Sermon Tone Analysis

Step 2: Interpretation

Learning Objectives

After this section, you should be able to:

• Identify some tools that help us move beyond the limits of our own understanding of a Bible text

• Summarize some ways integrated Bible study software can help us identify the interpretive options

Introduction: Getting to the Meaning

The second step of good Bible study involves interpretation.

This is working on the meaning of the passage.

A lot of people read the Bible and they think, perhaps naively, that they immediately know what the text says.

That’s not always the case.

Sometimes terms have a technical force where they are limited by what’s going on in the context, that kind of thing.

Sometimes the context is ambiguous enough that you can’t be sure whether it means one thing or another, or whether a text is supposed to be taken literally or figuratively.

And so there are choices that face the interpreter.

What’s the best way to get oriented to these kinds of things and get your hands around the meaning?

Relying on Your Own Understanding

One way is to do it the old-fashioned way and just try and do it on your own ability and your own strength.

There is something to be said—in fact, a lot to be said—for studying the Bible on your own and staying engaged, just [having] you and the Bible together with the Spirit as you interact with what it is that God is saying.

But that also can be a little bit limiting, because the Spirit’s worked in the lives of a lot of people, and there are people around the world who produced all kinds of tools to help you—people who have developed expertise in given areas and who have given their lives to studying the Bible.

So why should you think [that] in the few minutes that you sit with an open text, you could do better than someone who, say, has spent twenty or thirty years working in a passage and developed a specialty about it?

Using Tools

Study Bibles

This means that there are tools that can help us interpret the text, and perhaps the simplest tool to get your hands on is a really good study Bible: a Bible that has notes underneath that will trigger the historical context or the social context that’s at work.

It may note parallel passages or the way in which a word is used by a given writer or in a given context.

These good study Bibles are really helpful in orienting you to a text, and there are all kinds of good study Bibles out there that have been produced by various publishers.

Usually a good translation will have a study Bible version that their translation teams have helped them to produce, and most of these study Bibles are what I would call textual study Bibles—they’re simply engaged in helping you interact with the meaning of the text.

But there also are other study Bibles that also are quite valuable.

Zondervan has an archaeological study Bible in particular that’s very, very helpful, and it goes through and marks the key archaeological studies and the key features of social life and culture that are informing a given passage.

So it’s a study Bible with a particular slant that helps you particularly in areas that often are hard to find help in.

There also is an apologetics study Bible that Broadman & Holman has produced, and this is a very helpful text in dealing with the kinds of objections that people sometimes face when they read the Bible, and responding to that.