Post by Bo/CCPU Founder on Sept 18, 2015 9:49:48 GMT -6
FUNDAMENTALS OF BIBLE STUDY—HOW TO STUDY THE BIBLE OR HOW TO UNDERSTAND THE BIBLE— by Richard Jordan (a major study for beginners of dispensationalism)
This class is called The Fundamentals of Bible Study just to keep from calling it “Hermeneutics”. That word is a technical word meaning the “science of interpretation” and of course, would be the interpretation of the Scriptures. If you go to seminary or technical books, you will see words like “hermeneutics”. I don’t use such words very often because we are not charging you ten-thousand dollars for an education. When you charge that kind of money, and up, for an education you have to teach people to speak in ten-thousand dollar words. We are talking in plain words, so the biggest words you will hear in our lessons are words like fundamental and dispensational. Those are words you are familiar with; in other words, The Fundamentals of Bible Study. We will study how to understand and enjoy the Bible. It is important that you know how to do that. Usually when you start talking about that, you want to talk about the Bible itself.
We are studying manuscript evidence. In the Manuscript Evidence class we will deal with Bible text, what inspiration means, and the doctrine of preservation: how God has preserved His Word; where it is; how it is transmitted through history, and how you know that you have it in your hands in an English Bible. When you read a King James Bible, you know you have God’s Word. We will study all that then, and we won’t deal with that in this class. What this class will deal with is how to study the Bible so that we can get the proper meaning out of it. Someone said they want to know how to understand and enjoy the Bible. The key to that is knowing how to study it.
You can see the importance of this all around you in all the different ideas: the adoption of different methods of interpretation. I can’t emphasize that enough. Using different methods of interpretation is where the variant positions and different ideas in Christendom about different doctrines come from. Every doctrine in the Christian faith has at least fifty different views. How do so many views come about? Everyone has a view, from the Modernist on the one hand, to the Fundamentalist on the other hand, and beyond the Fundamentalist—over there where I would be. (I look at myself as somewhere beyond the Fundamentalist because some of those guys have some views, especially about the Bible, with which I am very uncomfortable. I feel they are inadequate, so I step a bit beyond them.)
How do you get all those views? Everyone of them claim to go by the Bible. I was trained in a very liberal college. Mobile College was a denominational college (sponsored by the Southern Baptist denomination), a four-year liberal arts college. I went there not to get a degree in Bible or teaching or preaching, but a secular education. The most conservative fellow on the campus was a neo-orthodox, which is pretty liberal. The fellow in charge of the Religion Department had two Doctorate level degrees, one PhD and one ThD. The ThD was in Biblical Criticism. When he read a passage, he interpreted it entirely different from what I would have understood it.
So the way you interpret the Scriptures depends on the method of studying. The method you study with results in the way you interpret or understand Scripture. Variations in interpretation or views come from different methods of studying.
We want to begin by understanding not only that we have the Bible but once you have it, how to get out of it what God has put in it for you.
2 Timothy 3:16 All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: 17 That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works.
The Bible, the Word of God, completely furnishes us for every good work God would ever have us do. God in His grace has given us His Word and that Word has equipped us to do anything God Almighty wants us to do. You have absolutely all the equipment you need in the Scripture. If that is true that it is profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction and instruction in righteousness, how do I get the profit out of it? That is what we will study in this class: how to study the Bible.
There are three basic principles in Bible study. Everything we will study will revolve around these three principles.
The first method of Bible interpretation was the literal method. In Nehemiah, let us look at a situation where some people begin to explain the Bible (interpret) with what we call the literal method, which I prefer to call the normal method. Just let the Scripture mean what it says and would normally mean.
Nehemiah 8:7-8 Also Jeshua, and Bani, and Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodijah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, and the Levites, caused the people to understand the law: and the people stood in their place. 8 So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.
When they stood there and made these people hear the Word of God, every word was important, so they wanted them to hear every word. Then they told them the meaning of the words (gave them the sense). When they read it, they literally interpreted it for the people and told them what it said and what it meant. That is called the literal interpretation. In other words, you just give the words their natural meaning. Even when a figure of speech is used, you still give it the natural meaning. This is sometimes called the grammatical, historical method.
There are two conflicting views: the literal method versus the allegorical method. An allegory is a mystical kind of a thing where a passage is “spiritualized”. Mr. J. C. O’Hair used to say people sometimes spiritualize the Scriptures because they do not have spiritual eyes, therefore they tell spiritual lies. In all of Christendom, Scripture is either studied literally or allegorically. When you study it literally, you study it the way we are doing it and you will wind up being a Fundamentalist or a Bible Believer. If you study it allegorically, you could wind up being either a Roman Catholic or a Roman Catholic sympathizing Protestant, a liberal or a modernist. Most of Christendom studies the Bible allegorically. That is the reason most of Christendom winds up in the can when it comes to doctrine.
We want to study Scripture literally. To illustrate:
Matthew 16: 18 And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
When it says the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, is there any reason you can not just take that Scripture for what it says, believing hell has gates? I know of no reason you can not. Did you ever read Revelation 18 where in speaking of the Lord Jesus Christ, it says He has “the keys” of death and hell? If hell has a gate, what would you do with a key? You could unlock the gate. Did you ever read in 1 Peter 3 where it is called “prison” – he went and preached to the spirits that were in prison? What are on the doors and windows in prison? Locks. Bars. That’s why in Jonah 2 it talks about the bars of hell.
The standard way of interpreting that is that the word “gates” in this Scripture is a figure of speech describing “power”. That spiritualizes it to “the powers of hell” can’t overcome it. However, it is just as easy to let it have the normal meaning of the word and recognize that hell is not some spiritual, nebulous, mystical thing out there somewhere, but that it is a place which Scripture supports.
I remember a modernist college Professor, who thought pre-millennialists were nuts and told me on one occasion, “You guys can’t get around in the Bible without a road map.” That’s pretty much true; I drive around Chicago with a map in my car all the time. The Professor was going to read this passage in Luke 1:30 – 33 and I was real curious to hear what he would say about it.
Luke 1:30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.
Professor Dobbs read that and said, “Of course, we know he is not going to literally reign over Jerusalem nor have a literal kingdom. That just means the ‘rule of God in the hearts of men.’ He will reign over the house of Jacob? Well, that is the church.”
Where can you get that out of those verses? You have to make that up. So this kind of thinking leaves you to the mercy of the theologians’ imagination.
That passage is referring to the virgin birth of Christ. If the “kingdom” is not real, then why is the virgin birth real? If the kingdom is spiritual, why isn’t the virgin birth spiritual? Do you see how modernists do that; they spiritualize and mysticize verses. When you hear people speak of a “religious fable”, that is this particular school of thought; that a verse does not carry a literal meaning, but that it is a story and the story conveys a spiritual truth. Whether the story is true or not, one does not care. Whether Adam and Eve really lived does not really make any difference.
Grammatical – Historical means that the words are the issue, (the grammar); and that the facts being conveyed are real.
There we have two different schools of thought. When you wind up in the can out there or you look at Christendom and see all the problems they are having, it is because someone moved from the correct Grammatical/Historical method to the Allegorical method.
The allegorical method uses figures of speech. What about them, you ask? Let us look at a true figure of speech in the following Scripture:
Matt. 26:26 - And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.
Was that piece of bread Jesus held truly his body? There is a church that claims it is his physical body. How do you know that is not literally the flesh of Jesus Christ? What was holding the bread? The actual, literal flesh of Jesus Christ was holding the bread. Christ meant “this bread represents my body”. When I draw a cross on the board and say, “Jesus Christ died right here at Calvary.” Now is that cross I drew the actual literal cross where Jesus Christ died? No. That cross represents the cross where he died. When He said, “This is my body”, His literal body was holding the bread. A natural, normal reading and understanding of what’s being said would mean, “This represents my Body.” “When I break the piece of bread, I am demonstrating through a figure of speech that my body will be broken.”
When we use a figure of speech it is about something that is real. It is not a mystical thing that never happened. Here’s the rule:
When you read Scripture, take it literally, unless there is a good reason for doing otherwise. If the literal meaning makes good sense, then the Scripture should be taken literally. If the literal meaning does not make good sense, then it is obviously a figure of speech. Take John 1, for example:
29 The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.
Was Jesus Christ a four-legged, wool-bearing lamb? No; he was a two-legged man; a Jew. But, was he the Lamb of God? Was he the sacrifice for sin? Sure.
Any time a figure of speech is used, there is a literal parallel that exists: like, The Lamb of God, (the figure)—Jesus Christ as the sacrifice for sin, (the factual parallel). The Bible is full of figures of speech, but the figures of speech in the Bible do not justify making everything mystical in interpretation. We use figurative, sense appeal language all the time. I do it constantly. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real or that it has a hidden meaning that you have to mysticize.
Hosea 12:10 I have also spoken by the prophets, and I have multiplied visions, and used similitudes, by the ministry of the prophets.
God said, “I’ve used similitudes.” A similitude is a comparison or a likeness. In our speech, a similitude is a comparison using “like” or “as”. A metaphor is a comparison that does not use “like” or “as”.
God said, “I’ve multiplied the ministry by the similitudes of the prophets.” The purpose was to convey truth. If you can understand the figure of speech or the physical similitude, then you can understand the spiritual truth. That does not mean the spiritual truth is not real; they are both real. But God uses one to help you understand the other. It is not spiritualizing things as you go along; it is using the literal, normal meaning to the words and letting them be normal.
I emphasize all this because the spiritualizing of Scriptures by the allegorical method of interpretation is the mother of abominations in the earth. The allegorical method of interpretation comes from a Jewish fellow by the name of Filo. Filo tried to take Greek philosophy and unite it with the Old Testament Jewish Scriptures. It was picked up in church history by a man named Origen. Origen, by all accounts, was a heretic. In fact, Origen would make a good Russellite. He believed about two-thirds of what Jehovah Witnesses believe: about the deity of Christ, about getting saved, about Hell, etc. He would make a good Russellite but he would not make a good Christian, yet he is one of the most famous people in early church history (2nd and 3rd century). Origen was the basis for the allegorical method of interpretation of Scripture mainly used in Christendom today. He was followed by Augustine.
There is a town you should remember. Alexandria. It is in Egypt. It is where the allegorical method has its roots.
What is Egypt a type of in the Bible? The world.
The allegorical method of interpretation of Scripture is associated with Alexandria, Egypt.
When we study manuscript evidence, you will see this show up with Origen as the first Bible corrector, the first polluter of the Word of God. He not only develops a false method of interpretation and introduces it into Christendom, he also develops the corruptions to the Word of God that are available today in the Good New for Modern Man, the New International Version, etc. that leave verses out and add verses and change words around to change meanings. Origen is the source of that.
The Grammatical/Historical method also had a first century witness. According to the historians, the town of Antioch had the opposing school of interpretation from Alexandria. Antioch had the opposing Bible text also.
What do we know about Antioch?
Do you remember who was involved in founding the church at Antioch in Acts 11? The Apostle Paul.
Do you remember that the disciples were first called “Christians” at Antioch? In Acts 13 it was the church at Antioch that sends Paul out with the gospel. He reports back to Antioch all through his ministry.
If you wanted to find out how to understand and interpret the Bible, would you go to Egypt or Antioch?
I’d go to Antioch!
I just explained to you how to read church history in the first three centuries and there is not one church historian that ever lived that would say that was a sound method. They would have said it was a biased method of interpretation. And to that, I would say, you are right. The problem is, it is a GOOD bias. Philip Schaff writes his church history from a bias. He’s the great authority in the Encyclopedia Britannica on church history, yet he writes from the bias of the allegorical method. We write from the Grammatical/Historical bias.
The split between the methods was created by those people trying to amalgamate their understanding of the Scripture with Greek philosophy. They tried to make the Bible equal with human viewpoint and vice versa and join them together. The culprit that caused this was education. Are we against education? Of course not. It is about human wisdom versus divine revelation. In the Bible, the way God expects you to understand His Word, is LITERALLY. Always make the words on the page the issue.
There are three problems with the allegorical method:
1) It destroys the issue of the words on the page in your Bible being your authority. They don’t mean anything; i.e., the facts are not the facts.
2) It leaves me at the mercy of a theologian’s imagination. (Includes supra-history: a truth above history. Stories in the Bible are just a vehicle to convey the truth presented.)
3) It impugns the integrity of God. (If God said “this” and meant “that”, why didn’t He mean what He said? Or say what he meant?) I’d call you less than reliable if you did that to me.
That’s what it does to God…makes God seem less than reliable.
All this is the source of all the variant doctrines. So the first thing we want to learn in studying the Bible is to just let it mean what it says. Let it say what it means.
1) That first principle of Bible study is to use the literal method of interpretation.
2) The second principal is to compare verse with verse to get the meaning.
The way you will learn to study the Bible here is not by running to a Greek Lexicon or Commentary or some Hebrew Dictionary first. When you read a passage of Scripture and need to understand what that passage is talking about, the first thing you do is let it mean what it says, and say what it means (give it a literal meaning). Secondly, look for a verse in the Bible to explain it to you. You compare verse with verse to get the meaning.
Let’s look at:
2 Pet 1:20 Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation.
When he says that no prophecy of the Scripture is of any private interpretation, what he is talking about is that no portion of the Scripture is to be isolated from the rest of the Word of God. One verse is a part of all of the Word of God. People tend to read a verse and tell themselves that to understand it they need to dig way down into it, getting into the grammar, the syntax, and all that stuff. The key is to look around for something else like it to help you out. Compare verse with verse.
Look for something else in Scripture to shed light on it. We are going to study later about what we will call truth from a remoter context where you will learn how to compare the verses. Definitions of words are fine and helpful to a point, but if you are going to understand the Scripture you will have to interpret it by comparing verse with verse. No verse stands by itself.
1 Cor 2:12 Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. (13) Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.
That’s the way you do it. You compare these things together. That’s how to understand what is going on in the Scripture; let the Scripture interpret itself. For an illustration let’s go to Daniel 7 where we have a passage of Scripture (the first 13 verses is an account of a vision Daniel had) where Daniel sees in verse 4, a beast that is like a lion. In verse 5, he sees another beast like a bear. In verse 6, another beast like a leopard; verse 7, another beast that he can't even describe. He does go on and describe what those beasts do in the first 14 verses.
The question is: who are the beasts? Is it Antichrist?
The standard interpretation of Christendom is that the beast represents a kingdom, etc. But, look now at verse 17.
Dan 7:17 These great beasts, which are four, are four kings, which shall arise out of the earth.
So according to verse 17, the four beasts are four kings.
I interpreted what the beasts are, or who they are, by continuing to read to where I found a verse that did it for me. That particular verse was close by so it wasn’t hard to find that one. If I want to understand what the beast in verse 4 is, I find the answer in verse 17. We can give a little more complicated illustration by going to Mark 16.
Mark 16:15 And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.
Jesus sends his disciples out post-resurrection. Christ dies on the cross; is resurrected; spends forty days with his disciples; will go into Heaven and send the Holy Spirit back to them. In this Scripture Christ is speaking to the disciples in this post-resurrection time, before the ascension, telling them to go out and preach the gospel to every creature. Are they to preach to everybody? Did they go out and preach to every Gentile they met? You might think so from that verse, but now look at Luke where there are some more instructions that you need to compare the Mark 16:15 verse with in order to get the understanding.
Luke 24:46-47 And said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day: (47) And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.
In one passage, Christ sends them out to “every creature” and in Luke 24 it says they are to begin at Jerusalem. Does that help you how to understand how to go to every creature? If you compare those verses, does it give you a little more understanding about what they were thinking of doing? Go to the book of Acts.
Acts 1:8 But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.
This is the same time period. Here He told them to go to Jerusalem, then Judea, then Samaria, and then to the uttermost parts of the earth. When you put those verses together, it gives you the full picture. Compare verse with verse to get explanation and understanding. If you had read Mark 16:15; “go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature”… and later on you read Acts 11:19 where those people went everywhere preaching the Word to “none but the Jews only”, would that seem like a problem to you? It would present a problem to me if he said, go preach to everybody and they wouldn’t preach to anyone but Jews. People would call them racial bigots because they would not preach to the Gentiles. I can show you commentary after commentary, preacher after preacher that say Peter and the Apostles were bigots because of the book of Acts when they would not preach to the Gentiles. That is a failure to compare verse with verse to see what the program is that they were operating under. That is taking only one verse (Mark 16:15) saying that is all there is and not seeing how it was modified and explained by the other passages.
So we want to compare verse with verse to understand it, amplify it and explain it. We will do a lot of that in our Bible study. The three basic principles or methods of study are:
1) THE LITERAL METHOD – Not Allegorical. Give the words their intended meaning. Not mystical or spiritual. Let the Bible say what it means and mean what it says. No hidden meanings.
2) THE COMPARISON METHOD (verse with verse) – Let the Bible interpret itself.
3) THE DISPENSATIONAL METHOD – Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth (2 Timothy 2:15)
The only verse in your Bible that tells you to study your Bible is that passage in 2 Timothy. There are verses that say “meditate” on it; there are verses that say “search” it; there are verses that say “hide it in your heart”; but this verse says “study it” and tells you how to study it. This is the basic method of Biblical Hermeneutics.
Do take it literally and compare the verses. But what is the framework in which we will do it?
2 Tim 2:15 Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
To rightly divide something is to make a separation. You distinguish between two parts. To do it “rightly” means to cut it straight; proper divisions. Recognize things that differ in the Scriptures.
It is not enough to be Scriptural and literal.
It is not enough to compare the verses.
You can be Scriptural by being literal and comparing the verses.
However, it is not adequate to be Scriptural. You must also be dispensational, because you can be Scriptural and still be out of the will of God if you are not dispensational.
So if you do not recognize the difference between what God has written in the Bible that is for your admonition and learning, and what is written in the Bible that is to and about you for your obedience today, you will not understand the Bible correctly.
There are more people in God’s program than just you and me as members of the Body of Christ. God has done more in his dealings with men than just form the church, the Body of Christ. For example, he formed the nation Israel and Israel is not the Body and the Body is not Israel. And his purpose for Israel is not the same as his purpose for us in the Body of Christ. So you need to distinguish between those two things.
Someone has said there are three golden keys: three simple questions.
1) Who wrote the passage?
2.) When did they write the passage?
3) To Whom did they write the passage?
Those three questions make up the basis of the dispensational approach. A failure to follow the dispensational method of Bible study is the source for all the confusion in all Christendom. So the corrective for the confusion is to learn how to rightly divide the Word. That seems really simple to me, so simple that most people think I’m nuts! But it is the key.
A dispensation by definition: is a particular program that God administers or dispenses (a particular set of instructions, if you prefer). You know what a dispensary is or what it means to dispense something. If you take the verb, “to dispense” and make a noun of it, it becomes a “dispensation” or that which is dispensed. To dispense means to hand something out; to give it out to people. A dispensary in a hospital is a place where the medical supplies are given out. The word “dispensation” is a good Bible word but clearly toyed with by the Satanic policy of evil. Roman Catholics use the word “dispensation” to mean an indulgence. What was the name of the disciple whom Jesus loved? John. The world has made a real interesting thing out of the word “john” haven’t they? A toilet. In the same way, the Satanic policy of evil has taken this word “dispensation” and made a mockery out of it.
In our next lesson we will begin to look into how to study the Scripture dispensationally. We will let the Bible teach us how to do that. But now we simply summarize the three basic ways to read and study the Bible.
1) Read it and let it say what it says.
2) Compare verses with verse – to understand it.
3) Rightly Divide it – recognize the things in the Scripture that God has done in different times and places…. The things that differ. We will distinguish between the programs.
Those three principles are the basis for understanding and enjoying the Word of God. Everything else we talk about will just be to explain those three basis principles.
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NOTE:
The above was taken from Grace School of the Bible's class "Fundamentals of Bible Study 101," ... Lesson 1: Fundamentals of Bible Study—How To Study The Bible or How To Understand The Bible
There are test questions that go with this lesson. If you're interested, please message me.
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