Hermeneutics - Lesson 3

Hermeneutics

Dr. Todd Miles

nt310-03

Description of Revelation

Lesson Transcript

I want to talk for a little bit now about what revelation is. We've looked at the need for it. I said God doesn't owe Revelation to anyone, but God graciously and generously gives revelation of himself, of his plans, tells us who we are. He's able to do that as our creator. So but how does he do that? And the Scriptures describe two different categories of revelation. They don't give them these names. So what I'm about to tell you is something that we lay on top of the Bible, but we do that to help us make some sense. When about whenever we talk about Revelation, one of the categories of Revelation is what will called general revelation. And general revelation is general in scope and general in substance, general in scope. And that it goes out to a broad audience. It goes out to virtually everyone. As long as their faculties are working correctly, they have access to this revelation. They don't just have access to it, but they have they have received this revelation. And the revelation they get is very general in substance. It's big truths about God. The most obvious manner of general revelation is through creation. Listen to Psalm 19 versus one through three. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse proclaims the work of His hands. Day after day, they pour out speech night after night. They communicate knowledge. There is no speech, there are no words. Their voice is not heard. So creation testifies to the glory of God. We learn that God is Creator and that He is big and awesome, intelligent, brilliant. All these things. These are truths and these truths are known. Romans Chapter one verses 19 through 21 tells us this. Listen to what Paul writes to the Romans. He says, Since what can be known about God is evident among them, among the people, the Gentiles, because God has shown it to them. Notice the language, have known it was known for his invisible attributes. That is, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen since the creation of the world being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse for those they knew God. They did not glorify Him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became worthless and their senseless hearts were darkened. There is true knowledge of God for which we will be held accountable. There are other pathways of general revelation that we find described in the Bible. Our conscience is one where the the work of the law is written on our hearts. The providence of God. As He directs affairs of humans in history, we learn things about who God is, about justice and such. Romans one at the end tells us that the people know the law of God to the point where they know that the evil things they do are deserving of death. And so, so so they know God to be judge. They know God to be holy. They know God to be law giver. But then that judgment doesn't come. And Romans chapter two tells us that that's supposed to lead people to repentance, that God is merciful. Apparently, that that's a general revelation, because the judgment that we all know we deserve, it doesn't actually come. But what do people do with this? These truths of general revelation. Paul describes in Romans that we suppress these truths in unrighteousness and we will be held accountable for that. Now, let me give a little shout out to general revelation, because I hear some things now and then to where I think it gets a bit of a bum rap. We often hear kind of what I just describe that general revelation is is sufficient to condemn, but it's not sufficient to save. I just said that, that we're accountable for this general revelation, that that we suppress it and unrighteousness, that that's a that's a moral act for which we are guilty, but the truths of salvation are not found in general revelation. So it is the case, I suppose, that it's sufficient to condemn, but but not to save. However, I think in asking the question, we're placing a burden upon general revelation that it was never meant to bear. General revelation and special revelation were always supposed to go together. And special revelations we'll find out is is particular truths about God, including the the plan of salvation. It's because of human sin that general revelation is separated from these more particular truths that we'll call special revelation here in a moment. That's that's our fault. It's not the fault of general revelation. General revelation was never meant to bear a salvific burden. And so general revelation is a generous revelation of who God is, and we should be grateful for it. God did not grant general revelation in some divine gotcha mode where he's going to say, Wow, I nailed you with general revelation, you're responsible for it. I haven't given you a path to salvation, so now I can just condemn you. That's not the heart of God at all. God is holy and God is just. But he didn't give general revelation so he can get us in the end. He gave us general revelation as the Book of Acts Chapter 17 tells us, so that we might reach out to him. General revelation is an invitation to know God. Now I've spoken about special revelation. So what exactly is it? Well, if general revelation is general in scope and general in substance, then special revelation is special in scope and special in substance. I don't really like that terminology, even though I just used it. I used it because that's what everyone uses. But I think particular would be a better word. Special revelation, in contrast with general, makes us think that there's some revelation that special and the other rest, the rest of it's kind of mundane. It's just general that that's not the case. All revelation of God is is wonderful and great. I like to say all revelation of God is special. Some of it's just especially special and the rest of it is generally special. But so. So we ought not to think that general revelation is mundane or boring or like second or third rate. I know particular in scope, special in scope, particular in scope. It goes out to a very narrow audience, individual people, and it is particular or special in substance. It is very unique information about who God is. And the best way to explain this is to describe it from a narrative everyone's familiar with. Moses at the burning bush, Moses is hiding out in the desert. He's tending sheep. He sees a bush that is on fire, but it's not being consumed, he says. It's kind of funny as you read it. I think I will go over there and look at this thing. And so he goes over and looks and is confronted by by the Lord. And the Lord then reveals to him that God is going to save his people, Israel, through Moses. And at that point in time, how many people on the face of the earth knew God's plan to save Israel? I would say one. As far as we know, Moses, that's particular in scope. Only one person was privy to this information at that moment. And it's a pretty particular in substance as well. It's God's plan to save our particular people out of slavery in a particular place, the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, so particular in scope. Particular in substance. Now, what are the avenues of this special revelation? Well, the Bible actually describes many different kinds of special revelation. One of those is personal encounter. We see that with Moses at the burning bush. He personally encounters God. There are individuals who encounter God, a manifestation of God or a messenger of God over and over again. And it seems that God can do this as He wants. A lot of times we're nervous about that as as Christians because we think it might replace the Bible or something. But the Bible describes these things and and any revelation from God is not going to go contrary to the Scriptures, because the Scriptures are also the revelation of God. A dream or a vision would be this kind of personal encounter as well. The Bible is full of those kinds of things. Again, I don't think that we need to be concerned about those. It appears around the world that God still communicates with people that way, and if he does, that particular revelation to a particular people. Mighty act is another form of special revelation. I think a good example of this would be the Egyptians crossing the Red Sea, where the waters fall down on them. Now even before they entered the dry land of the Red Sea. They knew that God was fighting for Israel. This is special revelation that God is fighting for Israel. The Egyptians knew and understood this. Not everyone else in the world did, but the Egyptians did. And then when the waters closed down upon them, they got more information about who this God was. Again, this is a particular revelation to a particular people. Most of the time when we think about special revelation, we're thinking about propositional revelation. That or maybe a better term for that would be verbal revelation, revelation that comes to us in languages that we can understand. And now there's lots of truth about God that is not contained in the Bible. The Bible doesn't contain exhaustively everything that is true about God. But I would argue that everything in the Bible is is true and is propositional revelation or this this linguistic revelation. We, for example, Jesus was I suppose he was a fairly long winded preacher because there were times where his disciples were nervous for the crowds. They had been there so long listening to Jesus that they were hungry and weren't going to be able to get home on time. And yet, as you read the longest Sermon of Jesus in the Bible, it's like three chapters. You can read it out loud in 20 minutes. People aren't going to grow faint from hunger in 20 minutes. It's probably not a stretch to think that what we have seen in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew's chapter five through seven, that's a summary. It's an accurate summary of what Jesus said, but it's not an exhaustive transcript of everything that he said. So there's lots of linguistic revelation about God from God that we don't have in the Bible. But everything that we have in Scripture is the Word of God. And then, of course, Jesus himself is special revelation of God. All three of the previous sayings personal encounter, mighty act, propositional revelation are found in Jesus wondrously. But we have a special category for Him. Hebrews Chapter one marks off the Incarnation as something that must be seen as special and unique. John Chapter one, verse 14 grace and truth are used twice. Jesus manifests the glory of the Father through many ways. But John wants us to see this pair of items in particular in John one. No, not, not everything about God is fully manifest in Jesus in the sense that Jesus was also a man. So there's more to God than what we see in Jesus. But there's not less. There's not less there. Jesus was God in the flesh. And when people saw him, they saw God. Now is special revelation. Is that efficacious? Is that effective to save? And the answer there would be that the just the revelation itself isn't necessarily it's not necessarily going to save you. It has to be responded to in faith. But the gospel is special revelation. The path of salvation is a particular revelation from God. And I don't think there's any hope of being saved apart from this special revelation, which raises the stakes for us. This is why it's so important that we read and understand the Bible well. Now let's think more about the process of how we get special revelation. And I want us to think in particular about the Bible here and in your hand out, there is a diagram of a bridge. As I said earlier, there's there's a separation between the human mind and God's mind and or, if you will, because it rhymes the mind of Todd and the mind of God. They those are not synonymous things. There's an enormous gap between those two. It's probably evident to you as you're trying to make sense of the things that I'm saying here. How is God going to bridge that gap? We can't do it again. God is sovereign over revelation of himself. He has to initiate it. He does. He does the work. And in how we get the scriptures, there's five pillars, if you will, five steps along the way. And the first one is inspiration. So let's take a deeper dive into the some texts that we just mentioned earlier. 2 Timothy 3:16, All Scripture is breathed out by God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, training in righteousness. That word breathed out is sometimes translated inspired. It comes from the Greek word thay up new stars. And this this is a bit of a mind bender of a word because it only appears one time in Paul's writing. And for Bible translators, it's always helpful to be able to go to other portions of an author's writing to see how they use the word so they can maybe figure out how we can best translate here. So they go to Paul's writings. No, it's not. It's not in any of his letters, Timothy. It's not in any of his letters at all. Okay. Or maybe it's in the rest of the New Testament. Somewhere in the New Testament. Oh, shoot. No, it's not anywhere else in the New Testament. Well, maybe in the Greek translation of the Old Testament. Right. There was certainly prophecy going on there. Maybe stay up. New stuffs was used there. Nope. Nope. Nowhere. Nowhere in even the Greek translation. Okay, well, maybe we have during the time period that the scriptures were written in when they were written in Koine Greek. Maybe we've dug out of the ground someone who used this word somewhere and we have it. It's extant. We have it in our hands. And the answer that is no. It's it seems like Paul made up a word. And so a lot of times Bible translators will just punt and they'll very would only just translate the word by giving to you the parts of it. They up new stuff. They ask God, new stars and adjective having to do with the spirit or wind did or breathed. So let's say God breathed. All Scripture is breathed out by God. Sometimes they'll say all Scripture is inspired. But but of course, to to inspire something that's like you're spiriting something inward. It's like all all scripture is inspired spirited, inward by God. And of course, that's not the case because God is breathing it out. It is it is spirited, outward or expired. But we don't want to say that in our translation. All Scripture is inspired by God. That makes it sound like it's like milk left too long in the refrigerator. And so we say inspired. Or again, they'll just punt and they'll say, God breathed or breathed out by God, even though we don't know exactly how to translate it. And maybe that's the best we can do. It does tell us an awful lot about what the Scriptures are. All Scripture is breathed out by God. The the Holy Spirit apparently worked in a human in such a way that that the Scriptures are literally like, breathed out by God. The message comes out of God and therefore it would partake of the character from which it flows, the character of God that the Scriptures come to us because God breathed them out. Now it doesn't tell us everything about inspiration. There's a lot more that could be said. And for us to go there, let's let's think about 1 Corinthians chapter two, verses 12 and 13. Paul is defending his Apostolic ministry with the Corinthians, which he had to do all the time, it appears. And he writes to them this. He says, Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God, And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. Notice that these are words taught to humans, not dictated. The Holy Spirit takes the thoughts of God and combines them with the words of humans so that we could receive it. And that's why we find differing vocabularies and styles amongst the different biblical authors. But all of it is consistently the truth that comes from God. There. There are those who would say that Christians believe that the Bible was dictated by God, but that's actually not the case. We don't really believe that. Some of it is dictated, but not near as much as we might think. No, we don't have a doctrine of dictation like Muslims do with the Koran. They would argue that their scriptures are dictated that the Koran allegedly was put together because an angel appeared to Muhammed and recited to Muhammed over and over again that what eventually became the Koran, Muhammad was illiterate, had to have it recited to him over and over and over and over again until he memorized. And then he went out, found someone who could write and recited it to them, and then they wrote it down. That's why it's called the Koran, which I believe is Arabic for recitation. That's that's what they say about their text. Christians don't say the same thing about ours. We say that the scriptures are inspired, inspired. These are words taught to humans, not dictated. An implication of that is that the human author is well aware of what he is writing when he's writing the Scriptures. Paul, for example, didn't shift into a hypnotic trance, was catatonic. His hand is moved, the stylus on whatever it was he was writing, and then he wakes up and goes, Wow, I just wrote a letter to the Romans. I probably should read that, right? No, that's that's not how it happened. Paul thought hard about what he was writing because these are words that are taught to him by the spirit not dictated. That raises the stakes for us when it comes to biblical interpretation, because we want to try to understand what did Paul mean by what he said. If we're writing a letter, if we're reading a letter of Paul, if we're reading something by Peter, we want to ask, what did Peter mean by what he said? What did Moses mean by what he said? What did Isaiah mean by what he said? Because they knew what they were writing and they're good good enough writers to communicate that well. Another passage that contributes to our doctrine of inspiration is 2 Peter Chapter one versus 20 and 21. Here Peter is talking about the Scriptures and how we got them, and he says this knowing this, first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For No prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God and they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. That that word that I in the translation, I read someone's own interpretation. He's really talking about where it originates from. Scripture never originated with humans. It came from God, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. They were moved by the Holy Spirit. Now, probably not. Not everything a prophet said was inspired. But what was inspired was brought about in unison between the human author and the spirit. So we put all that together. I would argue that a good definition of inspiration is this. Inspiration is a concurrent work of a holy God and a human author. Now God is holy. The humans are falling, right? Concurrent work of this Holy God and a human author whereby the human, the Holy Spirit so moved the human author that God got exactly what he wanted. That is his perfect word. And he did so without compromising or destroying the personality of the human author. Probably all of you have have read through the Scriptures and you realize that the different authors sound different, that no one sounds exact same. There is no like biblical writing style. John sounds like John. Peter sounds like Peter. Paul Sounds like Paul. James sounds like James. The author of Hebrews sounds radically different than all that group, right? Each author has a unique style, a unique personality, and all of that is brought to bear as they're writing the Scriptures because they're thinking they know the things that they're writing, but they're being guided and moved by the Holy Spirit, that what they write is every word of it, the Word of God. There's there's no sense in trying to say now what's human and what's divine. No, all of it is simultaneously human, and all of it is simultaneously divine. It's not human here and divine there. Every word, a human word, Every word, a divine word. All of Scripture is. Inspired. Sometimes we'll call that verbal plenary inspiration. Every word is inspired by God, and God is not embarrassed by any of those words. They're all his. He's not cringing as Paul is writing. Paul, why did you write that? Oh, well, I guess we got to make the best of it. I wish you wouldn't have said that stuff about baptism for the dead. That's just going to confuse people. No. Every single word God owns. Every single word God owns. This is my word. And he delights in his word because it is his word. And if that's the case, then. I think we should delight in every word as well. Doesn't mean that everything in the Bible is easy, doesn't mean that everything in the Bible is, on the surface, delightful. But when we dig into it a bit, we find that it is. I. Or at least we should. There's times where I'm reading the scriptures and it's like, Man, I don't like that. I wish. I wish that wasn't in there, but because it's the word of God, I really only have one legitimate response at that point. I have to repent. I have to change my mind. God, this is your word. It is good and true. It's authoritative because it is your word. And so all of it is good. Even the parts that chafe me my sensibilities. I think we should delight in every single word that God has written. And when it gets hard, I think we should repent. I think we should repent if we're interpreting it rightly. So this process has two agents and the product is perfect. Maybe a good example of this would be the virgin conception of of Jesus. You have sinful Mary, who was a human who's sinful. The Holy Spirit comes upon her. She conceives. And she gives birth to someone who is perfect. Jesus knew no sin committed. No sin in him was no sin. But I bet Jesus looked a lot like his mom. Who else is he going to look like? Right. And so just like the human authors of scripture, they write and it's it is the word of God, but it still sounds like them. I think we have a parallel and an analogy of that in Jesus. In order to be biblical in our interpretation and our theology, we have to take seriously what the Bible claims to be. The Bible claims to be inspired by God. It claims to be the Word of God. And the Scriptures make this claim about themselves. And if the Bible is the Word of God, then there's going to be implications, implications for the divine part of it, aspect of it, and implications for the human aspect. And all of these implications are going to guide what we do in this class. So what I'd like you to do is I'd like you to pause just from and think what are some implications of the divine aspect? That the Bible is the word of God. Think about those implications and then I want you to think about implications for the humanity of the Scriptures. What are some implications that the Bible is simultaneously divine and human? And then we'll come back and we'll think a bit about what those are.