippians called the book about joy, and Corinthians is a whole bunch of ideas about purifying the church and correcting the errors within their church. So each book, I am saying, has a big concept that is being conveyed, but then within the book you can break each book down into big movements as well. That might be a full chapter. That might be an entire section of several chapters at once. So there will be big movements of ideas throughout the book, and those can be broken down even smaller, into maybe one chapter, or maybe even just a passage of Scripture. For example, if you go to a Bible-preaching church, many times the pastor will say, “Okay, open your Bible,” and you will turn to a Bible passage, and then he reads maybe four or five verses, maybe seven or eight verses, whatever the selected text is. And from that text he will say something like, “Today we are going to have a sermon about love,” or, “Today the topic is how to grow your family,” or, “Today we are going to learn about how to overcome temptation.” So at the start of the sermon, or in the sermon title, there is something about the big idea of that text, and that idea is what is going to be conveyed through the rest of the sermon. Usually, if a sermon is like that, then I think even in our personal devotions we can study the Scriptures like that. So I like to really shoot for one big idea. What is God saying? What is God trying to convey here? What is the concept God is trying to convey? Because once I can figure that out, it is kind of like looking back at what God said, and once I figure out what God said, then I want to bring it to today and see what God is still saying to us. So what did God say, and what is God saying? If we do that for preaching, then I think we can do that for personal study as well. Just preach a sermon to yourself in your daily devotions or in your personal study, and look for that big idea there. There are different teams that compete, sometimes internationally, debate teams, and the debate team will have a certain team line, a big idea they are trying to debate. It is their side versus the other side. So they will break their debate down into the supporting arguments, but they are all trying to convince people, or win the debate, over that one idea. So we see a big idea there. If you are exposed to advertising, the advertisers are trying to expose you to one aspect of their company. They are not trying to sell you the entire company. They are just trying to sell you a product from their company, and they are going to focus a commercial not on many, many things but on one thing, one big idea. Journalism: if you read a newspaper or a news article, the lead sentence will usually be in that first paragraph. That is what sets up the entire story. That is your lead. That is your story in a nugget, your story in a nutshell. Everything you are about to read in the rest of the article is summed up in this statement. That is the big idea. So we see it all over the place, in journalism and advertising and debate, and maybe in a mission statement of a company you might be involved in. Your company might have a mission statement or a vision statement, this big idea they are trying to promote and live by. Well, we see that in the Old Testament as well. We see “the burden of the Lord.” That is a singular statement, but then we read chapter after chapter of this sermon: what does the burden of the Lord have to say to this country? “Woe unto thee, Moab,” and woe unto this one and that one, and there are all these big movements of the Scripture. Throughout all of the Scripture, not just the Old Testament, there are going to be ideas within a verse itself, within a passage, within a chapter, within many chapters, within many books, and then you go big enough and there is a message of the entire Bible, which is going to be about Jesus Christ and redemption through Christ. So the big idea is going to be very big, or it is going to be this nutshell concept within a smaller text, but either way we are looking at what the big idea is. This means we are putting certain things into our own words so that we can take it home with us, so that we can understand it, so that we can grasp it a little bit better. So we are going to be looking for the big idea.
Deep and Wide
You cannot arrive at the big idea without going both deep and wide. There is a kids’ song called “Deep and Wide,” and we need both aspects of that in our Bible study. I love going deep into Scripture. I love finding out the meanings of words and seeing that it is all connected, trying to mine out what is going on in the Scripture. But I do not want to go so deep into Scripture that I miss the width of Scripture too. I want to read several chapters before and after it to make sure I am staying in the flow of thought. I want to make sure I am understanding not only this word, this one verse, this one concept that is here, but I want to see how it fits into the whole chapter as well. So in Bible study you need both the depth and the breadth, the width, of what is going on in the Scripture. Big Idea Bible Study specifically is about getting both that in-depth look and the broad look at the same time, especially through the devotionals we have done. You will get broad reading as well as in-depth reading and rereading of a particular passage. So some of the things we want to understand are these. What was the original author’s intent? What was the original author trying to convey? What was he thinking when he wrote this book? What did God want him to convey, not only to the people in Galatia? Then number two, what is the timeless truth from that? There is a truth for the Galatians, but because it is the Scripture, because it is eternal, what is the timeless truth from that, the truth that affects all of mankind? How can we figure out that truth? And then third, what does it mean for us today? So first I have to know what the Scriptures said, then I have to figure out what they are still saying, and then I have to figure out what they are saying to me, and that is the final step. We look at that, like I said at the beginning, through observation, interpretation, and application. Observation is the big view. Interpretation is finding the meaning of the text, and we will talk in more detail about that in future lessons, getting a little bit more refined, more detailed. And then application is the final step, where we say, “God, what are You trying to change in me? What do You want me to do with this?” This is a book to be obeyed. So I do not want to just study it. I do not want to just know what it has to say, but I want to know what it has to say so I can obey it. So in what ways do I need to obey it? Observation is the bird’s-eye view; interpretation, what is God saying; and application, what is God saying to me.
Observation: The Bird’s-Eye View
I like to start with the observation side, and we are going to take probably the next ten minutes to talk about that. Observation, then, is the broadest view. It is the way you approach any text before diving into the words themselves on the page. I like to step back and say, “Okay, what is this book about?” Think about going into a library. You go in the front doors, if you have a library near you. We have libraries that are categorized by all the different topics of books, and there will be signs hanging from the ceiling that tell what type of book is in this section, on these shelves: signs that say reference over there, signs that say science books over here, or animals over there. Maybe you like fiction, and you walk into the library and look around at all the different signs hanging from the ceiling, and you find the fiction section. You want to go read a fun story, and within the fiction section you narrow it down a little bit more. There is shelf after shelf of different kinds of novels, and you want to read science fiction, so you go to the science fiction shelf. Already you are narrowing it down: “It is not going to be reference. It is not going to make me smarter. It is just going to be an enjoyable book, and I am going to have a fun time reading this science fiction story.” So you go to the science fiction shelf, and you see a series of books you have been reading through already, and you see the cover of the book, and you take one of the books off the shelf. You see the front cover has lasers and spaceships on it. It is a dark black cover, with spaceships flying around in space. You turn the book over and look at the back cover, and you see the author’s picture on the back, and you read a little bit about the author, and you see where he is coming from and how he got into writing science fiction stories. There is usually a paragraph on the back cover that gives you a little introduction to the book, a little teaser of what the book is going to be about, and it whets your appetite for what the story is like. I am saying that when you go to that section, before ever opening the cover and seeing what is on the inside of that book, before ever reading one word of that book, you have a pretty good idea of what this book is going to be like, because of the information you have gathered from what we are calling observation. You are just starting with the big picture, and that already narrows it down pretty close and tells you a lot about what you are going to be reading. That is similar to how the Bible is laid out. There is going to be an observation that is done before ever reading the words themselves, because the books do not all read the same. I mean, science fiction does not read the same as poetry or as a school book on science. You read one differently than you read the other. You have totally different expectations of each of them. The idea for the Scripture is the same. You do not read a letter from the Apostle Paul the same way you read the Psalms. You have different understandings. There is going to be apocalyptic literature, which calls for a different way of viewing it, because it is going to be prophetic and future-telling, so you are not going to read it the same way you read history, like the history of Israel. I used to just approach the Bible like it was all the same. I used to just open it here, to Revelation: “Okay, I will read some of that.” Then Ezekiel, and I will read some of that, and then Matthew, the Gospels and the parables, and read them all the same, and just look for something I could pull from it. That is not the right way to approach the Scripture. I should have started by observing, by observation. Observation is that big bird’s-eye view, like you are flying up in the sky looking down on the text from above. You are able to see the big movements going on. It is like being in an airplane, where you can see the farmland all sectioned out because you are so high up that you can see all of it at once. So observation is going above the text, in a sense. You are trying to see the entire book of Matthew, or the genre of Matthew, and you are trying to ask and figure out the answers to some of these kinds of questions. Why was this book written in the first place? You can find that from reading the individual verses of the book, but I want to look at the whole book as a complete unit. Why was this written? Why did this book need to be written and preserved for us still today? If you are reading a story, ask this: what happened in the story before this story? What happened leading up to this story? What was going on that caused this situation? So you look at the bigger picture. You ask these questions: To whom was this written? Why did this have to be written for them? Ask this question: What is the problem in mankind that God is trying to fix by writing this book? What are the issues in man that they were facing, that I am probably still facing today? What is the problem in mankind that God is trying to fix? We ask: What type of writing is it? What genre of writing is it? Is it poetry? Is it apocalyptic? Is it history? Is it narrative? Is it just telling a story, or does it expect us to find significance in every single word or not? So it is really important to take that bigger picture and see things in context. We are going to take a whole lesson on context pretty soon, but man, that is very important.
Do Not Skip Observation
Do not skip observation. Observation is very important, because did you know the Bible has lies in it? Do not call me a heretic. I am saying that the Bible accurately records, for instance, the lies of Satan. So if you are just reading it like, “That is no big deal; every word in here is for me,” you might open the Bible, read a lie of Satan, and think God said it. Observation helps you read the passage in its context and go, “Oh, okay. God did not say that; Satan did.” We need to make sure we are observing rather than just skipping to one word here or there. You might have heard the story. It is a fake story, but somebody says, “I need a message from God,” and he flips his Bible open, and it says, “Judas went and hanged himself.” He goes, “Oh no, this is a terrible message. I do not want that. I need a new passage.” He puts his finger down at some other random passage, and it says, “Jesus said, Go, and do thou likewise.” “Oh no, I hope this is not a message from the Lord.” And he tries flipping one more time, and it says, “That thou doest, do quickly.” That is not the way God leads. He is not expecting you to just flip through the Bible, stick your finger down, and find leadership from Him. That can lead to some disastrous results. That can lead to some terrible heresies. So we need to observe: what is God saying in this passage? What is the context here? We need to understand that there was an intention here. There are some people who study numbers and figures and types, and they go so deep that they think they can prove anything in the Bible. Psalm 46 has the word shake in it, and it has the word spear in it, forty-six words from the beginning and forty-six words from the end, and we have to skip this and that, and, “Oh, well, Shakespeare is in the Bible!” Well, no. That is not what God intended. That is not the meaning of the Scripture. You are missing the point. There is a verse in the Bible, Psalm 37:37, that says, “Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of that man is peace.” People named Mark really like that verse: “Oh, Mark, I am the perfect man.” But that is not what the verse is saying. I hate to break it to you, if your name is Mark, I am so sorry, but that is not what the author intended. That is not the meaning of that passage. And the same thing, I mean, you can go on and on: “Try the spirits.” That does not mean spirits like alcohol, right? “Try the spirits” means something completely different: “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.” So we want to be careful about that. We want to understand: what is the message? What is the intent of the Scripture? If you open a letter from your landlord, you are not just jumping around in the letter and pulling out random phrases from it. You are looking at what is going on. If the landlord says, “Dear Mr. and Mrs. John Smith, this letter is to inform you that unless you pay your bill, you will be forcibly removed from the premises. You have five days before you are evicted. Have a nice day,” well, you do not read that and say, “Well, that is so nice. They want me to have a nice day.” That is not the big idea of the message from your landlord. The big idea is, you have got to pay up, or you have got to get out. So see the Bible in the same way. I want to know what God is saying. I want to see the big idea, the bigger picture, of what God is trying to convey here, and that is a beautiful way to view the Scriptures. What is the point of this letter? Do not forget to observe. Start with observation. The next time we meet together, we are going to look through some of the tools to help you with some of those observations, so I am looking forward to seeing you next time. 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.
