Basics of the Bible - Lesson 5

 

So we’ve been talking about the Bible, the Old Testament, and the New Testament. It’s time to talk about: how do you actually read it? How do you understand it? When you pick this up and you open it, what do I do next? Okay, so that’s what this lesson’s about.

On the website, you can download the Bible study template. I really encourage you to do it. It’s a nice little handy guide to keep there as you’re reading the Bible and hear the questions you ask and the order in which you ask them. So I’d encourage you to get that.

I need to tell you upfront, my approach to Bible study is a little different than most. I don’t really care that much about the little details. I want you to understand the structure of the passage and what’s the main point. What is the main thing that the speaker is saying? So it’s a little different, but I think it’s the right way to do it.

But let me, right up front, say please, when it comes to studying your Bible, do not lead with the question: “What does this mean to me?” All right? That’s the end of the process. Most mistakes in understanding the Bible stem from asking this application question upfront. It’s not what you ask up front. It’s what you ask at the end.

And in fact, exegesis is the fancy word for getting the meaning out of the text. That’s what the ‘ex’means in Greek. Exegesis is getting the meaning out of the text. What is the one main point that the author is trying to make? Application comes at the end of that. 

All right, so four steps.

Number one: what the passage meant. What I’m asking you to do is to put yourself in the shoes of the original audience, 1st century for New Testament, put yourself in their shoes and say, “How would they have understood this particular passage?” So you always start with that historical meaning. A couple of steps.

One, find the beginning and the ending of the passage. Don’t ever just study one verse, all right? Again, so many problems have occurred when people want to focus on that one main little verse and not have any context at all. You’ve got to have the context if you’re going to understand the verse. So what you do is you find the beginning and the ending of the passage. Maybe the beginning and ending of the passage will be a paragraph. Maybe it’ll be a series of paragraphs. Maybe it’ll be the paragraphs between headings in your Bible. But you don’t know until you actually sit down and say, “Where does this story start? Where does this story end?”

Paragraphing and headings and things like that are not part of the inspired text. Those are things that Bible publishers put into their Bibles to help you. They’re usually pretty good. They’re usually right. But you need to find… Okay, if I’m going to understand what this passage meant: okay, first step is let me get the beginning and the end of it. What’s the passage?

So what I want you to do is to stop the video, and to go to Mark 2. This is a real easy thing to do, and so it’ll be fun. Just start reading. This is the story of the man let down through the roof by his friends to be healed. Just read it and find out where it starts (well, it’s going to start in 2:1), but just find out where it is. Get your hands around the story as a whole. Okay. Go ahead and do that and then come back.

Okay, that was pretty simple, wasn’t it? The story ends in verse 12. So we have a passage that’s 12 verses long, a beginning and ending.

What do I do next? The next thing you have to do is kind of figure out the larger literary context. What I mean by that is you need some kind of understanding of where you are. Are you in the New Testament or the Old Testament? Okay, that’s going to affect how you read the passage. What’s its genre? Genre just means what kind of literature is it? We have classes called hermeneutics that deal with questions of genre.

But basically, is this a narrative? Is this a story? Do I read it as a story that’s unfolding itself? Are these letters that were written for specific theological purposes? I need to figure out what those purposes are if I’m going to understand the passage. Is this intense theology where I need to really slow down and see connections between ideas? Or maybe this is some kind of special genre. Is it poetry? Is it parables? Is it apocalyptic, like the book of Revelation? You just kind of need to figure out where you are. What’s the literary context?

So what’s the literary context of Mark 2? Well, it’s a healing story, but it’s a story, isn’t it? It’s a straight narrative, and it’s meant to be read that way.

Now, this is the important one. What’s the point? What’s the point? Every passage in Scripture has a point. Again, this is where my approach to Bible study is a little different because I don’t really care about secondary details. I don’t care about where we are on the map, okay? Not at this stage anyway. But you got to say there’s a main point that’s being made, and what you want to do is not get sidetracked by things you don’t know, but focus on what you do know. When you read these 12 verses, what do you know?

Let me give you an example. A well-known story is the parable of the sower. A man went out to sow seed, and he threw some on rocky ground, and the birds ate it. Some fell among thorns, and the thorns choked it. Some fell where it grew up quickly, but there was no roots, and so it died. Then there was some seed that produced a bountiful crop. Okay, so there’s the parable of the sower.

What’s the point? In this particular parable, we often get moving into theological discussions. This seed, it grew up quickly and then died. Is it really a Christian? Did they really get saved? And all this kinds of stuff.

But if you stop for a second and say, “Well, what’s the point?” There’s one point. Put yourself in the shoes of the farmer, and what’s the point? A farmer doesn’t really care why seed didn’t grow; doesn’t care if the birds got it or if it grew up quickly and then died when it got hot, or whatever. There’s only one thing that a farmer wants, and that’s for the seed to produce a crop. See, if you let the details go aside, at least for the time being, and ask yourself, what’s the main point? What’s the big idea? One person used to say, what’s the “big idea”? What’s the main point that’s being made? You look at the parable of the sower,and you go, the only acceptable result of sowing seed is to get a crop. That’s what’s important. That is the point, in fact, that Jesus is trying to make.

So just as an illustration of why it’s so important to get to the point that the author’s making. When you’re at this stage, what you can do is that you can—you know, I used to print these things out and do them on paper, but doing a computer is… What’s the title? What’s the… If you’re going to break the story into sections, what are some of the subheadings you might want to put in? Because what you’re trying to see is what’s the point and how did the author get to the point? All right?

So here’s what I want you to do. I want you to, when I’m done saying this, shut the video down. Then I want you to look at those 12 verses in Mark, and I want you to read through and see the structure of the passage, see the evolution of the story. Do your subsections, as it were, and then try to find what is the main thing that’s being taught in this passage, okay? Go ahead and do that and then come back.

Okay, so what’d you find? Here’s how I would do it. I’m not saying it has to be done this way, but this is what I did. In the first two verses, Jesus is giving us a context. “A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. They gathered in such a large numbers, there was no room left, not even outside the door. He preached the word to them.” Okay. What’s that doing? That’s the context, isn’t it? It’s providing the historical backdrop to what’s going on.

Then in verses 3 to 4, we get one set of the players of the story. “Some men came bringing to him a paralyzed man carried by four of them. Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus by digging through it and then lowered the mat the man was lying on.” All right. Is this parable about architecture and the willful destruction of private property, or even the men’s faith (because we’re going to read about that in a second)? It’s a story. It’s introducing the players and here’s what’s going on.

But then you get to verse five. What’s it doing? When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Okay. Jesus is introducing conflict. Alright. He didn’t have to say it that way, but he wants the conflict because he wants to teach. Alright? Is that the main point? Well, I don’t know. Let’s keep reading.

Then in verses 6 to 7, there’s another group of protagonists, another group of people there. “Now some teachers of law were sitting there thinking to themselves, why does this fellow talk like that? He’s blaspheming who can forgive sins, but God alone.” So you have the conflict of verse 5 affecting another group of people.

Okay. Then what you have in 8 to 12 is Jesus’s rebuke, “Immediately, Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts. And he said to them, ‘Why are you thinking these things? Which is easier to say to this paralyzed man, your sins are forgiven, or to say, get up, take your mat and walk?’” Well it’s easier just to say, your sins are forgiven if you don’t have to prove it. Obviously, showing proof is more difficult.

“But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. So he said to the man, ‘I tell you, get up, take up your mat and go home.’” Then you have the result. “He got up, he took his mat and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone. They praised God saying, ‘We have never seen anything like this.’” Okay.

So you have the story unfolding in sections, and you could put subtitles on each of those sections. But the question is, what’s the main point? Is the main point about the men letting them down…whose faith in verse 5…is that the point? Jesus saw their faith? Is this story is about people’s faith?

I think if you could only say it’s about one thing, what’s it about? Well, it’s verse 10, “but I want you to know the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” That’s the whole point. The whole point of this parable: alleviate suffering. It was to show a story of people’s faith, and Jesus’s ability to heal. But all that dims in comparison to the main point that Jesus says, “I have the authority to forgive sins.” Of course, the point is: who forgives sin, but God alone. The Pharisees were right. Only God can forgive sins. So the main point is Jesus is claiming to be God.

See, if you let yourself get pulled aside into kind of details of the story, you may not get to the main point, which is, this is about who Jesus is. Jesus can do what only God can do. And that’s the main point.

So you get to that point and you’ve got to, you’ve just got to say, here’s the title, here’s the section, but here’s the main point. So that’s all part of the “meant stage.” That’s putting yourself in the shoes of 1st century people, and how would they have understood what it meant? Okay.

Once you’ve done that, then you go to the next stage, the second of the four, and that is what does the passage mean today? Now we’re not talking about application. We’re talking about culture. We’re talking about, as that story comes through the centuries and the millennia, is there anything that is cultural that doesn’t come? Alright.

The whole issue of culture, non-culture is important. I’ll give you an example. John 3:16, “God loved the world. He gave his only Son that whoever believes in him shouldn’t perish, but have eternal life.” Is there anything that would limit Jesus’s teaching to 1st century culture? No, it’s universal. It’s always true.

But then in Mark 12, he says, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar, and to God, the things that are God.” Is any of that cultural? Well, yeah, of course, because we don’t have Caesars anymore, right? We may have dictators or whatnot, but we don’t have any Caesars. So that’s a cultural element in this, and here’s the key. If there’s something that’s cultural in the passage, you don’t ignore it. If it’s cultural, it’s an expression in culture of an eternal truth. 

Just because something has a cultural veneer around it, doesn’t mean you can just throw it away. You’ve got to do a little more work and say, “Okay, well, what principle is being reflected in this cultural expression?” For example, the parable of the sower: “Well, I’m not a farmer, so I can ignore it. It’s all cultural.” We wouldn’t do that, would we? No.

You look at Leviticus, and it’s a bunch of rules about sacrifice. “Well, we don’t sacrifice anymore. I can just ignore it.” Why don’t we sacrifice anymore? What was the eternal principle behind the entire book of Leviticus? That God in his mercy and his grace is willing to allow a substitution for our sins, and maintain his holiness and justice. You can’t just throw the book of Leviticus away. You have to look at the eternal principles that are being reflected in cultural garb, and then get that eternal principle and bring it into today’s culture.

So, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar, and the things of God that are God.” What’s the eternal truth? That the government is able to collect money from its people. It’s legitimate. Pay your taxes. This is a real simple illustration, because we look at it, but I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people say, “Well, it’s cultural, so we’re going to ignore it.” No, that’s completely wrong. If it’s cultural, it’s a reflection of an eternal principle. Pay your taxes. And then you reapply that principle in today’s culture, and you pay your taxes, right? Okay, so that’s really, really important. Okay.

So what it meant originally, what it means today in the reinterpretation sometimes necessary with culture; and the next stage is reflection. Again, I’m not talking about application. There’s a point at which you’ve got to, almost in a sense, close the book and think about it. What you’re doing is that you’re asking three questions. What did I learn about God? What did I learn about myself? What did I learn about others? Those are the three questions that are so important. Okay, what did I learn about God? What did I learn about myself? And what did I learn about others?

I remember Sunday School once teaching on John the Baptist, and the fact that he was going to prepare the way for the Messiah. And I was going through these three lessons in the Sunday School class, and they struggled with it because they weren’t used to thinking this way. And then a person said, “God likes to work through people, doesn’t he?” I said, “What do you mean?” They go, “Well, he didn’t have to use Elijah. He could have prepared the way for the Messiah by himself, but he wanted to work through people.” I went, “Yeah, God’s really into community, isn’t it?” We had a great Sunday School lesson, but we said, “Okay, what did we learn about God in this passage?”

Then they say, “Okay, what did I learn about myself?” I encourage people, always put yourself in the shoes of every actor in the story. Put yourself in the shoes of the paralyzed man, of the friends who led him through the roof. Be a Pharisee and have good theology, right? Because only God can forgive sins. But what would that have been like? I mean, you’ve just got to really say, “Okay, what did I just learn about myself, my character, those kinds of things?” You do that. What do you learn about others? Now, the passage may not have something to say about all three of those, but it will certainly have something to say about one of them. Otherwise it wouldn’t be in the Bible. Okay? So you want to make sure you do that. What did I learn about God, myself, and others? All right.

Now we get to step four, application. Okay. My encouragement about application is make it practical and concrete. Don’t say, “Okay, my application is I’m going to be a better person.” That’s kind of meaningless. But rather, you know, “I’m not going to respond to my spouse in anger any longer. I’m going to really try to honor him or her.” See, a specific concrete application.

And then, I’ve heard of people doing this, when you go to Bible study or whatever it is next week, they say, “Hey, how’d you do with your application? How did you treat your wife? How did you treat your husband? Did you treat him with respect or did you yell at him again?” All right. So applications, to have any power, have to be concrete and have to be specific. Okay?

So there are your stages, what it meant, what it means, reflect on what you learned about God, yourself, and others, and then concrete specific applications. Now, when you’re done with this, you might have time to do more work. You could look up words you may not have understood in the passage, maybe read other translations. That’s always a good thing to do. Maybe read a study Bible and see what scholars will say about the passage. But what you want to do more than anything else is see the passage in context, understand it in context, the larger unit, reflect on what you learned, how that main point affects your understanding of God, yourself, and others.

And then, so what? How is this going to affect specifically what I do?

That’s what you do when you open this book.