What about when you are studying the Bible and you reach a different conclusion than somebody else? Which one of you is right? Well, you are, of course, and they are a heretic. That is how this thing works. Well, in today’s video we want to look at a few Scriptures that talk about that, that will give us an objective view of the Bible, and figure out where some of those differences of interpretation might come from. Hello, church. Today’s lesson is lesson four of a 20-part video series on Bible study, and in today’s lesson we are pulling some thoughts from this book, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation. We will talk about the distance between us and the Bible, look at bad scholarship versus good scholarship, and then look at interpretation styles throughout history. At the end we are going to look at three big presuppositions that we are admitting right from the beginning, before we go into Bible study. Here is where we land. If you are new here, my name is Ryan Rench. I am the pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Temecula, California. I recorded this video over a year ago for an extension ministry of a Bible college, so it looks a little different from our normal filming setup, but I hope it just helps you grow in knowing Jesus a little bit better. So with that, enjoy this week’s video.
The Distance Between Us and the Bible
Well, hello, and welcome back. This is Bible study lesson number four, and today we are going to cover two big topics. First we are going to talk about a goal of Bible study, and we will cover some more of that later on as well, and also the history of Bible study. Like I said, okay, we are jumping into the Scriptures now, and we are studying the interpreting of the Scriptures. We want to know what it means to interpret the Scripture. We are trying to find the meaning of Scripture, and we said last time that we are not approaching the Bible by framing it in our language but in theirs. Bible interpreters through the ages have used the Bible to force their thoughts into Scripture, and that is wrong. Frankly, they once used it to prove slavery was okay, and that is wrong. They wanted to use incorrect interpretations to further their own understanding. So when we are approaching the Scriptures, we need to acknowledge that there is a lot of distance between us and the original writing. I mean, here we are a couple of thousand years later, and there is a distance there in a number of ways. There is a distance of time. That is one way we are distanced from the Scripture. There are 1,900, 2,000, or 4,000 years between us and the writing of the Scriptures, depending on where you are reading. You are reading something like Job or Genesis, and man, those are such ancient books. And even for the New Testament writers, the Old Testament would have been ancient writings, and now here we are looking back on the New Testament writings. So we have to acknowledge that there is a distance of time between us and the original writers. We have just got to work at this, at figuring out how to bridge that gap of time. Then there is also a distance of culture. Your culture may not be the same as my culture. I need to try to understand your culture if I am going to communicate with you well. It is the same if there is another culture that Jesus lived in, or that Jonah lived in, or that Isaiah lived in, or that Abraham lived in. We need to understand their culture as best we can, and understand that maybe our society is not as much of an agricultural society as many of the societies of the folks we are reading about. There are customs, for instance, in the book of Ruth that just seem a little bit bizarre. They are taking off a shoe and handing it over. There are customs like the hand under the thigh, there are vows they are making, there are offerings they are giving, there are head coverings in 1 Corinthians, and there are just all kinds of things that at first glance we may not understand. So we need to understand there is a distance of culture there. Then there is a distance of geography. We are at a different location from where they were written. We support missionaries in Jerusalem, but most of you are probably not in Jerusalem. Some of you might be. But there is a distance from our understanding of our local geography compared to Israel, and the things they say about going up, or going north or south, the directions and the words they use, may not make sense until we think about the geography. Jonah running to Tarshish, the lay of the land, affects the way we read the Scriptures, so there is a distance there. Then there is a distance of language. If you are not native in Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic, there will be a little bit of a language difference from the original writings. Hopefully you have a good Bible you can study. But in English we do not use gendered language. We are right by Mexico, and a lot of our church members speak Spanish, and el and la make for a gendered language. It was a new concept for me in learning Spanish that all of the words would have those different connotations, that each word would have a different twist on it that we might not have in our English language. And some of the idioms of our English language will not really transfer to non-English-speaking people. We have phrases like “there is more than one way to skin a cat,” and the first time somebody who is not an English speaker hears that, he will go, “Oh, that is disgusting! What are you even talking about?” So we have little phrases like that, sayings like that, that may not transfer very well, or you have to do some study on them. There are going to be acrostics in the Scriptures, like Lamentations or some of the Psalms, where each verse will start with a different letter of the alphabet, and it will go alphabetically, expressing praise to God. We might not always pick up those kinds of things in our English language. There are things called chiasms. There are different ways the authors would use to point your understanding that may get a little bit confusing without some extra understanding. Now, I am not saying that we are deficient if you have a Bible. I am not saying that you cannot study the Bible, or that you are missing something if you cannot read Greek or Hebrew. I am not saying that at all. All I am saying is that we just have to put some work into it. We have to put some work into the study of Scripture, in that there are some of these gaps we have to close, some of these distances we are going to have to minimize through study, understanding that this is not a book that was first written to me. It was first written to other people, so I have got to figure out who it was written to in the first place and then try to bring that over to me as well.
A Divine Book and Faithless Scholarship
God is revealing Himself to me from it, and I am learning from it, but this is a divine book. It is not a human book, and that is where 2 Peter 1 comes in, where verse 21 says, “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” So this was not man’s word here. Oh, I keep doing that, don’t I? Sorry. You are just getting little snapshots of the puzzle that is there. But as we approach the Scriptures, we are not trying to put our thoughts into it. This is not a human book. This is a divine book. This is from God, so we are going to be really careful about this. As smart as we want to get in putting our intellect to it, we still need to approach it with a kind of reverence and awe and say, “You know what? Whatever God says, we are just going to do it.” Sometimes bad scholarship gets in the way of sincere Christians just saying, “I just want to obey God. I just want to read the Bible and know what God has to say to me.” Sometimes bad scholarship will cast doubt on the Scriptures and make us think, “Well, there is this critical scholar, and this critical text here, and this guy says there are no miracles, and this guy says everything can be explained from a humanist perspective, and this YouTuber out here says this, and this atheist says that.” We can get pulled apart by all these voices. We said in a previous lesson that the Apostle Paul is saying, just beware of those false voices, those voices that are going to draw you away from the Scriptures. Do not get enamored with a scholar who is leading you away from the Bible. Do not get so caught up in somebody who is making you doubt the Scriptures. I am all for scholarship. I am okay with scholarship. I think being smart is fine. That is totally okay. We are to love God with all our heart, all our soul, and yes, all our mind. So we are called to give our minds, to give attention to detail and to think and to love the Lord our God with all our mind. That is totally fine. So I am not bashing scholarship at all, but I am bashing faithless scholarship, the scholars who have no faith in God, who are approaching it only from a human intellect standpoint. If you read the beginning of 1 Corinthians, chapters 1, 2, and 3, man’s wisdom is nothing compared to God’s wisdom. So I would encourage us just to land on God’s wisdom and disregard the bad scholarship that is out there. But we do have to approach it with good scholarship, good study, and good interpretation of the Scriptures. For any of us who want the truth, any of us who truly want to know what the Bible has to say to us, it is going to take some work. It is not just going to take intellect, and we will cover that in future lessons as well.
The Goals of Bible Study
We want to see how the Bible can affect us today. We want to see how to apply it to ourselves today. But if I am looking at how to apply the Bible to me, I am kind of going in a circle here. If I want to apply it, I have to be able to interpret it right, and if I interpret it right, then I have got to be open and honest enough to apply it to myself. So how do we know something is from God? That is really the key. When we are studying the Bible, we want to discern God’s message. We want to know that what we are studying truly is the Word of God. Another good reason for studying the Bible would be to correct error. We want to make sure we are not swayed by those deceivers and the false teachers, and correct the error that is out there. And third, we said we want to apply these things to our lives. We want to take the Bible not just as a history book but as something that can change us and mold us. In some ways that third one is the hardest one. You start to read the Scriptures, and then you start to apply them to your individual life, or to the lives of those you are ministering to, and you look around and say, “Well, the Bible does not address this one thing I am facing. I wish it would be more specific here.” That is where Bible principles come in. You have to try to get to the heart of God on an issue and then line your life up with the heart of God, and not everybody is going to line up exactly where you do.
When Interpretations Bump Into Each Other
That is kind of one of those questions: what do we do when our interpretation bumps into theirs, and there is this differing interpretation? What do we do then? What if they remain unconvinced? Well, there truly are situations where there will be different understandings of the text and different applications of the text, and in some cases, between two Christian brothers and sisters, we can agree to disagree. There are going to be situations like that, where we can let our speech be alway with grace, and we can love people, and we can realize that I am on the same team, even if I do not always agree with somebody straight away. That is between brothers and sisters, where there are some of those areas that are not altogether clear. You might be convinced, but they might not be convinced, and you can still be brothers there. Where we cannot agree, where we must draw lines, where we must “mark them which cause divisions,” where we must call it out, is where those disagreements are in clear doctrinal error. That is what the Scriptures are talking about as he goes on in the text we were in: “The prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost,” and on into the next chapter, chapter 2: “But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.” So Peter is saying, watch out for these false teachers, “who privily shall bring in,” look at this next word, “damnable heresies.” Wow. These damnable heresies, “even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.” Well, that sounds pretty serious right there. So there are situations where somebody who is claiming to be a brother is believing things that are causing damnation to his soul. Meaning, there are heresies, there are differences of opinion, that will bring damnation. If you believe this, then you are necessarily not believing this other thing. So if there is a heresy that causes condemnation from God, then stay away from that. There is a time to draw a line in the sand, and whether that is a loving or unloving thing to do is a whole separate question from what we are talking about. We are just talking about faithfully understanding the Scriptures and seeing the line between those damnable heresies and true doctrine. The damnable heresies are ones that deny the Lord that bought them and bring upon themselves swift destruction. Verse 2 says, “And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of.” So the result of these kinds of teachings is that truth itself is disregarded and cut down. Verse 3: “And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you: whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not.” I was going to stop there, at verse number 3. So we have to be careful about the issues of heresies that are causing divisions, or that are causing people to turn away from the faith and to deny the Lord. We have to know the Scriptures. We have to know the difference between those kinds of things. People want to know what God is saying, and people want to understand the Scriptures.
The History of Interpretation
If we are talking about how people have viewed the Scriptures historically, when we look at the history of interpretation we realize that not everybody has seen eye to eye throughout the centuries. It has taken some shifts and some changes over the years. Back before Jesus’ time, and even the Jews in Jesus’ day, had a certain way of interpreting the Scripture, and it would be very allegorical, very picturesque. For example, in the story of David and Goliath, the stones would represent something, and the sling would represent another thing, and there would be all these pictures of strength and of truth. Really it was limited only to the imagination of the interpreter, if he could come up with lines drawn to spiritual truths that he pulled out of the story, not necessarily things the story itself was saying. So they would find deeper meanings to all these things. But I read the story of David and Goliath, and I am not necessarily finding spiritual significance in every piece of the story, which is what the allegorical method will do. So when interpretations contradict each other, when one guy says one thing and another guy says another, how do we respond to that? Well, I like responding by saying, “Look, the truth is not in me. I am not going to bring my interpretation to the Bible. Let’s just go to the Bible. Let’s see what the words have to say for themselves. Let’s see what this word means.” When you write a letter, don’t you mean to say something to the person you are writing? Well, it is the same for the people who wrote these letters. They were trying to say something to us, so let’s just trust them. When there is this allegorical method, or what is called a reader-response method, where I just bring whatever I want to find to the Bible, then I am pulling out of it what I want. No, that opens you up to all kinds of issues. In modern days it opens us up to what is called feminist hermeneutics, and there is even an LGBT hermeneutics. There is a twisting of Scripture, a reorganizing of Scripture, to try to make it fit what I want it to say. People whose lifestyles are completely opposite to what the Scriptures teach will find ways to twist the Scriptures for their own ends. And man, you start listening to some of them, and they sound very slick. They sound very academic. They sound very convincing, and you listen to that and go, “Wow, huh, that sounds pretty interesting. You make a good point.” Well, not if you are thinking about it in terms of hermeneutics, not when you are thinking about it from the standpoint of just being faithful to the Bible as it stands. You really have to read a lot of things into it to get something like that out of it.
Three Presuppositions
So we understand that we are approaching the Scriptures with some presuppositions, and we kind of admit coming in that when I am approaching this Bible study class, I am going to be focusing on this Bible as the Word of God. This is not a class necessarily to prove that. It is not going to be a class that goes into a whole lot of things like the Apocrypha, for example, and why we do not use the Apocrypha. We will just come at it with some presuppositions that say, “Look, the sixty-six books of the Holy Bible, the King James Bible here, are going to be the whole Scriptures, and this is going to be what is intact and whole and thorough for us. This is going to be what we read and study and base our lives on.” We approach it the way it is, even in the arrangement it is in. The arrangement itself is not necessarily inspired. The Jewish Bibles have some of the books in different arrangements. But I am approaching it the way it is arranged right here. I just appreciate the way this Bible is laid out for us, and I like the arrangement of the books as it is. I am convinced that what we have is the perfect, preserved Word of God. I am so thankful that when I open the Scriptures, I can trust that I am reading the Word of God, that I have what He wants me to have here. So we are grateful for that. We are thankful to be able to have that. My presupposition is that I have the Word of God. Another presupposition I am bringing to Bible study is that a Christian can understand the Word of God. Some people do not believe that. Some people do not think we will ever be able to understand, but I am saying yes, we can, and we do not need a Bible degree. We do not need to understand the original languages. You are not deficient if you do not have that. I just believe we can understand the Scriptures. The third presupposition I have is, look, this Bible is infallible. This is perfect. This is the Word of God, not the word of man, like the verses we read. It is a book about Jesus Christ, so I am going to trust it. If it was good enough for Jesus, and He opened up the Scriptures and expounded unto the men on the road to Emmaus all things concerning Himself, well, if Jesus trusted the Scriptures, then I am going to trust the Scriptures. If He believed them, then I believe them. That is just pretty simple to me. Luke 24 says, “And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me.” So here are the Prophets, here are the historical books, here are the Psalms. Jesus says all of these Scriptures are good enough, because they were about Him, and it is a divine book that Jesus trusted. The Bible says, “Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.” I love that Jesus just brought people back to a simple faith in the Bible. It is a book from God about God, and I like that, and I trust that. The Bible says, “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” This is an authoritative book. This is something we can trust and live by. John 10 says, “If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken.” So the Scriptures are just this beautiful, infallible Word that we can trust and live by, and I love it. In studying it, I have just come to these conclusions: it is the complete Word of God, a Christian can understand it, and it is a divine book. This Bible we can trust in every way, and so I do trust it. I trust the Scriptures that have been supernaturally passed down from generation to generation for us, and I am so thankful for that. I want to admit it, saying, “Look, I believe this,” and I want to inspire you to believe it as well. I am not going to try to correct it. I am not going to try to pretend I am some kind of expert scholar and say, “Well, it should say this or that.” I have been led wrong by dictionaries and by encyclopedias and by articles. I have been led wrong by all those things, but every time I follow this Book, I am doing okay. Every time I study this Bible, I feel like, “You know what? This is a sure foundation. This is something I can bank my life on. This is something good enough that will carry me through.” We are reading all these thees and thous and yes and yous and all of that in our King James Bible, and it is a beautiful thing to study. The thees and the thous even have meaning in the interpretation. The thees and the thous are singular, for speaking to one person. The ye and the you and your, the Y words, are speaking to groups of people. So even those words that might seem a little confusing might just take a little bit of work to mine out the meaning, but it is a blessing to be able to do so. I love doing that kind of study, and I appreciate that we have a Bible we can hold in our hands that is the complete Word of God. So the Bible as we have it is the complete Word of God, a Christian can understand it, and it is a divine book. It is this perfect book that we can hold in our hands, and I am so thankful for it, and so thankful that we get to study it. The next time we meet together, in the next video class, we are going to cover some of the topics from this book, Understanding the Bible for Yourself, and some prerequisites as we personally approach Bible study. There are some things we need to line our lives up with and be careful about, in a sense. So I am looking forward to the next class. We will see you then. 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.
