Now, with hermeneutics, as we begin this
whole section, we start with some
assumptions. Everybody has assumptions;
we do, too. Our assumptions I think are
well founded, but number one, the Bible is a
book. Duh. [Laughs] You’ve got one in front
of you. It’s stitched together. It used to
be scrolled. And it’s fun to see the steps
and now it’s data. There’s a great book
out, by the way, that talks about
communication when it went from oral to
written to printed to broadcast and now to
data. And broadcast, being such a
revolutionary thing, was very short lived in
comparison to how quick data came on its
heels. The whole issue of: how many years
was it just oral? How many years did it
take for that which was handwritten to get
on the printing press with Gutenberg?
From Gutenberg to the present, 400
years—basically from the 1500s, 1600s into
the present. And now broadcast within less
than a lifetime. And data– what’s happened
with data within the last five years is
phenomenal; it’s phenomenal. You have more
power on your cell phone than it took to
put a man on the moon in the 1960s. Your
phone is a much more complicated instrument
than the computers that helped put a man
on the moon, the technology. That’s how
fast knowledge is exploding.
Where did that come from? The Bible is a
book, okay? [Students Laugh] As a book,
it’s not just a book; it’s a divine book.
It’s a divine book. In other words, it’s
from God, about God, inspired from God,
illuminated by God to us. And with those
two basic principles– in other words, the
Bible is a book. It’s not videotape. It’s
not a magnetic bubble. It’s nothing like
that. It’s not a sound byte or a data byte.
It is words, in sentences, in books
revealed to us. It’s a library of books.
That’s gonna be important for our axioms to
follow. Number two: it’s a divine book, so
we expect something a little bit different.
This is not like the rest of the books on
your shelf. This is the living Word of God,
and as a divine book, it reveals the
character of God even in its formation.
So some axioms that flow out of these
assumptions. Number one– and if you’ll
look at your notes, you don’t have to write
everything in there. If you turn a page or
two, I have it all written out for you. But let
me give you a word out beside each one
of these. Because it’s a book, each writing
was written by an author to an audience in
a specific historical geographic situation
for a specific purpose. Each book of the
Bible had a context. That’s what we’re
saying. And there’s a historical context,
and therefore we need to understand
historical backgrounds. So out beside this
corollary, just put “historical.” It happened
in history by someone to someones
about something, okay? And it had an
intent, a rhetorical purpose.
Number two: each writing was couched in
the cultural setting in the times in which it
was written. It reflected the culture of
its day. Now, it’s not bound by the culture
of its day—please understand that—but it
reflects the culture of its day. So marriage
customs, money terminology, work
situation, even with Roman slavery in the
context: masters, you live this way;
slaves, live this way. That doesn’t mean
slaves are good, but there was a life that
God revealed if you were a slave. If you’re
a boss, if you’re an employee, there’s
different functions that God has given to us.
Is it bad to be an employee instead of
the boss? Not necessarily. Man versus
woman, etc.? No. Child versus adult? No.
But God has couched what He has written in
cultural settings, and so He talks about us
as sheep in an agrarian culture. You say, “I
never have lived on a farm. I don’t know
what that’s like.” All of them would have
known what that’s like. So if I’m gonna
know what it meant to be sheep, I’m gonna
have to study what it meant to be a sheep
in that culture, and that will have great
application for me. So I need to study the
cultural background, the cultural background.
What is girding up one’s loins, as we said
earlier? What is throwing dust on somebody's
head mean? What did that mean? “In my
Father’s house, there are many rooms.”
Why is that a marriage theme in John
14? What’s the marriage imagery? “In my
Father’s house, there are many rooms. If
I go and prepare a place for you, I will
come again and receive you unto myself,
that where I am, there you may be also.”
What’s it like to live in the Father’s house,
married to the Father’s Son? That’s a
marriage imagery of Middle Eastern practice.
Each writing was recorded in written
language and it followed normal grammatical
meanings, including figures of speech.
They had subjects, verbs, objects. There’s
tenses that are unique to Hebrew and tenses
that are unique to Greek, but God chose to
reveal in grammatical categories His Word,
which words Paul says we ultimately
speak. In other words, God took spiritual
thoughts, put them into spiritual words,
His words; these are the words Paul says
we speak. And so the New Testament was
recorded– was revealed and recorded in
what’s called Koine Greek, which is common
Greek, the language of the street. Not
slang, but common language, the Koine
Greek. So we study the grammatical
structure of the text. We study the
grammatical structure of the text.
Next: each writing was accepted or
understood in light of its context. So
contextually we want to know: what’s the
context? It was accepted or understood. One
of the great ways you know what language
means is watch the Bible, and when one
person is talking and another person is
listening and they repeat it back and they
respond to each other—are you ready for
this? The irony is it’s very normal.
[Laughs] They understood it exactly like it
was said. Now if it’s a special nuance and
“this he spake by the Spirit,” etc., and they
didn’t know what He was saying, there’s
contexts when which He hides truth and
reveals it in a special way, but it’s not weird.
Don’t get weird on me. [Student Laughs]
Each writing took on the nature of a
specific literary form. God chose to reveal
Himself in narrative, in prose, poetry,
proverb, parable, epistolary, apocalyptic
or visionary literature, legal literature;
you have romantic, what’s called idyllic
poetry with the Song of Solomon and some
of that. You’ve got wisdom literature. All of
those are specific literary forms that God
chose to communicate His will to us;
therefore, I need to study the literary—the
literary structures, the literary principles.
And finally, it was understood in accord
with the basic principles of logic and
communication. In other words, they didn’t
go, “Now, what He said was four, but four
has four parts; therefore, this stands for
this; this stands for this.” No, He didn’t do
that. It was normal. Now, are there figures
of speech? Yes, and it often will interpret
them for you. But they understood it in a
very rational way. Now we’re not talking
rationalism and rationalistic in the wrong
sense of this term, but it’s reasonable.
That might be another better word. It’s
rational and reasonable. When Jesus said,
“Get in the boat and go to the other side,”
what did the disciples do? “Now, what is
the meaning boat? And where is the other
side? [Students Laugh] And why would He
say that now?” No, they got in the boat and
they got out there. That’s the issue.
Again, don’t get weird on me.
Axiom number two: the Bible’s a divine
book. What do we mean by that? Well, number
one, the Bible contains mystery. And by
mystery it means there’s prophecy. In other
words, God reveals the future. There is
parables; there’s unique stories that he
tells that Jesus spins on the spot to reveal
something about the kingdom. There
is miracles that take place. That’s not
normal; otherwise, it wouldn’t be called a
miracle. He’s done miraculous things: sun
standing still, when He predicts that the
moon will turn to blood, the Red Sea
parting. If you’re reading through the
Bible this year, we just came through that
section a week or so ago. There’s great
mystery. There’s doctrine—the doctrine of
inspiration, the doctrine of the Trinity,
the doctrine of the death of Christ, the
substitutionary death of Christ. God has
revealed Himself, and it has divine meaning
from that standpoint that you wouldn’t
normally have. You wouldn’t normally use
a word “to buy out of the slave market,”
ἀγοράζω [agorazo], you wouldn’t normally
think of that in a spiritual context unless
you realize that God through His Son paid
the price to redeem us from sin.
And the term for redemption; other than
church, the only place I ever heard
“redemption” when I was growing up was
the green stamp stores. Some of you have
no clue what that was. But when you would
go to the grocery store when I was a kid,
when the earth was still cooling, [Students
Laugh] you would get green stamps
proportionate to how much food you
bought, sort of like airline points with a Visa
card now. They gave you these green
stamps, and the crazy thing is they gave
you these empty booklets and you had to
lick the green stamps, paste them in the
book, and when you got enough books,
you had a place called the green stamp
redemption store, and you went in and
redeemed your stamps for a gift out of the
catalog. My first little transistor radio was
from green stamps. Little first calculator that
I got was from green stamps that my mom
let me have. My first basketball was out of
the green stamp store, those kinds of things.
But redemption isn’t a term that was normally
associated with spiritual atonement. But
God chose to use that imagery. It takes a
humongous amount of money to fill enough
green stamps to buy a boat, and hence we
never had a boat, okay? We never had a
bike from green stamps. That took too
much. It takes an incredible amount to buy
somebody’s soul, and therefore God paid
for us with His Son, and that’s called
redemption: the price paid to redeem the
ransom. Okay?
Number two: unity. You’ve heard this:
1,500 years, 40 different authors, but with
an incredible spiritual revelational unity
across the pages of Scripture. We have a
consistent view of God. We have a
consistent view of Christ. We have a
consistent view of sin. We have harmony;
human authors without inspiration would
never have had the kind of agreement across
the pages that you have with this book. It
looks and it reads like all of these guys
got together and wrote it together, for the
most part, which it didn’t happen that way.
That’s one of the arguments for the
inspiration of the Scriptures is the unity
of the Scripture. This gives us the unity of
the faith. That’s what allows for systematic
theology that we can study. What has God
said about sin everywhere in the
Scriptures? All of that will ultimately come
into harmony as to how you handle it.
It won’t contradict itself. There’s apparent
contradictions, because if we haven’t done
our homework. One quick example: in one
passage, it says Jesus was coming out of
Jericho when He healed the blind men, and
the other passage says He was going into
Jericho when He healed the blind men.
“Aha! There’s an error in one of the texts,
‘cause you can’t come out and go in at
the same time, can you?” And the answer
is yes, because what we now know is
there were two Jerichos side by side.
There’s an Old Testament site of Jericho
and there’s a New Testament site of
Jericho, and they’re about a half a mile–
less than a half a mile apart from each
other. One was built by Herod the Great
prior to the time of Christ. That’s the
Jericho of the New Testament, but the Old
Testament site that was conquered is just
up the way from it, and so you could be in
between the Jerichos, and one writer could
be referring to the Old Testament Jericho,
coming out of Jericho, the other writer
coming into Jericho. And therefore there’s
harmony between the two Gospel writers.
Archaeology helps us on a few things that
way, but there’s great unity.
Number three, there’s progress of
revelation. God didn’t back up the truck
and dump it all on Abraham or through
Moses. He revealed Himself throughout
that 1,500-year period with 40 different
authors. And so not only over time is there
a progress of revelation, but even at times
within a book there’s progress of
revelation as He develops a theme or
develops a thought: the seed theology of
Genesis, the seed of the woman, the seed
of the serpent; the conflict between
righteousness and sinfulness that you have,
the conflict between one child and another.
I was with Walt Kaiser over the weekend;
he’s an Old Testament scholar. We both sit
on the Board of Bible Study Fellowship
together and we were in San Antonio at
board meetings. And he was doing– I did the
Bible study on Saturday morning and he did
the Bible study on Sunday morning. And he
was working his way through the Genesis
account. He was doing the grand scheme of
things through the Scriptures. You always
learn something new all the time, and
especially from a scholar like that. But
when God didn’t choose Esau but Jacob, it
was one of the two. Later, when God picks
another one, it’s one out of four. It’s the
fourth one in the line: Judah, ‘cause you
have Reuben, Simeon, etc., and Judah’s
number four, so out of twelve sons, God
picks the fourth born. When you get to
David, which one was David? He’s the eighth
one. So, in the grace of God, He picks the
second one out of two; He picks the fourth
one in this one, and He picks the eighth
one in this one—all of which to say that
God sovereignly chooses whom He wants
to use for His purposes, and it’s not just the
eldest son. In fact, He set aside the first
to establish the second is sort of a
principle of God’s grace through there. And
so you have that progress of revelation and
it’s wonderful. But the seed theology is
you develop it through Abraham and Isaac
and Jacob and get to Joseph. And the one
you would expect to have been chosen is
Joseph, but God in His grace picks
Judah—the most unlikely one, in fact, of
the 12 at that point in history. And that’s
what chapter 38 is about. Tucked into the
story of Joseph is one chapter about Judah
and Tamar, and you’re going, “Oops. Why
is that one there?” It’s as a foil for the rest
of the narrative. The progress of revelation.
Now, how are we gonna approach this? Let me
show you the diagram that you have in your
notes. In Acts 1:8, we started with words.
Words are combined in clauses and phrases
to produce sentences. Sentences are put
together to create paragraphs. And as
Traina says, the paragraph is the basic
unit of study. So here is our context. Our
immediate context is the paragraph, or when
we’re in poetry the stanza, if you please,
the poem itself. That’s the immediate
context. The remote context goes beyond
that because we now have sections, and
within sections, those make up books. So we
have a section or a book, and books are
written by authors in specific genres. Now,
the reason I diagrammed this this way is
that the author and genre is a bigger issue
than simply the book because we have
authors that write multiple books. So the
kinds of books that John writes, for
example: a Gospel, three Epistles, and
Revelation. And so we have authors who
write different kinds of genre. Most of them
write one kind of genre, but John wrote
three kinds. So we have authors in genre.
We have dispensation. Don’t let that word
choke you, okay? It’s a good, biblical
term. It was in the King James Bible and
that’s why we use it. You say why we use
Reform theology; it’s a very technical term
of Reformers, and so we have Reform as a
title. We’re not reforming something, on
the one hand, but we are on the other with
the term Reformation. But dispensation is a
term that’s used. Economy, οἰκονομία
[oikonomia] is the Greek word, and that
means a period of time. We call it the
Reagan economy, the Clinton economy, the
Bush economy, the Obama economy, okay?
We’re talking about a period of reign, a
period of rule, a period of time of
administration. So we have authors that
function within those periods of time.
Within the Scriptures, the Scripture is our
biggest remote context. That’s the Bible,
the canonical context. Now, we also have
context beyond that. We have what we call
extra-biblical context because the
Scriptures take on elements that are the
kind of languages that were used in the
Middle East and in the New Testament times,
in the Greco-Roman world, in the Ancient
Near East. We have culture in which all of
this took place, and we have history. And
so you have biblical history that happens
within the context of a larger history. You
have Scripture written in a context of a
bigger body of literature, and you have
different reflections of culture in the
different periods of culture, whether you’re
under an Egyptian culture, you’re under an
Assyrian culture, a Babylonian culture,
Greco-Roman culture. And so history, culture,
literature, Scripture, that kind of pursuit.
So as we study the Scriptures: the
immediate context, the remote context, and
the extra-biblical context. To lead out of
that series of circles is what we call
exegesis. Leading out of the meaning, out
of the text, in its circles of context. And
so we’re gonna take and do a lecture or a
lesson on pretty much each one of these
as we walk our way through interpretation.
You started with words. In interpretation,
we’re gonna start with the outside circle
and work our way in.