January 15, 2025 • 43 mins
Join John Cueto as he teaches an in-depth lesson on how to read and interpret the Bible. This is lesson one of the class.
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Episode Transcript
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So welcome to the first Teaching Tuesday here at Hub City Vineyard.
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My intention with these classes is to bring what I'm learning at seminary back to the
church.
So many of you have given me advice, prayed for me, supported me, encouraged me, and even
helped me by participating in some of my assignments.
I felt like it was the least I could do to share what I'm learning at seminary with you.
I've loved going deeper into Christian theology, apologetics, history, and so many other fascinating
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areas of Christianity.
And I find that some people worry that when they delve into theology or apologetics that
the faith becomes dry or too religious.
But I have found that every single thing I learned has helped me grow closer to God.
And I hope that it does the same for you.
So the topic of this first session is how to read and interpret the Bible.
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And every month I'm going to be sharing with you at least one resource.
And today's resource is called Grasping God's Word, and it's by J. Scott Duvall and J. Daniel
Hayes.
So I'm going to go through a bunch of the key parts of this book today, and I'm going
to show you how the tools and the roadmap they give you for reading and interpreting
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the Bible can really change your faith and help you grow in it significantly.
The first question I want to ask and I want us to think about is why do people read the
Bible?
You know, some people read the Bible to learn more about God, maybe in a factual sense or
to learn about the things that He did and continues to do.
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Some people read it to deepen their relationship with God.
I find that no matter what part of the Bible I'm reading, even if it is Old Testament
prophecy or Paul's letters, every single thing that I read, there is something in probably
every verse of the Bible that makes me grateful and makes me appreciate what God has done
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for us.
And so I find that no matter what my other goals are in reading the Bible, especially
when I'm learning it for school and I'm focused on it academically, no matter what the reason
I go in is, the outcome is that it deepens my relationship with God.
There are other good reasons too.
You might want to understand how God wants us to act in certain situations.
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And some people might even be reading the Bible from a secular perspective to read the
history of the world and learn about the people who used to live in it.
Now no matter what reason we're reading the Bible, none of these are just plain reading.
Every single one of these involves us doing some kind of interpretation.
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We don't just take what the text says at face value and never think about it again.
We have to understand, you know, what is it telling us and what do we do with that information?
And a warning that it's very important to be aware of is that it's very easy for us
to go off track if we don't have a system for interpreting Scripture.
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And let me give you one of the most popular examples.
So if we look at Revelation 3, 15 to 16 in the NLT translation, this is Jesus writing
the letters to the churches in Revelation.
And this one in particular, he's talking to the church in Laodicea.
And he says, I know all the things you do, that you are neither hot nor cold.
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I wish that you were one or the other, but since you are lukewarm water, neither hot
nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.
And so if we take this at the surface level, what do we have?
So we probably have a good idea of what it means to be lukewarm.
If you think of a lukewarm Christian, you think of somebody who might be a Christian
in name only.
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Maybe they reluctantly go to church when their family makes them go.
Maybe they don't do any Bible reading or prayer on their own time.
You might even think of somebody who only goes to church on Christmas and Easter.
So we have a pretty good idea of what lukewarm means, and our initial impression there is
pretty accurate.
But the problem comes when Jesus says hot and cold.
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Now we do actually have a pretty good modern understanding of what Jesus means by hot.
And so if we think of a Christian who is hot or on fire for God, we think of somebody who
is out there sharing the gospel happily.
They're out there making a difference in the world.
They're on fire for Jesus.
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They're worshiping, and people can see the passion for Jesus in them.
Another option for hot could be soothing.
So we could be warm and inviting.
Think of the feeling when it's cold out and you get a cup of coffee or hot chocolate.
That's a good understanding of hot.
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Problem comes with cold.
And so if we look at the word cold and we think of what's the first thing you think
of in our modern understanding?
Well, that would probably be if you ask somebody out and they say no.
We might say that they gave you the cold shoulder, or you try to talk to somebody and they ignore
you.
We would say the person is being cold to us.
But unfortunately, this leads us to a really dangerous misunderstanding.
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So we might look at this and we know what lukewarm means, and we have a good understanding
of what hot means, and we think we have a good understanding of cold.
And so if we apply cold to our faith, we might say, well, cold would be an atheist.
It's what Jesus is saying in this passage that instead of a lukewarm Christian, he either
wants somebody who's completely on fire for God or he wants an honest atheist.
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That was one of the interpretations I heard of it.
Now that should stand out to us as a problem.
There is no way if you have read through the Bible and you really understand God that he
would in any way want someone to be an atheist.
So we should already have some warning signs that our interpretation isn't correct.
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And it turns out that our understanding is incorrect.
And so what we've come to learn through archaeology and history is that there was a very specific
situation in Laodicea that Jesus was referring to.
So this map here can help us understand that.
Now Christians up until very recently didn't have access to this information.
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These are things that we discovered.
But what was really going on there is fascinating.
So Laodicea was sort of right between two other cities.
One was called Hierapolis and one was called Colosse.
Now Hierapolis was famous.
It had these amazing hot springs.
And if we think about going to a hot spring, we think about nice warm water, it soothes
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aches, it heals pains.
It's the same reason that people might go to a spa or a sauna today to get relief through
heat.
Similarly, Colosse was famous for its natural cold springs.
They didn't have refrigerators back then.
So this fresh cold water that came down from the mountains was a real draw for people.
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It was a real important thing about the town.
Now Laodicea didn't have either of these things.
And so they built these huge systems of aqueducts to transport water from Hierapolis and Colosse.
But there's another problem.
They didn't have insulated piping back then.
And these were miles and miles of aqueducts.
And so what you might expect to happen is exactly what happened.
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By the time the hot water from Hierapolis got to Laodicea, it was room temperature or
lukewarm.
And by the time the cold water from Colosse got to Laodicea, it was also room temperature
or lukewarm.
And so Jesus is using the contemporary situation that these people will be very familiar with
to illustrate this point.
And in this, you know, in this letter, hot and cold are both positive things.
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So the hot is warm and soothing, inviting, passionate.
Our modern understanding of it is pretty good.
But cold in this case is refreshing.
In this case, cold is a welcome change or a refreshing change of pace from the way the
world is.
Cold back then was a deeply, deeply sinful place.
Honestly, it's pretty much still the same.
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It's a deeply, deeply sinful place.
And so we're called to be cold in the sense that we're called to be shocking and refreshing
because we're different from the world.
And so Jesus was not saying, I want either an on fire Christian or I want an honest atheist.
He was saying, I want you to be soothing and healing and welcoming to the world and on
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fire for me.
And I also want you to be a refreshing and shocking, you know, difference from the world.
He was not saying he wanted an honest atheist.
And so our understanding of that scripture up until very modern times was quite wrong.
So what we need is we need a tool that will help us avoid these mistakes in the future.
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And that's what we're going to be talking about today.
And the tool that the authors give us in that book that I mentioned earlier is called the
five step interpretive journey.
And what this does is it walks us through five steps that will take us from the original
text to a modern application.
Now I actually like to add in sort of a step zero, which isn't included in their five steps.
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And I call this the pre trip.
So if we're going on a journey, we have to pack our bags.
And the two things that we want to do before we even set out on a trip is we will identify
our hermeneutic and pick a suitable Bible translation.
I'll start with the hermeneutic one because that sounds like it's going to be some horribly
complicated theological thing, but it's actually very simple.
The hermeneutic is the position or the philosophy that we use for Bible interpretation.
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And so the philosophy that we're going to be using today that you'll find at Vineyard
churches and genuinely a philosophy that is compatible with 99% of the churches that you'll
be around is conservative evangelical.
Now it's important to note that when I say conservative, I mean theologically.
I don't mean politically.
I don't mean socially.
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When we say a conservative theological position, we say the Bible means what it says.
This is opposed to a liberal theological position, which kind of picks and chooses what it wants
to take literally.
Let me give you an example.
So under a conservative theology, when we read in the Bible that Jesus died on the cross
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and came back to life, we believe that he literally died on the cross and came back
to life.
A liberal theologian might take that to say, well, yes, Jesus died on the cross, but nobody
can actually come back to life.
And so the Bible says that Jesus came back to life.
What it means is that Jesus's teachings and influence lives on in humanity forever.
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That's clearly not what the Bible says.
Similarly, when the Bible says that Jesus literally healed people, says he healed a
blind person or healed a person who couldn't walk, we believe that he really did those
things.
Whereas a liberal theologian might say, well, Jesus was a really smart guy.
And so while he was on earth, he gave the healers and the doctors of the time a knowledge
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that they didn't have before so that they could treat the blind or treat people who
had some kind of disability.
Clearly not what the Bible says.
And so we want to go, when we are doing our hermeneutic, it is one of the Bible means
what it says.
The evangelical just means Protestant with a focus on evangelism.
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We understand the Bible to be the final authority on everything.
This is in contrast to, say, Roman Catholics, where the pope or the magisterium, which are
scholars who help interpret the Bible, they can reinterpret an understanding of the Bible
that may disagree with what the Bible plainly says, or they may say that the understanding
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of the Bible needs to change over time to match modern circumstances.
We say that the Bible is the final authority on everything in the form that it was written.
And so when Jesus says that he is the only way to the Father, we don't believe that
can ever change.
And when God says something is good or something is bad, that does not change based on society.
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Then the second part of our pre-trip is picking a suitable Bible translation for study.
Generally there are three types that are categorized or accepted.
Scholarly, there's the word for word, thought for thought, and paraphrase.
You can see that I've added a fourth one that I call trash, which is not very nice, but
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I'll explain why in just a minute.
So word for word takes the original language of it, the Greek or the Hebrew, and it breaks
it up into the words and the proper tenses and so on, and identifies the corresponding
English word for that word.
And once it has all the words in a sentence or a paragraph, it rearranges them and changes
things the bare minimum so that it is understandable in English while trying to capture as much
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of the original language as possible.
You know, very good word for word translations would be the ESV or the NASV.
You can't go wrong with either of those.
There's the thought for thought translation.
What this does is it starts off the same way.
It takes the original language, it translates word for word, but then it looks at what the
author is trying to convey.
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And so where possible, they go word for word, but where things may be ambiguous, they will
go in a more, you know, they try to capture the thought.
And I'm going to show an example and it'll make a little bit more sense.
Two really good thought for thought translations would be the NIV or the NLT.
Now paraphrase treats things a little bit differently.
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It may or may not start with the original languages, or it could start with another
type of translation like a word for word or thought for thought.
It looks at what the Bible is trying to say in either a sentence or a paragraph, and it
presents it with sort of a commentary built in.
One of the most common ones is the message.
The benefit to these is they can be very easy to read.
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The downside is that because it comes with a built in commentary, you are getting that
translator's philosophy or opinion on things instead of looking at directly what was written
by the biblical authors.
And then the reason that I have a trash category, which you're not going to find in any textbooks,
is because there are some translations that are actually damaging for people to use.
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These sort of fall into the paraphrase category, in some cases.
Others like the Watchtower would pretend to be a word for word translation, but they do
some very disingenuous stuff.
The Passion translation, for instance, is actually banned for many schools and many churches
because it changes the theology of the Bible.
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It really downplays the damaging effects of sin and sort of presents us a story of a God
that really likes people and He's doing all this nice stuff for us.
He's just not that worried about sin, which we know is, you know, sin's a big deal.
And that's a very major change to make that can really damage your theology.
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You know, on the other hand, the Watchtower pretends to be a word for word translation,
but to match the Jehovah's Witness theology, they add things or they remove things.
I'm going to show you an example in just a minute of a very dangerous addition that they
make.
So to sort of show you how these four translations work in a practical sense, let's look at John
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1-1.
You can see here, this is a Greek original manuscript of John 1-1 that I got off the
internet.
You can see this is very challenging to work with.
This is not something that you would be reading for fun.
There are no uppercase and lowercase letters.
There is no spacing.
There is no punctuation.
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It's all just one long string of uppercase Greek letters pushed together.
So the first step for any translator is what you see on this slide.
This is from what is called a Greek Interlinear Bible.
This is people who are Greek language experts and they do the hard work of figuring out
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what the individual Greek words were.
They identify the root word, the tense, the context of it, and they break it down and
they show you what it should be in English and they also have audio samples and links
to reference libraries.
And so you can see that big string of Greek characters, when they break it down and parse
it, what we get is the following.
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In beginning was the word, in the word was with God, in God was the word.
And if you're familiar with John 1-1, this sounds a whole lot like the one that you're
used to with just the very end being in a different order.
So the ESV, when they go to translate it, they take the Greek, they look at the words,
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and the only thing they change is the order of the words at the end to reflect the subject
and object of the verb.
And so we get the ESV translation of in the beginning was the word, in the word was with
God, in the word was God.
Pretty close to the original Greek.
NLT is also very similar to the original Greek.
It reads, in the beginning the word already existed, the word was with God, and the word
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was God.
So you can see they really made two changes here.
They flipped the nouns at the end so that there is subject-object agreement, but then
in the beginning it doesn't say in the beginning was the word, they change it to say the word
already existed.
That is because the context of the Greek verb used there is already exist.
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They want to make sure that by just saying was, they aren't confusing the reader.
It's a small change for readability and understanding that doesn't detract from the theological
message.
Now we can look at how the message translates this, and it says the word was first, the
word present to God, God present to the word, the word was God.
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Some people find this to be easier to understand.
I am not one of them.
I think that this muddies the theological message a little bit, but some people do genuinely
find this easier to read, but it does significantly change the passage.
And then finally we have the watchtower.
And so you can spot exactly what they did here.
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It looks just like the ESV with one massive change.
They added the letter A at the very end, it says, and the word was a God, and they put
a lowercase G.
Now if we look at the Greek, there is no A anywhere in there.
There is no indicator that it should say, A God.
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The word was God.
The word was not A God.
They are making a challenge to Jesus's equality with God, his pre-existence, his eternality.
It is a major theological change, and it is a really dangerous one because it demonstrates
why the Jehovah's Witness theology is so wrong and so dangerous.
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This is a big enough change that it could threaten somebody's salvation.
And so what we get from this is that if we want a suitable Bible study for translation,
we need to be using a word for word or a thought for thought.
What I typically recommend to people is that we want to use a word for word and a thought
for thought.
And so if you were trying to find two translations that you could use for your study, I would
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say the ESV and the NLT.
Anytime you want to study a passage, read it in both of those translations and it will
help you get the original word for word as well as a good understanding of what the authors
were going for.
Now that we're done packing our bags, we can start the actual interpretive journey that
you'll find in the book.
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And so step one is called grasping the text in their own town.
And the goal of this step is to understand what the passage meant to the original audience.
You've probably heard Chris say the following.
The Bible was written for us.
It was not written to us.
And there's a big distinction there.
It was written in another language, to another people, very long ago.
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But the message of it is for us.
And so we need to understand the context in which it was written in order to understand
what it should mean for us now.
So there are four things that we do as part of this step.
First, we read the passage in multiple translations.
I always look at a word for word, a thought for thought, and then I will look at the interlinear
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Bible as well to make sure that I am seeing exactly what the original authors wrote.
We're going to do this step together.
Next is a step that we're actually going to skip today because it's very involved.
And I've picked a passage that doesn't require it.
And this step is identifying keywords and doing original language word studies.
I'm going to do a class entirely on how to do this in both Greek and Hebrew.
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And like I said, we'll skip it today.
But the other two that we will do today are researching the historical context and establishing
the literary context.
So let's start by reading our passage, which is Numbers 20, 11 to 12.
We'll start with the ESV.
It says, And Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice.
And water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank in their livestock.
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And the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, Because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as
holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly
into the land that I have given them.
And then we're going to do the same thing.
We're going to read it in the NLT, which says, Then Moses raised his hand and struck the
rock twice with the staff, and water gushed out.
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So the entire community and their livestock drank their fill.
But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, Because you did not trust me enough to demonstrate
my holiness to the people of Israel, you will not lead them into the land I am giving them.
Let's think about the literary context.
This is coming from the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible that Moses wrote.
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He wrote these down to record the history of the beginning of the universe, up to, you
know, God's people being taken captive in Egypt, set free, and establishing Israel.
Now the literary context of these books is called a historical narrative.
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These are real events recorded, you know, as a story or a narrative.
So when we say story or narrative, we don't mean that they are fake or fictional.
We mean that they are real events written down, you know, as we would record events
and dialogue in a story.
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We also want to look at the historical context.
And so the historical context, there's two things we want to look at.
First are the events that led up to this.
And so, you know, Moses has been in the desert with the people of Israel for almost 40 years
at this point, and they were just getting ready to go into the land that God had promised
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them that would become Israel.
Now in this verse, Moses gets angry because the people are upset with him.
They're complaining that they don't have water to drink, and Moses gets mad.
He lifts up his staff.
He hits the rock with his staff.
Water pours out.
And we see that, you know, God gets upset with Moses and Aaron.
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And he says, because you didn't do this the way I told you to, you're not going to make
it into the promised land.
Why is this such a big deal?
Well, the reason that it's a big deal is that much earlier in their journey, right when
they first got out of Egypt, the people are complaining and saying the same thing.
And they're saying to Moses, why did you take us out of Egypt?
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We had housing and we had food and we had water.
Sure, we were slaves, but we weren't going to die.
You've brought us out to the desert to die.
So Moses, he goes to God and explains what's going on.
He says, God, what should I do to take care of these people?
They're upset.
And God tells him to do something very specific.
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He tells him to go to a stone and to speak to the stone, and water will come out of it.
And Moses listens to God, and he goes up to a stone and he speaks to the stone.
And just like God promised, water comes out of it and everybody's able to drink their
fill.
And so this gives us a pretty good idea of what's going on in our verses.
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This is almost the same situation, but instead of being at the beginning of the 40 years
of wandering, it's at the end of the 40 years.
And Moses had to put up with these people complaining and belittling him and getting
angry at him for almost 40 years now.
He's an old man now, even older than he was when he started and he wasn't young then.
And he is at his wits end.
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And they're just about to go into the land that God has promised them.
The people should be excited.
They should know that God's promise is about to come true, but instead they're still complaining.
Moses, he's at his wits end.
And they come up and they get mad and they complain.
And he loses his temper.
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He knows what God did almost 40 years ago to get them water, but he doesn't do it.
He reacts out of anger.
He walks up to the rock and instead of talking to God first, or praying for the people, or
speaking to the rock, he loses his temper and he hits the rock with his staff.
Now, God is not going to punish the people for Moses' anger.
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So water still comes out and the congregation drinks everything that they need.
Moses has sinned very gravely in this case.
He has not followed God's instructions.
He used his spiritual gifts in anger.
And for this he has to be punished.
Now that we've understood what the passage means to the original audience, it's time
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to move on to step two, which is called measuring the width of the river to cross.
Our goal here is to understand the differences between us and the original audience.
There are going to be situations in life that are very, very different for us 6,000 years
later.
What's also interesting is that there are probably going to be plenty of situations
that are almost identical for us 6,000 years later.
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So we need to figure out which parts of this story are specific to that people in that
time and which parts are universal.
Now to figure this out, we answer five questions.
First, how long ago did the original audience live?
Depending on whether you take Genesis literally or figuratively, you may answer this question
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differently.
Second question, what is the cultural situation of the original audience?
We talked about this a little bit in the first step.
Basically, the people of Israel have been freed from slavery in Egypt.
They've been wandering the desert for 40 years.
They have not been happy campers that entire time.
They've basically been angry at Moses and complaining the entire time.
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And they're just about, just about days away from going into the promised land and they're
still complaining to Moses.
What language did the original audience speak?
In this case, they spoke Hebrew.
This really isn't relevant to our understanding of the passage.
This passage doesn't contain any words or phrases that would be specific or really different
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in Hebrew.
And so we can pretty much ignore the language difference for now.
What covenant did the original audience fall under?
This is a big deal because Jesus came to fulfill the old covenant.
And so the way that people under the old covenant, the Mosaic covenant lived, was very different
to the way that we live now.
Now, these people had already gotten the Ten Commandments.
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They were already aware of all of the rules that God expected them to live under.
We would say that they were under the old covenant.
We are under the new covenant.
So there may be, if there are theological parts of this passage that deal with the way
we are supposed to live, there may be differences there.
We'll see if there are later.
And then a fifth question that we need to ask ourselves is, who would we be in the passage
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if anyone?
And the truth is that we should try our best to put ourselves in the shoes of everybody
in the passage because we probably fit in all of those shoes at some point in our life.
Everybody in this room is or has been a leader at some point in their life.
Now Moses is leading a crowd of tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
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We may have never been in that situation, but we could be parents or we could be teachers.
At work we could be a supervisor or a business owner.
We all have situations where we are leaders in one way or another.
But I think that most of us have also fell in the shoes of the congregation.
I know that I used to be a very negative person who complained about everything.
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And I can very easily see myself in that passage as the people complaining to Moses, even though
he's been working hard for 40 years to take care of them.
Now when we continue to parse this passage, I'm going to pick a perspective and I'm going
to pick the perspective of Moses when I talk about what the theological principles are.
And that's actually a good segue to step three, which is called crossing the principlizing
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bridge.
We want to identify the timeless theological principles inside this passage and we're going
to do it with two ideas.
First we're going to list all the theological principles in the passage in present or future
tense.
That means we want to not say Moses lost his temper.
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We want to talk about people in the present losing their temper, or we're going to talk
about people in the future who will or could lose their temper.
But we also want to make sure that our principles are not specific to a region, culture, language,
time, or individual person, unless we're talking about God or Jesus.
So in that case, we wouldn't even talk about Moses having lost his temper in the past.
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It would be if a person lost their temper in the past.
But again, we also want it to be in present or future tense, so it would be a person loses
their temper or a portion will or could lose their temper.
And again, if I take the perspective of Moses here, I've picked out two of what could be
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possibly many more theological principles.
And they are, we should not use God's spiritual gifts carelessly or in anger, which is what
Moses did in that passage.
It had very negative repercussions.
And the second principle could be, as leaders, we cannot allow people's shortcomings to cause
us to sin, which is again what Moses did.
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The people absolutely sinned by doubting God, doubting Moses, and spending the 40 years
complaining.
But Moses undoubtedly sinned in response to their shortcomings and sins.
Now this leads us to step four, which is consulting the biblical map.
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We take the principles that we've just identified in step three, and we want to make sure that
they match the rest of the Bible.
There are two things we do here.
First is we have to survey the Bible to find the theological principles.
We want to make sure that any principle that we state is in line with the rest of the Bible.
Now there's a couple ways that you could do this.
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You could read through the entire Bible and look for every situation where something similar
happens and write that down, or write down the verse reference.
That would be very time consuming if you had to read the entire Bible every single time
that you had to look up a certain topic.
A second option is to look at a systematic theology book.
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This takes the Bible and it breaks it down by topic, and it collects all the information
on a specific topic in one place.
They've already done the work for you.
This is what I would recommend.
So when I'm writing lessons for the kids, if I pull a principle out of a passage, I
go and I look at a systematic theology book to say, hey, does my interpretation of this
principle match what the theology says in this systematic theology book?
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If it doesn't, I've got a big problem.
I've misunderstood it or misrepresented the Bible, which I don't want to do.
A third option, which is easy but is not always accurate, is to Google it.
I don't recommend this because what you find on the internet is very, very unreliable.
However, there are some websites which are very good.
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One of the great websites which we are allowed to use at school is called GotQuestions, and
it is a conservative evangelical website which provides systematic theology, question, and
answers online.
So for instance, if we were looking up, a kid comes to you and says, what happens when
my pet dies?
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Does it go to heaven?
We could go to GotQuestions, we could type in pets or animals, and that is the first
question and answer that comes up.
It gives you all the verse references that talk to it or talk about it, and it helps
you understand that topic.
It's a good third option, definitely not the first choice.
And we also need to ask ourselves, does our phrasing of the principles line up with other
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biblical examples?
When I'm pulling a principle out of a passage and presenting it to the kids as part of a
lesson, I always ask myself, could I picture Jesus saying this?
Could I picture Paul saying this?
Could I picture any of the apostles saying this?
And if the answer is no, because they have demonstrated clearly that even when they're
having to correct people for doing some really bad things, they do it with love.
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And so if I can't present a principle from the Bible with love, I'm doing it wrong.
Now let's look at a very popular passage as an example.
We're going to look at Romans 3.23 in the NLT, and this reads, for everyone who sinned,
we all fall short of God's glorious standard.
Now honestly, this passage is pretty self-explanatory as far as the theological principle goes.
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It's also pretty easy to imagine how you could present this in a very harsh and unloving
way.
Imagine telling somebody that they're useless, that they're awful, that they're trash, that
nothing they ever do is good enough, that God hates them and wants nothing to do with
them.
What's that going to do other than scare the person away from God?
They're certainly not going to learn the theological principle because they're going to be so focused
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on the negative feelings that you've stirred up.
We want to make sure that when we are picking a principle out of a passage and presenting
it to people, it is always done in truth and in love, just like Jesus commands.
If we apply this two-point test to the principles that we came up with earlier, let's take a
look.
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So for the first one, that we should not use God's spiritual gifts carelessly or in anger,
there are about a dozen, probably two dozen, verses that I could pull that address this
directly.
The one that I chose to use an example here is 1 Corinthians 13, 1 to 3.
And Paul says,
If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn't love others, I
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would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I had the gift of prophecy and if I understood all of God's secret plans and possessed all
knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains but didn't love others,
I would be nothing.
If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about
it.
But if I didn't love others, I would have gained nothing.
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We could find similar writings in all of Paul's letters, letters by the other apostles.
We can see Jesus saying similar things, and we can find this sort of idea all over the
Old Testament.
So we're in good shape on this one.
How about the second point of, as leaders, we cannot allow other people's shortcomings
to cause us to sin.
Left picked another one of Paul's letters.
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This is Philippians 2, 2 to 4.
Then make me truly happy by agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working
together with one mind and purpose.
Don't be selfish, don't try to oppress others.
Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves.
Don't look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others too.
This matches up.
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Paul's other letters contain similar words.
So do the other apostles' letters.
So does Jesus.
So do many places in the Old Testament.
We could probably find two or three dozen, maybe even more, references of a similar nature.
We're in good shape on this principle.
Now that we have our principles, we made sure that they are in concordance with the rest
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of the Bible, it's time for the final step.
Step five, which is called grasping the text in our town.
And the goal here is to develop a modern application.
And so to do this, we have two things we want to do.
We want to provide the application of the principle for individual Christians living
today, and we want to provide very concrete examples.
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We don't want to do hypotheticals or unnamed people.
If we're doing examples from our life, we want to tell it like it actually happened.
So last summer, I stole somebody's car, so I did this.
So if you were the person who I stole their car, you might say, well, last summer, John
stole my car, so this is what I did, and this is what happened.
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Let's see how we could do that for our two principles.
So for the principle that we should not use God's spiritual gifts carelessly or in anger,
there are two that I came up with, but I think that you could probably come up with about
50 for both of these.
First one is we should never tell the person we have a message from God for them because
we want them to do something.
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You know, one of the things that we hear from a lot of teenage girls is that a teenage boy
will tell them, God told me I'm going to marry you, so it's okay for us to have sex now because
we're pretty much married already.
I mean, what's the big deal?
There is zero chance that God has told the teenage boy that and that he is misrepresenting
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that because that is something that he wants.
Second example, we should never pray for harm, even the most evil person.
You know, instead, we should pray for God's justice and the person's repentance.
One example could be we see a terrorist attack on the news.
We pray, God, please kill everyone in ISIS.
Could you picture Jesus making that prayer?
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Absolutely not.
You know, Jesus is the one, the last thing he does on the cross is he asks the father
to forgive the Roman centurions who nailed him to the cross and killed him.
I mean, this is the last thing that Jesus would do.
So if we are praying that God will provide justice for us against people who have done
us wrong and we want to pray for somebody's repentance and pray that they will turn to
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Christ, that's great.
But we should never pray for harm.
How about our second principle?
This one is as leaders, we cannot allow other people's shortcomings to cause us to sin.
Well, the two applications that I came up with this are we can't repay sin with sin.
And if we do it in a moment, we need to apologize as soon as we can.
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I'll give you an example of a huge mistake that I made where I reacted, you know, to
somebody else's sin with my own sin.
So in class a couple of weeks ago, one of the kids was holding a basketball, looked
up at the ceiling, saw the fire sprinkler and launched the basketball right at the sprinkler.
And so I took the kid aside and I was incredibly harsh in how I spoke to him.
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It made him really upset.
It made his parents upset and rightfully so.
You know, my sin and that mistake was not just losing my temper, but also expecting
the kids to understand how sprinklers work and why hitting sprinklers with a basketball
is a big deal.
And so I had to make that right by not just apologizing to him, but by apologizing to
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all of the kids and saying, hey, I tell you all these times to not throw the ball at the
sprinklers, but I've never once explained to you how sprinklers work.
And so I sat down and I did that and we haven't had a single issue with the kids throwing
balls at the sprinklers since.
Second application would be that we can't leverage our position for personal benefit
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or grievances.
You know, one of the most glaring examples of this would be Kenneth Copeland.
He has run donation drives at his church to get private jets or to buy more houses for
himself.
You know, he promises that God will bless those who give to him or give to his church.
This is a clear abuse of his position and the generosity of others.
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When we give money to a church, we're giving money to God and the church is expected to
use it for God in the way that God would use it.
And buying mansions and private jets is not the way that God would use it.
So you can see that now that we have completed this interpretive journey, we can take the
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passage and we can really understand what it meant to the original audience, and we
understand how we should use it today.
It's very important that we follow these steps.
Now as you get more familiar with the Bible, you'll find that you're already familiar
with the cultural understandings, the historical understandings, the literary context.
So you may know these things implicitly.
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You know, I don't need to go and look up when I'm reading Genesis or Exodus to understand
that it's a historical narrative because I've already analyzed passages in those
books dozens of times now, maybe a hundred times now.
And so I'm able to skip part of that step because I've already done it so many times.
And a lot of what we talked about today probably seems familiar.
You're probably saying to yourself, well, I've seen Chris or Rudy or Jess do this while
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they give sermons.
And that's correct.
They may not stand up on stage and say, all right, here's step one, step two, step three,
step four, step five, but they are taking the passages.
They are doing all this work in the background.
And then when they present you the passage and they talk about the historical situation
that the people were in, and then they talk about the principles that come from it, and
then we end with our action steps, they are doing those five steps for you and walking
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you through this process every single week.
And so we can see how valuable this is for our individual study.
Now that's going to wrap us up for this session.
I'm very excited for the next session, which is nine ways that the Bible's cultures are
different from our culture today.
If we understand these, they can help us, you know, do that step one and step two a
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whole lot easier.
And then finally, I just want to put the resource back up on the screen.
I highly recommend getting this book and reading it.
It is one of the most useful books I've had at seminary.
Additionally, I'd love to hear your feedback and ideas.
You can email me anytime at john at hcv.church.
And finally, if you ever want a copy of the slides or the narration, you can find it at
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hcv.church.
Thank you very much for coming to this session.
God bless you guys and have a wonderful evening.
So welcome to the first Teaching Tuesday here at Hub City Vineyard.
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My intention with these classes is to bring what I'm learning at seminary back to the
church.
So many of you have given me advice, prayed for me, supported me, encouraged me, and even
helped me by participating in some of my assignments.
I felt like it was the least I could do to share what I'm learning at seminary with you.
I've loved going deeper into Christian theology, apologetics, history, and so many other fascinating
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areas of Christianity.
And I find that some people worry that when they delve into theology or apologetics that
the faith becomes dry or too religious.
But I have found that every single thing I learned has helped me grow closer to God.
And I hope that it does the same for you.
So the topic of this first session is how to read and interpret the Bible.
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And every month I'm going to be sharing with you at least one resource.
And today's resource is called Grasping God's Word, and it's by J. Scott Duvall and J. Daniel
Hayes.
So I'm going to go through a bunch of the key parts of this book today, and I'm going
to show you how the tools and the roadmap they give you for reading and interpreting
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the Bible can really change your faith and help you grow in it significantly.
The first question I want to ask and I want us to think about is why do people read the
Bible?
You know, some people read the Bible to learn more about God, maybe in a factual sense or
to learn about the things that He did and continues to do.
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Some people read it to deepen their relationship with God.
I find that no matter what part of the Bible I'm reading, even if it is Old Testament
prophecy or Paul's letters, every single thing that I read, there is something in probably
every verse of the Bible that makes me grateful and makes me appreciate what God has done
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for us.
And so I find that no matter what my other goals are in reading the Bible, especially
when I'm learning it for school and I'm focused on it academically, no matter what the reason
I go in is, the outcome is that it deepens my relationship with God.
There are other good reasons too.
You might want to understand how God wants us to act in certain situations.
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And some people might even be reading the Bible from a secular perspective to read the
history of the world and learn about the people who used to live in it.
Now no matter what reason we're reading the Bible, none of these are just plain reading.
Every single one of these involves us doing some kind of interpretation.
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We don't just take what the text says at face value and never think about it again.
We have to understand, you know, what is it telling us and what do we do with that information?
And a warning that it's very important to be aware of is that it's very easy for us
to go off track if we don't have a system for interpreting Scripture.
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And let me give you one of the most popular examples.
So if we look at Revelation 3, 15 to 16 in the NLT translation, this is Jesus writing
the letters to the churches in Revelation.
And this one in particular, he's talking to the church in Laodicea.
And he says, I know all the things you do, that you are neither hot nor cold.
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I wish that you were one or the other, but since you are lukewarm water, neither hot
nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.
And so if we take this at the surface level, what do we have?
So we probably have a good idea of what it means to be lukewarm.
If you think of a lukewarm Christian, you think of somebody who might be a Christian
in name only.
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Maybe they reluctantly go to church when their family makes them go.
Maybe they don't do any Bible reading or prayer on their own time.
You might even think of somebody who only goes to church on Christmas and Easter.
So we have a pretty good idea of what lukewarm means, and our initial impression there is
pretty accurate.
But the problem comes when Jesus says hot and cold.
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Now we do actually have a pretty good modern understanding of what Jesus means by hot.
And so if we think of a Christian who is hot or on fire for God, we think of somebody who
is out there sharing the gospel happily.
They're out there making a difference in the world.
They're on fire for Jesus.
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They're worshiping, and people can see the passion for Jesus in them.
Another option for hot could be soothing.
So we could be warm and inviting.
Think of the feeling when it's cold out and you get a cup of coffee or hot chocolate.
That's a good understanding of hot.
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Problem comes with cold.
And so if we look at the word cold and we think of what's the first thing you think
of in our modern understanding?
Well, that would probably be if you ask somebody out and they say no.
We might say that they gave you the cold shoulder, or you try to talk to somebody and they ignore
you.
We would say the person is being cold to us.
But unfortunately, this leads us to a really dangerous misunderstanding.
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So we might look at this and we know what lukewarm means, and we have a good understanding
of what hot means, and we think we have a good understanding of cold.
And so if we apply cold to our faith, we might say, well, cold would be an atheist.
It's what Jesus is saying in this passage that instead of a lukewarm Christian, he either
wants somebody who's completely on fire for God or he wants an honest atheist.
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That was one of the interpretations I heard of it.
Now that should stand out to us as a problem.
There is no way if you have read through the Bible and you really understand God that he
would in any way want someone to be an atheist.
So we should already have some warning signs that our interpretation isn't correct.
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And it turns out that our understanding is incorrect.
And so what we've come to learn through archaeology and history is that there was a very specific
situation in Laodicea that Jesus was referring to.
So this map here can help us understand that.
Now Christians up until very recently didn't have access to this information.
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These are things that we discovered.
But what was really going on there is fascinating.
So Laodicea was sort of right between two other cities.
One was called Hierapolis and one was called Colosse.
Now Hierapolis was famous.
It had these amazing hot springs.
And if we think about going to a hot spring, we think about nice warm water, it soothes
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aches, it heals pains.
It's the same reason that people might go to a spa or a sauna today to get relief through
heat.
Similarly, Colosse was famous for its natural cold springs.
They didn't have refrigerators back then.
So this fresh cold water that came down from the mountains was a real draw for people.
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It was a real important thing about the town.
Now Laodicea didn't have either of these things.
And so they built these huge systems of aqueducts to transport water from Hierapolis and Colosse.
But there's another problem.
They didn't have insulated piping back then.
And these were miles and miles of aqueducts.
And so what you might expect to happen is exactly what happened.
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By the time the hot water from Hierapolis got to Laodicea, it was room temperature or
lukewarm.
And by the time the cold water from Colosse got to Laodicea, it was also room temperature
or lukewarm.
And so Jesus is using the contemporary situation that these people will be very familiar with
to illustrate this point.
And in this, you know, in this letter, hot and cold are both positive things.
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So the hot is warm and soothing, inviting, passionate.
Our modern understanding of it is pretty good.
But cold in this case is refreshing.
In this case, cold is a welcome change or a refreshing change of pace from the way the
world is.
Cold back then was a deeply, deeply sinful place.
Honestly, it's pretty much still the same.
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It's a deeply, deeply sinful place.
And so we're called to be cold in the sense that we're called to be shocking and refreshing
because we're different from the world.
And so Jesus was not saying, I want either an on fire Christian or I want an honest atheist.
He was saying, I want you to be soothing and healing and welcoming to the world and on
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fire for me.
And I also want you to be a refreshing and shocking, you know, difference from the world.
He was not saying he wanted an honest atheist.
And so our understanding of that scripture up until very modern times was quite wrong.
So what we need is we need a tool that will help us avoid these mistakes in the future.
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And that's what we're going to be talking about today.
And the tool that the authors give us in that book that I mentioned earlier is called the
five step interpretive journey.
And what this does is it walks us through five steps that will take us from the original
text to a modern application.
Now I actually like to add in sort of a step zero, which isn't included in their five steps.
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And I call this the pre trip.
So if we're going on a journey, we have to pack our bags.
And the two things that we want to do before we even set out on a trip is we will identify
our hermeneutic and pick a suitable Bible translation.
I'll start with the hermeneutic one because that sounds like it's going to be some horribly
complicated theological thing, but it's actually very simple.
The hermeneutic is the position or the philosophy that we use for Bible interpretation.
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And so the philosophy that we're going to be using today that you'll find at Vineyard
churches and genuinely a philosophy that is compatible with 99% of the churches that you'll
be around is conservative evangelical.
Now it's important to note that when I say conservative, I mean theologically.
I don't mean politically.
I don't mean socially.
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When we say a conservative theological position, we say the Bible means what it says.
This is opposed to a liberal theological position, which kind of picks and chooses what it wants
to take literally.
Let me give you an example.
So under a conservative theology, when we read in the Bible that Jesus died on the cross
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and came back to life, we believe that he literally died on the cross and came back
to life.
A liberal theologian might take that to say, well, yes, Jesus died on the cross, but nobody
can actually come back to life.
And so the Bible says that Jesus came back to life.
What it means is that Jesus's teachings and influence lives on in humanity forever.
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That's clearly not what the Bible says.
Similarly, when the Bible says that Jesus literally healed people, says he healed a
blind person or healed a person who couldn't walk, we believe that he really did those
things.
Whereas a liberal theologian might say, well, Jesus was a really smart guy.
And so while he was on earth, he gave the healers and the doctors of the time a knowledge
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that they didn't have before so that they could treat the blind or treat people who
had some kind of disability.
Clearly not what the Bible says.
And so we want to go, when we are doing our hermeneutic, it is one of the Bible means
what it says.
The evangelical just means Protestant with a focus on evangelism.
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We understand the Bible to be the final authority on everything.
This is in contrast to, say, Roman Catholics, where the pope or the magisterium, which are
scholars who help interpret the Bible, they can reinterpret an understanding of the Bible
that may disagree with what the Bible plainly says, or they may say that the understanding
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of the Bible needs to change over time to match modern circumstances.
We say that the Bible is the final authority on everything in the form that it was written.
And so when Jesus says that he is the only way to the Father, we don't believe that
can ever change.
And when God says something is good or something is bad, that does not change based on society.
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Then the second part of our pre-trip is picking a suitable Bible translation for study.
Generally there are three types that are categorized or accepted.
Scholarly, there's the word for word, thought for thought, and paraphrase.
You can see that I've added a fourth one that I call trash, which is not very nice, but
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I'll explain why in just a minute.
So word for word takes the original language of it, the Greek or the Hebrew, and it breaks
it up into the words and the proper tenses and so on, and identifies the corresponding
English word for that word.
And once it has all the words in a sentence or a paragraph, it rearranges them and changes
things the bare minimum so that it is understandable in English while trying to capture as much
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of the original language as possible.
You know, very good word for word translations would be the ESV or the NASV.
You can't go wrong with either of those.
There's the thought for thought translation.
What this does is it starts off the same way.
It takes the original language, it translates word for word, but then it looks at what the
author is trying to convey.
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And so where possible, they go word for word, but where things may be ambiguous, they will
go in a more, you know, they try to capture the thought.
And I'm going to show an example and it'll make a little bit more sense.
Two really good thought for thought translations would be the NIV or the NLT.
Now paraphrase treats things a little bit differently.
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It may or may not start with the original languages, or it could start with another
type of translation like a word for word or thought for thought.
It looks at what the Bible is trying to say in either a sentence or a paragraph, and it
presents it with sort of a commentary built in.
One of the most common ones is the message.
The benefit to these is they can be very easy to read.
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The downside is that because it comes with a built in commentary, you are getting that
translator's philosophy or opinion on things instead of looking at directly what was written
by the biblical authors.
And then the reason that I have a trash category, which you're not going to find in any textbooks,
is because there are some translations that are actually damaging for people to use.
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These sort of fall into the paraphrase category, in some cases.
Others like the Watchtower would pretend to be a word for word translation, but they do
some very disingenuous stuff.
The Passion translation, for instance, is actually banned for many schools and many churches
because it changes the theology of the Bible.
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It really downplays the damaging effects of sin and sort of presents us a story of a God
that really likes people and He's doing all this nice stuff for us.
He's just not that worried about sin, which we know is, you know, sin's a big deal.
And that's a very major change to make that can really damage your theology.
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You know, on the other hand, the Watchtower pretends to be a word for word translation,
but to match the Jehovah's Witness theology, they add things or they remove things.
I'm going to show you an example in just a minute of a very dangerous addition that they
make.
So to sort of show you how these four translations work in a practical sense, let's look at John
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1-1.
You can see here, this is a Greek original manuscript of John 1-1 that I got off the
internet.
You can see this is very challenging to work with.
This is not something that you would be reading for fun.
There are no uppercase and lowercase letters.
There is no spacing.
There is no punctuation.
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It's all just one long string of uppercase Greek letters pushed together.
So the first step for any translator is what you see on this slide.
This is from what is called a Greek Interlinear Bible.
This is people who are Greek language experts and they do the hard work of figuring out
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what the individual Greek words were.
They identify the root word, the tense, the context of it, and they break it down and
they show you what it should be in English and they also have audio samples and links
to reference libraries.
And so you can see that big string of Greek characters, when they break it down and parse
it, what we get is the following.
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In beginning was the word, in the word was with God, in God was the word.
And if you're familiar with John 1-1, this sounds a whole lot like the one that you're
used to with just the very end being in a different order.
So the ESV, when they go to translate it, they take the Greek, they look at the words,
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and the only thing they change is the order of the words at the end to reflect the subject
and object of the verb.
And so we get the ESV translation of in the beginning was the word, in the word was with
God, in the word was God.
Pretty close to the original Greek.
NLT is also very similar to the original Greek.
It reads, in the beginning the word already existed, the word was with God, and the word
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was God.
So you can see they really made two changes here.
They flipped the nouns at the end so that there is subject-object agreement, but then
in the beginning it doesn't say in the beginning was the word, they change it to say the word
already existed.
That is because the context of the Greek verb used there is already exist.
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They want to make sure that by just saying was, they aren't confusing the reader.
It's a small change for readability and understanding that doesn't detract from the theological
message.
Now we can look at how the message translates this, and it says the word was first, the
word present to God, God present to the word, the word was God.
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Some people find this to be easier to understand.
I am not one of them.
I think that this muddies the theological message a little bit, but some people do genuinely
find this easier to read, but it does significantly change the passage.
And then finally we have the watchtower.
And so you can spot exactly what they did here.
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It looks just like the ESV with one massive change.
They added the letter A at the very end, it says, and the word was a God, and they put
a lowercase G.
Now if we look at the Greek, there is no A anywhere in there.
There is no indicator that it should say, A God.
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The word was God.
The word was not A God.
They are making a challenge to Jesus's equality with God, his pre-existence, his eternality.
It is a major theological change, and it is a really dangerous one because it demonstrates
why the Jehovah's Witness theology is so wrong and so dangerous.
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This is a big enough change that it could threaten somebody's salvation.
And so what we get from this is that if we want a suitable Bible study for translation,
we need to be using a word for word or a thought for thought.
What I typically recommend to people is that we want to use a word for word and a thought
for thought.
And so if you were trying to find two translations that you could use for your study, I would
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say the ESV and the NLT.
Anytime you want to study a passage, read it in both of those translations and it will
help you get the original word for word as well as a good understanding of what the authors
were going for.
Now that we're done packing our bags, we can start the actual interpretive journey that
you'll find in the book.
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And so step one is called grasping the text in their own town.
And the goal of this step is to understand what the passage meant to the original audience.
You've probably heard Chris say the following.
The Bible was written for us.
It was not written to us.
And there's a big distinction there.
It was written in another language, to another people, very long ago.
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But the message of it is for us.
And so we need to understand the context in which it was written in order to understand
what it should mean for us now.
So there are four things that we do as part of this step.
First, we read the passage in multiple translations.
I always look at a word for word, a thought for thought, and then I will look at the interlinear
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Bible as well to make sure that I am seeing exactly what the original authors wrote.
We're going to do this step together.
Next is a step that we're actually going to skip today because it's very involved.
And I've picked a passage that doesn't require it.
And this step is identifying keywords and doing original language word studies.
I'm going to do a class entirely on how to do this in both Greek and Hebrew.
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And like I said, we'll skip it today.
But the other two that we will do today are researching the historical context and establishing
the literary context.
So let's start by reading our passage, which is Numbers 20, 11 to 12.
We'll start with the ESV.
It says, And Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock with his staff twice.
And water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank in their livestock.
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And the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, Because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as
holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring this assembly
into the land that I have given them.
And then we're going to do the same thing.
We're going to read it in the NLT, which says, Then Moses raised his hand and struck the
rock twice with the staff, and water gushed out.
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So the entire community and their livestock drank their fill.
But the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, Because you did not trust me enough to demonstrate
my holiness to the people of Israel, you will not lead them into the land I am giving them.
Let's think about the literary context.
This is coming from the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible that Moses wrote.
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He wrote these down to record the history of the beginning of the universe, up to, you
know, God's people being taken captive in Egypt, set free, and establishing Israel.
Now the literary context of these books is called a historical narrative.
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These are real events recorded, you know, as a story or a narrative.
So when we say story or narrative, we don't mean that they are fake or fictional.
We mean that they are real events written down, you know, as we would record events
and dialogue in a story.
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We also want to look at the historical context.
And so the historical context, there's two things we want to look at.
First are the events that led up to this.
And so, you know, Moses has been in the desert with the people of Israel for almost 40 years
at this point, and they were just getting ready to go into the land that God had promised
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them that would become Israel.
Now in this verse, Moses gets angry because the people are upset with him.
They're complaining that they don't have water to drink, and Moses gets mad.
He lifts up his staff.
He hits the rock with his staff.
Water pours out.
And we see that, you know, God gets upset with Moses and Aaron.
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And he says, because you didn't do this the way I told you to, you're not going to make
it into the promised land.
Why is this such a big deal?
Well, the reason that it's a big deal is that much earlier in their journey, right when
they first got out of Egypt, the people are complaining and saying the same thing.
And they're saying to Moses, why did you take us out of Egypt?
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We had housing and we had food and we had water.
Sure, we were slaves, but we weren't going to die.
You've brought us out to the desert to die.
So Moses, he goes to God and explains what's going on.
He says, God, what should I do to take care of these people?
They're upset.
And God tells him to do something very specific.
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He tells him to go to a stone and to speak to the stone, and water will come out of it.
And Moses listens to God, and he goes up to a stone and he speaks to the stone.
And just like God promised, water comes out of it and everybody's able to drink their
fill.
And so this gives us a pretty good idea of what's going on in our verses.
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This is almost the same situation, but instead of being at the beginning of the 40 years
of wandering, it's at the end of the 40 years.
And Moses had to put up with these people complaining and belittling him and getting
angry at him for almost 40 years now.
He's an old man now, even older than he was when he started and he wasn't young then.
And he is at his wits end.
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And they're just about to go into the land that God has promised them.
The people should be excited.
They should know that God's promise is about to come true, but instead they're still complaining.
Moses, he's at his wits end.
And they come up and they get mad and they complain.
And he loses his temper.
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He knows what God did almost 40 years ago to get them water, but he doesn't do it.
He reacts out of anger.
He walks up to the rock and instead of talking to God first, or praying for the people, or
speaking to the rock, he loses his temper and he hits the rock with his staff.
Now, God is not going to punish the people for Moses' anger.
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So water still comes out and the congregation drinks everything that they need.
Moses has sinned very gravely in this case.
He has not followed God's instructions.
He used his spiritual gifts in anger.
And for this he has to be punished.
Now that we've understood what the passage means to the original audience, it's time
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to move on to step two, which is called measuring the width of the river to cross.
Our goal here is to understand the differences between us and the original audience.
There are going to be situations in life that are very, very different for us 6,000 years
later.
What's also interesting is that there are probably going to be plenty of situations
that are almost identical for us 6,000 years later.
(26:56):
So we need to figure out which parts of this story are specific to that people in that
time and which parts are universal.
Now to figure this out, we answer five questions.
First, how long ago did the original audience live?
Depending on whether you take Genesis literally or figuratively, you may answer this question
(27:17):
differently.
Second question, what is the cultural situation of the original audience?
We talked about this a little bit in the first step.
Basically, the people of Israel have been freed from slavery in Egypt.
They've been wandering the desert for 40 years.
They have not been happy campers that entire time.
They've basically been angry at Moses and complaining the entire time.
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And they're just about, just about days away from going into the promised land and they're
still complaining to Moses.
What language did the original audience speak?
In this case, they spoke Hebrew.
This really isn't relevant to our understanding of the passage.
This passage doesn't contain any words or phrases that would be specific or really different
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in Hebrew.
And so we can pretty much ignore the language difference for now.
What covenant did the original audience fall under?
This is a big deal because Jesus came to fulfill the old covenant.
And so the way that people under the old covenant, the Mosaic covenant lived, was very different
to the way that we live now.
Now, these people had already gotten the Ten Commandments.
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They were already aware of all of the rules that God expected them to live under.
We would say that they were under the old covenant.
We are under the new covenant.
So there may be, if there are theological parts of this passage that deal with the way
we are supposed to live, there may be differences there.
We'll see if there are later.
And then a fifth question that we need to ask ourselves is, who would we be in the passage
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if anyone?
And the truth is that we should try our best to put ourselves in the shoes of everybody
in the passage because we probably fit in all of those shoes at some point in our life.
Everybody in this room is or has been a leader at some point in their life.
Now Moses is leading a crowd of tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
(29:09):
We may have never been in that situation, but we could be parents or we could be teachers.
At work we could be a supervisor or a business owner.
We all have situations where we are leaders in one way or another.
But I think that most of us have also fell in the shoes of the congregation.
I know that I used to be a very negative person who complained about everything.
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And I can very easily see myself in that passage as the people complaining to Moses, even though
he's been working hard for 40 years to take care of them.
Now when we continue to parse this passage, I'm going to pick a perspective and I'm going
to pick the perspective of Moses when I talk about what the theological principles are.
And that's actually a good segue to step three, which is called crossing the principlizing
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bridge.
We want to identify the timeless theological principles inside this passage and we're going
to do it with two ideas.
First we're going to list all the theological principles in the passage in present or future
tense.
That means we want to not say Moses lost his temper.
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We want to talk about people in the present losing their temper, or we're going to talk
about people in the future who will or could lose their temper.
But we also want to make sure that our principles are not specific to a region, culture, language,
time, or individual person, unless we're talking about God or Jesus.
So in that case, we wouldn't even talk about Moses having lost his temper in the past.
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It would be if a person lost their temper in the past.
But again, we also want it to be in present or future tense, so it would be a person loses
their temper or a portion will or could lose their temper.
And again, if I take the perspective of Moses here, I've picked out two of what could be
(31:03):
possibly many more theological principles.
And they are, we should not use God's spiritual gifts carelessly or in anger, which is what
Moses did in that passage.
It had very negative repercussions.
And the second principle could be, as leaders, we cannot allow people's shortcomings to cause
us to sin, which is again what Moses did.
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The people absolutely sinned by doubting God, doubting Moses, and spending the 40 years
complaining.
But Moses undoubtedly sinned in response to their shortcomings and sins.
Now this leads us to step four, which is consulting the biblical map.
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We take the principles that we've just identified in step three, and we want to make sure that
they match the rest of the Bible.
There are two things we do here.
First is we have to survey the Bible to find the theological principles.
We want to make sure that any principle that we state is in line with the rest of the Bible.
Now there's a couple ways that you could do this.
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You could read through the entire Bible and look for every situation where something similar
happens and write that down, or write down the verse reference.
That would be very time consuming if you had to read the entire Bible every single time
that you had to look up a certain topic.
A second option is to look at a systematic theology book.
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This takes the Bible and it breaks it down by topic, and it collects all the information
on a specific topic in one place.
They've already done the work for you.
This is what I would recommend.
So when I'm writing lessons for the kids, if I pull a principle out of a passage, I
go and I look at a systematic theology book to say, hey, does my interpretation of this
principle match what the theology says in this systematic theology book?
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If it doesn't, I've got a big problem.
I've misunderstood it or misrepresented the Bible, which I don't want to do.
A third option, which is easy but is not always accurate, is to Google it.
I don't recommend this because what you find on the internet is very, very unreliable.
However, there are some websites which are very good.
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One of the great websites which we are allowed to use at school is called GotQuestions, and
it is a conservative evangelical website which provides systematic theology, question, and
answers online.
So for instance, if we were looking up, a kid comes to you and says, what happens when
my pet dies?
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Does it go to heaven?
We could go to GotQuestions, we could type in pets or animals, and that is the first
question and answer that comes up.
It gives you all the verse references that talk to it or talk about it, and it helps
you understand that topic.
It's a good third option, definitely not the first choice.
And we also need to ask ourselves, does our phrasing of the principles line up with other
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biblical examples?
When I'm pulling a principle out of a passage and presenting it to the kids as part of a
lesson, I always ask myself, could I picture Jesus saying this?
Could I picture Paul saying this?
Could I picture any of the apostles saying this?
And if the answer is no, because they have demonstrated clearly that even when they're
having to correct people for doing some really bad things, they do it with love.
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And so if I can't present a principle from the Bible with love, I'm doing it wrong.
Now let's look at a very popular passage as an example.
We're going to look at Romans 3.23 in the NLT, and this reads, for everyone who sinned,
we all fall short of God's glorious standard.
Now honestly, this passage is pretty self-explanatory as far as the theological principle goes.
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It's also pretty easy to imagine how you could present this in a very harsh and unloving
way.
Imagine telling somebody that they're useless, that they're awful, that they're trash, that
nothing they ever do is good enough, that God hates them and wants nothing to do with
them.
What's that going to do other than scare the person away from God?
They're certainly not going to learn the theological principle because they're going to be so focused
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on the negative feelings that you've stirred up.
We want to make sure that when we are picking a principle out of a passage and presenting
it to people, it is always done in truth and in love, just like Jesus commands.
If we apply this two-point test to the principles that we came up with earlier, let's take a
look.
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So for the first one, that we should not use God's spiritual gifts carelessly or in anger,
there are about a dozen, probably two dozen, verses that I could pull that address this
directly.
The one that I chose to use an example here is 1 Corinthians 13, 1 to 3.
And Paul says,
If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn't love others, I
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would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I had the gift of prophecy and if I understood all of God's secret plans and possessed all
knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains but didn't love others,
I would be nothing.
If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about
it.
But if I didn't love others, I would have gained nothing.
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We could find similar writings in all of Paul's letters, letters by the other apostles.
We can see Jesus saying similar things, and we can find this sort of idea all over the
Old Testament.
So we're in good shape on this one.
How about the second point of, as leaders, we cannot allow other people's shortcomings
to cause us to sin.
Left picked another one of Paul's letters.
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This is Philippians 2, 2 to 4.
Then make me truly happy by agreeing wholeheartedly with each other, loving one another, and working
together with one mind and purpose.
Don't be selfish, don't try to oppress others.
Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves.
Don't look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others too.
This matches up.
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Paul's other letters contain similar words.
So do the other apostles' letters.
So does Jesus.
So do many places in the Old Testament.
We could probably find two or three dozen, maybe even more, references of a similar nature.
We're in good shape on this principle.
Now that we have our principles, we made sure that they are in concordance with the rest
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of the Bible, it's time for the final step.
Step five, which is called grasping the text in our town.
And the goal here is to develop a modern application.
And so to do this, we have two things we want to do.
We want to provide the application of the principle for individual Christians living
today, and we want to provide very concrete examples.
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We don't want to do hypotheticals or unnamed people.
If we're doing examples from our life, we want to tell it like it actually happened.
So last summer, I stole somebody's car, so I did this.
So if you were the person who I stole their car, you might say, well, last summer, John
stole my car, so this is what I did, and this is what happened.
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Let's see how we could do that for our two principles.
So for the principle that we should not use God's spiritual gifts carelessly or in anger,
there are two that I came up with, but I think that you could probably come up with about
50 for both of these.
First one is we should never tell the person we have a message from God for them because
we want them to do something.
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You know, one of the things that we hear from a lot of teenage girls is that a teenage boy
will tell them, God told me I'm going to marry you, so it's okay for us to have sex now because
we're pretty much married already.
I mean, what's the big deal?
There is zero chance that God has told the teenage boy that and that he is misrepresenting
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that because that is something that he wants.
Second example, we should never pray for harm, even the most evil person.
You know, instead, we should pray for God's justice and the person's repentance.
One example could be we see a terrorist attack on the news.
We pray, God, please kill everyone in ISIS.
Could you picture Jesus making that prayer?
(38:50):
Absolutely not.
You know, Jesus is the one, the last thing he does on the cross is he asks the father
to forgive the Roman centurions who nailed him to the cross and killed him.
I mean, this is the last thing that Jesus would do.
So if we are praying that God will provide justice for us against people who have done
us wrong and we want to pray for somebody's repentance and pray that they will turn to
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Christ, that's great.
But we should never pray for harm.
How about our second principle?
This one is as leaders, we cannot allow other people's shortcomings to cause us to sin.
Well, the two applications that I came up with this are we can't repay sin with sin.
And if we do it in a moment, we need to apologize as soon as we can.
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I'll give you an example of a huge mistake that I made where I reacted, you know, to
somebody else's sin with my own sin.
So in class a couple of weeks ago, one of the kids was holding a basketball, looked
up at the ceiling, saw the fire sprinkler and launched the basketball right at the sprinkler.
And so I took the kid aside and I was incredibly harsh in how I spoke to him.
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It made him really upset.
It made his parents upset and rightfully so.
You know, my sin and that mistake was not just losing my temper, but also expecting
the kids to understand how sprinklers work and why hitting sprinklers with a basketball
is a big deal.
And so I had to make that right by not just apologizing to him, but by apologizing to
(40:15):
all of the kids and saying, hey, I tell you all these times to not throw the ball at the
sprinklers, but I've never once explained to you how sprinklers work.
And so I sat down and I did that and we haven't had a single issue with the kids throwing
balls at the sprinklers since.
Second application would be that we can't leverage our position for personal benefit
(40:37):
or grievances.
You know, one of the most glaring examples of this would be Kenneth Copeland.
He has run donation drives at his church to get private jets or to buy more houses for
himself.
You know, he promises that God will bless those who give to him or give to his church.
This is a clear abuse of his position and the generosity of others.
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When we give money to a church, we're giving money to God and the church is expected to
use it for God in the way that God would use it.
And buying mansions and private jets is not the way that God would use it.
So you can see that now that we have completed this interpretive journey, we can take the
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passage and we can really understand what it meant to the original audience, and we
understand how we should use it today.
It's very important that we follow these steps.
Now as you get more familiar with the Bible, you'll find that you're already familiar
with the cultural understandings, the historical understandings, the literary context.
So you may know these things implicitly.
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You know, I don't need to go and look up when I'm reading Genesis or Exodus to understand
that it's a historical narrative because I've already analyzed passages in those
books dozens of times now, maybe a hundred times now.
And so I'm able to skip part of that step because I've already done it so many times.
And a lot of what we talked about today probably seems familiar.
You're probably saying to yourself, well, I've seen Chris or Rudy or Jess do this while
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they give sermons.
And that's correct.
They may not stand up on stage and say, all right, here's step one, step two, step three,
step four, step five, but they are taking the passages.
They are doing all this work in the background.
And then when they present you the passage and they talk about the historical situation
that the people were in, and then they talk about the principles that come from it, and
then we end with our action steps, they are doing those five steps for you and walking
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you through this process every single week.
And so we can see how valuable this is for our individual study.
Now that's going to wrap us up for this session.
I'm very excited for the next session, which is nine ways that the Bible's cultures are
different from our culture today.
If we understand these, they can help us, you know, do that step one and step two a
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whole lot easier.
And then finally, I just want to put the resource back up on the screen.
I highly recommend getting this book and reading it.
It is one of the most useful books I've had at seminary.
Additionally, I'd love to hear your feedback and ideas.
You can email me anytime at john at hcv.church.
And finally, if you ever want a copy of the slides or the narration, you can find it at
(43:14):
hcv.church.
Thank you very much for coming to this session.
God bless you guys and have a wonderful evening.
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