Sermon Tone Analysis

Other Bible Study Tools

Introduction

Last week we thought through genre.

This morning, we’ll turn and look at some tools we have for Bible study.

And we’ll begin with the Author’s Intent.

After all, have you ever seen a verse being used out of context?

Can someone give me an example?

(example: Mt 7:1 – (“Do not Judge”).

Whenever we approach a passage of scripture, we should always ask two questions:

(1) Why did the author write it?

(2) What is the context?

Knowing the purpose and context of a verse or passage will help you understand your bible correctly and prevent you from making some of the errors we just talked about.

I.

The Author’s Intent

So let’s begin with our 1st tool, the author’s purpose.

Every book of the Bible was written with a specific purpose in mind, therefore we should interpret each part of a book in light of this purpose.

This means we would say that you can’t impose whatever meaning you want on a text.

The problem with this approach is that the Bible is God’s word, not our word.

Its overarching purpose is to tell us about him.

And so we need to understand what he’s trying to accomplish with it.

We know the biblical writers were inspired by God; therefore, their purpose is God’s intention.

So let’s take a look at some passages to see how to uncover the author’s intention.

We’ll start with some where the author’s intent is easy to spot.

Explicit and Clear Purpose

[Keep us looking at our bibles]

Turn with me to the end of John’s gospel, chapter 20 verse 30 -

OK.

So why did John write the book of John? [wait for an answer].

When you study the book of John, then, you need to keep this purpose in mind.

It’s one reason why John is so explicit about who Jesus is (remember last week).

Implicit or more ambiguous purpose

So what if the intention isn’t obvious or explicit?

In these cases, we should examine the text for clues.

To try and understand why it was written and what the main themes are.

We talked about this in our last class on genre: When dealing with a NT epistle or OT Prophet try to answer these four questions to get a sense of the purpose (on handout):

1.

Who is writing to whom?

2. What is the situation of the author and reader?

3. Are there any problems or issues that are being addressed?

4. Are there any repeated themes or a single idea holding the book together?

A helpful text to meditate on with these four questions is

For home study: 2 Timothy 1.9-10.

I want to encourage you to look at these verses at home.

I think you’ll see that these verses are profitable just by themselves.

But you’ll get more out of them, I promise you, if we understand how they support Paul’s main purpose for 2 Timothy.

Remember: If you don’t understand the author’s purpose, you won’t often get the passage completely wrong (by God’s grace).

But you’ll probably end up simply affirming a general truth rather than seeing the deeper meaning of the passage.

QUESTIONS?

We should always keep in mind that God’s underlying purpose in all of scripture is the revelation of his glory, primarily as it is displayed through the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, when we sit down to study God’s Word, as we seek to discern the purpose and the context of a passage, we should do so with the goal of growing in our knowledge of Him in all his glory!

Let’s continue on and discuss two more important interpretive tools: structure and parallelism.

They’re designed to help us break up larger sections of scripture to help us better understanding their meaning.

Let’s start with structure.

III.

Structure

We want to ask ourselves two questions when we’re trying to understand the structure of a passage:

Has the author divided his material into sections?

How do those sections fit together?

That first question is key.

Not all portions of Scripture have an overarching structure to them.

But when a book appears put together in a particular pattern or order, it’s important that we understand what that structure is.

That way we can see more clearly what the author is trying to do at each point in the book.

Finding Structure

OK.

So how do I figure out the structure of a passage?

Look down in your handout and you’ll see a few tips for doing this.

1. Look for repeated words or repeated themes.

2. In narratives, look for scene changes.

Pretend you’re a movie director or a playwright and ask yourself, “did the action just switch scenes here?”

“If not, why did the author move me on to something different?”

We’ll get to an example of this in a few minutes.

3.

In dialogues, you can often divide the text up based on who is speaking.

For example, in Job it matters hugely if it’s Job speaking, God speaking, or one of Job’s friends.

4. In some places the structure that’s used is the structure of a legal argument.

Malachi is a good example of this, as is Paul’s letter to the Romans.

In Romans 1 and 2, Paul establishes that everyone is under God’s wrath because of their sin, for Gentiles in Chapter 1 and Jews in Chapter 2, before he begins his argument about the free gift of salvation in Christ for those who believe in chapter 3.

So if you see a logical progression of thought, like in Romans, it may well be the structure of a progressive argument—and you would do well to trace out that argument.

Incidentally, you’ll find that the paragraphs, chapter divisions, and verse divisions in your bibles are generally helpful.

But sometimes they’re not.

Keep in mind that they’re not inspired by God.

Often, it can be useful to print out the section of Scripture you need from a site like www.biblegateway.com

so you can read it without verse, paragraph, or chapter divisions.

Using Structure

[Find a bible text as an example]

Once you’ve broken out your passage into subsections, whether based on scenes, or arguments, or themes, or repeated phrases, it’s useful to then give each section a summary title.

This forces you to think about what the main point of each subsection is and write it down.

Don’t feel like you have to be wed to your first thought; you can always change it later.

After you’ve summarized in a few sentences what each section is about, the next step is to see how each part fits together.

As we said before, in a letter, the sections might be arguments that build on each another, or in the case of a narrative, the sections might contrast or complement one another.

Along the way, you might find that you’ve started to outline your section of Scripture.

Often, it can be useful to go ahead and finish the outline.

Outlining a chapter or even an entire book can be a great way to follow a flow of thought and see how structure reveals meaning.

Another thing that can help is to memorize a passage of Scripture.

When you memorize it, you’re more likely to notice patterns of theme and word recurrence that give evidence of structure—at least at the chapter level.

And you’re more likely to see how the author uses Structure to accomplish his purpose.

Seeing how the author has structured what he’s saying will help us see the big idea of the whole passage.

Parallels

We looked at parallels a little bit when we looked at the genre of poetry.

We talked about the different types of parallelism.

Parallelism makes for nice poetry, but it also helps us grasp the meaning of the passage in a different way.

It serves to give you two chances to understand something.