How to Study Your Bible – Dr. George Guthrie

Lesson 1 – The Process of Bible Study

I. Reasons for failure to study God’s Word: 1 Corinthians 8

I want to welcome you to the class on Bible Study and Interpretation. It’s good to see everybody here. We’re going to have a good time with this class over the next few weeks, and it’s one that all of us need. It is very, very important because the way we read and understand the Bible really affects the way we live. We make decisions based on our understanding of what we’re reading in the Scripture. If we’re serious about the Scripture as some type of authority in our lives, it’s very, very important for us to think through, how do we understand it correctly because all of us interpret the Bible. Everybody does. It’s just a question of whether we’re reading it in ways that are healthy and positive or if we’re reading it in ways that may lead us down some paths of wrong thinking about God and about life and that kind of thing. So we’re going to have a fun time with this class and it’s great to see everybody here.

I want to ask you to do something with me from the start. I want us to look at a passage of Scripture together and talk about it and that passage is 1 Corinthians 8. And we’re going to read this whole chapter together and then I want to ask you this question: what are the challenges of reading and understanding and studying a passage like this? Okay. So we’re going to read this together and then we’re going to kind of dialogue a little bit about some of the challenges we face in reading a passage like this, and then we’re going to get into a word picture that I think describes the process of Bible reading and Bible study pretty well, so let’s read this passage together. I’m reading from the New American Standard translation, and you may have another translation, that’s great, and just read along with me.

“Now concerning things sacrificed to idols, we know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge makes arrogant, but love edifies. If anyone supposes that he knows anything, he has not yet known as he ought to know; but if anyone loves God, he is known by him. Therefore concerning the eating of things sacrificed to idols, we know that there is no such thing as an idol in the world, and that there is no God but one. For even if there are so–called gods whether in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom are all things and we exist for him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through him. However not all men have this knowledge; but some, being accustomed to the idol until now” – false gods – “eat food as if it were sacrificed to an idol; and their conscience being weak is defiled. But food will not commend us to God; we are neither the worse if we do not eat, nor the better if we do eat. But take care lest this liberty of yours somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. For if someone sees you, who have knowledge, dining in an idol’s temple, will not his conscience, if he is weak, be strengthened to eat things sacrificed to idols? For through your knowledge he who is weak is ruined, the brother for whose sake Christ died. And thus, by sinning against the brethren and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ. Therefore, if food causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause my brother to stumble.”

II. Challenges of reading and understanding verses of Scripture

All right. Now I picked a passage that’s a little bit foreign to us. Not a little bit; it’s probably a lot foreign to us in a number of ways, and I picked that passage on purpose. So I want to ask the question: what are some challenges? I mean right from the start we hop down into Corinth in the first century A.D. and we read this strange passage about eating meat sacrificed to idols. To kind of get a reference point here, how many people this week your big temptation in life had to do with whether or not you were going to eat meat that was sacrificed to an idol or a false god? Anybody here really struggle with that this week? I think probably most of us would say, you know, that’s not something that was just a real big temptation this week.

All right. When we read a passage like this, what are some of the challenges that we face right from the beginning in terms of understanding it, thinking about how to apply it to our lives, even just reading it on the surface? What are some of the challenges that we face right from the start? Come on. Get in here with me and think. Get the brains turning this morning. What are some challenges right from the start of reading and understanding and applying a passage like this? How would you describe the challenges?

1. Understanding how to apply Scripture to our lives

A. Cultural differences

Okay. You obviously have some very different cultural dynamics going on here. It’s very much like going to a foreign country would be for most of us, where we go into a place and – what is culture anyway? How would you describe culture? Because we’re going to talk more about that a little bit later in this session. What is culture? Okay. It’s a way of life, a way of doing things. It involves all kinds of things like religious practices, language, dress, ideas about relationships, ideas about gender. There are all kinds of things that are cultural dynamics.

Okay. Somebody else said something over here. Yeah, the language is hard to follow, and an aspect of the language that has to do with the logic of the argument is kind of hard to follow if you don’t know what’s going on. Okay. Yeah, the question of is this physical food that’s being talked about or is this some kind of word picture that’s going on? What else is challenging about understanding a passage like this and thinking about applying a passage like this?

Okay. You think he’s tying word knots. So you think the flow of the logic and the argument is somewhat convoluted. All right. Somebody else? Oh, yeah. Okay. That’s a great point. When you drop down into a passage like this, kind of separate from context, it’s real hard to pick up on in general who is being addressed, why are they being addressed, and what we’ll find out at some point with Corinth is this is a letter that was written to address very specific problems and questions that had come up in that church. So you really have to understand something about their situation and what Paul is trying to accomplish in this book, but what he’s doing is he’s going through and he’s dealing with a series of difficult issues in that church.

B. How do you make the connection between what Paul says (which seems so foreign) and relate it to our lives today?
Okay. Somebody else? What about on the application side? If you sit down and you’re having your Bible study or Bible reading time, you’re saying, you know, Lord, I really want to get something from your Word today that will help me know how to live in my world this week. What are the challenges of a passage like this, obviously? David says go find another chapter! No, now listen. This is God’s Word to us too. And we can’t simply go and take kind of a smorgasbord approach to the Bible, and I know you’re not saying that we should. But, you know, there is a temptation to do that, that we come to a passage that’s really hard or difficult or maybe we don’t like what is being said there. We want to jump to something else that we feel comfortable with and we do understand. A lot of people in the church today tend to read the more practical parts of Scripture that have to do with real obvious application and they like those passages and they don’t like to struggle with the passages that deal with theology that maybe we have a hard time understanding or something that’s hard to think about applying. I think one of the challenges with a passage like this is how do you make the connections between what Paul’s talking about in a passage like this that’s so foreign to us and the types of things that we deal with on a regular basis here in our culture. Yeah, that’s why we’re here this morning to talk about Bible study.

C. A word picture: Taking a trip. What is involved in taking this trip?

Okay. I want to use a word picture that I think describes what we go through with Bible reading or Bible study, and that word picture has to do with taking a trip. And I want you to kind of get in your mind for a minute the process of going on a trip, and I want you to think about what is a memorable trip that you’ve taken that really sticks out to you that really kind of made an imprint on your life in some way. I want you to get that trip in mind. We’ve had a lot of memorable trips in our life. When I was a junior in college, I went to Singapore, and going over into a very, very different culture and kind of learning the dynamics of that culture and relating to people in that culture was really an amazing experience. And when I came back from that trip and hit Hawaii and there were Chinese people who were acting like Americans, it blew my mind. I had a much harder time adapting to the culture when I came back than I did when I went over because I was expecting to have to adjust when I went over. But it was pretty tough when I came back. And there were Americans who were using humor, and you know how in America a lot of times we use humor that’s cutting and really puts other people down and things like that? You don’t have that in a Chinese culture. It’s a much different kind of dynamic in terms of the humor in that culture.

I think about our honeymoon. When we went on our honeymoon, I got food poisoning on our honeymoon night. I got some bad lobster at a five-star French restaurant. And in the middle of the night I got up and Pat had something in her eye. She had a speck in her eye and she wanted to see if I could get that out, and that being a very biblical concept, I went in the bathroom and when I tried to get that little speck out of her eye, I fainted right out in the floor. And I remember waking up and my face was pressed against the tile floor and my first thought was, God, please don’t let me die on my honeymoon night. This would not look good. I’ve waited so long to get married. And we wound up the next day flying out to El Paso, Texas, in a snow storm. They were having a blizzard in El Paso, Texas. Twenty-two inches of snow. We had to fly on to Phoenix. They flew us back to El Paso. We flew in, in zero visibility, and we’re snowed in at the Roadway Inn for two days in El Paso, Texas. And we finally made it all the way to the cabin, waded to the cabin in 33 inches of snow, and then made it back and wound up having a great time. But it was quite a memorable trip. You think you would have reevaluated? Yeah. Well, it certainly got us off with a bang, you know, in terms of our marriage.

Well, how about you? What are some memorable trips that you’ve taken? Think about what was involved in taking that trip. When you went on that trip, you left a home situation, a culture that you were familiar with, that you were comfortable with. Probably people around you used language pretty much the same way you do. They probably dressed in a way and acted in a way that you were fairly familiar with. But then you left home and you took a vehicle of some type to get you to that other place. Get in your mind what kind of vehicle did you take? Was it a car? Did you go down to Memphis and jump on a plane and fly somewhere? For some of you, you may have been on trips where you hiked part of the distance or something like that. But you took a vehicle and you went to this other place. You got to the other place and you started finding out what it meant to live there, how people used language, what kind of foods they ate. 

I remember when we went to Naples, Florida, a couple of years ago. When you first get to a place where you’re going on vacation, you don’t know any of the streets. You don’t know where the places to eat are. But after you’ve lived there for about a week, you learn what people mean by the words they’re using. You learn the best places to eat, what the most popular foods are. For instance, in Naples, there’s a little place down there we loved to eat that is famous for their Key Lime pie. And so that was a very important part of the culture. We went back and made sure that we were very oriented to Key Lime pie that week. We’d buy whole Key Lime pies and bring them home from that place. But you go and you live in that place for a while and you learn what it means to communicate there. Then you take some kind of vehicle to come back home, and once you get back home you may bring some souvenirs with you. So you get things in that place and you bring them back with you and then you arrive home and you live at home.

IV. Why Bible study is more like an expedition

Now we’re using the image of a trip, but in some ways Bible study is more like an expedition. Now can you tell me why would I say that? Why would I say that when we go and we read the Bible, if you’re just having a Bible reading time or you’re studying the Bible, why in some ways is Bible reading or studying more like an expedition? Why would I use that term to describe what we’re doing when we do Bible study?

Okay. It’s not just about getting to the destination, it’s about what. It’s about what? All right. You’re going to discover something there. Anybody else? Okay. Yes, that’s right. It is a trip. You’re going to discover something and hopefully to bring something back with you when you come back home. Right? So you’re going for a specific purpose and you’re going to bring that thing back with you.

A. You are going to discover something

Now let’s talk about how Bible study is like doing an expedition or a trip. Well, first of all, let’s talk about our home culture, the fact that we all have a culture that has shaped how we think and talk and act. And that’s not a bad thing; that’s just a fact of life. All of us have ways in which we have been profoundly influenced by the fact that we live in American culture at this point in history. The way that we dress. This morning I have a tie on which for our immediate church culture is not a real common thing, so immediately when you see me in a tie you’re thinking, well, he’s going to speak somewhere else this morning, and you’d be right. Why? Because it’s not a normal aspect of our immediate church culture that we have here, and I’ve thought about ties some recently. You know, think about three hundred years from now people looking back and looking at the way we dress at this point in time. And they’re going to see us wearing these things and they’re going to think that is so goofy that they tied this thing around their neck on a regular basis. But they’re going to also look at the other ways that we dress and it’s going to seem real foreign to them because they’re going to be in a different place in time. It’s going to be a different kind of cultural dynamic.

A while back I was going to visit someone in the hospital from church here, and I went up to Jackson General Hospital and what happened was I was out running errands and I thought, oh, I need to go by and see so–and–so at the hospital. And I had on blue jeans and I had on a t–shirt and my tennis shoes, and I went up to that floor and I approached one of the nurses and I said, “Which room is so–and–so in?” and they said, “Well, may I ask why you would want to see them?” And I said, “Well, I’m one of the pastors at their church.” And she went – she said, “Well, you’re a pretty cool pastor,” like that. Now was she saying that, you know, the air conditioner’s been up a little bit high today in the building here and you seem a bit cold. The temperature. Physically, you seem to be a little bit cool. Would you like us to turn some heat on or something like that? Is that what she was saying? No. What did she mean by the word “cool”? From our cultural understanding, what does she mean by the word “cool”? Right on. It means I was correct about something, right? What did she mean by “cool”? Somebody tell me. Okay. She probably meant, well, you’re not stuffy or you’re not like my concept of a pastor who I would expect to show up dressed a certain way. She was speaking very much out of our immediate culture – church culture – in this area. So what she was doing is she was approaching the situation from the standpoint of the way she thinks about how people dress and about how language is used, and all of us have that aspect to our home culture. 

Now when Paul says now let’s talk about food that has been sacrificed to idols, what you and I have to do in a sense to get into what he’s talking about there is we have to leave home. We can’t just stay in our own way of thinking, our own mindset in terms of culture and language and practices. To understand what he is talking about there, we can’t just write this off and say, “Well, that’s ridiculous. That’s stupid. What is he talking about?” Because God intended 1 Corinthians to be written at that place at that time and to communicate specific messages from Paul who is a very, very important person in the foundation and development of the early church.

B. The vehicle that gets us there 

Okay. So we got to leave home. Well, what’s the vehicle that will get us back to that culture to understand some things about what is going on and what Paul is talking about in this particular passage or any passage that we’re dealing with? I want to suggest that it’s a sound process of study or reading, we could say. A sound process of study or reading using good tools with the right spiritual commitments. And these will help us to arrive at the original meaning of the text. In 2 Timothy 2:15, for instance, Paul writes, “Study to show yourself approved.”

Now this doesn’t mean that you and I are not going to bring our own understandings to the text. Of course we are. We’re going to talk about that a little bit, that the fact that we live in this culture in this day and this time, we bring unique perspectives to the Bible and that’s normal. But we’re going to have to talk about how do we deal with those. So what we’re wanting to do to get to a place of understanding what’s going on in this text is we want to talk about what’s a sound process of reading. What is a sound process of study? We’ve got to understand the language, the forms of communication, the historical backdrop, aspects of the culture, what God was saying to them in that place at that time.

Now let me tell you why I think this is the basic right way to approach understanding a passage of Scripture. And we’re going to get more into this as we go along with the seminar, but the reason why this is the right way to understand a passage of Scripture is because this is the way language works. Language doesn’t work apart from a specific context. It doesn’t work apart from a specific way that you understand words. It doesn’t work apart from even specific situations in life. In fact, I can say the same thing to Pat in the same exact words and mean two completely different things given the context. And so words mean something because they’re in specific context.

We were up in Vancouver, British Columbia, a few years ago. I was teaching a class up there, and we were walking down a street of Langley, British Columbia. Beautiful little town – mountains in the background, the Canadian Rockies, the ocean out in the other direction – and it was a gorgeous day. And what had happened was someone else was not able to teach this class and at the last minute we were asked to go up there and teach this class, and as we were walking down the street, we don’t normally use sarcasm, but I said to her, “Boy, you know, I really hate it that so–and–so asked us to come up here this week.” Now my words had a surface meaning that was exactly the opposite of what I was really saying, and you had to understand the context: the beautiful day, the fact that we were browsing bookstores which we love to do, we were having tea and scones and things like that. The context was very, very important. 

And it’s the same way in Scripture, that you and I need to take the effort to read and study certain things about this passage because that’s the way language works. Language happens in specific contexts with specific intentions and meanings. And just like in a conversation, if I’m talking to Tom and Tom is saying something to me and I’m not hearing his intended meaning of what he is trying to communicate, in fact, what I’m doing is I’m turning it around to mean something else, then all of a sudden what I’ve done is I’ve disrespected him as a person. And what I want to suggest is if we don’t take the time and effort to think through how do I read and study what Paul is saying well, then what I’m doing is in a sense I am disrespecting Paul’s message, I’m disrespecting God’s choice of that place and that time of what was being communicated, and so we want to do some study to get back to that culture. 

C. The foreign culture: The difference between meaning and significance

Well, the foreignness of the culture is the third point. What is our destination? What I want to suggest is to understand the original meaning of the text as much as we can as given in the place, time, and situation in which God revealed his truth. To understand the original meaning of the text as given in the place, time, and situation in which God revealed his truth. This has to do with respecting God’s choice of that place and that time. And there’s a passage in Jeremiah 23:36 that says this: that “every man’s own word will become an oracle.” Part of the judgment on the people of that time was that instead of being oriented to God’s Word and to what God would say to respond to it, that part of the judgment on that time was that every person’s word became an oracle. And what that means is that every person read their own word, their own understanding of reality, as if it was the word of God. Instead of really trying to say, okay, what was God saying and communicating in the context of history here, the idea is, you know, what do I want this to mean? What do I read into this? And so we want to get back as much as we can to understand what was being communicated in that place in that time.

Now let me give you a principle here. We’re going to talk about the difference between meaning and significance. But here’s the principle and I want to ask you to write this out in the margin of your notes there. This is from Gordon Fee and Doug Stuart in a little book on interpretation that they have, and the principle is this: that a text cannot mean what it never meant. A text cannot mean what it never meant.

Now we’re going to talk about the fact that a text may have significance for us that it did not have for the Corinthians because we live in a very different place and a very different time, but in terms of the meaning of the text, a text is not going to mean something that it did not mean originally when Paul was writing it. And another way of saying this is if a text can mean anything, then it doesn’t mean anything in particular. If a text can mean anything – if it’s just whatever I want it to say – then it doesn’t have any specific meaning at all and we certainly can’t talk in terms of its authority in our lives in that sense.

I remember hearing about a lady who in her church she went to her pastor and she said, “Pastor, I think that I was doing Bible reading and I think that through the Bible God is showing me that I am supposed to divorce my husband.” And the pastor said, “Well, you know, where did you come up with that?” And she said, “Well, in Paul’s writings he says, ‘Put off the old man.’” Well, when Paul said, “Put off the old man,” did he have any concept in his mind of divorcing, a phrase that we use in our culture at times that’s passé now – it’s not used any more when we talk about somebody being the “old man.” Paul never had a concept of that. That’s reading meaning from our culture into the passage and changing the meaning of the passage. So as much as we can, what we want to do is we want to get to an understanding of what Paul was trying to say in that place and that time. 

D. The return home

Now this brings us to the fourth step and that is the return trip. Just like you have to take a vehicle to come back home, in Bible reading or Bible study, what’s going to get us back home? How are we going to take that meaning if Paul is saying something very specific in that context and bring it back to our day and time? Well, what I want to suggest is that that vehicle for getting us back home is grasping the significance of what we’ve learned. Grasping the significance of what we’ve learned. How does God’s truth apply to us? We may not be dealing with the same type of situation that Paul describes, but how does God’s truth apply to us today?

Well, there are a couple of things that we can look for there. First of all, what are the shared life experiences that we have with these people to whom the passage was originally written? What do we have in common with them and what is different about our situation and theirs? A number of years ago I was at a retreat and one of my friends who was on the retreat was Korean. And he’s gone back and he’s the head of a Bible church training department in Korea and has been for a number of years. And we were standing out on a deck of the retreat center and we were having – both of us having a wonderful experience at this retreat and we were trying to talk to each other about deeper things that were going on inside of us because of what we were experiencing in terms of growth that weekend. But it wasn’t happening because his English was very limited and my Korean was pretty much nonexistent. You know, I can say kamsahabnida, you know, thank you, and a couple of things like that but that’s about it. And so we were standing there and both of us were kind of frustrated because we were not able to share kind of our hearts in terms of the spiritual experience that we were having in this beautiful place. And all of a sudden in Korean he started singing “How Great Thou Art.” And then I joined him singing in English and the music bridged the gap there because we were sharing the words of that song and had a phenomenal time talking through that song about what God was doing in our lives. There was a shared life experience even though we were separated by our cultures. There was a shared life experience there.

All right. A second aspect of thinking about the significance would be what are the biblical principles that are universally true and relevant here? What are the biblical principles that are universally true and relevant? They’re going to be true for all places at all times. Now let’s go back to our passage on eating meat offered to idols and let’s talk about these two dynamics here just for a minute.

We have certain similarities and we have differences with the people in Corinth at that time. Somebody help me out here. What are some of the similarities and what are some of the differences? Let’s start with the differences. What are differences between us and a person who lived in Corinth in the first century A.D.? What are they? Come on. We can refrigerate our food. Thank you, Tom. Tom’s very practical. I appreciate that very much. Okay. You do have that dynamic. There were ways to preserve food somewhat in the ancient world with salt and stuff like that but, you’re right, it’s a very, very different world and so you would often go out and buy meat that was right there on the street and eat that. Okay. What else? Okay. In our culture specifically, we don’t have animal sacrifices. That’s a difference. In fact, that’s very foreign to us to think about sacrificing animals. What else? What are other differences? You have a situation there where the church was actually very young, just a few decades old. We, on the other hand, have the New Testament. We have a long history of the church. What else? What are some other differences? Okay. Clothing is going to be different. 

What about similarities, though? Now think about it. With those people who are in that church at that time to whom Paul was writing, what are the things that we have in common with them? And some of these are very basic. Okay. We’re believers in Jesus. And we’re asking questions about how do I live for Jesus in my culture. That’s a very, very important commonality that we have with the Corinthians. What else? Okay. They were struggling with broader cultural dynamics just like we struggle with broader cultural dynamics. What else? What are other similarities? Okay. We have dynamics in the church and with people outside the church where we have an impact on those around us, don’t we? Somebody back here in the back had one. Anybody? I see a hand back there. Anything else?

Okay. As you read this passage of what Paul is saying here, how would you boil down a basic principle of what Paul is talking about in this passage? How would you boil it down? He says, in essence – now we’re going to not go into all the details of the logic here – but if you brought it down to a basic principle where he is saying that in essence we know that it’s not a big deal. This meat is just meat, because these people who are worshiping these gods, they’re false gods. We know that everything belongs to the Lord and this is just meat. But, if I go and a person who’s a believer in the church doesn’t understand that and they maybe have just come out of a pagan situation where they struggled with this association with false gods and they see me eating this meat that they normally associated with being offered to a false god, it’s going to mess them up spiritually. And what Paul in essence says, if that’s the case then I’m not going to use my freedom to eat this kind of meat if it’s going to mess somebody else up spiritually. Now how would you boil that down to a principle? What’s the basic idea that’s not just oriented to their culture but really would apply to all Christians at all times? How would you describe the basic idea or the principle there?

We talked about the fact that we have some commonalities with them. They’re trying to follow Jesus. They’re doing it in a broader cultural situation where they’re having to make some decisions. They would have impact on others around them in that culture by the decisions that they’re making. So what would you say is the principle? How would we boil it down to a truth that we could grab onto in our cultural situation? Well, I think something else a little different than that. Yes. Yeah, the principle is: even when I’m dealing with an area of freedom for myself, I need to evaluate how my decisions are having an effect on other people, specifically people who may not be very mature Christians or haven’t been in the church very long. How are my decisions affecting them? And we’re going to talk about ways to narrow that, but, in essence, in general, that’s one of the main points that Paul is making.

E. Bringing this all back home

Now, when we think about bringing this home and that’s the last point, bringing it back to application. Finally, we bring the truth of God’s Word to bear on our lives and world by good application and communication, then what are some possible ways that we can think towards applying a passage like this? I think what we would need to do is to ask ourselves the questions: What are some areas of my life in which I may feel freedom but my choices could have a very negative impact on other believers around me in the church? What are some of those areas? And we’re not going to go into great detail in trying to answer that, but all of the sudden, what we’ve done is we’ve brought this very foreign, very difficult passage back to our situation. For some of you, you might think about specific types of decisions that you would make. If there are religious parallels, that would be the closest thing to what Paul is talking about here. It may be that you might have the freedom to do something associated with another church maybe that you came out of that you don’t feel like they have the best doctrine in the world but it would really confuse a young believer. Why are you going over there and associating with those people? Well, there are ways that we need to talk about that kind of dynamic, but there may be some other things here. 

I’ve had people bring up the question of the type of movies we watch. For some in the church have more freedom in terms of specific life choices. For instance, in Europe a lot of Christians will drink alcohol at times, will drink wine with their meals, and if you’re going to be in that kind of cultural situation, what kind of decisions – how do you make decisions about what’s appropriate and inappropriate and those kinds of things? But when we start thinking about application, we would want to think for our lives what are decisions that we might make that might cause another believer to stumble? And it might be best if we didn’t make that kind of choice at this point.

I’ll just give you one practical example there that might relate. It might be for you that you realize that in terms of the type of music that you listen to, for instance, that you have a variety of types of music that you enjoy and that you can listen to. There are some types of music maybe that a young believer you are relating to struggled with because it connects to a former way of life that they really were not walking with God. It was prior to them coming to Christ. Maybe for some of you who are students, if you are a roommate with that person, you may have freedom to listen to various kinds of music but you may limit your freedom in that case because a certain type of music would have a negative effect on that person who was your roommate. You may feel genuine freedom because again the Scripture doesn’t say “don’t listen to this kind of music.” Now we want to evaluate music on the basis of the messages it’s communicating and that kind of thing, but you may – even though you have freedom with a certain kind of music – choose to limit your freedom so that it would not negatively affect someone you were trying to help who was a young believer who was coming up. Well, think about your life. Think about what decisions you make that might need to be limited in order to have the right kind of impact on another person who is around you, especially in terms of their spiritual life and their growth. 

Now why is the trip important, in summary. We’re going to get into great details on the different aspects of this trip as we go along. But it’s because the God of all the universe has acted and spoken his truth about life in specific times, places, languages, and cultures in history, his revelation has been recorded in and expressed through his inspired Scriptures, thus the Bible is the most important book in all history for people to read, study, and apply to their lives. Now this doesn’t mean that it’s easy, but what it does mean is that it is worth us putting our effort into. And what we’re going to talk about next week is the fact that Bible study and Bible reading it’s hard to be consistent with, what are some things that can motivate us in terms of doing it on a regular basis? So we’re going to talk about that a bit next week.

Now let me ask a question and then I’m going to give you an assignment that I want you to do in preparation for next week, but does anybody have a question or a concern about something that I’ve raised this morning in this picture that we’ve talked about, that Bible study or Bible reading is like taking a trip. It’s like going to that other culture and bringing something back with you and seeking to apply it in specific ways. Does anybody have a question or a thought or a concern that you want to raise? 

One of the things that we’ll talk about is the New Testament’s use of the Old Testament. A lot of times what is going on there, if you go back and read it, there are parallels between that original cultural situation and the way it’s being used in the New Testament, but that is a great question and it’s something that we’ll get into some when we talk about interpretation here. There are various ways that the New Testament authors use the Old Testament, but I don’t think that they can be accused of what we normally would call Scripture twisting. There’s normally something that’s very much in line and in correspondence with the way that God has acted in history and they’re sometimes drawing parallels to those situations and understanding more of the backdrop of the Old Testament passage helps us to see those parallels, but we’ll talk about that some. Okay. Other questions? Anything specifically you want to deal with in this class as we go along? Any other questions? 

Okay. Let me just give you a quick preview and then we’re going to let me give you an assignment. We’re going to talk in this class about reading the Bible well. What are some plans for reading that can help you? We’re going to talk about different tools to use in your Bible study and your Bible reading. We’re going to talk about all kinds of basic things like how do you do a word study well and how do you keep from what are called word study fallacies where you come up with stuff that Jesus and Paul never thought of. We’re going to talk about how to make very practical, specific application. So we’re going to have a good time in the class as we go along. Now here’s your assignment for next week. Psalm 119 is a long Psalm but it deals with the benefits of God’s Word. The benefits of God’s Word. And what I want to ask you to do for next week is I want to ask you to read through Psalm 119 a couple times and to jot down all of the different benefits of God’s Word according to Psalm 119. And you’re going to find things like “it helps me in times of difficulty to keep perspective,” “it keeps me from sin,” and things like that. But I want to ask you to read through Psalm 119 a couple times and jot down as many benefits as you can find of reading God’s Word, studying God’s Word, being in God’s Word. Okay? All right. 

Well, thank you very much for being here this morning. Let’s have a closing prayer. And if you have any questions, come up and talk to me after the class. Let’s pray. Father, thank you very much for this beginning session of Intro to Bible Study. I pray, Lord, that you would help us to have a great time together over the coming weeks, that we would really deal with your Word in a way that is helpful, and help us to grow in our skill in how to read it and to study it well. Lord, I pray that you would just be with these folks and just bless them for their desire to study and to read the Bible more effectively. Lord, I pray that you would give them encouragement through this class, and we ask these things in Christ’s name. Amen.

© 2011 – Dr. George Guthrie and BiblicalTraining.org

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© 2011 – Dr. George Guthrie and BiblicalTraining.org. Website: BiblicalTraining.org.