Our Bible [Explained](4)

CHALK BLACKBOARD

HERMENEUTICS: INTERPRETING THE TEXT

EXEGESIS: OUT OF, TAKING OUT OF THE TEXT

EISEGESIS: INTO, PUTTING INTO THE TEXT

Authorial Intent

2 Timothy 2:15 ESV

15 Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

WELCOME KOINONIA, ONLINE ALSO

This is week 4 of our study of the Word of GOD.

We started with our foundation with 3 truths.

3 Presuppositions

Every part of scripture is theopneustos. GOD Breathed, Inspired by GOD.

2 Timothy 3:16 NASB95

16 All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness;

2. Scripture is well preserved. Jesus said “

Matthew 24:35 NASB95

35 “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.

3. All scripture is without error.

Can I Trust the Bible? Infallibility, Inerrancy, Interpretation

inerrant signifies the quality of being free from all falsehood or mistake, and so safeguards the truth that Holy Scripture is entirely true and trustworthy in all its assertions.

We affirm that canonical Scripture should always be interpreted on the basis that it is infallible and inerrant.

We have discussed the transmission and translation of our Bible.

This week we have the Interpretation of the Bible.

--Opening Prayer:

LORD, teach us how to study our Bibles AND better use YOUR Word.

This week, we are discussing the Interpretation of the Bible.

This is an 8-week study all in itself, so in the 40 minute version we may not cover all areas, but if you have questions, let me have them and we will get to them.

Our first question could be, we now understand the transmission of the scriptures and the translations of the bible.. but...

How do we interpret the Bible?

How should we interpret the Bible?

If we say that the only source of truth is the Bible, there is no further revelation then this is it, here.

Then the compelling thing becomes--how do we get the right message out of this book?

Given that we're dealing with an ancient book, in some cases, of course, a very, very ancient book going all the way back to the time of Moses, many, many centuries ago, and even in the case of the New Testament, a couple thousand years ago, we are dealing with the fact that it's a different time, it's a different people, it's a different culture, it's a different geographical setting.

It's different sociologically, it's different physically, geographically.

It's different in terms of language and so we have to kind of close all those gaps to interpret Scripture accurately because

whatever the Bible meant when it was originally given is exactly what it means now.

And so we have to recreate that scene.

Sometimes you hear people say, "We need to bring the Bible into modern times."

That's exactly the wrong thing to do, you need to take the modern reader into ancient times.

You need to reconstruct the setting in order that you can get the interpretation at the time it was written.

So let's take a look at the question: How should we interpret the Bible?

The word that we use to describe interpretation of the Bible is hermeneutics

Hermeneutics

It is from a Greek word, hermeneuo which means to interpret or to translate, to give the meaning.

It is giving the sense of what something says.

It would be used of anything that needed to be interpreted.

It’s like when we are talking and we say, "What exactly do you mean by that?"

That's a very common expression to something you don't understand.

Or "What do you think that person meant?

Or What do you think this writer means?"

If you go to high school or college, and you take a course in American Literature, or European literature or any other kind of literature, you're going to be dealing with prose or poetry,

you're going to be continually asking the question,

"What did the writer mean?"

What was the message here because it's sometimes not obvious on the surface.

Sometimes it is if the writer says the sky is blue, we don't need to study that a long time.

But there are a lot more things that aren't nearly that simple.

So hermeneutics, which is an English transliteration of this Greek verb, hermeneutics is the science of Bible interpretation.

And I want you to identify it as a science because it is a science.

That is, it operates under fixed rules.

That's very important to establish.

It is the crucial science behind all accurate doctrine, all sound doctrine that is faithful to the Word of God.

Where you have a deviation from sound doctrine, inevitably you have a failure to use the science of hermeneutics.

A question people ask is "Why do so many good men disagree on a verse or given passage?

My initial answer to that is because none of us is perfect, all accuracy doesn't reside with any of us.

Because we are prone to presuppositions, because we may be ignorant of certain facts that have been outside our education, we could come to a wrong conclusion.

Or we could just decide that we want something to mean a certain thing and read it in.

But, agree with this.

Every text of Scripture has one true interpretation.

We might not get them all right, we might disagree, but all texts of Scripture have one interpretation, one only.

That is the essence of communication.

God is saying something, not anything you want Him to say, and not everything.

So the distinctive science of Bible interpretation is called hermeneutics and it is behind all sound doctrine, all understanding of Scripture.

And consequently, anything that is wrong is a deviation for the most part, anything certainly

that is heretical is a deviation from the principles of sound interpretation.

Now having said that, let me say this.

IN MY OPINION...

Pentecostals and Charismatics do not operate on sound hermeneutics.

They do not. MY OPINION..

Poor principles of hermeneutics show up in this Movement everywhere, as they do in other Movements.

Let me quote from the writer Gordon Fee

Gordon Fee is a seminary professor with a terminal degree.

He's a very brilliant man and interestingly enough, Gordon Fee is a Pentecostal.

And listen to what he says about the Pentecostals and Charismatics with regard to Bible interpretation.

I quote, "Pentecostals, in spite of some of their excesses, are frequently praised for

recapturing for the church her joyful radiance, missionary enthusiasm and life in the Spirit.

But they are at the same time noted for bad hermeneutics.

First, their attitude toward Scripture regularly has included a general disregard for scientific exegesis and carefully thought out hermeneutics.

In fact, hermeneutics has simply not been a Pentecostal thing.

Scripture is the Word of God and is to be obeyed.

In place of scientific hermeneutics there developed a kind of pragmatic hermeneutics.

pragmatic meaning use what works for us instead of following the correct way of doing something.

Obey what is taken literally because it's obvious, spiritualize, or allegorize, or devotionalize the rest."

And then he says, secondly, "It is probably fair and important to note that in general the Pentecostals' experience has preceded their hermeneutics.

In a sense, the Pentecostal tends to exegete his experience," end quote.

That is absolutely true.

What do we mean by the word "exegete," means to draw out.

eisegesis is reading into from eis ,

the word "into," reading into the text, putting into the text your own ideas.

Exegesis is drawing out from the text.

When we talk about exegesis that means we're teaching how to let the text speak for itself.

Rather than reading into it, you let the text speak for itself.

Pentecostals--says Gordon Fee--tend to exegete their experience.

Now he has come to this conclusion simply by observing the Movement, because it's absolutely true.

I could take time to give you some of the crazy illustrations of this, a few of them might give you some insight.

Watching a typical television program, you will see evidences of this every night on any Charismatic television channel.

They say they base things on the Bible and then they come up with things like this.

Here's one.

"The gentleman says, 'My ministry is based entirely on my life verse, Matthew 19:26.

With God all things are possible.

God gave me that verse because I was born in 1926.'"

Obviously, intrigued by that method of obtaining a life verse, the host of the program grabbed

a Bible and began thumbing through excitedly, "I was born in 1934," he said.

My life verse must be Matthew 1934.

What does it say?"

Then he discovered that Matthew 19 has only 30 verses.

Undeterred he flipped to Luke and Luke 19:34 says, "And they said, 'The Lord has need of him.'"

That's Luke 19:34.

Thrilled, he explained, "O that's the verse, the Lord has need of me."

To which the host's wife responded, "You can't use this, the verse is talking about a donkey."

What a wonderful life verse.

Now you say, "That's extreme."

No, that's not extreme, that's pretty ordinary.

That incident says much about the willy-nilly way some Charismatics approach Scripture,

looking for a word from the Lord, they often play Bible roulette, you know, they spin the Bible, as it were, and flip it open somewhere and whatever it says, that's the Lord's verse for them for that moment.

And, of course, you know the classic illustration of that, flipping through the Bible somebody

came across Matthew 27:5, "Judas went out an hanged himself," that won't work.

Flip to another page, Luke 10:37, "Jesus said, 'Go thou and do likewise.'"

That's not going to work.

Flip to another passage, John 13:27, "And what you do, do quickly."

All of that is in the Bible, it just doesn't go together.

That's not the message that you should commit suicide.

And while that story may be apocryphal, it does make an important point, looking for

meaning in Scripture beyond its historical intent in what we call authorial intent.

That's a little expression that you read a lot when you read about the science of Bible interpretation.

Authorial Intent

What did the author intend?

What did the divine author intend that the human author wrote down?

What was the intent of the author, God and the writer?

That's what we're always after.

It's not what you want it to mean, or what I want it to mean, or what anybody else wants it to mean.

It's not what it might mean to somebody now, or today, it's what did the author intend?

the divine Author and the human instrument that divine Author used?

This is critical.

Many Charismatics will pluck a verse out of its context.

And they're not the only ones.

The importance of careful biblical interpretation couldn't be overstated.

It's impossible to overstate it.

Misinterpreting the Bible, listen, is essentially no better than not believing it.

Misinterpreting it is essentially no better than not believing it because if you believe something it doesn't say, you have missed what it does say so while believing what it doesn't say, you don't believe what it does say.

What good does it do to agree that the Bible is God's Word, God's revelation if you misinterpret it?

You miss the truth.

You miss the authorial intent.

Interpreting Scripture is absolutely critical.

You might be a very effective communicator, you might be very glib and you might be very warm-hearted toward the Bible.

You might...you might want to do the very best you can to communicate what you think the Bible means, but this is real serious here.

This is so serious that I would compare it to a physician.

You don't want somebody who is untrained in surgery to operate on you.

And there's a sense in which we want to be careful who operates on the Word of God.

Who cuts into the Word of God to discern its meaning should be prepared.

There is, by the way, a whole stream of church ministry and pastors and associations and

fellowships that kind of pride themselves on non-seminary trained men who are not seminary

trained and in many cases haven't gained the tools to accurately handle the Word of God.

Some of them will then read the good books and find the good commentators and lean on

someone else.

And that's fine, as well.

And that's what most Christian lay people do.

You also are responsible for rightly handling the Word of God and you need to know where

those good resources are.

You sometimes hear people say, "Well what does this verse mean to me?"

That's a very poplar thing.

That's kind of the early years of the Bible study movement, people would get together

with a Bible...now this happened in the late sixties, people started Bible studies.

people were gathering in groups and there was really no one who had the tools to interpret Scripture,

and so it kind of fell down to what does this mean to You?, what does this mean to me?

That has nothing to do with the true meaning.

All that matters is what the verse means period...not what it means to you.

We can get to what the truth of the verse means in your life, but not until we know what it actually means.

Every jot, every tittle, every small element of Scripture carries only the intended meaning

of the author and the task of the interpreter is determined what that meaning is.

All right, so that's just kind of a bit of an introduction to the importance of the science of hermeneutics.

Second Timothy 2:15, you remember this verse?

2 Timothy 2:15 NIV

15 Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.

That's the mandate of hermeneutics.

Second Timothy 2:15, "Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman that doesn't need to be ashamed."

If you don't handle accurately the Word, you stand before God ashamed.

This is our responsibility.

The Word must be handled with diligence and care and precision and accuracy and those who fail to do that will be ashamed.

Now let me suggest three errors to avoid just to kind of expand this a little bit

Three errors to avoid in Bible interpretation

Don’t try making a point at the price of proper interpretation

In other words, you might have a point to make, you want to make it so you proof text it with a verse taken out of context.

It's very easy to do that.

It's very tempting to do that for a pastor or a teacher to sneak a foreign meaning into a text to get a desired response.

This is a very old ancient way of handling the Scriptures,

it goes back to the rabbis who did this all the time, the ancient Jewish rabbis.

A rabbi was trying to convince his people that the primary issue in life was concern for human beings.

And that's a good thing.

Our primary concern in life should be for human beings, for some people it's cats, and for some people it's dogs and for some people it's for horses, and for some people it's money and whatever.

But we should be able to convince people the primary issue in life is to care for people.

This rabbi in a sort of a traditional rabbinic fashion came up with a way to do that

and it was going to Genesis chapter 11 and the story of the Tower of Babel.

He made the story of Babel a story to demonstrate that your concern should be for people.

You say, "How did he do that?"

Well he used the stones of the Tower of Babel to support his idea in this way.

He said that the builders of the tower were frustrated because they put material things first and people last.

As the tower grew taller, it took a hod carrier many hours to carry a load of bricks to the brick layers at the top.

The Tower of Babel, a ziggurat way up in the sky and they're carrying bricks to the brick layers at the top, said the rabbi.

If a man fell off the Tower on the way down, no one cared because he didn't lose any bricks.

But if a man fell off the Tower on the way up, everybody was very sad because the load of bricks was lost too.

That, said the teacher, is why God confounded their language because they gave priority

to the building and the bricks rather than human beings.

Well look, I agree.

You shouldn't give priority to bricks, you should give priority to people.

The sad thing is, you could pull that off.. easily and have everyone saying, "Boy, that is a powerful point.

That's a memorable point.

I'll never forget that."

You probably won't, unfortunately.

But that has nothing to do with the Tower of Babel, nothing whatsoever.

In fact, it skews the whole point of Genesis 11, it is true, people are more important than bricks.

There isn't anything in Genesis 11 about people mourning if somebody fell off with or without bricks.

Genesis 11 says nothing about the importance of people over bricks.

The point is, God is more important than idols and God will judge those who make an idol.

Babel was God's judgment on proud men who were defying Him.

Now it's a good message to consider people more than bricks.

But please don't read it in there.

Now that goes on endlessly in rabbinical writing.

It's all over their writings.

That's just one illustration.

Refrain from making a point at the price of a proper interpretation.

That would be Eisogesis reading your point into the text and manipulating it to fix it

as opposed to exegesis, letting the text yield its own truth.

Secondly, avoid superficial study.

These are three errors to avoid.

Avoid superficial study

Good accurate Bible study, I will let you know, is hard work...it is hard work.

It can't be done by flipping quickly through the Bible.

It can't be done by flipping around in a concordance and trying to piece things together.

Understanding the Bible, listen, understanding the bible accurately, listen, is alien to me.

It is alien to me if you consider who I am, what language I speak, when I live and where I live...the whole document is alien to me.

It is a completely foreign document.

Everything about it is foreign.

Its language is foreign, its culture is foreign, its geography is foreign, its history is foreign,

its philosophies are foreign, its social customs are foreign, it is a totally alien document to me.

And I can never establish the meaning of a text without knowing what it meant to the author and so I have to create then the complete context in which the author wrote.

That is alien to me and therein lies the work

This requires immense diligence.

The interpretation of Scripture is hard work.

Now I want to say at the same time that the meaning is clear.

It just takes hard work to get to it.

But it's amazing how clear it is.

And I want to tell you about the clarity of Scripture.

I know there are people who say, "The Bible's not clear, the Bible is an ancient document, we can't know what it means."

I hope this has been your experience, here at Spring Creek Baptist.

You sit there and I open up a passage like this morning in John 5, and I read six or seven verses to you and you kind of wonder exactly what is that about.

And after many, many, many hours, if not years, of thinking about that text, I tell you what

it's about and all of a sudden the light comes on.

You probably say to yourself, "That's pretty simple, that's pretty obvious."

How many times have you said to yourself, "Why didn't I see that?"

Why didn't I see that?

It's clear.

It's the normal way to understand the text.

1 Timothy 5:17 says, "Double honor is to be given in the church to those

who labor in the Word and doctrine."

But why does the church give honor to those who labor in the Word and doctrine?

Because the church is the beneficiary of their hard work when the clarity of scripture is brought out to bear.

God gives teachers to the church, to labor in the Word and doctrine so that the people in the church can understand the Word of God clearly..

One of the real early scholars in this subject of hermeneutics wrote this,

"It is often asserted by devout people that they can know the Bible completely without helps.

They preface their interpretations with a remark like this, 'I have read no man's book,

I have consulted no manmade commentaries, I have gone right to the Bible to see what it had to say for itself.'"

Now that's a very pious statement. (self-righteous)

That's a very sort of spiritual sounding statement.

And you could say that and people might say, "Amen, brother, amen."

But that is not the way of wisdom.

You don't want to sit under that.

Does any man have the right or the learning innately on his own to bypass all the accumulated

illumination of the Holy Spirit through the history of the church?

And that is about as proud and unspiritual a statement as any person could make.

It's a veiled egotism to say, "I don't read human books, I go right to the Bible."

It's a subtle affirmation that you are...you're a greater source of biblical wisdom than say

John Calvin, or any other who consulted every available source there was.

We can't confuse inspiration with illumination.

We have an inspired text, we need to be illuminated by the Holy Spirit, that's 1 Corinthians 2.

We need to be taught by the Spirit.

The Spirit knows the things of God and He teaches us.

The function of the Spirit is not to communicate new truth, and this is where the Charismatics go off.

The function of the Spirit is not to teach or to reveal new truth, it is to bring illumination, bring light to the Bible.

And instead of them chasing revelations and looking for new truth, if the Holy Spirit was really moving in them, if the Holy Spirit was moving in them the way they think He is,

they would be the purest and the noblest and the highest and the best of interpreters of Scripture.

Fact: They are not.

How could you have a Holy Spirit Movement and the Holy Spirit not do His primary work

which is the work of illuminating the Word of God for the people of God?

You have to believer that the work of the Holy Spirit illuminating the believer who studies the Word faithfully is to yield the truth.

What this gentleman was writing was simply describing a lack of respect for Holy Spirit

illuminated biblical theologians, expositors and scholars who have spent years studying and interpreting Scripture.

I've heard this so many times, "John MacArthur has a great ministry, an influential ministry,

think of what it would be like if he had the Holy Spirit."

That's what Charismatics say.

That's the work of the Holy Spirit, illuminating my mind, not apart from the diligence of study, but as a result of the diligence of study.

Charismatics place emphasis on letting people in a congregation say whatever they think the Spirit told them.

That's not the Holy Spirit.

That's not how the Holy Spirit works.

I heard a radio interview where a Charismatic woman who also was a pastor was asked how she got her sermons up.

She replied, "I don't get them up, I get them down.

God delivers them to me."

Really?

How does that work?

God delivers them to you?

It's sort of unspiritual, if you have to study, if you have to get it up, if you have to dig it out.

We should be very, very careful never ever to superficially study the Scripture and then blame it on the Holy Spirit.

So, on the one hand, diligence in the study.

On the other hand, a confidence and trust in the leading of the Holy Spirit.

And I would promise you this, wherever the soundest doctrine is, wherever the purist

and truest understanding of Scripture is, there the Holy Spirit is.

So, if you would like, I would say this, there may not be a church in this area that I know

of where the Holy Spirit has manifested Himself more powerfully than right here at Grace Church

because His work is to illumine the Scripture and make it clear, and do by the clarity of

that Scripture a mighty work in the salvation and sanctification of souls.

don't make a point at the price of a proper interpretation.

The second, avoid superficial study.

Third, don't spiritualize or allegorize a text.

This is a popular thing.

What do you mean spiritualize or allegorize?

Well, you use Scripture like some kind of story and make it mean whatever you want.

This is an extreme example and I'll never forget, I listened to this series...a young couple came to our church,

I remember the pastor who was talking to them and he came to one of our pastors to get counseling

about marriage problems and he began talking to them and it was clear they should never

gotten married.

And this is not a match made in heaven.

So, "Why did you get married?"

"Oh," said the husband, "it was the sermon our pastor preached in our church."

"Really, what sermon was it?"

"Well, he preached on the walls of Jericho."

Walls of Jericho, what does that have to do with marriage?

"Well," he said, "that God's people claimed the city, marched around it seven times and the walls fell down."

He said, "If a young man believed God had given him a certain young girl, he could claim

her, march around her seven times, the walls of her heart would fall down.

So that's what I did and we got married."

To which our pastor said, "That can't be true, you're kidding me, right?"

"No, no, that's true.

And there were many other couples who got married because of the same sermon."

Can you imagine people circling girls?

I mean, that's enough to scare you, ladies.

Talk about stalking, about the third time around you've got to get out of there.

Some people think marriages are made in heaven and some are, but that's a marriage made in an allegory.

A well-known.... pastor preached a series on the book of Nehemiah and he said...

Nehemiah's writing about Jerusalem's walls were in ruin.

That speaks of a broken-down walls of human personality.

Nehemiah represents the Holy Spirit who comes to rebuild the walls of human personality that are broken down.

When he got to the king's pool in chapter 2, he said this meant the baptism of the Holy Spirit and the mortar between the bricks rebuilding the wall was speaking in tongues.

So the message was, Nehemiah is teaching us that the Holy Spirit wants to rebuild the broken walls of your personality through the baptism of the Spirit and speaking in tongues.

Nehemiah?

It has nothing to do with human personality, the baptism of the Spirit or speaking in tongues.

But, you know, people sit and say, "That's deep.

That is deep.

Wow, I never saw that."

Of course you never saw that.

a very well-known, well, well known pastor of a large church preached on the Rapture of the church one night from John 11.

John 11 is about Lazarus and his resurrection.

And he preached on the Rapture of the church from John 11 and essentially he said, "Lazarus

allegorically refers to the church and Jesus saying "Lazarus, come forth," was a picture of the resurrection of the church."

So afterwards there was this little ice cream shop and he said, "John, John, were you there tonight?"

I said, "Yeah, I was there."

He said, "Have you ever seen that in John 11?"

I said, "No one has ever seen that in John 11.

You are the first."

And he took it as a compliment.

He said to somebody, "John says no one's ever seen that but me..." and oh boy.

You know, I used to say this is like...you don't even need the Bible for this.

You know, if you're going to make something up, you could use little Bo Peep, right?

You could say, "Little Bo Peep, she was little, she was alienated by her name.

She was sad.

And to make her sadder, she lost her sheep.

Everywhere in the world people are lost."

I mean, you could preach that stuff from anything.

"Ah, but they'll come home.

Yes, if you're faithful.

Yes, those lost people, they'll come home."

But I think you get the point.

This is the Bible being used and abused, so you don't do those things.

Okay, you don't make a point at the price of a proper interpretation.

You don't do something superficial and you don't use the Bible for spiritualizing, allegorizing

and devotionalizing.

You use faithful hermeneutics.

All right, what are those hermeneutics?

The five principles

That would sort of leave you uneducated but I'm going to do the best at it because you

need to know about these.

Let me just give them to you and you can think them through, the literal principle...the

literal principle.

These are the five principles, scientific principles that I work with that all Bible

interpreters have always worked with...

Literal principle

What does that mean?

You interpret the Scripture according to normal language, real people, real history, normal language.

If somebody comes up to you and says, "It's certainly a beautiful day today."

You say, "Oh, what's the secret meaning of that?"

There's no secret meaning, it's just a beautiful day, I thought I'd say that.

Why would you do that with the Bible?

If the Bible says something that matter of fact, why would you assume there's some secret hidden meaning?

There isn't.

So this is real people, real history, normal language...its real meaning.

The words of Scripture are words that are to be understood in ordinary ways in the course of any daily use of normal language.

Whatever the most obvious meaning, the simplest meaning, the clearest meaning, the most normal meaning--that's the meaning.

You say, "Well what about figurative language?"

Well, you know, we use figurative language.

"You know, I'm as worn out as a dog.

I'm..."

You don't mean you're a dog.

We understand metaphoric language, we understand analogies, we speak in analogies all the time.

That's normal language.

Figures of speech are normal language.

Symbolism is normal language.

But allegory is secret, hidden meaning that is not contained in the normal language.

There is no deeper meaning, there's no hidden meaning, there's no secret meaning, there's no spiritualized meaning.

Yes, they're prophetic passages where there are analogies, there are illustrations.

You read Zechariah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, in the book of Revelation you see images...those

images are conveying a reality.

They are conveying a reality in a symbolic way.

And, you know, we use those kinds of things all the time, so did Jesus in parables, right?

Parables were fictional stories conveying actual truth.

So you do not ever abandon literal interpretation in favor of some mystical, hidden allegorical

interpretation which discards accuracy, coherence, intelligence and reason.

Then you have a free-for-all...free-for-all.

This also was the way the rabbis did it.

The rabbis said Abraham had 318 students because letters and...

letters had a numerical equivalent

and the consonants in Abraham's name added up to 318, so the fact that the consonants

in Abraham's name added up to 318 meant that Abraham had 318 servants.

That's just not true, that's irrelevant.

It has nothing to do with the truth that's being conveyed with the name Abraham.

it appears in numerology, sometimes you read

about numbers in the Bible...sometimes you read about certain historical events appearing

in the text of the bible if you go across the letters at an angle, or a diagonal or

up or down or across and it gives all the events of history.

You can throw those things in a computer.

Somebody did that.

Somebody said this is the secret meaning of the Bible, there are books that have been written on this.

Somebody else put the same stuff together, threw it in a computer and accomplished exactly

the same thing with Herman Melville's Moby Dick .

And he wasn't divine, and he didn't write secret meanings in the letters on different rows and at different angles.

So these kinds of things are crazy misguiding treatments of Scripture.

So literal...literal.

Number two, the

historical principles

the historical context is everything...culture,

geography, politics, religion, the thinking of the people, the perspectives, the world

view, what's going on at the time, how the people think...all of that is informing you

on the historical context.

So I start out with the literal principle, I go to a text, I say, "Okay, it means exactly

what it appears to mean.

If there's a figure of speech, then the figure of speech will become clear as to what it

illustrates, at what it refers to.

Then the second thing is the historical principle.

What are the characteristics of the city?

What were the cultural conditions?

What were the politics?

What were the social pressures?

What were the tensions?

What were the problems?

What were the crises?

What were the customs of the people?

What informs all of this?

Now here's where you can get some help.

If you want to know the secret of John MacArthur's preaching, here it is.

I have a really good library.

As I said earlier, that's all alien to me.

I have to go find all that.

I have to go back and find that in Bible dictionaries, Bible handbooks, commentaries, books on history,

books on Bible customs, books on everything I can get to reconstruct the times.

I remember very early in my Christian life I devoured Alfred Edersheim's Life and Times

of Jesus the Messiah , two massive volumes which reconstruct the Jewish history around

the life of Christ. biography on the history of the world

around the time of the Apostle Paul because I needed to have all that information, even

as a student in seminary I knew that authorial intent was everything and I had to reconstruct

the history.

It is absolutely critical and it's what makes the Bible come alive.

It's why you feel you're there.

You don't feel the Bible is all of a sudden been dropped out of heaven into your world,

you feel you've been dropped into its world, right?

That's because of the historical context.

There's a third principle and that's the

grammatical principle

This is to take a look at the language and the syntax and lexicography of a passage...the

words, the way they're arranged, the prepositions, the pronouns, the antecedents.

And you can do that in your English Bible.

You interpret, you do that as a matter of course.

What do the words mean?

What is the preposition telling me?

To what does this pronoun refer?

To whom does it refer?

So it's a grammatical thing.

We break that into word studies, studies of actual words, syntax which is how the words

are connected with each other.

The word studies is lexicography, what is the lexicon definition.

Syntax is how the words are constructed and that is part of the science.

So you have to get into the grammar.

This is where knowing the original language is really critical.

And if you don't know Greek and Hebrew, you can...and you want to really study the Bible,

you can get books that will give you the English.

You can access the Greek from the English.

You can access even the Hebrew from the English and find those original meanings.

One of the reason through the years that I've written so many commentaries is to help people

do that.

There are other books like that that are available in the bookstore.

Instead of just buying the end product of somebody else's study, get in on the front

end of it, get these kind of books and go at it yourself.

It's necessary to do grammar to find out what the meaning is and just to give you kind of

a maybe a step deeper into it, when I'm interpreting a passage, I look for the main verbs because

verbs always carry the action and that's what you're always looking for, the flow of action

is always around the main verbs.

And if you can find a main verb supported by a lot of participles, you know the participle

always modifiers the main verb and you can work your outline around the main verb and

the participles.

So you're digging down on verbs, nouns, phrases, modifiers, adverbs, adjectives, all of that

is in the course of doing grammatical study.

And I would just tell you, this is alien and foreign to the Charismatic Movement.

The fourth is a

synthesis principle

The synthesis...the Reformers used the expression Scriptural Scriptorium Interpreteur .

What does that mean?

Scripture interprets Scripture.

Scripture interprets Scripture.

If you want to be able to do this, you...this is a skill you can buy probably for about ten bucks.

Get Treasury of Scripture Knowledge...TSK

Treasury of Scripture Knowledge.

You can look up every verse and find every other verse in the Bible that refers to the same idea and the same truth.

It's not a concordance.

It's not the same word, it's the same idea.

It's the Scripture interpreting the Scripture.

Scriptura Scriptorium Interpreteur , let the Scripture interpret the Scripture.

So that's the synthesis principle.

So when you hear me ask a question like this morning, you don't recognize the glory that

is from the one true God and I said the glory from the one true God is Jesus Christ.

Why would I say that?

Because that's how He's spoken of in John 1:14, that's how He's referred to in 2 Corinthians 4, that's the synthesis principle.

So after you've done the grammatical work in the text, you compare it with other related texts and that's how you come to a full understanding.

One writer says, "The Bible appears like a symphony orchestra with the Holy Spirit as

its Toscanini, each instrumentalist has been brought willingly, spontaneously creatively

to play his notes just as the great conductor desired, though none of them could ever hear the music as a whole.

The point of each part only becomes fully clear when seen in relation to all the rest."

That's a brilliant statement.

The Bible is a symphony and when you study one theme, you're just putting all the instruments

together and then it becomes a symphonic presentation of that one truth.

One more principle, the practical principle...

the practical principle

The final thing you want to ask is what are the implications of this?

Now when I talk about this, I don't talk about application, talk about implication.

There's a difference.

Application means do this...and I've been criticized through the years and maybe justifiably, of not giving application, not applying what I teach, not spending time at the end of a discourse, the end of a sermon, making direct application.

And my answer to that is I'm much more concerned about implication than specific application.

And what I mean by that is this.

I want you to be processing in your mind the implications of this text.

It's the Holy Spirit's work to make the application.

I could say, "Go home and do this, go home and do that, go over there and do this."

I could give you specific application but it might not apply to all of you.

I would rather give an implication that hits all of you.

Like this morning, I said, "Here are three things that will give you assurance of your salvation."

That's the implication of this message.

You understood that.

Everybody understood that.

That was the delivered truth at the end.

That was the practical principle.

As to specifically making application of that new understanding of your assurance, that's

going to work out, flesh out as the Holy Spirit directs your thinking, your experience, and

your life.

Well, there are the five principles.

Now you know the secret of what I try to do.

And what we all do as we teach the Word of God.

Having said all of that, we have to go back to a final text

1 Corinthians second chapter.

"Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is of God that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.

The natural man receives not the Spirit of God, they are foolishness to him.

Neither can he know them because they're spiritually discerned.

The natural man can't do this, can't interpret Scripture.

Nor can those who don't submit themselves to the principles and the science of hermeneutics.

But at the end of the day is the Holy Spirit's illumination that guides that intense process to the end that comes up with the right and a clear interpretation to the glory of God.

All right, that's your lesson.

Let's pray.

Father, we thank You for our time today to talk about these things and to consider

how urgent and important it is for us to handle Your Word accurately.

Help us to be faithful at that in every sense.

The truth then becomes our life and our joy and for it, we give You glory and we thank You in Christ's name.

Amen.