Read the Bible for Life - Lesson 7

I’m privileged to teach at a wonderful university. I’m surrounded here by master teachers. One of the things we talk about is active learning.

How do we draw students into the process of learning so that it transforms their minds and their hearts? Now, Jesus was the master teacher. He used object lessons, parables, drama, figurative language to draw his disciples in and transform their lives. What we’re going to talk about in this session is we’re going to talk about Jesus’ teaching and how we can read it in a way that really changes us.

In our last session, we talked about the stories of the New Testament, specifically thinking about the life, ministry, death, resurrection of Jesus and how those stories move us into the book of Acts and the expansion of the early church. Now, what we’re going to focus on in this session is the teaching of Jesus, which is brilliant. I’m very excited about this session because Jesus was a master teacher.

So, the first thing we want to talk about in this session is that Jesus’ teaching often is organized according to main themes. Now, I think Jesus did this in his teaching ministry. I think there were times that Jesus pulled certain themes together.

We see some of that in the Sermon on the Mount, for sure. And probably there are times when the gospel writers pulled the material of Jesus together to organize certain themes in their gospels. Think about the fact that Jesus’ teaching ministry lasted for three and a half years.

And the gospel writers could only get so much material into a scroll. If you took, for instance, the Gospel of Luke in scroll form and you rolled out that scroll, it probably would have been about 30, 32 feet long, which was about as long as a scroll could be in that time. Because if you got a scroll that was longer than that, it was too big to carry.

So, the gospel writers had to pick and choose their material and organize their material from a lot of material that Jesus would have taught. And they brought it together for us in an organized way. So, let me give you a couple of examples of what we’re talking about here in terms of the gospel material being organized according to key themes.

In John 13:31 through 17:26, we have what is called the Farewell Discourse. This is the center section of John. This is taking place on the night before Jesus’ death. And it’s very interesting when you look at this body of teaching. It is organized in a narrative form. The story is rolling.

The tape is rolling, so to speak, watching Jesus and the disciples. Now, all of this narrative and this body of teaching focuses on going out. So, the theme that runs through it is Jesus is about to go out of the world.

And what this body of teaching does is it pulls together the theme, how do disciples live in the world when Jesus has gone out of the world? And what you find in this body of teaching are themes like, you trust God. You now live by the power and the direction of the Holy Spirit. You pray in Jesus’ name. You keep his Word. You receive Jesus’ peace as you’re dealing with the difficulties in the world. You endure persecution. You know that Jesus has prayed for you. And that beautiful prayer of Jesus in John 17, not only for his disciples, but all those who would believe. So, Jesus prayed for us as well.

So, you have the themes in this part of John coming together around this idea of Jesus going out of the world. And we see this also in Sermon on the Mount, Luke 15. You have three parables on lost things: lost sheep, lost coin, lost son.

And so, at times, Jesus’ teaching is brought together around key themes. So, we want to ask as we’re reading through the Gospels, is there a key theme that ties this part of the teaching of Jesus together? But there is a second point for reading the teaching of Jesus, and that is that Jesus’ teaching revolves around a central message. Now, as you think about the teaching of Jesus, what are some of the key themes that come to mind for you? 

Student: Money and resources.

Dr. Guthrie: Okay, money and resources. Jesus dealt more with how we use our resources than he did with the themes of heaven and hell in the Gospels. I think he seems to talk a lot about the heart nature of things rather than just actions, sort of drilling down deeper to the level of the heart.

Yeah, Jesus’ teaching certainly had to do with our actions. But Jesus is not just interested in restricting actions. You know, “Do this religious thing. Don’t cross over this line.” That’s where the Pharisees were a lot of times. Jesus pushes down to the level of the heart and the motivations.

So, that’s another key theme. Good, Michael. Somebody else? 

Student: A lot of emphasis on relationship, how you interact with other people.

Dr. Guthrie: Very, very much emphasis on relationship. Some of it pointing back to covenant guidelines in the Old Testament of how we relate to each other. If you remember, Jesus said all of the Law in the Old Testament is summed up in two commands: to love God and to love other people.

Student: Maybe the kingdom of earth versus the kingdom of heaven. 

Dr. Guthrie: Okay, the kingdom, the kingdom. Very good, very good. Because that actually is the central message in the teaching of Jesus that we want to focus on just for a minute. All of the teaching of Jesus comes together around this idea of the Kingdom of God. In Mark 1:15, Jesus said, “the time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news.” Now, this is a defining statement. Jesus said, “In my person, in my ministry, the Kingdom of God has now come among you.”

Now, there’s an Old Testament backdrop to this. If you think back to some of what we’ve talked about in relation to reading the Old Testament, it forms the backdrop for Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom. Let me say a couple of words about Old Testament background here.

In the Old Testament, God is the rightful king over the whole earth. That’s clear. Psalm 99:1, “The Lord reigns. Let the peoples tremble. He is enthroned above the cherubim. Let the earth quake.”

So, you have this idea that God is the sovereign Lord over the whole earth. But you also have the prophets at times speaking of a time coming in the future when God will reign in Jerusalem. He will reign on Zion.

For instance, Isaiah 24:23, “The Lord of hosts will reign as king on Mount Zion in Jerusalem and he will display his glory in the presence of his elders.” Now, think back to that time in the Old Testament when the Israelites had been delivered from slavery in Egypt. They were in the wilderness. They moved into the Promised Land. Joshua and then Judges reflect that period of time. And during that time, God was to be their king.

God said, “You’re not going to be like the other nations who have a human king. I am going to be your king.” But after a while, what the people did is they rejected God as their king. And they said, “You know, we want to be like the other people around us. We want a real earthly king who we can see and touch and live with.” And so, they rejected God as king.

And when God is talking to Samuel about this, he says, “Look, they haven’t rejected you. They rejected me.” But God hits straight licks with crooked sticks.

What God does at times is he works with us, even in the decisions that we’re making. And what God does is he works with the Israelites at this point, and he establishes kings. But that doesn’t work out very well, does it, in the Old Testament story? You have David as the pinnacle of kingship in the Old Testament.

But from David on, there starts to be an anticipation of what God is going to do in the future with a coming king who is going to be in the line of David. But the idea is that God’s kingdom is going to reassert itself on earth. And that’s what happens in the life and the ministry of Jesus.

And then the content was also radically new, because Jesus came and proclaimed the Kingdom of God is at hand. Now, for centuries, for centuries, the Jews were waiting for their salvation. God had promised that one day he would raise up the Messiah who would deliver and save them.

And Jesus comes on the scene and he announces the Kingdom of God is at the doorstep. The Kingdom of God is at hand. And that was radically new. It means everything you’ve hoped for is coming to fulfillment. I might say, “One day I’m going to get married. You say, “Yeah, that’s neat, that’s neat.” But if I said to you, “I’m getting married today,” you’d perk up, you know. That’s a very different message than this is going to happen somewhere in the distant future to say it’s going to happen right—it’s happening right now. Okay, put this in the context of the big picture story of the Bible, the development of that story. When Jesus comes and says the Kingdom of God is here, that’s not just something that drops out of heaven.

So how does it fit with this developing story? And how does Jesus’ teaching play a specific role in that developing story? We call it the Kingdom of God. Maybe we should say the reign of God, because really what the kingdom in its essence is, is God’s sovereign lordship over all of creation. God created this universe. He’s sovereignly in control. Human beings rebelled against him, though. And since then, we’ve been alienated from him.

But God promised from the beginning, right after the fall of Adam and Eve, he promised to bring restoration, to bring them back, human beings back into relationship with him. And all of the covenants, all of the Old Testament is pointing forward to that day when God was going to act decisively to reconcile his people to himself. And so the Kingdom of God means that God is claiming back his authority and calling for people to submit to that authority.

The reign of God is our submission to his authority in our lives. And then what Jesus accomplishes through his life, death, and resurrection is to provide the means for that reconciliation. So in part, it is an expression of the presence of God among his people and the working out of the implications of that relationship with God in the way that people live.

Is that fair? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it’s what God is doing and God has acted decisively through Jesus Christ to save us.

And then how do we respond to that? We submit to his authority. We accept him as our Lord and savior. And then we take that message of the kingdom to those who’ve never heard it.

So when Jesus comes on the scene as Messiah, many people of his day are looking for a Messiah to come. There actually were different views about what Messiah would do. There were some people who were thinking Messiah was going to come in and God’s agenda was to kick the Romans out of Palestine.

But that was not what Jesus came to accomplish. There was an invasion of the Kingdom of God going on but it was an invasion that was going to take place through the heart. So we live in a time now that is a time in which the kingdom is invading the earth and the lives of believers as people submit their lives to the gospel, as their lives are transformed, as God is changing people’s lives and God’s will is done as it is in heaven.

But that’s going to be brought to a completion at the end of the age when God moves in and completely rules the earth again and all the enemies are submitted to him. So you have this now and not yet aspect of the kingdom in the teaching of Jesus. Martin Luther said, speaking of this tension, he said, “I have two days on my calendar, today and that day. Today, I live under the lordship of Jesus. I live in the Kingdom of God now, but that day when Jesus returns, we’re going to see all of the kingdom brought to completion as Jesus comes back and rules.” 

The third point is that Jesus’ message was communicated through a variety of methods. Now in Jesus’ time, rabbis normally taught with reference to other rabbis, kind of like scholars today will say, “Well, scholar so-and-so says this and so-and-so says this about this.” Rabbis of the day would say, “Well, Hillel said this about this Old Testament Law, but Shammai said this about the Old Testament Law.” When Jesus came, he taught differently. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew says that Jesus taught with authority. He said, “I say to you.” And when Jesus taught, he used brilliant methods of teaching.

Now think with me just for a minute. What are some of the methods that Jesus used in his teaching that come to mind? 

Student: He used storytelling. He liked to paint a picture to help people clearly see what he was saying.

Dr. Guthrie: Okay. He used storytelling. He painted a picture with stories. We’re going to talk about parables in just a few minutes. What else? 

Student: I think he used object lessons a lot. Things that happen to be handy. A fish or a coin or something like that. 

Dr. Guthrie: Right. Teaching during the day, walking around. A lot of times what a teacher did is he had his disciples with him and he walked around. And Jesus was absolutely brilliant at just taking normal things from life and using them to teach truth. Does anything else come to mind? 

Student: He used humor or puns, play on words a lot.

Dr. Guthrie: Okay. Jesus used a lot of figurative language like we talked about with the Old Testament. He used puns and metaphor, simile, various kinds of figures of speech. Okay. We don’t have time to talk about all the different methods that Jesus used, but I want us to focus on just a few. So let’s talk first of all about object lessons.

Jesus would use objects to illustrate a spiritual truth. Now, I want you to think just for a minute about this candle that is sitting here on the coffee table. Jesus would take an object like a lamp in his day, and he would use that to describe some type of spiritual truth. So he could say, “You are the light of the world.” You don’t take a lamp—in his day it would have been a little oil lamp. “You don’t take a lamp and hide it in a closet, put it under a bushel. You put it out where it can give light. And what you as my followers are supposed to do is you are supposed to shine your light on the world. As you live under the Kingdom of God, as you live for the Father, shine your light in the world.”

So Jesus could use something like a candle. He used salt. “You are the salt of the earth.”

Do you see how he just picked up normal things that people would use every day and said, “Let me tell you how this truth parallels this object.” So what we want to ask when Jesus is using an object lesson, we want to say, “What is the parallel? What’s the parallel that he’s driving home? What is the thing in that object that parallels some aspect of spiritual truth?” 

A second method that we want to talk about is drama. Jesus did on occasion act out something in order to teach. In John 13, on the night before Jesus’ death, he has the supper with his disciples, and then he dramatizes something. Does anybody remember what Jesus acts out at that point? 

Student: [Inaudible]

Dr. Guthrie: Okay. Yeah. The washing of the disciples feet in that culture that would have been just absurd to the disciples that the master would wash their feet. It was common for people to have their feet washed in that culture because you wore sandals. The roads were all dusty. You would come to someone’s home. Your feet would be just messy. And it was a courtesy to provide water or to have a servant wash the person’s feet.

But in that culture, you did not have someone who was of a higher status wash someone’s feet who was of a lower status. And what Jesus does is he turns that cultural value on its head, and he puts a cloth about himself, and he begins to wash the disciples’ feet. And what he does is he teaches them the nature of the kingdom by acting it out.

And what’s the point? What’s the point of foot washing? Service. That if you’re going to be great in the kingdom, the point is not to rise to a higher status so that everybody waits on you. The point is you serve others. You act as a servant for others. 

A third point that we mentioned a minute ago was Jesus also uses figures of speech. We saw this with metaphor. Metaphor is a comparison, not using “like” or “as.” When we mentioned a minute ago, “You are the light of the world.” Jesus doesn’t mean that literally we are shining. He is using a figure of speech to describe how we are to have an impact on the world as they see us, right? 

When he says, “I am the good shepherd” in John 10, he doesn’t mean that he is walking around with a staff and sheep. It is a figure of speech where he is describing himself as the one who protects, as the one who provides for, really going back to imagery of the Old Testament. The leaders were called shepherds at points in the Prophets. Normally, they were bad shepherds. God was the good shepherd. Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd. And so Jesus picks up that image and he teaches using that image. 

And then finally, we come to parables. Parables were very prominent in the teaching of Jesus. A parable is a story that is set alongside a spiritual truth in order to focus on that spiritual truth. How do we read the parables in a way that we really hear what Christ is wanting to communicate to us? Well, the parables, the simple definition is a story from everyday life, an everyday story that teaches a moral truth. But really, Jesus’ parables are much more than that.

I like to compare the parables to a mousetrap. The mouse sees this piece of cheese, and it’s a wonderful piece of cheese. So they go and they grab the piece of cheese to eat it. And what happens? Right when they think they’re getting it, the mousetrap snaps shut on them. The parables draw us in. It’s a wonderful story.

And we tend to identify with certain characters in the story, but they always then catch us at some area of spiritual need or spiritual deficiency. If we’re hearing them well. If we’re hearing them well, yeah. 

So how do we hear them well? I think there’s a couple of principles we need to keep in mind when we read the parables. We need to, first of all, keep in mind Jesus’ context. That these parables were given in that 1st century context. And sometimes the values that were part of that culture are not the same kind of values we share. So we do need to study the parables in their context. There’s one example of that.

When we think about the parable of the prodigal son, which we really could say is the prodigal sons, if you understand the story. I think about the father running out to meet his son. Now to us, we don’t think much about that. But in the culture of that day, that really was a loud message. Absolutely. A patriarch, the leader of the family, was the most revered member of the family. And an elderly patriarch would never run anywhere. He was a dignified person. He would walk slowly and people would come to him for favors. He wouldn’t even go to them. So the people that ran were slaves and children. That’s a patriarch would never run.

So for him to see his son afar off, first of all, to be looking for a son and then to run to him would be something viewed as disgraceful almost in that context. And what’s the point? The point is he is overwhelmed with unbridled joy. He doesn’t care about social status. He doesn’t care what other people think. He wants to demonstrate his love and just throw off all constraints and demonstrate his love. And so Jesus is giving a picture of what in the parable? Of God’s unbridled love for us.

I’ve also heard the parable called the parable, the “prodigal father,” because prodigal means lavish, it means wasteful. Well, viewed in that cultural context, this is wasteful love. This is love that goes way over the top. And so Jesus is trying to show us that God’s grace, God’s love for us is far beyond anything we can possibly comprehend and absolutely unconditional. 

So when we’re dealing with the parables, we want to identify what is the main point of this story. But we also want to ask, as I look at the characters in this story, where does my life fit in? With whom do I identify? How is there a parallel between my life and the life of someone in the story? I was reading a book by Tim Keller called Prodigal God, in which he talks about the parable of the prodigal son. And what was uncomfortable for me as I moved through that book and he was unpacking the parable was it became clear to me at points, I identify too much with the older brother in that story. And it was convicting. And that’s exactly what is supposed to happen with a parable. It draws us into the story. It sneaks up on us. And then it brings the truth to bear on our lives. So Jesus used parables to teach us about how we live more effectively in the kingdom. 

Now, there’s one final thing that we want to talk about in reading the teaching of Jesus, and that is that Jesus’ teaching has a primary goal. And that goal is discipleship. Jesus’ teaching was not about simply giving us interesting information or entertaining us through his stories. Jesus’ teaching was about drawing us into the story in a way that we understand what it means to be radical disciples of Jesus. And what I mean by that word ‘radical’ is that we begin living our lives, looking at those around us and living counter-culturally, as we’re living by kingdom values rather than by the world’s values. It’s not a half-measure kind of endeavor to live as a disciple of Jesus.

We are called to be completely committed to him. As Christians today, how do we interface with the teaching of Jesus in a way that we hear God speaking to us in all of its immediacy? We hear it as God’s word to us. How do we live in this part of the Bible and embrace it with our lives? Yeah, it’s easy to hear the epistles because they’re written to churches. And we’re a church. We’re the Church. And so it sounds like the same language.

But then Jesus sometimes sounds rather esoteric. Jesus is talking to his people and teaching in ways that we say, “Well, how does that apply to me today?” But I think we need to recognize that Jesus is basically communicating the heart of God and the values that God values. You read the Sermon on the Mount and you realize that this is radically new teaching based on the way the world views things.

The world says, “Blessed are the rich, blessed are the powerful, blessed are the mighty.” And Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor, blessed are those who are hungry, blessed are the oppressed.” And so Jesus takes the world’s values and turns them upside down. And we realize that God’s values aren’t necessarily typical human values. So they become a measure for us of our value system. We can ask as we read the teachings of Jesus, “Are my values more in line with what we see here as God’s values, or are my values really more worldly?” Absolutely.

And I think the application of the Bible is discerning the heart of God in the text. How does God want us to live? Who is God? Who are we in relationship to him? In Luke 9:23 and 24, Jesus said, “If anyone wants to come with me, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me.” In the ancient world, we have to understand that the image of the cross was not what it is today. We think of the cross on this side of Jesus’ sacrificial death as something that is beautiful, and rightly so. We wear crosses around our neck, or we have them on our walls. But in the ancient world, the cross was so offensive, crucifixion was so horrible, that people in polite society would not even say the word. It was seen as a profanity, because there was no worse death in the ancient world. A person was put on a cross to be tortured over a period of days, to die a slow, painful, horrible death. 

So when Jesus says, “Take up your cross and follow me,” it was a striking image, probably an offensive image to a lot of people in his audience. Because Jesus was saying, “You have got to turn your back on your own way of life, and you’ve got to lay down your life for me.” And so what discipleship means, what Jesus is calling us to through his teaching, is a different way of living our lives. 

There is a Bible college professor who lives in Israel named Yohanna Katanako. He pastored a small church in the Israeli city of Jerusalem. As a Palestinian living in Israel, this pastor, this Bible professor, experienced persecution on a regular basis. And one of the places that was very difficult for him to deal with was when he would go through checkpoints, and he would have to interact with Israeli soldiers.

But then he thought about Jesus’ teaching, and he decided that what he would do is he would begin to share the love of Christ, just make a choice to share the love of Christ with them. And he started taking with him tracts that explained the gospel and the love of Jesus in Hebrew. And every time he would come to a checkpoint with these soldiers, he would start sharing the gospel with them and handing them literature that would point them to the love of Christ.

And he said, you know, over a period of months, what happened was that God began to transform his heart. So that then, after months, he noticed in himself that not only was he not dreading going to the stops, he was actually praying for an opportunity to have an encounter with an Israeli soldier so that he might share the love of Christ and the gospel with him.

That’s what the teaching of Jesus is supposed to do. As we obediently follow Jesus in very tangible ways in living counter-culturally in the world, that he begins to change us, to transform us in our lives so that then we can have an impact on the world and be a part of that kingdom invasion that God is doing. And that one day is going to be consummated with not only the transformation of these bodies into a resurrection body, but the transformation of the heavens and the earth into a new heaven and new earth. And that is exciting as we think about that end goal of the teaching of Jesus.