February 12, 2025 • 36 mins
Join John Cueto as he teaches an in-depth lesson that explores nine cultural differences between our culture and the biblical cultures.
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Welcome to the second session of Teaching Tuesday at Hub City Vineyard.
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This is February 2025 and today's session is called Bible Blinders.
We're exploring nine cultural differences between our culture and the biblical cultures
to help us better understand what we read in the Bible.
Think of today as a continuation of the previous session.
Last time we looked at the five-step interpretive journey which is a tool to help us go from
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the original text to a modern application.
The first three steps of this process were step one, grasping the text in their town,
which is where we're going to understand what the passage meant to the original audience.
Step two, measuring the width of the river to cross, which is where we're going to understand
the differences between us and the original audience.
And step three, of crossing the principlizing bridge, which is when we identify the timeless
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theological principles in the passage.
All three of these steps are made a lot easier the more we understand about the biblical
cultures.
Today's resource is called Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes by E. Randolph Richards
and Brandon J. O'Brien.
I highly recommend this book.
It's easily one of the most interesting and informative books I've read since I've been
at seminary.
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However, I do have to give two disclaimers about it.
The first is this, I can't do this book justice.
You really need to read about the author's personal experiences.
These guys went out, they did mission work, they've helped to plant and lead churches
all around the world.
You're going to read things in this book that I just can't capture in this class, like experiences
they've had in other cultures and other cultures that you really need to read from their perspective.
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The second disclaimer is that different doesn't necessarily mean better or worse.
The one thing I don't like about this book is that the authors spend quite a bit of time
apologizing for the circumstances of their lives.
They apologize for being male or for being white or for being American, and I don't think
that that's biblical.
In Acts 17, 26 to 27 in the NLT it says, from one man he created all the nations throughout
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the whole earth.
He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall and he determined their boundaries.
His purpose for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him
and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.
What this means is that God has determined the time, location, and circumstances of our
lives.
If you're white, he made you white.
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If you're black, he made you black.
If you're a man or a woman, that's how he made you.
If you were born in 2003, he decided that you were going to be born in 2003.
And if you were born in America, that's because God decided you were going to be born in America.
So we shouldn't be apologizing or feeling bad about the circumstances of the life that
God has given us.
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Instead, we should take advantage of all the resources and the different perspectives that
we have access to, to learn as much about the world as possible.
So in that sense, what the authors are doing is laudable, but you may be a little bit frustrated
like I was when you read this and you see them apologizing so much.
That said, the author's experiences in other countries and other cultures has given them
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a really neat perspective and a great tool for analyzing the differences between our
culture and the biblical cultures.
Think of all the aspects of a culture like an iceberg.
You know, we have things that are immediately visible as you're sailing along on the ocean,
and you can see that these are above the surface.
And then if you happen to dip your head below the freezing cold water, you would see some
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things that are just below the surface.
They're not quite as obvious, but once we investigate them, they're pretty apparent.
But then if you go way deep down in the ocean where the bulk of the iceberg is, there are
things that are deep below the surface that are fundamental to a culture that may be almost
impossible for people outside that culture to understand, and they determine many of
the important things about that culture, and therefore they determine many important things
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about what we read in the Bible.
So we're going to start with the above the surface category, and the first item in this
category is cultural morays.
Now one way to think of cultural morays is it's just the way things are.
It's really obvious.
You know, if you're driving down the road, our stoplights are red, yellow, and green.
And if you went to another country where they use different color stoplights, that would
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be immediately obvious.
But it goes a little bit beyond that too, because there's often a moral value placed
on these aspects.
So for instance, we expect somebody to stop at a red light.
And if we are stopped at a red light and the light turns green, but other people keep going
through their red light, we have a moral complaint against the people who are running a red light
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and not letting us go on our green light.
Another real world example of this might be this adorable dog on the screen.
Is this man's best friend?
Is it the main course, or is it a disgusting pest?
Well, if you're in America, your answer is probably man's best friend.
But the authors tell this great story about a mission trip in Indonesia where they were
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welcoming a new pastor and there was a dinner in his honor.
And the best dish that they could recommend this guy was stir fried dog.
It's hard for us to imagine being in a situation like that.
But if you are out experiencing different cultures, especially on mission work, it's
probably something you're going to run into.
But there's a third option beyond friend or food.
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There's also disgusting pest.
You see in some cultures like Islam right now, or in the ancient Hebrews that we read
about in the Bible, dogs were considered unclean.
They were routinely exterminated or chased out of towns.
And when we read stories like the beggar Lazarus, and he's laying there, the dogs are licking
his wounds, it's considered a grave insult and an indignity that like a harmful scavenger
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or a pest would be licking his wounds.
And so the reason that cultural mores are so important when we're talking about the
biblical cultures and how they affect our understanding of what we read in the Bible
is that moral aspect to it.
So for instance, what if we apply our morals to what we read in the Bible instead of having
the Bible dictate our morals?
Think about the different perspectives on alcohol that you might find in different American
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churches.
There are some churches that teach that drinking in moderation is okay.
There are some churches that teach that no drinking is allowed under any circumstances
and that when we read about things like wine in the Bible, that they were talking about
grape juice.
So if we look at what the Bible actually says about alcohol and drinking, I picked out four
scripture verses.
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The first is John 2, 1 to 11, where Jesus turns water into wine for his first miracle.
There's 1 Timothy 5, 23, where Paul says, don't drink only water.
You ought to drink a little wine for the sake of your stomach because you were sick so often.
There's Proverbs 21 that says wine produces markers, alcohol leads to brawls.
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Those led astray by drink cannot be wise.
And finally, Romans 14, 21, where Paul says it is better not to eat meat or drink wine
or do anything else if it might cause another believer to stumble.
And so regardless of our cultural morays, the biblical teaching on alcohol is that in
moderation alcohol is certainly not required, but it is okay.
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As long as we're not acting or speaking violently, we're causing another person to stumble.
And when we read the Bible, we want to make sure that we are interpreting it and understanding
what the Bible says and not what our culture says and then applying that backwards to the
Bible.
And so our next above the surface aspect is race and ethnicity.
And so it makes sense that this is considered one of the very obvious things.
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It's easy to look at someone and see that they're a different race.
And when you're in a culture, the relationships and the dynamics between different races and
ethnicities is pretty obvious.
America is no exception.
And I think it's fair to say that race in America in 2025 is pretty complicated.
When I was growing up in elementary school with these things called heritage days, and
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our class was a good mix of different races and ethnicities.
And so the teacher would have everybody bring in a dish of food related to their heritage.
And you'd present it to the class, you'd explain a little bit about your family's
heritage, and then everybody would get to try and learn about a bunch of different cultures.
It was a wonderful experience.
It was part of the idea of the melting pot in America, where we didn't divide based on
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racial and ethnic differences, but we came together as Americans, but we also learned
about and celebrated each other's differences.
And so it was a big shock to me when I was in college and what you might call contemporary
race politics in America started emerging.
I remember telling people about those heritage days, and I was shocked to hear people tell
me that that was racist.
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I actually had a professor give a lecture in class about how Martin Luther King was
racist because he didn't want people focusing on racial differences.
They thought that Martin Luther King's views were outdated and that it was racist to not
focus on racial differences and said we should be focusing on racial differences.
And they started pushing for things like segregated dorms again.
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It really made no sense to me.
And I imagine it was just as confusing to a lot of other people.
And if it's as confusing to us, the people that live in this culture, imagine how much
we would get wrong about the biblical stories and narratives if we take American race relations
in 2025 and we apply those to stories about the Middle East thousands of years ago.
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For instance, what would we get wrong if we looked at numbers 12, 1 to 2 from the American
perspective?
In the NLT version, it says, while they were at Hazaroth, Mary Manerian criticized Moses
because he had married a Cushite woman.
They said as the Lord spoke only through Moses, hasn't he spoken through us too?
But the Lord heard them.
Now Mary Manerian were Moses's brother and sister.
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And so the story goes on that God gets upset with them and punishes them for criticizing
Moses's wife.
If we do a little bit of digging, we find out that the Cushites were very dark skinned
Africans.
And so if we apply an American perspective to this story, we might understand it as Mary
Manerian are criticizing Moses for bringing someone lesser than them into their family.
But is that what's actually going on?
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Well, no, if we do a little more digging, we find out that the Cushites were revered
as these amazing warriors.
So Mary Manerian, they're not criticizing Moses for marrying down or bringing someone
unworthy into their family.
They're actually saying to Moses, who do you think you are?
God has spoken through us as well.
We're also prophets, but you you're marrying way up to somebody you definitely don't deserve.
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It's still not great that they're criticizing Moses based on the race of his wife, but it's
the exact opposite of the impression that we have initially.
And so if we really want to understand the dynamics of this story, we have to make sure
that we understand all the circumstances and that we're not just applying an American lands
or a Western lands to this story.
The last item in the above the surface category is language.
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And in one sense, this is very obvious because, yes, the Old Testament was written in Hebrew
and the New Testament was written in Greek.
But it's not just the fact that these were written in different languages and we're now
reading them in English.
Most significant thing is that there is meaning, there are words and concepts in other languages
that are not in English and vice versa.
And so we read stories in the Bible, there may be entire concepts that those cultures
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have that we don't have or concepts that we do have that they didn't have.
Let me give you an example from my life.
I am colorblind.
And so when I look at this rainbow, I know because I've been taught in school that there
are seven colors.
There's red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
But if I'm being honest with you, I don't really know what indigo looks like and I'm
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not sure I know what violet looks like either because I only see five colors here.
If I had to name the colors, I would say, well, there's definitely red, there's yellow,
there's green, there might be blue.
I don't know if I actually see blue and then I see black.
At most, I see four or five colors here.
But I know that there are seven colors and I know that most of you looking at this see
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seven colors.
So if I was in charge of naming colors in the English language, we would have been missing
words for colors that you guys can see that I can't see.
And so we've been missing out on a lot of information.
And let me give you a similar example from the Bible.
For instance, in English, we have one word for love.
But in Greek, there are four words that represent love.
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There's eros, which is passionate, romantic love.
That's where we get the word erotic.
There's philia, which is friendship type of love.
There's stoge, which is familial love, like a parent and a child.
And then there's agape, which is unconditional, sacrificial love, like God.
You know, agape is often used to describe when Jesus died on the cross.
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And so when we are reading a translation in English, we don't know which of these four
words is being used.
And there are people who either through ignorance or for certain agendas will try to claim one
of the words is there and not one of the other words.
Two of the most common examples would be David and Jonathan, and then the disciple John and
Jesus.
The Bible clearly says that David and Jonathan loved each other.
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And it describes John as the disciple that Jesus loved.
And people will look at this and they will claim that these were same sex relationships,
that it was a romantic love or an erotic love.
But if we look at the Greek word used, it's not eros.
It's agape.
We were describing unconditional, sacrificial love, not erotic love.
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And so if we truly want to understand these biblical passages, sometimes we have to dig
into the languages that they were written in and look at the differences between English
and those languages to understand the context of what is being said.
Well, now we get to go just below the surface.
We're going to start to see some things that are massive differences between our culture
and the biblical cultures.
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And the first one is an example of a huge one, which is individualism versus collectivism.
We are an individualist culture.
Our culture is centered around the individual.
You decide what you want to be when you grow up.
You decide the goals for your life, whether you want to get married and have a family,
the type of job you want to have.
We may value input from our family, and on occasion we may value input from our culture
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or our country, but they don't get to determine the direction of our lives.
However, that is not the case for the biblical cultures.
We can see a contemporary example of this in Japan.
You know, when the first Christian missionaries went to Japan, they ran into a really strange
problem that they weren't expecting.
And Christian missionaries in Japan still run into this problem today.
You see, Japan is a collectivist culture, and they place a lot of weight on what their
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ancestors did.
They do things like praying to their ancestors at shrines.
And so when the Christian missionaries went over there and they would tell people about
Jesus, the people were very receptive.
They would say, well, yeah, what you're saying sounds great.
I believe, I think it's true, but I can't be a Christian.
And the missionaries would be shocked, and they would say, well, why not?
If you think it's true, what's stopping you?
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And they would say, well, my ancestors weren't Christian, which means they aren't saved.
They're in hell right now.
And so if my ancestors weren't saved, it wouldn't be right for me to be saved now.
And so even though I agree with you, I'm sorry, I just can't be a Christian.
This is completely foreign to us, but it's an essential part of their culture.
And these types of collective decisions about faith are something that we see in the biblical
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cultures as well.
For instance, let's look at the story of the jailor's family from Acts 16.
To set the stage for you, Paul and Silas are out walking and they encounter a slave girl
who's possessed by a demon.
Now this demon gives the slave girl the ability to predict the future, and she's using this
ability to make her masters a lot of money.
Well, she's driving Paul crazy.
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Day after day, she bothers him shouting crazy things out.
And eventually he loses his patience and he turns around and he casts the demon out of
her.
And her masters are furious because now they're out a ton of money.
They have Paul and Silas arrested and thrown in jail.
Now after this happens, Paul and Silas turn the jail into like a worship service.
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They're praying and singing hymns and the other prisoners are listening in.
And all of a sudden there's a massive earthquake.
The prison shakes and all the doors fly open.
Now the jailer who's in charge of this prison wakes up because of the earthquake.
He sees all the prison doors open and because it was commonplace in their culture to take
responsibility by taking your life, he pulls out his sword and he's getting ready to kill
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himself.
Well, Paul runs over and stops and he says, no, stop, don't kill yourself.
We're all here.
So the jailer runs down and he sees what's going on and he sees Paul and Silas and he
says, you know, sirs, what must I do to be saved?
And they tell him, believe in the Lord Jesus and you'll be saved along with everyone in
your household.
And then it goes on to say that they, they told him all about Jesus and they told everybody
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in his household about Jesus.
The jailer cared for his wounds and then he and everyone in his household were immediately
baptized.
Well, this sounds really strange to us because it sounds like this household made a collective
decision to start following Jesus.
The collective decisions like this were acceptable in biblical cultures and they continue to
be acceptable in collectivist cultures today.
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If you imagine an American family sitting at home at dinner one night and the dad comes
running through the door and he says, Hey, everybody have great news.
I heard about this guy named Jesus.
And from now on, we're going to be a Christian family.
We would all probably think, well, that's great for the dad, but that doesn't mean anything
for the mother or the kids.
But in the collectivist culture, the family would sit down, the father would share the
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information, they would discuss it as a family and they would ultimately decide as a family
whether or not the family is going to be following Jesus.
And the next item in the just below the surface category, honor and shame is very closely
related to collectivism as well.
You see, in an individualist culture like ours, we could say that the center of morality
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is the individual.
If I tell a lie or if I steal something, even if nobody knows, I know that I have done something
wrong.
Furthermore, it allows individual morality to be different than society's morality.
For instance, in our society, pornography is rampant and almost everybody uses pornography.
But the Bible warns us to guard our hearts against lust.
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And so just because society says the pornography is okay, doesn't make it something that's
okay on the individual level for the Christian.
In the collectivist society, society becomes the ultimate arbiter of morality.
Whatever it says is okay, is okay.
If there's a situation where society says it's okay to lie or kill or steal, regardless
of what your personal beliefs are, that's okay.
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If you do something in private and you never get caught, such as looking at pornography
or lying or stealing, if nobody ever finds out about it, did you actually do anything
wrong?
The way society enforces these norms is through honor and shame.
By doing things that society says are positive, you gain honor.
By doing things that society says are negative or failing to fulfill your duties, you lose
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honor or become shamed.
And we can see an example of this from a news conference in Japan.
These are executives who are responsible for building a giant residential building that
is now in disrepair.
It turns out that the construction was substandard, data was falsified, there was bogus accounting
so that people could pocket money, and now the building is collapsing.
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In America, they would be fined financially, they might get some jail time, they might
lose their company.
But in Japan, it goes beyond that.
They would get those same penalties, but because they have done something dishonorable that's
gone against society, they also expected to get up, bow, and apologize on live TV to their
families, to their companies, to their countries, to the entire culture for the shame they have
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brought upon them.
And this is just the first step.
Until they are able to take enough honorable actions to restore their honor in society's
eyes, they're going to be barred from a lot of business opportunities and they're going
to have a very difficult time living their lives in that culture.
But had the building not started to collapse and none of this had ever been found out,
none of these men would have felt guilty because in their culture, they hadn't done anything
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wrong until it was exposed.
We can see that same honor and shame system all throughout the Gospels, and especially
in the story of Jesus and Nicodemus.
Whenever we read the Gospels, we see a ton of different encounters between Jesus and
the Pharisees.
The Pharisees are constantly calling Jesus out, asking him questions in public.
Now in our society, if we ask a person a question, it's because we want to know the answer.
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But in an honor and shame system, when you call somebody out publicly or even just ask
what seems to be an innocent question in public, you're making a challenge to their honor.
If they don't answer well, or if they answer in a way that society doesn't support, you
can take some of their honor.
So the Pharisees were actually trying to challenge Jesus and take some of his honor.
But when Jesus was able to answer their questions and usually defeat their arguments, he would
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actually take their honor.
And so we see the Pharisees get furious with Jesus.
It's because every time he's able to answer one of their challenges, he is lowering their
status and standing in that society.
Now if we don't understand this dynamic, we can get the wrong impression about other
people like Nicodemus.
For instance, in John 3, 1-2, Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night and he wants to speak with
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him privately.
In our culture, we might call Nicodemus a coward.
And I've heard people say this before.
They would say that Nicodemus was so ashamed to be seen with Jesus in public and he didn't
want to talk to him for fear of other people's opinions, but that's not what was going on.
If you approach somebody privately, you're not challenging their honor because it's not
done in public.
Nicodemus really wanted an answer.
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And he came to Jesus in a way that wouldn't challenge his honor to show respect and demonstrate
his interest.
The final item in our just below the surface category is time.
And we're getting into aspects of a culture that are so ingrained in the culture and so
hard for us to imagine anything being different that we have to just jump into an example.
And so the example I picked for time is vineyard time.
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I first learned about it a couple years ago at the National Conference when I was helping
with the kids.
We wanted parents to pick the kids up at 4.30, but I noticed that they had set a dismissal
time on the schedule for 4 o'clock.
And so when I asked about this, I thought it was a mistake in the program and the organizer
started laughing and she said, no, we don't operate on normal time here.
We operate on vineyard time.
And so if we want the parents to pick the kids up at 4.30, we have to tell them that
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it ends at 4 o'clock so that they'll be here at 4.30.
Now this is a little bit different than our culture's ordinary approach to time where
we have strict measurements and things are in strictly chronological order.
But it turns out that vineyard time is actually pretty close to some of the biblical culture's
conceptions of time.
One example of this are the two ways that the Greeks approached time.
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They had chronos, which is where we get the word chronological.
And this refers to events happening at the exact time that they did and in the specific
order that they did.
But they also have kairos.
And we don't have a concept like this in English, but you could sort of explain it as when things
happen at the right time or when things happen at a significant time.
And so for instance, if I'm talking about how my morning goes, I might say I wake up,
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I brush my teeth, I get a shower, I eat breakfast and I leave for work.
That would be chronos or the chronological time.
But what if I focused primarily on the things that were super important to me?
I could say I got up this morning, I brushed my teeth and took a shower, I'm ready for
the day.
Now I left out a bunch of things and I may have even put those two items in the wrong
order.
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But I talked about the things that were most significant to me.
Now in our culture, we might say that I left out some information or I presented it inaccurately.
But in the Greek culture, this would be a perfectly good use of kairos where I'm highlighting
important things in the order of importance.
It's important that we're aware of this distinction when we read some of the biblical narratives.
For instance, in the temptation of Jesus, the devil tempts Jesus three times.
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This is recorded in Luke and in Matthew.
In Luke, first the devil challenges Jesus to turn a stone to bread.
Then the devil takes Jesus up to a mountain and tells him if he worships him, he will
give Jesus control over the entire world.
And then finally, he takes Jesus to the highest point of the temple and challenges him to
jump off to see if the angels will catch him.
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Now when we look at the temptation in Matthew, Matthew also starts with the devil challenging
Jesus to turn the stone to bread.
But he tells the temple story second and goes to the mountain third.
Because of our culture's perception of time, we look at this and we see a problem.
Did one of them make a mistake?
Did one of them lie?
We might consider this a mistake or discrepancy, which could call the inerrancy of scripture
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into question.
But what Luke and Matthew are doing is they're using kairos.
Whatever the real order of these three events was, we can trust that all three events happened
because both authors include them, but each is making a different theological point.
And they're using kairos to highlight the most significant of the three events last.
For instance, Luke's gospel builds towards the scene at the temple.
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And so it makes sense that he ends the temptations of Jesus by focusing on the temple.
And when you look at Matthew's gospel, many of the most significant things in his gospel
happen on mountains.
You know, for instance, we can see the transfiguration and we can look at the sermon on the mount.
And so it makes sense that with this theme of mountains, he's going to present the mountain
temptation last.
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Neither of them are wrong.
Neither of them are lying or made a mistake.
They're simply using an accepted rhetorical method to present the information.
Well now it's time to go deep below the surface.
And our first topic in this category is called rules and relationships.
And here we're talking about how different societies look at firm rules versus things
that can bend a little bit.
And so I think one of the best ways to illustrate this is the time that I learned how to barter.
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Now my best friend is Chinese and so is the girl that I dated for a couple years in college.
And so I had the great experience of getting to go to different Asian street markets.
And I learned really quickly that the culture there is quite different than what you would
expect at a normal American grocery store.
If I go into Weiss and I want to buy a Dr. Pepper and the price says $3 and I go up to
the register and I want to pay $2, they're going to tell me that's too bad and I can
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either pay the $3 or leave.
But when you go to the street markets, you're expected to barter because it builds a relationship.
It took me a couple of times to realize this.
It wasn't until I kept trying to pay people the advertised price until somebody pulled
my girlfriend aside and asked her if I was kind of slow.
And so finally she explained to me that the advertised price was merely a starting point
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to build a relationship.
If the price on the sticker said $5, I was meant to offer $3 and then the person would
counter with $4.50 and then I would counter with $3.50 and then finally we would settle
on $4.
Now there'd be a relationship of mutual respect which would lead to future business.
We see a lot of examples of relationships trumping rules in scripture as well.
For instance, consider Paul's words on women in ministry.
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One of the most well-known verses is 1 Timothy 2.12 where he says, I do not let women teach
men or have authority over them.
Now this seems pretty black and white.
If we listen to what Paul is saying, women can't be pastors, women can't be teachers.
But the exact same person wrote in Romans 16 1-2, I commend you, our sister Phoebe,
who is a deacon in the church in San Crea.
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Well, a deacon is a position of authority who would often be involved in some teaching.
So what is the difference here?
It's that Paul's first statement, which is a rule, is based on certain elements of that
culture.
For instance, in those days women were not educated in the Torah like the men were.
So there were many situations where women were having to interrupt or stop church to
ask questions about things that all the men would know.
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It was very disruptive.
So when Paul came up with this rule, he was responding to a set of circumstances.
But the rule bans based on relationships.
And if Phoebe is somebody that God has called and equipped to be in ministry, he's not
going to say no.
And so what Paul is saying is, yes, my general rule is that women are not allowed to teach
or hold positions of authority.
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But if God has called a woman to do that, I'm not going to stand in her way.
There are well-known examples when Jesus' disciples picked grain on the Sabbath.
The Pharisees got upset about it, but Jesus redefined the laws of the Sabbath to prove
that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.
Considering that Christianity is ultimately about a relationship between God and man,
we can't ignore the power of relationships over rules.
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Our next deep below the surface topic is virtue and vice.
And the idea here is that different cultures have different ideas of what's virtuous and
what counts as vice.
I ran into a situation when I was doing my undergraduate studies in computer science
that can illustrate this.
At the University of Maryland, we had four main groups in computer science.
There were the American students, Asian students, Indian students, and Russian students.
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And it was just a part of the American, Asian, and Indian culture that when you were given
a programming assignment, you were expected to do it on your own and submit your individual
work.
But that's not how Russian students learn to do programming work.
When they learn, they're expected to work in a group and they submit the group's work
together.
So, when we had a big programming assignment due, there was this huge scandal because all
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of a sudden, all the Russian kids got flagged for plagiarism.
They had done what they had always done, which was to work as a group and then they submit
everybody's individual assignment as a copy of the group's efforts.
Well, the college had to step back and realize that they weren't cheating, but there was
this huge disconnect between their expectations and the Russian students' culture.
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And so, going forward, they had to educate the Russian kids and it took them quite a
bit of time to get used to this difference.
And the really crazy part about this was that when it comes to school assignments, we consider
things like self-sufficiency virtuous and we consider sharing work or sharing information
to be something bad.
But when you get out into the working world and you're working as a team and you're submitting
all of your work as a team, it's the exact opposite.
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An employee who refused to work with other employees is not a virtuous employee.
And so, our ideas of what is virtuous and what is a vice depend heavily on context as
well as culture.
And this is a lesson we have to take into our reading of the Bible as well.
And so, if we re-examine the idea of self-sufficiency being a virtue in American culture, we can
find that that's not really compatible with what the Bible says.
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You know, in American culture, it's considered good if you can do everything on your own
and you don't need help from other people.
But consider what it says in Galatians 6, 2.
The NIV version says, carry each other's burdens and in this way you will fulfill the
law of Christ.
And the NLT says, share each other's burdens and in this way obey the law of Christ.
And it's clear that what Paul is saying here and what God is saying through him is that
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self-sufficiency is not this thing that we should strive for.
You know, we're meant to be an entire family under Jesus.
And so, we should be sharing each other's burdens.
We should be helping each other out.
It's not a sign of weakness to go to other people and ask for help.
Instead, it's a blessing when someone comes to us and asks for our help.
And we should be just as blessed and willing to go to other people and ask for their help.
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This is the opposite of what our culture says is virtuous, but that's why God's kingdom
is sometimes called the upside down kingdom.
Because it doesn't match what it shows on earth.
And that's why our ideas of virtue and vice are not necessarily what they were in the
biblical cultures.
And then the last cultural difference we're going to look at today is called the center
of God's will.
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The best way to think about this is when God makes promises or when God makes predictions,
is he talking about me as an individual?
Is he talking about a group of people?
Is he talking about an entire culture?
Is he talking about a country?
Is he talking about the human race as a whole?
When we read the Bible, we want to understand which group of people God is talking to.
In the biblical cultures, often had a different understanding of what that was.
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For instance, look at Romans 828 in the NLT version.
It says, and we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who
love God and are called according to his purpose for them.
If we take this as being a promise to us individually, it could throw our faith for a loop when bad
things happen to us.
If we understand correctly, however, that this is meant to be a promise to all believers
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as a whole, we can understand God's intention better.
And we're not going to be discouraged when bad things happen to us individually, but
overall things work out for God's plan.
A few years ago, I was driving with a friend of mine.
We were going out to get lunch and we passed the children's hospital and she knew that
I was starting to be a pastor.
And she looked over to the children's hospital and she said, you know, I'm really glad that
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Christianity works for you, but as long as places like that exist, I don't think I could
ever be a Christian.
And I asked her what she meant by that.
And she said, you know, God promises that all things will work out for good, but that
building is full of sick and dying children.
How is that good?
Well, then I later found out that she had actually had a miscarriage and this miscarriage
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had caused her relationship with her boyfriend to break up.
And so she's gone through all this trauma and she's taking the promises that God made
in the Bible that she'll never have any trouble.
And so when she has trouble, she sees this as God breaking his promises.
Now that was obviously not the right time to launch into some sort of apologetic explanation,
but it helps us prepare ourselves for when bad things happen.
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We have to fight this tendency in Western culture to take all of these promises in the
Bible at an individual level.
For instance, in Philippians 4.13, when Paul says, I can do all things through Christ who
strengthens me.
This is not a blank check to every believer that God is going to help them succeed in
every single thing they ever want to do.
Now in Paul's situation, he's talking about enduring hardships and suffering, which is
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something that millions of Christians have had to do throughout time.
And if they've been able to do it because of Christ strengthening them, it's not a promise
that I could go out tomorrow and become the next star quarterback in the NFL.
And so if we can adapt our understanding of the center of God's will to what it was to
the biblical cultures, we can better understand what the Bible is promising and we can set
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our expectations correctly.
Well, now that we're aware of some of the differences between our culture and the biblical
cultures, what are we supposed to do with all this?
I've got five tips that I hope will help.
The first is this, don't stop reading your Bible.
The first time I read through this book, I freaked out.
I said, wait a minute, I've missed so many things when I've read through the Bible because
I wasn't familiar with the cultures.
Should I stop reading my Bible?
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Should I spend the next year or two learning about the biblical cultures before getting
back into the Bible?
And the answer is no.
I can guarantee that your Bible reading so far has changed your life and help you grow
closer to God.
And that's not going to change.
What will change is that you now know that there are differences between our cultures
and things are going to stand out to you.
You're going to be reading through a Bible passage.
You're going to spot something.
You're going to say, hey, this seems really different from our culture.
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Could there be a different meaning here or hidden meaning?
I better go look this up.
And that leads directly to tip two, which is read books on biblical cultures.
The authors of Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes recommend a book called Biblical Social
Values in Their Meetings, a handbook by John J. Pilch and Bruce J. Molina.
Another tip that I highly recommend is reading writings by the church fathers.
These are people who studied with or directly from the apostles.
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They were very involved in the early church.
They published a lot of writings with different theological perspectives and help us understand
how those biblical cultures were applying what they were learning.
Some of my favorites are Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Papias, and especially Augustine,
who's been transformational for my life as a Christian.
I also recommend looking up the Didache.
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This is one of the first Christian commentaries that goes into a lot of detail on how the
early Christians interpreted scripture.
And speaking of commentaries, tip four is to look up biblical commentaries.
There are thousands of commentaries out there and it can be hard to find the right one.
One thing they recommend in seminary is the website bestcommentaries.com.
This shows all of these scholarly accepted commentaries.
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They're sorted by order of reviews.
You can filter by different denominations like Protestant and Catholic.
It can really help you track down some amazing resources to dive deeper into the Bible.
And then the final recommendation, tip five, is to read non-Western theology.
This can be incredibly challenging, but two great books to start with are The Next Christendom,
The Coming of Global Christianity by Philip Jenkins, and An Introduction to Third World
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Theologies by John Parrott.
These are going to help you understand how people from non-Western cultures interpret
the Bible and you may find some very useful tips in here.
And so that's going to wrap us up for today.
I'll put the resource back up on the screen along with my email address and a link to
where you can download the slides in the future.
As always, I'm grateful for your feedback, questions, comments, and ideas.
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Please feel free to get in touch anytime and thank you for listening today.
There's no impossible I believe that you are working now
to pour it out, pour it out, pour it out.
Welcome to the second session of Teaching Tuesday at Hub City Vineyard.
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This is February 2025 and today's session is called Bible Blinders.
We're exploring nine cultural differences between our culture and the biblical cultures
to help us better understand what we read in the Bible.
Think of today as a continuation of the previous session.
Last time we looked at the five-step interpretive journey which is a tool to help us go from
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the original text to a modern application.
The first three steps of this process were step one, grasping the text in their town,
which is where we're going to understand what the passage meant to the original audience.
Step two, measuring the width of the river to cross, which is where we're going to understand
the differences between us and the original audience.
And step three, of crossing the principlizing bridge, which is when we identify the timeless
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theological principles in the passage.
All three of these steps are made a lot easier the more we understand about the biblical
cultures.
Today's resource is called Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes by E. Randolph Richards
and Brandon J. O'Brien.
I highly recommend this book.
It's easily one of the most interesting and informative books I've read since I've been
at seminary.
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However, I do have to give two disclaimers about it.
The first is this, I can't do this book justice.
You really need to read about the author's personal experiences.
These guys went out, they did mission work, they've helped to plant and lead churches
all around the world.
You're going to read things in this book that I just can't capture in this class, like experiences
they've had in other cultures and other cultures that you really need to read from their perspective.
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The second disclaimer is that different doesn't necessarily mean better or worse.
The one thing I don't like about this book is that the authors spend quite a bit of time
apologizing for the circumstances of their lives.
They apologize for being male or for being white or for being American, and I don't think
that that's biblical.
In Acts 17, 26 to 27 in the NLT it says, from one man he created all the nations throughout
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the whole earth.
He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall and he determined their boundaries.
His purpose for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him
and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.
What this means is that God has determined the time, location, and circumstances of our
lives.
If you're white, he made you white.
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If you're black, he made you black.
If you're a man or a woman, that's how he made you.
If you were born in 2003, he decided that you were going to be born in 2003.
And if you were born in America, that's because God decided you were going to be born in America.
So we shouldn't be apologizing or feeling bad about the circumstances of the life that
God has given us.
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Instead, we should take advantage of all the resources and the different perspectives that
we have access to, to learn as much about the world as possible.
So in that sense, what the authors are doing is laudable, but you may be a little bit frustrated
like I was when you read this and you see them apologizing so much.
That said, the author's experiences in other countries and other cultures has given them
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a really neat perspective and a great tool for analyzing the differences between our
culture and the biblical cultures.
Think of all the aspects of a culture like an iceberg.
You know, we have things that are immediately visible as you're sailing along on the ocean,
and you can see that these are above the surface.
And then if you happen to dip your head below the freezing cold water, you would see some
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things that are just below the surface.
They're not quite as obvious, but once we investigate them, they're pretty apparent.
But then if you go way deep down in the ocean where the bulk of the iceberg is, there are
things that are deep below the surface that are fundamental to a culture that may be almost
impossible for people outside that culture to understand, and they determine many of
the important things about that culture, and therefore they determine many important things
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about what we read in the Bible.
So we're going to start with the above the surface category, and the first item in this
category is cultural morays.
Now one way to think of cultural morays is it's just the way things are.
It's really obvious.
You know, if you're driving down the road, our stoplights are red, yellow, and green.
And if you went to another country where they use different color stoplights, that would
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be immediately obvious.
But it goes a little bit beyond that too, because there's often a moral value placed
on these aspects.
So for instance, we expect somebody to stop at a red light.
And if we are stopped at a red light and the light turns green, but other people keep going
through their red light, we have a moral complaint against the people who are running a red light
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and not letting us go on our green light.
Another real world example of this might be this adorable dog on the screen.
Is this man's best friend?
Is it the main course, or is it a disgusting pest?
Well, if you're in America, your answer is probably man's best friend.
But the authors tell this great story about a mission trip in Indonesia where they were
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welcoming a new pastor and there was a dinner in his honor.
And the best dish that they could recommend this guy was stir fried dog.
It's hard for us to imagine being in a situation like that.
But if you are out experiencing different cultures, especially on mission work, it's
probably something you're going to run into.
But there's a third option beyond friend or food.
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There's also disgusting pest.
You see in some cultures like Islam right now, or in the ancient Hebrews that we read
about in the Bible, dogs were considered unclean.
They were routinely exterminated or chased out of towns.
And when we read stories like the beggar Lazarus, and he's laying there, the dogs are licking
his wounds, it's considered a grave insult and an indignity that like a harmful scavenger
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or a pest would be licking his wounds.
And so the reason that cultural mores are so important when we're talking about the
biblical cultures and how they affect our understanding of what we read in the Bible
is that moral aspect to it.
So for instance, what if we apply our morals to what we read in the Bible instead of having
the Bible dictate our morals?
Think about the different perspectives on alcohol that you might find in different American
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churches.
There are some churches that teach that drinking in moderation is okay.
There are some churches that teach that no drinking is allowed under any circumstances
and that when we read about things like wine in the Bible, that they were talking about
grape juice.
So if we look at what the Bible actually says about alcohol and drinking, I picked out four
scripture verses.
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The first is John 2, 1 to 11, where Jesus turns water into wine for his first miracle.
There's 1 Timothy 5, 23, where Paul says, don't drink only water.
You ought to drink a little wine for the sake of your stomach because you were sick so often.
There's Proverbs 21 that says wine produces markers, alcohol leads to brawls.
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Those led astray by drink cannot be wise.
And finally, Romans 14, 21, where Paul says it is better not to eat meat or drink wine
or do anything else if it might cause another believer to stumble.
And so regardless of our cultural morays, the biblical teaching on alcohol is that in
moderation alcohol is certainly not required, but it is okay.
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As long as we're not acting or speaking violently, we're causing another person to stumble.
And when we read the Bible, we want to make sure that we are interpreting it and understanding
what the Bible says and not what our culture says and then applying that backwards to the
Bible.
And so our next above the surface aspect is race and ethnicity.
And so it makes sense that this is considered one of the very obvious things.
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It's easy to look at someone and see that they're a different race.
And when you're in a culture, the relationships and the dynamics between different races and
ethnicities is pretty obvious.
America is no exception.
And I think it's fair to say that race in America in 2025 is pretty complicated.
When I was growing up in elementary school with these things called heritage days, and
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our class was a good mix of different races and ethnicities.
And so the teacher would have everybody bring in a dish of food related to their heritage.
And you'd present it to the class, you'd explain a little bit about your family's
heritage, and then everybody would get to try and learn about a bunch of different cultures.
It was a wonderful experience.
It was part of the idea of the melting pot in America, where we didn't divide based on
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racial and ethnic differences, but we came together as Americans, but we also learned
about and celebrated each other's differences.
And so it was a big shock to me when I was in college and what you might call contemporary
race politics in America started emerging.
I remember telling people about those heritage days, and I was shocked to hear people tell
me that that was racist.
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I actually had a professor give a lecture in class about how Martin Luther King was
racist because he didn't want people focusing on racial differences.
They thought that Martin Luther King's views were outdated and that it was racist to not
focus on racial differences and said we should be focusing on racial differences.
And they started pushing for things like segregated dorms again.
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It really made no sense to me.
And I imagine it was just as confusing to a lot of other people.
And if it's as confusing to us, the people that live in this culture, imagine how much
we would get wrong about the biblical stories and narratives if we take American race relations
in 2025 and we apply those to stories about the Middle East thousands of years ago.
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For instance, what would we get wrong if we looked at numbers 12, 1 to 2 from the American
perspective?
In the NLT version, it says, while they were at Hazaroth, Mary Manerian criticized Moses
because he had married a Cushite woman.
They said as the Lord spoke only through Moses, hasn't he spoken through us too?
But the Lord heard them.
Now Mary Manerian were Moses's brother and sister.
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And so the story goes on that God gets upset with them and punishes them for criticizing
Moses's wife.
If we do a little bit of digging, we find out that the Cushites were very dark skinned
Africans.
And so if we apply an American perspective to this story, we might understand it as Mary
Manerian are criticizing Moses for bringing someone lesser than them into their family.
But is that what's actually going on?
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Well, no, if we do a little more digging, we find out that the Cushites were revered
as these amazing warriors.
So Mary Manerian, they're not criticizing Moses for marrying down or bringing someone
unworthy into their family.
They're actually saying to Moses, who do you think you are?
God has spoken through us as well.
We're also prophets, but you you're marrying way up to somebody you definitely don't deserve.
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It's still not great that they're criticizing Moses based on the race of his wife, but it's
the exact opposite of the impression that we have initially.
And so if we really want to understand the dynamics of this story, we have to make sure
that we understand all the circumstances and that we're not just applying an American lands
or a Western lands to this story.
The last item in the above the surface category is language.
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And in one sense, this is very obvious because, yes, the Old Testament was written in Hebrew
and the New Testament was written in Greek.
But it's not just the fact that these were written in different languages and we're now
reading them in English.
Most significant thing is that there is meaning, there are words and concepts in other languages
that are not in English and vice versa.
And so we read stories in the Bible, there may be entire concepts that those cultures
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have that we don't have or concepts that we do have that they didn't have.
Let me give you an example from my life.
I am colorblind.
And so when I look at this rainbow, I know because I've been taught in school that there
are seven colors.
There's red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
But if I'm being honest with you, I don't really know what indigo looks like and I'm
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not sure I know what violet looks like either because I only see five colors here.
If I had to name the colors, I would say, well, there's definitely red, there's yellow,
there's green, there might be blue.
I don't know if I actually see blue and then I see black.
At most, I see four or five colors here.
But I know that there are seven colors and I know that most of you looking at this see
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seven colors.
So if I was in charge of naming colors in the English language, we would have been missing
words for colors that you guys can see that I can't see.
And so we've been missing out on a lot of information.
And let me give you a similar example from the Bible.
For instance, in English, we have one word for love.
But in Greek, there are four words that represent love.
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There's eros, which is passionate, romantic love.
That's where we get the word erotic.
There's philia, which is friendship type of love.
There's stoge, which is familial love, like a parent and a child.
And then there's agape, which is unconditional, sacrificial love, like God.
You know, agape is often used to describe when Jesus died on the cross.
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And so when we are reading a translation in English, we don't know which of these four
words is being used.
And there are people who either through ignorance or for certain agendas will try to claim one
of the words is there and not one of the other words.
Two of the most common examples would be David and Jonathan, and then the disciple John and
Jesus.
The Bible clearly says that David and Jonathan loved each other.
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And it describes John as the disciple that Jesus loved.
And people will look at this and they will claim that these were same sex relationships,
that it was a romantic love or an erotic love.
But if we look at the Greek word used, it's not eros.
It's agape.
We were describing unconditional, sacrificial love, not erotic love.
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And so if we truly want to understand these biblical passages, sometimes we have to dig
into the languages that they were written in and look at the differences between English
and those languages to understand the context of what is being said.
Well, now we get to go just below the surface.
We're going to start to see some things that are massive differences between our culture
and the biblical cultures.
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And the first one is an example of a huge one, which is individualism versus collectivism.
We are an individualist culture.
Our culture is centered around the individual.
You decide what you want to be when you grow up.
You decide the goals for your life, whether you want to get married and have a family,
the type of job you want to have.
We may value input from our family, and on occasion we may value input from our culture
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or our country, but they don't get to determine the direction of our lives.
However, that is not the case for the biblical cultures.
We can see a contemporary example of this in Japan.
You know, when the first Christian missionaries went to Japan, they ran into a really strange
problem that they weren't expecting.
And Christian missionaries in Japan still run into this problem today.
You see, Japan is a collectivist culture, and they place a lot of weight on what their
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ancestors did.
They do things like praying to their ancestors at shrines.
And so when the Christian missionaries went over there and they would tell people about
Jesus, the people were very receptive.
They would say, well, yeah, what you're saying sounds great.
I believe, I think it's true, but I can't be a Christian.
And the missionaries would be shocked, and they would say, well, why not?
If you think it's true, what's stopping you?
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And they would say, well, my ancestors weren't Christian, which means they aren't saved.
They're in hell right now.
And so if my ancestors weren't saved, it wouldn't be right for me to be saved now.
And so even though I agree with you, I'm sorry, I just can't be a Christian.
This is completely foreign to us, but it's an essential part of their culture.
And these types of collective decisions about faith are something that we see in the biblical
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cultures as well.
For instance, let's look at the story of the jailor's family from Acts 16.
To set the stage for you, Paul and Silas are out walking and they encounter a slave girl
who's possessed by a demon.
Now this demon gives the slave girl the ability to predict the future, and she's using this
ability to make her masters a lot of money.
Well, she's driving Paul crazy.
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Day after day, she bothers him shouting crazy things out.
And eventually he loses his patience and he turns around and he casts the demon out of
her.
And her masters are furious because now they're out a ton of money.
They have Paul and Silas arrested and thrown in jail.
Now after this happens, Paul and Silas turn the jail into like a worship service.
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They're praying and singing hymns and the other prisoners are listening in.
And all of a sudden there's a massive earthquake.
The prison shakes and all the doors fly open.
Now the jailer who's in charge of this prison wakes up because of the earthquake.
He sees all the prison doors open and because it was commonplace in their culture to take
responsibility by taking your life, he pulls out his sword and he's getting ready to kill
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himself.
Well, Paul runs over and stops and he says, no, stop, don't kill yourself.
We're all here.
So the jailer runs down and he sees what's going on and he sees Paul and Silas and he
says, you know, sirs, what must I do to be saved?
And they tell him, believe in the Lord Jesus and you'll be saved along with everyone in
your household.
And then it goes on to say that they, they told him all about Jesus and they told everybody
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in his household about Jesus.
The jailer cared for his wounds and then he and everyone in his household were immediately
baptized.
Well, this sounds really strange to us because it sounds like this household made a collective
decision to start following Jesus.
The collective decisions like this were acceptable in biblical cultures and they continue to
be acceptable in collectivist cultures today.
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If you imagine an American family sitting at home at dinner one night and the dad comes
running through the door and he says, Hey, everybody have great news.
I heard about this guy named Jesus.
And from now on, we're going to be a Christian family.
We would all probably think, well, that's great for the dad, but that doesn't mean anything
for the mother or the kids.
But in the collectivist culture, the family would sit down, the father would share the
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information, they would discuss it as a family and they would ultimately decide as a family
whether or not the family is going to be following Jesus.
And the next item in the just below the surface category, honor and shame is very closely
related to collectivism as well.
You see, in an individualist culture like ours, we could say that the center of morality
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is the individual.
If I tell a lie or if I steal something, even if nobody knows, I know that I have done something
wrong.
Furthermore, it allows individual morality to be different than society's morality.
For instance, in our society, pornography is rampant and almost everybody uses pornography.
But the Bible warns us to guard our hearts against lust.
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And so just because society says the pornography is okay, doesn't make it something that's
okay on the individual level for the Christian.
In the collectivist society, society becomes the ultimate arbiter of morality.
Whatever it says is okay, is okay.
If there's a situation where society says it's okay to lie or kill or steal, regardless
of what your personal beliefs are, that's okay.
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If you do something in private and you never get caught, such as looking at pornography
or lying or stealing, if nobody ever finds out about it, did you actually do anything
wrong?
The way society enforces these norms is through honor and shame.
By doing things that society says are positive, you gain honor.
By doing things that society says are negative or failing to fulfill your duties, you lose
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honor or become shamed.
And we can see an example of this from a news conference in Japan.
These are executives who are responsible for building a giant residential building that
is now in disrepair.
It turns out that the construction was substandard, data was falsified, there was bogus accounting
so that people could pocket money, and now the building is collapsing.
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In America, they would be fined financially, they might get some jail time, they might
lose their company.
But in Japan, it goes beyond that.
They would get those same penalties, but because they have done something dishonorable that's
gone against society, they also expected to get up, bow, and apologize on live TV to their
families, to their companies, to their countries, to the entire culture for the shame they have
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brought upon them.
And this is just the first step.
Until they are able to take enough honorable actions to restore their honor in society's
eyes, they're going to be barred from a lot of business opportunities and they're going
to have a very difficult time living their lives in that culture.
But had the building not started to collapse and none of this had ever been found out,
none of these men would have felt guilty because in their culture, they hadn't done anything
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wrong until it was exposed.
We can see that same honor and shame system all throughout the Gospels, and especially
in the story of Jesus and Nicodemus.
Whenever we read the Gospels, we see a ton of different encounters between Jesus and
the Pharisees.
The Pharisees are constantly calling Jesus out, asking him questions in public.
Now in our society, if we ask a person a question, it's because we want to know the answer.
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But in an honor and shame system, when you call somebody out publicly or even just ask
what seems to be an innocent question in public, you're making a challenge to their honor.
If they don't answer well, or if they answer in a way that society doesn't support, you
can take some of their honor.
So the Pharisees were actually trying to challenge Jesus and take some of his honor.
But when Jesus was able to answer their questions and usually defeat their arguments, he would
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actually take their honor.
And so we see the Pharisees get furious with Jesus.
It's because every time he's able to answer one of their challenges, he is lowering their
status and standing in that society.
Now if we don't understand this dynamic, we can get the wrong impression about other
people like Nicodemus.
For instance, in John 3, 1-2, Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night and he wants to speak with
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him privately.
In our culture, we might call Nicodemus a coward.
And I've heard people say this before.
They would say that Nicodemus was so ashamed to be seen with Jesus in public and he didn't
want to talk to him for fear of other people's opinions, but that's not what was going on.
If you approach somebody privately, you're not challenging their honor because it's not
done in public.
Nicodemus really wanted an answer.
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And he came to Jesus in a way that wouldn't challenge his honor to show respect and demonstrate
his interest.
The final item in our just below the surface category is time.
And we're getting into aspects of a culture that are so ingrained in the culture and so
hard for us to imagine anything being different that we have to just jump into an example.
And so the example I picked for time is vineyard time.
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I first learned about it a couple years ago at the National Conference when I was helping
with the kids.
We wanted parents to pick the kids up at 4.30, but I noticed that they had set a dismissal
time on the schedule for 4 o'clock.
And so when I asked about this, I thought it was a mistake in the program and the organizer
started laughing and she said, no, we don't operate on normal time here.
We operate on vineyard time.
And so if we want the parents to pick the kids up at 4.30, we have to tell them that
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it ends at 4 o'clock so that they'll be here at 4.30.
Now this is a little bit different than our culture's ordinary approach to time where
we have strict measurements and things are in strictly chronological order.
But it turns out that vineyard time is actually pretty close to some of the biblical culture's
conceptions of time.
One example of this are the two ways that the Greeks approached time.
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They had chronos, which is where we get the word chronological.
And this refers to events happening at the exact time that they did and in the specific
order that they did.
But they also have kairos.
And we don't have a concept like this in English, but you could sort of explain it as when things
happen at the right time or when things happen at a significant time.
And so for instance, if I'm talking about how my morning goes, I might say I wake up,
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I brush my teeth, I get a shower, I eat breakfast and I leave for work.
That would be chronos or the chronological time.
But what if I focused primarily on the things that were super important to me?
I could say I got up this morning, I brushed my teeth and took a shower, I'm ready for
the day.
Now I left out a bunch of things and I may have even put those two items in the wrong
order.
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But I talked about the things that were most significant to me.
Now in our culture, we might say that I left out some information or I presented it inaccurately.
But in the Greek culture, this would be a perfectly good use of kairos where I'm highlighting
important things in the order of importance.
It's important that we're aware of this distinction when we read some of the biblical narratives.
For instance, in the temptation of Jesus, the devil tempts Jesus three times.
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This is recorded in Luke and in Matthew.
In Luke, first the devil challenges Jesus to turn a stone to bread.
Then the devil takes Jesus up to a mountain and tells him if he worships him, he will
give Jesus control over the entire world.
And then finally, he takes Jesus to the highest point of the temple and challenges him to
jump off to see if the angels will catch him.
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Now when we look at the temptation in Matthew, Matthew also starts with the devil challenging
Jesus to turn the stone to bread.
But he tells the temple story second and goes to the mountain third.
Because of our culture's perception of time, we look at this and we see a problem.
Did one of them make a mistake?
Did one of them lie?
We might consider this a mistake or discrepancy, which could call the inerrancy of scripture
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into question.
But what Luke and Matthew are doing is they're using kairos.
Whatever the real order of these three events was, we can trust that all three events happened
because both authors include them, but each is making a different theological point.
And they're using kairos to highlight the most significant of the three events last.
For instance, Luke's gospel builds towards the scene at the temple.
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And so it makes sense that he ends the temptations of Jesus by focusing on the temple.
And when you look at Matthew's gospel, many of the most significant things in his gospel
happen on mountains.
You know, for instance, we can see the transfiguration and we can look at the sermon on the mount.
And so it makes sense that with this theme of mountains, he's going to present the mountain
temptation last.
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Neither of them are wrong.
Neither of them are lying or made a mistake.
They're simply using an accepted rhetorical method to present the information.
Well now it's time to go deep below the surface.
And our first topic in this category is called rules and relationships.
And here we're talking about how different societies look at firm rules versus things
that can bend a little bit.
And so I think one of the best ways to illustrate this is the time that I learned how to barter.
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Now my best friend is Chinese and so is the girl that I dated for a couple years in college.
And so I had the great experience of getting to go to different Asian street markets.
And I learned really quickly that the culture there is quite different than what you would
expect at a normal American grocery store.
If I go into Weiss and I want to buy a Dr. Pepper and the price says $3 and I go up to
the register and I want to pay $2, they're going to tell me that's too bad and I can
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either pay the $3 or leave.
But when you go to the street markets, you're expected to barter because it builds a relationship.
It took me a couple of times to realize this.
It wasn't until I kept trying to pay people the advertised price until somebody pulled
my girlfriend aside and asked her if I was kind of slow.
And so finally she explained to me that the advertised price was merely a starting point
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to build a relationship.
If the price on the sticker said $5, I was meant to offer $3 and then the person would
counter with $4.50 and then I would counter with $3.50 and then finally we would settle
on $4.
Now there'd be a relationship of mutual respect which would lead to future business.
We see a lot of examples of relationships trumping rules in scripture as well.
For instance, consider Paul's words on women in ministry.
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One of the most well-known verses is 1 Timothy 2.12 where he says, I do not let women teach
men or have authority over them.
Now this seems pretty black and white.
If we listen to what Paul is saying, women can't be pastors, women can't be teachers.
But the exact same person wrote in Romans 16 1-2, I commend you, our sister Phoebe,
who is a deacon in the church in San Crea.
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Well, a deacon is a position of authority who would often be involved in some teaching.
So what is the difference here?
It's that Paul's first statement, which is a rule, is based on certain elements of that
culture.
For instance, in those days women were not educated in the Torah like the men were.
So there were many situations where women were having to interrupt or stop church to
ask questions about things that all the men would know.
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It was very disruptive.
So when Paul came up with this rule, he was responding to a set of circumstances.
But the rule bans based on relationships.
And if Phoebe is somebody that God has called and equipped to be in ministry, he's not
going to say no.
And so what Paul is saying is, yes, my general rule is that women are not allowed to teach
or hold positions of authority.
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But if God has called a woman to do that, I'm not going to stand in her way.
There are well-known examples when Jesus' disciples picked grain on the Sabbath.
The Pharisees got upset about it, but Jesus redefined the laws of the Sabbath to prove
that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.
Considering that Christianity is ultimately about a relationship between God and man,
we can't ignore the power of relationships over rules.
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Our next deep below the surface topic is virtue and vice.
And the idea here is that different cultures have different ideas of what's virtuous and
what counts as vice.
I ran into a situation when I was doing my undergraduate studies in computer science
that can illustrate this.
At the University of Maryland, we had four main groups in computer science.
There were the American students, Asian students, Indian students, and Russian students.
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And it was just a part of the American, Asian, and Indian culture that when you were given
a programming assignment, you were expected to do it on your own and submit your individual
work.
But that's not how Russian students learn to do programming work.
When they learn, they're expected to work in a group and they submit the group's work
together.
So, when we had a big programming assignment due, there was this huge scandal because all
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of a sudden, all the Russian kids got flagged for plagiarism.
They had done what they had always done, which was to work as a group and then they submit
everybody's individual assignment as a copy of the group's efforts.
Well, the college had to step back and realize that they weren't cheating, but there was
this huge disconnect between their expectations and the Russian students' culture.
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And so, going forward, they had to educate the Russian kids and it took them quite a
bit of time to get used to this difference.
And the really crazy part about this was that when it comes to school assignments, we consider
things like self-sufficiency virtuous and we consider sharing work or sharing information
to be something bad.
But when you get out into the working world and you're working as a team and you're submitting
all of your work as a team, it's the exact opposite.
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An employee who refused to work with other employees is not a virtuous employee.
And so, our ideas of what is virtuous and what is a vice depend heavily on context as
well as culture.
And this is a lesson we have to take into our reading of the Bible as well.
And so, if we re-examine the idea of self-sufficiency being a virtue in American culture, we can
find that that's not really compatible with what the Bible says.
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You know, in American culture, it's considered good if you can do everything on your own
and you don't need help from other people.
But consider what it says in Galatians 6, 2.
The NIV version says, carry each other's burdens and in this way you will fulfill the
law of Christ.
And the NLT says, share each other's burdens and in this way obey the law of Christ.
And it's clear that what Paul is saying here and what God is saying through him is that
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self-sufficiency is not this thing that we should strive for.
You know, we're meant to be an entire family under Jesus.
And so, we should be sharing each other's burdens.
We should be helping each other out.
It's not a sign of weakness to go to other people and ask for help.
Instead, it's a blessing when someone comes to us and asks for our help.
And we should be just as blessed and willing to go to other people and ask for their help.
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This is the opposite of what our culture says is virtuous, but that's why God's kingdom
is sometimes called the upside down kingdom.
Because it doesn't match what it shows on earth.
And that's why our ideas of virtue and vice are not necessarily what they were in the
biblical cultures.
And then the last cultural difference we're going to look at today is called the center
of God's will.
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The best way to think about this is when God makes promises or when God makes predictions,
is he talking about me as an individual?
Is he talking about a group of people?
Is he talking about an entire culture?
Is he talking about a country?
Is he talking about the human race as a whole?
When we read the Bible, we want to understand which group of people God is talking to.
In the biblical cultures, often had a different understanding of what that was.
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For instance, look at Romans 828 in the NLT version.
It says, and we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who
love God and are called according to his purpose for them.
If we take this as being a promise to us individually, it could throw our faith for a loop when bad
things happen to us.
If we understand correctly, however, that this is meant to be a promise to all believers
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as a whole, we can understand God's intention better.
And we're not going to be discouraged when bad things happen to us individually, but
overall things work out for God's plan.
A few years ago, I was driving with a friend of mine.
We were going out to get lunch and we passed the children's hospital and she knew that
I was starting to be a pastor.
And she looked over to the children's hospital and she said, you know, I'm really glad that
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Christianity works for you, but as long as places like that exist, I don't think I could
ever be a Christian.
And I asked her what she meant by that.
And she said, you know, God promises that all things will work out for good, but that
building is full of sick and dying children.
How is that good?
Well, then I later found out that she had actually had a miscarriage and this miscarriage
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had caused her relationship with her boyfriend to break up.
And so she's gone through all this trauma and she's taking the promises that God made
in the Bible that she'll never have any trouble.
And so when she has trouble, she sees this as God breaking his promises.
Now that was obviously not the right time to launch into some sort of apologetic explanation,
but it helps us prepare ourselves for when bad things happen.
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We have to fight this tendency in Western culture to take all of these promises in the
Bible at an individual level.
For instance, in Philippians 4.13, when Paul says, I can do all things through Christ who
strengthens me.
This is not a blank check to every believer that God is going to help them succeed in
every single thing they ever want to do.
Now in Paul's situation, he's talking about enduring hardships and suffering, which is
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something that millions of Christians have had to do throughout time.
And if they've been able to do it because of Christ strengthening them, it's not a promise
that I could go out tomorrow and become the next star quarterback in the NFL.
And so if we can adapt our understanding of the center of God's will to what it was to
the biblical cultures, we can better understand what the Bible is promising and we can set
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our expectations correctly.
Well, now that we're aware of some of the differences between our culture and the biblical
cultures, what are we supposed to do with all this?
I've got five tips that I hope will help.
The first is this, don't stop reading your Bible.
The first time I read through this book, I freaked out.
I said, wait a minute, I've missed so many things when I've read through the Bible because
I wasn't familiar with the cultures.
Should I stop reading my Bible?
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Should I spend the next year or two learning about the biblical cultures before getting
back into the Bible?
And the answer is no.
I can guarantee that your Bible reading so far has changed your life and help you grow
closer to God.
And that's not going to change.
What will change is that you now know that there are differences between our cultures
and things are going to stand out to you.
You're going to be reading through a Bible passage.
You're going to spot something.
You're going to say, hey, this seems really different from our culture.
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Could there be a different meaning here or hidden meaning?
I better go look this up.
And that leads directly to tip two, which is read books on biblical cultures.
The authors of Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes recommend a book called Biblical Social
Values in Their Meetings, a handbook by John J. Pilch and Bruce J. Molina.
Another tip that I highly recommend is reading writings by the church fathers.
These are people who studied with or directly from the apostles.
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They were very involved in the early church.
They published a lot of writings with different theological perspectives and help us understand
how those biblical cultures were applying what they were learning.
Some of my favorites are Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Papias, and especially Augustine,
who's been transformational for my life as a Christian.
I also recommend looking up the Didache.
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This is one of the first Christian commentaries that goes into a lot of detail on how the
early Christians interpreted scripture.
And speaking of commentaries, tip four is to look up biblical commentaries.
There are thousands of commentaries out there and it can be hard to find the right one.
One thing they recommend in seminary is the website bestcommentaries.com.
This shows all of these scholarly accepted commentaries.
(35:21):
They're sorted by order of reviews.
You can filter by different denominations like Protestant and Catholic.
It can really help you track down some amazing resources to dive deeper into the Bible.
And then the final recommendation, tip five, is to read non-Western theology.
This can be incredibly challenging, but two great books to start with are The Next Christendom,
The Coming of Global Christianity by Philip Jenkins, and An Introduction to Third World
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Theologies by John Parrott.
These are going to help you understand how people from non-Western cultures interpret
the Bible and you may find some very useful tips in here.
And so that's going to wrap us up for today.
I'll put the resource back up on the screen along with my email address and a link to
where you can download the slides in the future.
As always, I'm grateful for your feedback, questions, comments, and ideas.
(36:04):
Please feel free to get in touch anytime and thank you for listening today.
There's no impossible I believe that you are working now
to pour it out, pour it out, pour it out.
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