So do you know that I wasn't the one slotted to teach this class? I learned that I would be teaching it, oh, about an hour ago. Ray's not feeling well. He's got some illness that he's working through. And so he has so many wonderful notes here that this class is really going to teach itself. I'm just here so you have something to look at. If you didn't get a handout, you should get one from the front there. And then don't forget to remind me. Somebody, how about you? You can remind me. At the very end of the class, we have a Bible quiz that we're handing out that is homework. You guys are going to take home a Bible quiz for homework. And I think you're bringing this next week. And Ray is going to be teaching part two of this class. Is it open? No, it's not. Not open Bible. So we are getting started on a new series, Understanding the Scripture, Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth. Again, this first section is in two parts. This is part one. Part two is next week. Ray will be teaching next week. And as far as introductory remarks go, You guys bear with me, okay? I'm reading another person's notes, and this might be a good illustration of hermeneutics, because what did the author intend to be taught here in class? You see how I did that there? Yep. Pay attention. There's more of that coming. Let's get started with prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you for this beautiful day that you've made for us. Thank you that we get to come together again on this Lord's day to engage our minds, engage our hearts, and engage the core of who we are. We wanna learn, Lord. We want to worship you this morning in the worship service. We want to engage our minds. We want to be transformed this morning. We know that you do that. little by little, and mostly on Sunday mornings. So help us this morning to be engaged, and we pray that your spirit would illumine our minds, that we would be more like Jesus at the end of the day. In Jesus' name, amen. All right, so rightly dividing the word of truth. The purpose of the study here, there are two goals and three outcomes. Goal number one is to learn principles and methods to interpret Scripture accurately. And goal number two is to deepen our ability to understand and explain Scripture. Okay, those are the goals. The outcomes, what we hope to come from that, is to properly understand God's Word. and to properly apply God's Word. Isn't that important? It's not just the understanding of God's Word, it's the application of God's Word. If you never get to the application, if you never apply God's Word, then you're just a big fat brain, and you don't have wisdom, because wisdom is rightly applying, rightly living out the truth that we have. It's not enough to just learn a whole lot about the Bible. If it stays floating around in your head and it never, as Calvin would say, it never pours into or hits the bloodstream, then you're no better for it. And a lot of us, I think the normal way for us is that we have more information in our heads than have hit the bloodstream, than have gone out to actually impact our lives and are actually operative in our bodies. And that that's that's fine because the information comes into the mind first and that's the natural way that it flows out but careful careful about getting a big fat head and not having that actually pour into and Apply and transform your life James 122 says be doers of the word and not hearers only deceiving yourselves so rightly dividing the word, or in contrast to that, wrongly dividing the church. That's Ray's note here. All right, so the introduction and overview then is talking about the word hermeneutic and then the word hermeneutics. Who knows the difference between those two words? Does the plural really change things? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. Yep, hermeneutic would be the method of interpretation, sort of like the worldview or the paradigm, if you will, that you approach the Scripture with, and then the plural, hermeneutics, would be various principles of interpretation. Any thoughts? Anyone want to add anything to that? Does anyone know the word in Greek? Oh, I wish you'd say it. All right. That's right. Yeah, you passed. Yep, and the word means translation or interpretation. As a verb, it means to bring to understanding, to translate, or to make clear. So when we think about hermeneutics, you think of two different things. It can be described as an art, or it can be described as a science. So, we are looking at biblical interpretation to understand God's Word rightly. As a science, we might say that there are rules, there are principles, and there are methods. Think of hermeneutics, rightly understanding the Word of God, and as a science we can say that there are rules. There really are rules. There are principles and there are methods. And then you say, well, how about an art? Is it an art form? Well, yeah, it can be described as an art because you are acquiring skills that require judgment. Many of the things that we're doing in hermeneutics are what some people call harmonizing of the text. You've got, wow, I've got this piece and I have an understanding of this piece and how it works, this understanding of the book of Genesis or the origins, and then I have this other piece and I have an understanding there, and then you look and say, how do those two work together? How do I harmonize things? One of the things to harmonize that I think is critical to harmonize would be justification and sanctification. Okay, so Paul says that we're saved by faith apart from works in Romans, and then James says, you see how you're saved by your works? And you think, whoa. Now, getting back to hermeneutic, just the overall worldview or paradigm, what we would have to say is, here's what's impossible. It's impossible that James is contradicting Paul. That's off the table. You say, well, why is that? Because God doesn't contradict himself. We're dealing with God's Word here and not the Word of man. So it's off the table that Paul and James would be in contradiction with one another. So then you say, well, but He says, not by works, and then he says, you see your Savior, and you think, well, how do I put that together? Well, there is, and this is what we should take comfort in, the whole Bible does harmonize. The whole Bible has one ultimate author, and it's impossible for God to contradict himself, so we should leave here thinking that the Scripture never contradicts itself. Anybody who claims that Scripture does contradict itself, What we should do is ask that person about who they are to make that statement. God in His Word says that it's impossible for God to lie. And then someone comes up to me and says, I found an error in Scripture. And I say, Scripture found an error in you. Scripture says all men are liars. So who's lying? God or? or you, right? And again, you think of that as, okay, that's a good apologetic tactic to use against someone who would come and argue against Scripture, but think of that, without thinking of how I'm going to use that on somebody who might come and knock on my door challenging Scripture, think of that as something to take comfort in yourself. As you look and say, wonder. Maybe my lack of faith in a moment could cause me to think, I wonder if there's a problem here in Scripture. And I would say, yeah, not only can unbelievers not raise the question of whether God's Word contradicts itself, but believers shouldn't either, and that ought to give us comfort. Questions on that? Thoughts on that? Will you guys just shoot your hands up anytime if you have questions? All right. Why is it needed? Why do we need these rules, these principles, methods, this art of putting things together? One reason would be the distance that we have from the original writings. Okay, we don't speak the same language. There's a distance of language. There's a distance of culture, that things were going on in that culture that are different than what go on in our culture, in some ways. A distance in time, a distance in geography, right? Time separates us from the biblical, the time of the biblical writings, geography, the culture, the language. So how many languages were were the Bible written in? How many languages are represented in the whole of Scripture? It's a real question. Three, that's right. And who wants to name them? A little louder for the... Yeah, there you go, right. Okay, the culture, Greco-Roman or Jewish culture, the geography, things are said like he went up Acts 21 12 to Jerusalem and then we hear down in Luke 10 30 down to Jerusalem you start thinking of how geography is is important there so yes please you can when Qur'an was making statements that was regarding space and time and geography and the plants. He goes, this isn't real. This isn't jive. And when he started to read scripture, the Bible, it was these kind of things that just up and down and the plants and the geography that got sunk into his soul. Just on that level alone, this seems like to be true as opposed to the Quran. Yeah, that's a good point. If you're going to fabricate those things, how is it possible to get them right? You start thinking of Luke as he names people. Well, if we name civil magistrates today, you think of the sheriff, the deputy, the president, the vice president, all of those names of authorities that we have in our day, makes sense to us in our culture. Well, Luke, he names people certain ways, the Tetrarch and all this other stuff, centurions and whatnot, and you think, wow, all of that is accurate, all of it jives, all of the places that he named and all that stuff like that, and people do historical archaeology and they, you know, I think Sproul said once that every time someone turns over another shovel of dirt, they find more more evidence that, for example, that Luke knew what he was talking about. One of the things that I'm realizing, as far as the handouts that I have, that I may be a little confused here on what we're doing. I regularly get confused. I will mention this though. If you guys think of, this is one of those hermeneutic type things. Have you guys heard of Josephus? Most people have. Josephus was a historian and he wrote a book and a lot of people look and say, okay, I have Luke who tells me things. Luke was a historian too. So I have Luke the historian and I have Josephus the historian. And as you look at those two things and you say, well, wow, I know Luke is telling the truth because Josephus corroborates what Luke said. Does anyone see a problem with that? Yeah, exactly. And you look and say, okay, well, what's the standard? Now, it's great that Josephus corroborates and gives evidence that jives with what Luke is saying. But it's important for us not to say, wait a minute, if I'm testing Luke by Josephus, then Josephus is the standard. But Josephus was not inspired by the Holy Spirit to write down a historical account. That's not the infallible historical account. This one's the infallible. I should say, hey, I know Josephus is telling the truth because Luke said it. That's the standard. Yes, Tom. Oh, I see. Gotcha. Yeah. Yep. Well. Yeah. Gary. Yeah, so the question is, if the scripture is sufficient, then someone might ask, well, do I even need any of these other sources? What are these other sources doing for me? Well, I think what I would say is Scripture is sufficient. If Josephus was required in order to understand Scripture rightly, then we'd have to challenge the sufficiency of Scripture. We'd have to say that I guess Josephus may be the key to understand Scriptures rightly. And you got to be careful with that because many cults, many false religions have come and have said things like that. Ellen G. White, the one who started the Seventh Day Adventist group, what she claimed was not that she had an extra book. It wasn't like the Mormon faith where they said, you know, we have an extra Testament, right, another Testament of Jesus Christ, that's the Mormon view. But Ellen G. White just said, no, I'm just someone who can interpret the Scripture rightly. And you say, okay, so without you, I can't have an accurate interpretation of Scripture? And she said, bingo. And you think, well, welcome to the world of a cult. But I think I would say, around friends, I'd say that when we study extra-biblical sources, sometimes we learn things about the culture or the history that actually help us give context and give us a deeper understanding, right? Near Eastern type stuff, and you say, wow, now when I read this portion of scripture, I have a deeper understanding of it because because that historical work that I looked at actually gives me some taste of the culture or the history or things that were going on there. I think it enriches the understanding that we have. Good question. Anyone want to chime in with additional thoughts on that? Yes, Joel. I think even listing all these names and history, it kind of encourages people to say, or encourages people to say, oh yeah, look, it corresponds with what we know, who the charge pilot was. So it kind of encourages the reader to say, OK, we know. It takes it out of the realm of myth, like the Greek myths. You never have a king that actually exists. You have these fictional people. Sometimes they try to put it in the history. But as soon as you put it in the history, it's easy to go, That's not right. But even Josephus doesn't say, as far as I know, Christ was God incarnate, the incarnate Word. That's not what Josephus is doing. We have to go to Scripture to know the truth of those things. The extra-biblical stuff just helps us see, oh, this is a myth, like the Greek myths that happen outside, apart from time. It's history. It's real. It happened. and now Luke is going to tell us what that means, or the Gospels are going to tell us. Yeah. Got it. Great point, Gary. I think so, and I have a question. I think a use of using actually the sources would be to nullify the ethical commands of Scripture by saying, oh, it only applies in a certain unique context in the first century, blah, blah, blah. So it doesn't apply to today. Right. yeah yeah and and if you think of that the Bible itself is a history book and you think okay well I can't can I read other history books sure because scripture doesn't give an exhaustive historical account of all the things that have happened right this book is big but it's not it's not that big Right? So many, many other things happened in history that are not recorded in Scripture. So Scripture covers what God intended it to cover historically, and He's giving the teaching on what's happening there. You say, okay, I have a history book. I know what happened 2,000 years ago. I know these things that happened. You say, well, can I read other history books that tell me other things about things that happened? Sure, sure you can. But again, the thing is, which one is controlling? Which one is infallible? Which one is used as the standard upon which to view the others? If you have that principle nailed down properly in your mind, then I say, yeah, read all the history books you want. Will Durant, I think, have you guys heard that name? He's one of the brightest or most famous historians ever. And again, I don't look down at his work. I say, yeah, that's great. Read it. and get it. Oh, it does? OK. OK. Yes. and how Luke, in Acts and Luke, makes use of historical stuff. And he confirms every single thing that Luke said, even that could be questioned, can be verified historically, even by secular authors. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, that's great. People say that the extra biblical sources are confirmatory, but they're not authenticated. Yeah, good point. OK, let me make sure I have my notes here proper. I don't know if they all got printed out, so give me a minute. And while I'm getting my ducks in a row here. Let me give you an illustration that I think is helpful. I've used this in some of the kids' classes that I've taught. When you think of, you guys have seen these big gigantic murals that people draw. I think we were visiting Tennessee once and we went somewhere where they, against this huge wall, there was a real painting of the Battle of Gettysburg or something like that. And you look back from it, it's like, whoa, that's huge, right? This big old mural. And you can see the big picture of the mural from standing a good distance back. Wow, this is obviously the Battle of Gettysburg. Look, they've got the blue and the gray, and there it is. And you say, OK, well, that's great, but if this A lot of murals have a lot of good detail in them, and if you zoom in and you look and say, wow, look at the expression on that guy's face, right? Something just happened to him. The author is intending to do something with that specific thing. You say, well, but yeah, but if I look back at the whole big picture, I'm not focusing in on the expression of each soldier's face. And I want us to have that in our mind as an illustration. You think, a mural can be looked at from a distance and you can see the big picture. But then you can zoom in and you can look and say, look at that, look at that, what's that guy holding in his hand? And then you can even get into, if it's a good artist, you can get into brush strokes. And you think, wow, look at the brush strokes there, how that, that there's something being told And as I look at that, you think of Scripture can be viewed as the big picture, the big story, the hermeneutic. You think, well, what's Scripture about? It's about God sending his Son to redeem a people in history. But it can be summed up pretty quickly, you know, wow, there's a big picture kind of thing. And then you drill in, it's just like Nebuchadnezzar ate grass. Like, whoa, like what? does that fit into the big picture?" And you do that kind of thing, and I think it enriches it, and I believe it was Cornelius Van Til that talked about the hermeneutical spiral. Basically, what he was saying is that as you walk through and read through the Scripture the first time, what's going to happen is you're going to get the low-hanging fruit, you're going to get a an understanding, a general understanding of the big picture, but you're not going to understand it as well as you might understand it the second time around, and then the third time around, and then the fourth time around. And so you look at that, and the idea is that what will end up happening, and this is the spiral, is the big picture of the Bible is going to help you understand the details. And then the details in Scripture are going to help you understand the big picture. And as you continue to cycle through reading Scripture, you think, wow, these details enrich my understanding of the big picture. And the clearer the big picture is for me, that helps me understand the details. And you improve your hermeneutic that way. So that big picture, that 3,000 views, you just said helps us when we go to the restaurant. How does that big picture help us from atomizing? If you could explain that question, because it's kind of new. Atomizing would be when you isolate pieces of the text apart from the others. You don't keep the whole big picture in mind. Yeah, and that's a danger on one side of the road, right? The danger is to atomize and take pieces without understanding them in the context. You know, I think the ditch on the other side of the road is to say, I have a big picture in view, but you're reading a particular passage and you say, yeah, well that doesn't I don't need to understand what that particular thing means. Why? I've already got a big picture in view. It can't mean that. I say, well, you better find out what it does mean, right? Maybe it doesn't mean what your premillennial friend is trying to tell you that it means, but you better find out what it does mean. Does that mean by having a permanent duty in the world, do you have a permanent duty? Right. Yeah, that's right. And I think the thing to recognize is that our hermeneutic can be improved upon. That needs to be settled in our head. Just because we have a hermeneutic, we have a paradigm, we have presuppositions about the big picture, I'd say yes, but it can be improved upon. You can improve upon it, and oftentimes that improvement comes by the Scripture, bought by pieces of the Scripture, influencing and changing and growing our understanding of the big picture. We need help in the details, and we need help in the big picture, and there's a cycle that we're both kind of complement each other. All right, I found the things in the notes that I needed to get to. So the author's intent, thinking about the author's intent. We are trying to seek to understand the intended meaning of the original writer. You've heard that before. What was John or Moses or Paul trying to communicate? This written information, this written word, it was intended to communicate something. And the question is, what? What did the original author intend to communicate? And we were just talking about this in the car, and I don't mean to give an answer to one of the quiz questions, but it's not just, well, what was Paul trying to communicate? Well, it was, yeah, what was the Spirit trying to communicate through Paul's writing, right? We understand this is God trying to communicate. So you want to understand the original author's intent and trying to get an understanding of what they meant to communicate. So, yes? Just not to say that you were saying this or implying this, but. In order to maintain the clarity of God's revelation, I would say that it's not just that Paul was trying to, or that John was trying to, or that God the Spirit was trying to, but that Paul did, and that John did, and that the Spirit of God did communicate. So that, we'll get into a future lesson about the clarity of revelation, but it wasn't that God was looking for the right words to say, and hopefully this will translate into this particular leader's mind. I know you weren't saying that, but I just wanted to make that clear that God did reveal, He did communicate, and we're the ones who are trying to understand. Yeah, thank you for that. And one of the things that helps me to think of something that was written in the notes here, we do have additional challenges in understanding God's word because of the distance that we had spoken about. But if I said, OK, well, what if that distance was not there? What if you were one of the original hearers of the the book of Romans or Ephesians? I'd say, oh, well, then. Yeah. Then those people understood everything perfectly clearly. I'd say, uh, no, because not only do we have that distance that we're working through, but we have the noetic effects of sin. We have the effects of sin on our mind, and so did they. They may have heard something that they didn't like to hear. And so that's an additional challenge where our sin is clouding us from that. And yet, there's nothing wrong with the message, the message as it was given through through the Holy Spirit and from the pen of Paul, nothing wrong there. That was clear communication, no problem there. The problem is with the sinful hearer or reader in our case. Peter even acknowledges that Paul's own writings, he didn't say that Paul was having trouble communicating but that some of his writings are harder for us to understand. which I think Peter included himself in, in that group of us. He also had the noetic effects of sin, so he didn't have the inspiration as far as understanding everything that everyone ever wrote. He was in the same boat as everyone else as a pedagogue. And Peter also puts the blame on those who distort Paul's words as problems of them being untaught as they were yet. Yeah. All right. There is the contextual principle and here's Ray's illustration. He says, what does this phrase mean? It was a ball. If I just, you heard someone say in our context, it was a ball. Now, the three different understandings or interpretations of that could be that we're talking about baseball, or we could be talking about a fancy dance, a ball, or having fun, right? We had a ball, and there was no ball involved, no baseball or basketball, and it wasn't a fancy dance, it was just you guys were smoking cigars and talking theology, and you had a ball. We usually have a ball Alright, layers of context is next, and this kind of touches on what Gary was talking about. There are sentences, there are verses, there are words, but those words and sentences and verses are included in chapters, and those chapters are running arguments, and those are included in a book, and you say, wow, you know, and that's why the Reformation Study Bible is so helpful, right? It gives you a context of who wrote the book, when it was written, and that just, that helps you so that you're not just isolating and pulling something out of context, which D. A. Carson says a text without a context is a pretext for a proof text, right? You can, people can make the Bible say just about anything if you pull something out of context and and we want to be responsible students of Scripture and not do that. And it's not to say that you can't have your favorite verse. A piece of truth can be encapsulated very nicely in a particular sentence or verse, no problem there, as long as it's understood properly, it's understood in the proper context. Yeah, true, yep, exactly, which I think he gets to here. One other thing to, or a couple other things to keep in mind, is that we have a progressive revelation from God. I know you guys don't like the word progressive, but tough. Progressive revelation means that God is telling a story, as you might look at in a book, you know, the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe, right? You don't know everything you need to know in chapter one, but as you go through and say, okay, now that I have a complete understanding that this story had a beginning and an end and there it is, and it was being revealed in history. So how many years, what was the span of years that the scripture was written in? Who knows? Close. 1,450, no, I think it was about 1,500, yeah. Who's counting? Some people. All right, the revelation is progressive. And then we talk about a literal interpretation, okay? There's a literal interpretation, there's a natural interpretation. What are we getting at when someone says, I intend you to understand the words that I'm communicating to you literally? Okay, well, there's a famous example that people say to get away from a bad understanding of the word literal. Who knows what it is? Yeah, right. I am the door, and you don't think, okay, Jesus is really four inches of oak. Right. But when we say literal, what we mean is that certain genres of scripture are to be taken. Poetry is supposed to be taken as poetry. History is supposed to be taken as history. Prophecy is taken as prophecy, and that type of thing. If we had more time, I'd ask you guys what your take is on Jonah, whether you think it was a real fish or whether you think that that just meant that Jonah died. I've been recently hearing more things about Jonah. I thought it was a fish. Call me crazy. Call me a literalist. I've been called worse names. Okay. Scripture interprets Scripture is the next one, sometimes referred to as the analogy of faith. It's the process of interpretation by which an expositor labors to understand whatever text or verse with which he is working in light of doctrines drawn out of the canon of Scripture. It is seeking to match interpretive possibilities to establish doctrinal truths as a safeguard against arriving at a false conclusion. Basically, clearer passages of Scripture shed light on the unclear passages. We want to understand Scripture in light of Scripture. Again, that calls us to the whole idea of saying, I see the big picture, and that means that guy in the blue coat in the Gettysburg mural, Well, I know that he's on the northern side because he's got a blue coat on. If the author intended him to be on the other side, he would have painted him with a gray coat. Our understanding of the whole Bible helps us to correct certain problems that we may otherwise fall into. Okay, the grammatical principle, word meaning, grammar, syntax. And this kind of touches on what you were saying, John Mark. The Bible, I think Sproul said this, the Bible is a book and it's to be read like any other book. And you think, what? Why would we say that? We're talking about the Bible here. Yeah, but it's written communication, and that means that you're supposed to take written communication and understand the person who is communicating it. This isn't something that we read differently than other books. We're trying to understand what the intended message is that's supposed to be communicated. Tom? Oh, I'm so glad, yep. I'm so glad you said that. That takes me to one of the points that he had, and I hope I get through this. One of the things that is one of the hermeneutical principles that we understand is that Scripture has one interpretation, a single meaning. And the Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 1, Part 9 says, the true and full sense of any Scripture, which is not manifold but one, And Sproul drills down on this and says, yes, the scripture has a meaning. It has one meaning. There's there's one thing that is meant here. But what he says, and this is kind of what you were saying, Tom, is. the application of that particular truth may be, you may have a thousand applications, right? So you read something, one season of life, and the truth found there applies to this particular thing that's happening in the season of life. Then you read it at a different season of life, and it's not that the truth there has changed, it's just that the application is manifold. The meaning is singular and the application is manifold. Okay, the harmony of Scripture. This is Sproul here. It says, no part of Scripture can be interpreted in such a way as to render it in conflict with what is clearly taught elsewhere in Scripture. We talked about that before. The Scripture, it's impossible for Scripture to contradict itself. And anyone who says that it is possible for Scripture to contradict itself, we have things that we want to say to that person and say, Well, let's just say it's you, Matthew. Let's say you say, Matt, the Scripture is full of contradictions. I think I was just asking to say, have you ever contradicted yourself? And if you would in your better moments, and a lot of opponents of Scripture in their better moments would realize, yeah, I've made mistakes here. Yeah, I've contradicted myself here and there. I say, well, if you're a self-admitted person who contradicts yourself, then how are you in authority to find contradictions here, right? Again, Scripture says all men are liars, and it says it's impossible for God to lie. And so when a man comes knocking at your door and saying, Scripture is false on this point, that's impossible. Can't be, God can't lie. That's a good place to end. And maybe that is where we're all in. I think that we have about a minute for any closing thoughts or questions. Something that was helpful when I was reading through these things and trying to understand it was these principles, especially in that divine author box, come from scripture itself. So that progressive revelation, Jesus tells us, Moses in John 5, he says, Moses is writing about me. In Luke 24, he shows how all the psalms, prophets were talking about Christ. Ephesians 3, that which was not known to previous generations, that's a progressive revelation, the harmony of Scripture, right? God does not deny Himself. So all these principles come from the Word itself. They're not just things that we think are good ways to read our Bible, and then we do it, but Scripture itself teaches us to read Scripture as one. Yeah, that is so important too, because when you come down to it, the paradigm that one brings to the scripture. ends up being something that is so controlling for them, right? I mean, you tell people, hey, I've got a verse of Scripture, and you think that you're going to change their mind with it, but it just doesn't happen in a lot of cases. You think, what's going on? Well, the paradigm that they're working on, that thing is locked in. It's solid. And if someone says, well, for us, where do you get your paradigm? if you think, well, you're gonna have to get your paradigm from Aristotle, and I'd say, what? Like, does the Scripture not provide its own paradigm? And if it didn't, if it didn't provide its own paradigm, and you need to get the glasses, as it were, right? Paradigms are usually described as glasses, right? I put my glasses on and they're rose-colored, so everything kind of looks rosy. They're blue-colored and everything kind of looks blue, or the yellow ones, right? And you think, okay, well, Scripture obviously wants us to have the right paradigm. Where do I get the glasses? Where do I get them? Yeah, real quick, I like what the Westminster says in chapter 1, section 7, where it talks about the learned and the unlearned. Yeah, that's what our unschooled not unschooled.