Hermeneutics - Lesson 2

I. The Nature and Practice of Hermeneutics

A. The Revelation of Interpretive Convictions

All right. Again, I want to caution you, this is not anything that I would normally ask a person to do whenever they listen to a sermon—sit around and think about what the pastor did hermeneutically or what the preacher did. But I do think that it is the case that we can testify to what our hermeneutic or our rules of biblical interpretation are, what our convictions are. We can testify to what they are, but the proof is actually in the pudding. Our convictions about hermeneutics, our ideas about how to interpret the Scripture, those are going to come out very clearly every time we teach or read the Scriptures.

B. Case Study Observations: Matthew 11 and John the Baptist

So, what did I do? I’ve been teaching this class for a number of years. I usually do this same devotional. And so here are some of the different observations that people have made about what I did.

The first thing I did was that I did introduce the author, Matthew, as being inspired by the Holy Spirit. And so as I read the text, there was an element—Matthew writes by inspiration of the Holy Spirit. I was basically alerting both myself and anyone who was listening that we’re about to hear from God here as we read these words.

I also prayed. I requested illumination. I wanted God to open his word up to us and also open us up to his word. It was maybe subtly communicating even a bit of humility that we really can’t do this on our own, that we’re dependent upon the Lord to illuminate his word and to make a change in us.

I expressed a bit of curiosity about the text. I asked some critical questions, or we might call those interpretive questions. These are questions that we need to ask and then answer if we’re going to understand this text rightly. And then I framed at least the beginning of the devotion by answering those questions.

I went back to the Old Testament to establish the ground or the foundation for what I was doing here. I looked at the prophecies that pointed to John. I established a time frame as well as I did that. We looked back into the past, prior to the coming of Jesus, and then read earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, before Jesus was actually on the scene, John was doing this task.

We introduced some of the characters: John, John’s disciples, Jesus, Jesus’ disciples, asking: who are the characters in this narrative?

But I spent a lot of time looking at how Matthew had structured his Gospel. Something that you’ll hear from me over and over again in this course is that the biblical authors are really good writers. They are exceptionally good writers, and they give us the context that is necessary to understand what they have written. And so, in order to figure out what was going on in Matthew 11, of course, we went back to the Old Testament, that’s a very broad context. But the most important context would be what Matthew has given us himself. And he has identified who John is already in the earlier chapters.

I tried to repeat some critical words that are found throughout the biblical text. We thought about the Messiah and his coming.

A lot of cross-references. You might have noticed we were going all over the place in our Bibles. We emphasized Matthew in context. He’s the, after all, the author of the book. But we went to some other gospels as well to compare and to maybe to get some more information about who John was, who Jesus was.

We asked how this narrative actually fits into the big picture story, both from Matthew 3, but then also from Matthew 11, our text, the one that we were focusing on, and we did spend a bit of time in the Old Testament.

I suggested to you that John was doubting a bit. He wasn’t sure, he didn’t understand why he was in prison. And now some people will look at that text, and I’ve read this in commentaries where they will say, “Oh, John never doubted, he was just passing off his disciples. John was the forerunner, after all. He wouldn’t have been doubting.” But I think that turns John into someone who’s not really human. He had to be a bit disappointed in how things were going.

And also, the disciples went to Jesus, and then they went back to John. They left. They weren’t there to hear what Jesus had to say about John and about the greatest in the kingdom and the least in the kingdom.

And so, I suggested that maybe John was doubting and that’s not clearly articulated in the text. But I think that it’s good in Bible study to ask questions and maybe use a bit of a tethered imagination, a sanctified imagination.

I also tried to do some personal application as well to the Bible reading. I tried to do in the text what the author was doing.

And then I did focus on Jesus in the Gospel. We spent a lot of time looking at narrative. We spent some time looking at prophecy as well. A couple of different literary genres.

Now, in all of that, everything that I did in this text, and more, we’re going to do in this class. We’re going to look at the different levels of context, the different kinds of contexts, both literary and historical/cultural, thinking about the importance of that. We’ll focus on individual words; we’ll focus on sentences and paragraphs. We’ll look at different literary genres to think how best to understand the Bible. And we’re going to do that with a heavy dependence upon the Spirit of God, recognizing the Bible for what it is: the Word of God written by humans. And everything that we do in this class is going to flow from our understanding of what the Scriptures actually are.

C. Defining Hermeneutics as Science and Art

Let’s begin by thinking about what hermeneutics actually is. What is it? Why would we use such a ridiculous word to describe the interpretation of the Bible? Well, this ridiculous word is actually found in the Bible, or at least the Greek translation of the Old Testament. It comes from the Greek word, the word hermeneutics comes from the Greek word ‘hermēneúō,’ which means to interpret or to explain or to translate.

If you care about such things, it’s also the root word for ‘Hermes,’ who was the messenger to the gods in Greek mythology. Now, I’m not suggesting that Greek mythology is important to biblical hermeneutics, but for those of you who care about such things, it is interesting that this messenger from the gods has this name that’s rooted in this word for explaining or translating or interpreting.

Now we do find this word in the Greek translation of the Old Testament in Nehemiah 8:7-8. You might recall from the Book of Nehemiah that the people of Israel, the people of God, are back from exile. They’re back in the Promised Land, returning from Babylon and Persia, but they have lost the Law. They’ve lost facility with Hebrew, apparently. And when the Law is read to them as they gather in Jerusalem, we’re told that a number of people were necessary to help them understand it.

And so, picking up in Nehemiah 8:7-8, and I’m not going to read verse 7, but it’s a bunch of names of people who were Levites. The last part of verse 7, “…explained the law to the people as they stood in their places. They read out of the book of the law of God, translating and giving the meaning so that the people could understand what was read.” So that’s what hermeneutics is. It’s about giving the meaning so that people can understand.

Now, hermeneutics is the word that we use for the science and art of biblical interpretation. So, what is hermeneutics? The science and art of biblical interpretation. We might ask, science and art? Is it both? How can it be both? Well, why is it a science? Well, because, as we’ll see here, there are rules that can be classified in an orderly system, and it takes skill to apply those rules. But we can actually have an argument about what a text means and we’ll use our hermeneutics to try to persuade one another that what we are saying is true to what the biblical author meant. So, it’s a science in that sense.

But it’s also an art. It’s an art because it’s not an exact science. As you know, we can have Christians of goodwill disagreeing about the meaning of a text. No matter how persuasive or how right I might think I am, I might not be able to persuade you that my interpretation is to be preferred over your interpretation. It’s not an exact science. It’s a contested science. And it takes practice. It takes practice. Kind of like being a doctor, medicine is a science, but it’s also an art. It takes a deft touch.

Now, hermeneutics then is going to be the foundation on which the superstructure of doctrine is built. A lot of times we turn to our experiences to establish what’s right and wrong, but that’s not the way we should go. We need to rely upon God’s word and then interpret our experiences in light of that. We have to try to understand what God’s word means. Try to understand what God means by what he says.

II. The Scriptural Basis for Right Interpretation

A. The Mandate of 2 Timothy 2:15

Second Timothy 2:15 is a very popular verse. For those of you who are familiar with Awana, this is the children’s ministry, this is the Awana verse. It comes from, the name comes from, Paul writes to Timothy, “Be diligent to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who doesn’t need to be ashamed.” So Awana is a worker approved, not ashamed. That’s where the term comes from. But the passage then says, “Present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who doesn’t need to be ashamed, correctly teaching the word of truth.”

Okay, that’s good advice. We should correctly teach the word of truth. But that implies something that’s a little frightening. If we have to be told to correctly teach the word of truth, then an implication is that we can incorrectly teach the word of truth. And I don’t know how many people would raise their hand that they want to do that. How many of you here want to incorrectly interpret the Bible and then teach it poorly? That’s a frightening prospect because if God has spoken, we would do well to understand God’s word correctly, particularly if everything that this book purports to be true is indeed true. If God has spoken in his word, we want to know what he means by what he says. That’s going to raise a question: how do we rightly handle Scripture? And that’s what this entire course is designed to do.

B. Benefits and Blessings of Studying God’s Word

I want to ask you, what are the benefits to studying the word of God? Before we dig into actually how to interpret the Scripture, let’s think about why it would be important to get what God said right. And so, I have a series of verses that, what I’d like you to do is to pause, read the passages, and then think about, What are the benefits of studying and understanding God’s word correctly?

2 Timothy 3:16-17
Joshua 1:8
Psalm 1:1-3
Jeremiah 15:16
Luke 4:1-4
1 Corinthians 2:9-11

Read those passages, jot down a few observations about why it’s important to read and understand the Bible.

[Dr. Miles pauses teaching for a few moments so that the listener can read the passages and jot observations.]

Well, hopefully that was a fruitful time for you, to just think for a while about why it’s so important to understand the Bible correctly. I’m not going to walk through every single one of these passages. We’re going to look at 2 Timothy 3:16-17 in detail here in a moment. But what’s clear from this passage is that all of the Bible is inspired by God. (We’ll look at what that means here in a moment.) And because of what it is, it is therefore profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, with the goal, so that the purpose, the purpose being that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. So, we want to understand what God means by what he says, because the Bible is the word of God and it’s useful for all of these ministry things so that those involved in ministry may be complete, equipped.

C. The Discipline of Biblical Meditation

Joshua 1:8 where Joshua was instructed, “Don’t let this book of instruction depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night.” The Hebrew word for meditation is ‘hāḡâ,’ and it literally means “to mutter over.” I don’t know if you’ve ever read something and your mind is working so hard as you’re trying to figure out what the author is meaning by what he’s writing that you find you’re reading out loud as you read the passage. Well, that’s kind of what biblical meditation is.

I know in like Eastern mysticism meditation, maybe, the emphasis is on emptying your mind, I don’t know, think about the sound of one hand clapping, or something like that. But that is not what biblical meditation is. Biblical meditation, far from emptying your mind, is filling your mind with the Word of God and wrestling with it. Wrestling with it so much that your lips begin to move as you talk out loud to yourself.

I had one teacher who told me that biblical meditation is like having a lemon drop in your mouth that you are just working over. You’re trying to get every ounce of flavor out of it as you move that lemon drop around in your mouth, trying to suck out every ounce of flavor that you can.

And we’re told that as you do that, or Joshua was told, that you want to do that because you want to be careful to obey it. And if you obey it, then you’ll be prosperous, then you’ll be successful.

Now, we would point out that Joshua 1:8, this verse was given to Joshua specifically and might not necessarily be addressed to me. But when we go to Psalm 1:1-3, we get something that is addressed to just generally the people of God. And the same ideas are there.

“How happy is the one who does not walk in the advice of the wicked or stand in the pathway with sinners… Instead his delight is in the Lord’s instruction, and he meditates on it day and night. He’s like a tree planted beside flowing streams that bears its fruit in its season, its leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.”

And so here the same idea, except now in poetic language, instead of just being told, “You will prosper, you will succeed,” it’s poetically likened to a tree that bears fruit and whose leaf survives, it never withers. And then you get the statement, “Whatever he does prospers.” And so, this instruction to meditate on the Word of God, it’s not particular to just Joshua, like Joshua 1:8 perhaps could be interpreted. But in Psalm, it’s for anyone who wants to delight in the Lord’s instruction, who wants to be wise, who wants to be happy.

III. Divine Revelation and the Role of the Spirit

A. The Necessity of God’s Self-Disclosure

We could go on through a number of these. I’d point out for Luke 4. This is the story of Jesus being tempted by the devil. And though Jesus had many things going for him, it is instructive that he responds to the devil by quoting the Word of God. Now, he had been praying and he’d been fasting. He was full of the Holy Spirit, so he’s got other things at his disposal as well. But it’s obvious that Jesus, in dealing with temptation, when he addresses Satan, he quotes Scripture at him.

And in context even, we would find out that the Scripture that Jesus quoted at Satan was applied perfectly. He, Jesus, is in the wilderness. And so, he goes back to the wilderness wanderings and quotes from the books of Moses that were given to the Israelites while they were in the wilderness. And so, contextually, it was a perfect choice by Jesus. Jesus is learning the lessons in his wilderness temptation that the children of Israel 1400 years earlier had not mastered. But Jesus was obeying, and he was—he knew what was the right thing to do.

1 Corinthians 2:9-11, “As it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no human heart has conceived’ – God has prepared these things for those who love him. Now God has revealed these things to us by the Spirit, since the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except his spirit within him? In the same way, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.”

Why is Bible study important? Because the word of God was revealed to the prophets and the apostles by the Spirit of God, who knows the very thoughts of God. So, it is important that we understand what God has given to us. We’ll come back to this passage in a moment as well.

B. Divine Sovereignty in Revelation

I would point out here, though, before we get into exactly what the Scriptures are, that we desperately need revelation from God. You see, there is a big separation between our mind and the mind of God; the mind of Todd, if you will, and the mind of God. The Scriptures instruct us; we’re not neutral when it comes to God. There is really no such thing as neutrality toward God. No one is wearing that white lab coat, evaluating the evidence coldly without bias. No one’s doing that. The Bible describes unrepentant sinners as enemies of God. Ephesians 2 says that we are, by nature, objects of God’s wrath.

Furthermore, God has revealed certain things to us about himself. When the children of Israel were in the wilderness wandering around with Moses leading them, Moses told them, as he recited to them the Law for the second time, this revelation from God as to what they were supposed to do, how they were to behave, how they were to believe, how they were to worship. He told them in Deuteronomy 29:29 that, “The hidden things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us and our children forever, so that we may follow all the words of this law.”

You see, there is a separation between who God is, the mind of God, and who we are, our minds. And that separation cannot be overcome by us. We don’t sneak up on God. We are entirely dependent upon God to reveal things to us. This gap, though, is overcome by God’s revelation.

Deuteronomy, the passage we just read, said that there are hidden things. Well of course there are. It’s the mind of God. But God has revealed some things to us and they belong to us and God has revealed them to us so that we might follow him.

So, revelation, revelation is not a matter of human discovery, but it is God’s self-disclosure. God is sovereign over all information about himself. Again, we don’t sneak up on him from behind and find out something. You know, God never regrets. “Oh boy,” you know, “Todd was so clever. I wish he wouldn’t have figured that out about me.” No, that’s never the case. God is absolutely sovereign over knowledge of himself, and, quite frankly, knowledge of us as well.

And the Scriptures are very clear that God doesn’t owe revelation to anyone. He doesn’t. If we would have continued reading in Matthew 11 after the John the Baptist narrative, we would have seen Jesus criticizing people in Capernaum and Chorazin and Bethsaida, the so-called Evangelical Triangle, the place where most of Jesus’s first advent ministry took place. And he criticized them by saying this: “If the miracles I performed would have been done in Sodom, they would have repented.” Jesus tells them, all the stuff I’m doing for you and you’re not repenting, if that would have been done in Sodom, they would have repented. The worst place in human history, Sodom and Gomorrah, the place that we associate with vileness and depravity and lack of repentance, that God judged definitely and persuasively and completely. And Jesus says even they would have repented. So, it’s a scathing rebuke.

But what’s interesting is, is the implication of this is that, of course, the miracles that Jesus did in Capernaum and Bethsaida and Chorazin, they weren’t done in Sodom. Sodom didn’t see Jesus do these things, and so they didn’t repent and they were judged. Apparently, God doesn’t owe to Sodom the miracles that Jesus did for Capernaum, by which, at least according to Jesus, they would have repented. God doesn’t owe revelation to anyone.

There’s no sense in which Sodom will be able to raise its hand on the day of judgment and say, “Hey, hey, wait a second; Jesus said we would have repented if we would have gotten a little more revelation.” That may be true, but God didn’t give them that revelation and they were judged. It’s sobering. God doesn’t owe us revelation. He generously gives it.

First Corinthians 2:8, we read the same thing. If the rulers had understood that Jesus was the Lord of glory, they would not have crucified him. But of course, they didn’t understand that. God had not revealed that to them, and so they crucified Christ and were culpable for that heinous crime.

So, what does that make us think? If you’re the recipient of revelation, we should just bow before this great God who has given to us what he didn’t have to. God could have ignored us all and held us accountable for our sin. We should marvel that he grants us revelation. It is a wondrous, wondrous doctrine.

C. The Interplay of the Divine Spirit and Human Authorship

Student: So maybe you’ll get into more detail about this later, but you mentioned, especially in 1 Corinthians 2:9-11, how Scripture was written by people communicating the thoughts of God. So, with hermeneutics, we can have, we can get a lot of information about how we can best understand what the meaning of the authors was by looking at it in different ways or from different perspectives or different sources of information. But then also, relying on the Spirit to help us really understand what God is communicating to us. So, how do you do that in a practical way by using the things that we can know, and then by relying on the Spirit to really help us understand that?

Dr. Miles: Yeah, let me answer that in two ways. The first way is to say we’ll talk about that more in depth later. I am going to talk about the role of the Holy Spirit in interpretation specifically. But just to answer your question now, to recognize that there is one Divine Author, and that is the Spirit of God who is responsible for everything that’s in the Scriptures, as well as many human authors. And so, we go to God and we ask that he would illuminate the text for us.

Now we’ll talk more about what illumination is, but I think it has a lot to do with understanding, and it has a lot to do with applying what it is.

And then because the Spirit worked through human authors, we’re going to use a lot of the tools that (we'll talk about them in this class) but tools that I’ll argue are pretty intuitively obvious because everybody communicates with one another. And we’ve picked up a lot of valuable hermeneutical lessons as we’ve advanced in our years.

D. Avoiding Common Interpretive Errors

And so, I don’t think that hermeneutics is terribly mysterious. I think it’s actually pretty intuitive. I often joke the first day of class in hermeneutics. I tell them, “I’m really not going to teach you anything in here, but thanks for paying tuition for this.” What I want to do is make you aware of what you are doing in the Bible and make it so that you can be intentional with what you do. Because it seems to me that most of the major Bible study errors that are made—most interpretive errors are when we treat the Bible as something other than what it is. And we violate all of the rules, the rules that we know about communication, we violate them and do with the Word of God what we would never do with one another: take things out of context, not pay attention to what was said before or after, or the setting. Not pay attention to figures of speech, take things more literally than what was certainly implied, not taking things as literally as what was certainly implied. All of these things that we would never do with one another, or we would be rebuked for doing that with one another but we feel the freedom to do that with God’s word, and I’m not sure why.