Seven Arrows- Intro and Lesson 1

First of all, I want to thank each of you for agreeing to participate in this group.

I want to lay out the reason why I am doing this before we jump in to the actual book.

Most of you would probably assume that I am just doing this for school and in a sense I am doing this for school.

The ultimate reason I am doing this, is that I want this to be profitable for you as well.

Honestly, if this is only for school, its not worth doing. Having a degree from a school is great and all, but at the end of the day, its piece of paper. One day, it will end up in the dumpster.

So my goal in this is that we would grow together as men of God.

So having said that, I want to give you a little introduction to why I chose the book I chose.

Hopefully, you have that book and have already started to read chapter 1 at least.

The reason why I chose this book is that I believe that Christian men need to be students of God’s Word.

On page 28, in the book, in their introduction, they say this-

“A direct correlation exists between a person’s intake of the Scripture and his conformity to the image of Christ.” (pg 28)

So I agree with that.

I believe that you and I are made more like Christ through spending time in God’s Word.

Jesus in John 17 in His high priestly prayer, he was praying for His disciples, and also for us.

John 17:17 NASB95

17 “Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth.

So again, I agree with the statement-

“A direct correlation exists between a person’s intake of the Scripture and his conformity to the image of Christ.” (pg 28)

We must know God’s Word. We must read God’s Word in order to be transformed into the image of Christ.

So the reason why I chose this book is that I believe it will help you walk through God’s Word better.

I think at times, especially with men, we don’t enjoy doing stuff we don’t know how to do.

For instance, Fishing-

A friend of mine recently got a boat, it was like a bay boat of some sort, Key West, nice boat! And he asked me if I had been red-fishing before, I said yes, so then He asks me to go with him down to Winyah Bay and we were going to go after Redfish. I said, “Sure.” So we set out, got down there, put the boat, and he said to me, alright, where you want to go?

And I looked at him, and said I don’t know. I’m along for the ride. In fact, the last time i went red fishing, I was along for the ride. And he said, well where did y’all go? And I said, I don’t know man, its been like 2 years.

So he decided to go up in a creek, and try the redfish there.

Well, long story short, we fished for about 6 hours didn’t catch a fish that day.

Later he told me that he went out again with another friend “who knew what he was doing” and only caught one little sea bass.

Next thing I know, he has sold the boat. I asked him why he sold it. His response was, I bought to go and catch fish but obviously I can’t do that.

We don’t enjoy doing stuff we don’t know how to do. In fact, at times, we will just quit.

I think at times, that may be the case with our Bible reading and study.

Many times, we come to the Bible, to read it, and we really don’t know how to read it. We don’t know how to interpret it. So we just quit.

My hope is that with this book- Seven Arrows- we can get some direction on reading the Bible and interpreting it properly.

So just to tell you a little about the book as a whole before we jump in to the first chapter.

The purpose of the book is to give you the proper knowledge and tools, and really to get you to ask the right questions when you come to the Bible to read it.

The Seven Arrows are essentially Seven Questions to ask that you should try and answer when you come to the Bible.

The Seven Arrows are:

Arrow 1: What does this passage say?

Arrow 2: What did this passage mean to its original audience?

Arrow 3: What does this passage tell us about God?

Arrow 4: What does this passage tell us about man?

Arrow 5: What does this passage demand of me?

Arrow 6: How does this passage change the way I relate to people?

Arrow 7: What does this passage prompt me to pray?

Now in each session or video, we are going to take one arrow in order per session, and teach through.

What does the question mean?

Why is important?

How we do answer it?

and hopefully in answering these question, the goal is that when you come to the Bible, you will know what questions to ask, and how to answer those questions.

Also, this video will be the longest video because I had to introduce it and everything.

The rest of the videos will be shorter, because we will just jump right in to the next arrow. I won’t have to introduce everything again.

Having said all that-

Let’s jump right in to Arrow #1.

Arrow 1: What does this passage say?

“The goal of Arrow 1 is to encourage all readers to examine and to engage the Bible with a clear goal in mind. In fact, not having a clear goal when they sit down to read the Bible might be the source of the frustration. Our first goal should be to determine what the passage says.” (p. 40)

“The biblical authors use two kinds of language when they write—literal and figurative.

When authors employ literal language, the main goal is to convey information in a straightforward fashion with no symbolic meaning. As a result, what the author intends to teach is equal to the meaning of the actual words he uses.

Figurative language, however, should alert us to the fact that the author intended to present a message that is not equal to the literal meaning of the words that he used.” (p. 44)

So essentially the Bible uses two types of language.

Both literal and figurative.

By the way, we do this all the time as well.

When someone scares you-

“You almost gave me a heart attack!” Well does that mean that one of your coronary arteries leading to your heart closed up. No, we mean that the person scared us.

However we also use literal language language.

I’m going to the dumpster to take some trash off.

We mean we are going to the dumpster to take some trash off.

In either case, you know what the persons means though, right.

In the same way, when we come to Scripture, we have to know what kind of language is being using.

Is it literal? Or figurative?

The best way to determine that- is looking at the context. Because Context determines meaning.

Let me give you an example of that-

Take the word “Yard” for example.

What does the word “yard” mean?

Well that depends. In what context are you using it?

Because take these two sentences for example.

I mowed the yard.

What am I talking about when I say the word “yard”?

I’m talking about the grass around my house.

I gained a yard on the play.

Obviously, I’m no longer talking about the grass around my house. I’m talking about a unit of measurement on a football field.

What I am saying is- the same word has different meaning based upon the context in which we are speaking.

When we come to the Bible, its no different. We have to know what going on, on the larger scale before we can understand the specific passages.

This is why I discourage you from point and shoot Bible reading. Because, we have no idea what is going on in the context of things.

“When studying a particular book, begin by reading the whole book with the goal of knowing the overall picture of what happens and what is being described in the book.” (p. 45)

So when you read the Bible, you have to know what is going on in the larger context before we can understand the specifics.

And once, you understand that, then you are ready to look at the text itself.

And in this first chapter, and you really should go and read it if you haven’t.

He lists some things that you should look for when are reading the text. All these are helpful in finding out what the passage says.

Repetition of Words and Themes

Now, I know what you may be thinking. I have to remember all those when I come to read the Bible to understand the Bible? Not necessarily but they can be helpful.

To put it as simple as possible, all we are doing here in even giving you this list, is we want to slow down our read of the Bible.

The goal is not just to read the Bible the goal is to understand it.

Again the question (the first arrow) is: What does the passage say?

So rather than boring you to death talking about those things, lets take a passage of Scripture and work through it together.

First the context.

Jesus is speaking with Nicodemus-

Lets read verse 1-

Now lets just observe things about the text that we are studying.

Keep in mind here. Right now we are just observe the text. just pointing out things that we need to study. This is the beginning. The first question.

So we are just going to mention key words here. ask key questions. look at comparisons.

Tone

Important Nouns Circle

14

Moses

serpent

Son of Man

15

whoever

eternal life

16

God

world

only begotten Son

Whoever

Him

Eternal Life

17

God

Son

world

world

world

Him

18

He

Him

He

He

Son of God

Verbs- Highlight

14

Lifted

Lifted

15

Believes

will have

16

loved

gave

believes

shall not perish

have

17

did not send

to judge

might be saved

18

believes

not judged

does not believe

has been judged already

has not believed

Repeated Words- Square

Lifted

whoever believes Believes

Eternal life

Only begotten Son

judge

Important words

SAVED

PERISH

General observations.

the reference to Moses- Numbers 21:4-9

The comparison to the serpent and the Son of Man.

All these things are important.

In this arrow, we are just look at what the text says.

Observing the text.

It doesn’t have to be even this complicated. Again the point of doing this is trying to understand the text. Not just read it.

That is the first arrow.

What does the text say?

The goal with this is SLOW DOWN when you read the Bible.

I would rather you take 15 minutes of careful study of a few verses and truly understand it than to take 15 minutes and read 4 chapters and not understand it.

John 17:17 NASB95

17 “Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth.

Home work-

In the Book, they use the example 1 John 1:5-22

I want you to do what we just did with that text.

The book will help you out with that.

Next week we will go to Arrow number 2-

What did this passage mean to the original audience?