How to Read the Bible
245 | “Meet Your Bible” | Seven Sermon Summer Surfin’ Spectacular
Get to Know Your Bible
Surf's up for our "Seven Sermon Summer Surfin' Spectacular"! This week, Ryan offers a proper introduction in his sermon, "Meet Your Bible". Ever felt like you know about the Bible, but haven't been formally introduced to this library of books? Why is it crucial to remember this collection was written for you, but not directly to you? And how can we stay curious about a book we think we know so well? Join us for a friendly reintroduction, designed to build your confidence and help you fall in love with it all over again!
Takeaways
The Big Idea: To read the Bible well, see it not as one book, but as a whole library telling one great story.
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Introduction
Ryan: Amen. What a cool book. There's the that should be like our tagline. Bible geeks. What a cool
Bryan: What a cool
book.
() Surf's up, everybody. And welcome to the Seven Sermon Summer Surf and Spectacular here on our summer. I don't even know what this is. Our summer series that we're doing, just kind of wasting some time between our seasons that we're doing here.
And I'm Bryan Sheely here on the episode, and I'm joined as always by my buddy, by sir, by chief. What's up, pal?
Ryan: episode.
Bryan: going, bud?
Ryan: we're having some trouble this summer. Clearly we are in summer mode. We're in off season mode here. I am. Yeah, I am ready to continue our awesome series here. Our spectacular series of sermon listening and
Bryan: on. What was your name again?
Ryan: my name is going to be Ryan on this particular episode.
Bryan: So it's funny because that is the exact setup that Ryan used in the sermon that we're going to get into here on
Ryan: Oh, now I get it.
Bryan: So of course, I don't forget your name, but it is funny. You get to these moments where you realize "Boy, I've known that person for a very long time.
What's his name again?"
Ryan: Yeah.
Bryan: And of course, we're not talking about people. We're talking about the Bible as a book that we know, but do we really know it as well as we think we
Ryan: Yeah, I mean, I think that some people maybe it's just an intimidating book that, you know, they've heard tell of, but they've never really met. And others of us, we we know a lot of facts about, but maybe the proper introduction has never been made. And, you know, we do? So
many sermons where you're drawing from the Bible, of course, and you're touching on this and that and you're bouncing around.
And if someone hasn't really been introduced to what is happening in the Bible, where it comes from, how it's organized, what it really is. I think they're missing a big piece of the foundation that lets you enter into all the other conversations. And, of course, this ties in with some of the earliest conversations we had in that square one series we just recently completed about what is the Bible and what's it about and some of those kinds of
Bryan: let's meet your Bible here on the episode. We're going to have a proper introduction for this book that we have been reading for a very long time. It is the title of our podcast, and yet we are maybe going to introduce it again in a way that hopefully isn't confusing or builds confidence for people to better approach this amazing book.
Sermon 5: "Meet Your Bible"
Bryan: So let's get into that and then stay tuned. We'll have some conversation about this sermon at the end.
Ryan: Have you ever had one of those times when maybe there's somebody who is part of your circle of friends and you've sort of known them for a while but you were never actually properly introduced and so you kind of don't know their name for sure? And so you see them from time to time and you just say, "Hi buddy, how you doing?"
And it's just kind of almost too awkward now that you've known them for a year sort of to ask them their name. Maybe you try to find out from somebody else. Or sometimes you have someone that you really do know. Like I had a friend, I considered a friend in a previous congregation that I found out years down the road that I had been calling them by the wrong name for years.
And I say that to my shame, but it happens sometimes that you kind of know some things about somebody. You know their favorite sports team, you know their face, but you don't really know them. And maybe that can sometimes happen with the Bible. Maybe you know, you probably do know a good bit about the Bible, or maybe it's just something you bump into at church pews or the Gideon version in the hotel room.
Maybe you've spent a good bit of time with it, but perhaps you've never been properly introduced. So that's what we want to do this morning. Give a brief introduction, a proper introduction to the Bible. And if you are really familiar with it and you've spent years with it, then I think still it is a good thing to see.
We sometimes miss some points or forget some things about how we should interact with it. And a lot of times I think some of the most fundamental misinterpretations and false teachings come from not knowing, not understanding what the Bible is. This is kind of like introducing to some of your best friends another person that you really, really love.
This isn't a person, but it is a book that I absolutely treasure. I love this book so much. And it's about a person that I love so much. And so it's the way that you get to know them. I think a lot of people honor the Bible from a distance, deciding that Bible study, that personal Bible study, just isn't for me.
And others can jump to strange conclusions because they've never learned the importance of context. And so it's important to really come to know what the Bible is so it can become a treasured, fruitful part of our life. And the first thing to know about it, I'm going to have four points about this, about the Bible, is that you have nothing to fear.
It's not scary. Sometimes it can be intimidating. It is a big book. That is a big, big book. But you don't need to worry. It is a book that you can understand and you can engage with and you can enjoy and you can get to know the God that it reveals. Point number one is, though I'm a book, I'm really a book of many books.
Why is that important? Well, I think you'll see that if we don't read it as it was written, as a book of many books, we're going to miss the context and misunderstand the book. So the word Bible comes from the word Biblia, which actually means books. Not book, but books. It's a plural word. And then this eventually got shortened to the word Bible.
So the name of the book is books. So it's a collection of books. And this is really important to understand. God, of course, brings a unified wholeness to the Bible, as we'll talk about, but reading it as one book in the usual sense can lead to out of context conclusions. Every one of these books has its own purpose, serving God's overall purpose.
John, the Apostle John, writes 1 John, his first epistle, to people who need reassured about their salvation. I write this to you, he says, in 5.13, so that you may know you have eternal life. John, the same guy, writes Revelation for a very different purpose. It's a vision that he's sharing about big things that are about to change and then things that will happen and change at the end of time.
He writes his gospel, the gospel of John, for a totally different purpose, so that we might come to believe in Jesus, that he is the Son of God. All of those have different purposes. They have different structures that use some of the same language, but they are reflecting different themes. They don't contradict each other, but we need to study 1 John and understand what it's doing and understand the book.
And so a good practice is to have a steady diet of studying books by the book. Now, topical studies are really good, and that's going to go across different books, and we're going to piece them together. But we want to understand what a word or a topic or a study means within a book. And we noticed how Mark is doing certain things, and that's a little different than what Matthew and what John and Luke are doing.
And those are important for us to understand first, first what Mark is communicating to his audience, and then we can piece these things together and apply them to ourselves. This is so essential. And so I want to talk a little bit about the organization of this book. A lot of books. And the first section is called the Old Testament.
You'll find if you open your Bible, to Matthew chapter 1, that there's often a page in there, right? A page right between Malachi 4 and Matthew 1. And the first section is the Old Testament, and the second section is the New Testament. We'll talk about those words in a little bit. But each one is broken down a little bit different.
They go together. It's not two separate collections. They are one Bible, but they're two different sections, and within those sections, there are various sections. So a good way to remember the way the Old Testament breaks down, if you can remember, 512 5512. Five books of the law, 12 books of history, then you have the five books of poetry or the writings, and then you have the five major prophets and the 12 minor prophets.
And that's the way the Old Testament breaks down in our Bibles. Now, I want to take you just a little bit deeper into this to talk about, because it's helpful to me to understand that we have the same books in our Bible, our Old Testament, as Jesus and John and John the Baptist and Josephus had in the Old Testament that they had, but they're organized a little bit differently.
And it's helpful to know both and how they're organized. The first five, whenever Jesus, Jesus talks about the law and the prophets and the Psalms, the Psalms being the biggest part of the writings. And he talks about the order of the Hebrew canon, which is still, if you have a Jewish friend, the way that their Bible is organized has the same exact books that we have, again, just organized differently.
He talks about the martyrs from Abel to Zachariah, going from A to Z, going from the first martyr in Genesis four to the last book of the Old Testament and the last martyr in Chronicles. So Jesus talks about this structure of the books. So there's the law, again, the first five books of the Bible, sometimes called the law of Moses, sometimes called the Torah, sometimes called the law or the Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.
It's called the law, but they're not all books of law as a genre. It's important to know. There's some case law in the book of Leviticus, but a lot of it's stories, right? There's stories of how accounts, narratives from the beginning of everything in Genesis through the story of Israel and Exodus and the wilderness wandering and Numbers, and then that wonderful sermon of Moses before they cross into Palestine, the book of Deuteronomy.
That's the first five books. But then in Jesus' scrolls, he didn't have it organized into a book like this, but they would in the synagogues have scrolls, collections of scrolls, and the next group are the prophets. But they would include the historical books as prophets like Kings and Samuel, and it wouldn't be first and second Kings.
They just put them together as one, Kings and Samuel. And these are the former prophets, and then there's the later prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah and all the minor prophets, et cetera. And then lastly, there's the writings. And again, Psalms is a lot of that, but there's all these different writings in this collection also.
Same books, just organized a little differently. Ours has come about partially from the Septuagint, which was the Greek translation of the Old Testament, and then has evolved the way it's organized. The New Testament starts with five books of history, and the first four are different than the fifth. The first four, we call them gospels, which just means good news, but they are biographies of Jesus that are making a particular argument about who Jesus is.
And when we read the gospels, we start to understand they are telling us, they are telling us good news because Jesus is good news. They're telling us not only who he is and what he did in his ministry, but they're telling us about his death. A giant portion of each of those books is about his death and then about his resurrection.
After that comes the book of Acts, which picks up the story at Jesus' ascension and talks about how Jesus goes in, how Jesus sends forth his people and continues to work through them as they carry the gospel into Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and the uttermost parts of the earth as the church spreads.
And then we get a lot of letters or epistles. And the first group of these letters, the first 13, are by Paul, and then the rest are by others. And these are letters sometimes to individuals like Philippian or Timothy, sometimes to churches, sometimes to broader groups like the Hebrews. And then finally, there's this vision, this prophetic vision that John presents to us, and that's the organization of the New Testament.
And together, this library, this holy library is connecting. They're all doing different things, but they work together and God creates a unified whole. This Bible is God's complete written masterpiece. There's no more written words that we need inspired from God. It is complete. It gives us everything we need.
It is the faith once for all delivered. It is the word of God that, as Paul tells Timothy in 2 Timothy 3, 16 to 17, is breathed by God. He says there, "All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work."
This all goes together. Through the centuries, God has preserved this library of books that give us all we need for every good work. This book was written over 1,600 years by a lot of different authors in three different languages. And yet, these men wrote with authority from God. And all of the different parts reveal God's harmonious, complementary message.
And framing all of the little stories within the book is one grand story. One big connected theme, a thread that goes through it. And so as we look at it, we want to study it as one complete and harmonious story. If you think that Mark is contradicting Matthew, read it again. They are not contradicting each other.
They are doing different things. So understand how they work together. And we need to watch how these different authors are, if you will allow the metaphor, in conversation with each other. Mark is picking up themes from Moses and from Isaiah and fleshing them out in different ways. And they're bouncing off of each other.
God is telling this story and letting it echo in different ways. I always like to compare it to the musical score, the movie, and how different phrases like the Darth Vader theme or the Luke Skywalker theme shows up in different ways. But we know what it means. Whenever we see new heavens and new earth, whenever we see death on a cross, whenever we see the idea of being an image bearer of God, all of these different themes, we recognize, oh, that's pointing us back, and we want to watch how this theme is developing.
And so here's a summary of how this theme, this story goes together. Starts with creation, and then there's the fall. And this happens in the first three chapters of the book. There is a good world and a good humanity that God makes, and he's walking in the cool of the day. He's in fellowship in the garden.
And then there is a rebellion. There is a choice to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and an exile from the garden. And then when we get to the fall continues down through chapter 11 of the Bible, which is kind of the prologue to the Bible, and we see things like the flood, and we see the Tower of Babel, and then we meet the generations of the account of the generations of Terah.
We meet Abraham, and we see how he's going to take this one chosen family and bless the world with this one, through this one man. And this family we're going to follow really through not only as it grows bigger and bigger, but as it becomes a nation. The grandson, see, Abraham has Isaac, Isaac has Jacob, whose name is changed to Israel, and Israel becomes this great nation with 12 different tribes.
And that nation is God's people and a covenant people that he has with them. And we follow this until from that seed of Abraham and Israel comes the Christ, Jesus himself. And then we follow the story of Jesus as he fulfills all of these promises and themes and ideas from before. And then he has his body that his physical body raises from the dead and ascends.
But he says, I still have a body here on earth, and that body is my church. And through that church, I want to continue to do my work and spread my kingdom. And then we see a coming point, and the Bible ends with this picture, something that hasn't yet happened. There is, we started with creation, but there is new creation.
There is a new heavens, a new earth that descends, this new Jerusalem, this picture of resurrection that comes about and glory and God making all things right. And as 2 Peter 3 in verse 13 says, a new heavens, a new earth where righteousness dwells. And this is the story that all of the rest of the Bible helps us to understand.
So we want to watch for that story and keep connecting the smaller stories to that bigger story. The third point is this is written for you, but not to you. Hmm, what does that mean? Well, who did Paul write Philemon to? Philemon! Who did Paul write Timothy to? Timothy! Who was Obadiah writing for? The Edomites.
There is a particular audience in mind that the authors, as they're writing it, are thinking, here is what I'm writing. I know I have a shared cultural context. I have a shared language with this person I'm writing to or this group I'm writing to. I have a particular purpose I want to accomplish in them.
But God meant for it to get to your hands. God meant for this book to be compiled, the writings to Philemon and the writings to the Edomites, all of these things to be pulled together by godly men and women, by people who honored and treasured these things. And he oversaw this book becoming something that you can hold.
He meant for it to get to you. But it's helpful to recognize it wasn't written to you. Well, why does that matter? Because I think some people view it like, well, this is just a love letter to me and just say, okay, God, what do you have to say to me? And open the book and see what it says. "For the customs of the people are delusion because it is wood cut from the forest."
Oh, so that must be talking about the delusion I saw in the news today. No, that's not how it works. That's not how the Bible works. What we want to do, that's from Jeremiah 10, is where I randomly opened to, and I want to understand what Jeremiah is doing to his original, as he communicates to his original audience.
And after I understand that, then I want to figure out how does this connect to everything else and how does this connect to me so that I can work with it and live. It is personal. It is absolutely personal for you. But in order to be a proper Bible student, we have to deal with the most challenging obstacle to understanding in Bible study, which is context.
You live in a different context than they do. You speak a different language. If God was writing to you, don't you think he would write it in your language? But he knew you would get it. And so you have to think about, well, what did this mean in the flow of the original book and in the original language and in the original historical context that it's written to?
It's really important. Study what the author meant first and then apply it. Not the other way around. We want to jump to the application. I hear what you're saying, God, about delusions and move on. No, first think critically and then let it in the heart once you truly understand. And the point isn't that you need to be a scholar on the culture, but the more you dive in, the more you think about what was happening there, the better you're going to understand what's happening.
So one of the big contextual issues is it's in a different language. It was written in Hebrew in the Old Testament, a few parts in Aramaic, and then the New Testament in Greek. So we have to think about a translation. I don't speak ancient Hebrew, so I need a translator's help. I need language resources to properly study it.
And so then we look at our translations and we are so blessed. God has given us the gift of many translations. Translation is as part of the biblical tradition as the use of words themselves. God chose to use words and he chose to translate over and over again. Think about the moment that the gospel comes to be preached to all of those who are in Jerusalem by Peter, and what did they hear?
They heard the word in their own tongue. Remember in Acts 2, the day of Pentecost? All these different tongues and they're hearing it in their own language, being translated. It's a reversal of the Tower of Babel. If you read the Gospels and you read what Jesus said, you are already reading a translation.
Jesus wasn't speaking Greek. Mostly he was speaking Aramaic. Sometimes you'd see some Aramaic phrases in the Book of Mark, but usually we're reading it in Greek. And the inspired writer, the prophet, has taken Jesus' words and translated it into Greek and now we have it here. There are early translations, so early, the translations, the Syriac translation, the Latin Vulgate.
Before Jesus showed up on the earth, there was already a Old Testament translation from Hebrew to Greek called the Septuagint that is quoted often throughout our New Testament. So there's nothing wrong with reading a translation, but you want to think about the goal is, the translators are not inspired, the goal is to try to get to what the original said.
And we have incredible confidence based on our over 5,600 manuscripts of the New Testament, very, very early, based on the manuscripts of the Old Testament. We have incredible confidence in what the original text was. But that doesn't help us until we get to the meaning, and to get to the meaning we need translation.
So what do you have? Hopefully you've got either a Bible in your hands or with you, or you have a phone that has access on your YouVersion app or whatever you use to many different translations. There are two different theories, two different approaches to translation that we see widely. You can kind of break this down, and two big words I'll give you.
You could call it formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. And all that means, formal equivalence meaning it's trying to be as exactly word for word as it can be. Dynamic equivalence means it's trying to get the meaning to you in English as precisely as they can. For instance, any of you guys study Spanish in high school or sometime?
Okay, so if someone, if Asher says how old he is, if he says it in English, he would say I'm 10 years old. If he says it in Spanish, he would say tengo 10 años, I have 10 years. If I was translating in dynamic equivalence, I would say I'm 10 years old. If I was translating in formal equivalence, I would say I have 10 years.
And there's a range, right? There's a range between those two. Like it's not cut and dry. Everybody is doing some dynamic equivalence at some level, or it just would be garbledy-goo. If you want to be truly literal with formal equivalence, beyond the Young's literal translation, you use the interlinear. An interlinear where it has the Greek text or the Hebrew text, and then below it, the English word for it, and it's all out of order.
But that can be helpful too. So that's formal equivalence. If you go way past dynamic equivalence and thought-for-thought translation, you get over here to paraphrase, which is kind of a commentary on the text. It's not really trying to translate it exactly, but it's trying to get the idea across in the most practical way.
So what is the right way to do it? Which is the divine favorite translation. There isn't one. There isn't a right one, okay? And I don't have a ultimate favorite translation, but you can see that in this flow that certain things are going to be useful for particular purposes. When you're studying and you're trying to get to the heart of what something means, a closer to word-for-word translation is going to be better because whenever you look over here at something that's more thought-for-thought, there is a lot of interpretation that is already happening, right?
Somebody has said, "I think basically what Paul means here is this." And maybe that is what he means, basically. But they're making a lot of interpretive decisions for you. This make sense? As opposed to when I'm studying, I want to say, "Okay, well, that's good. I like to see what you think that means. You know the language better than I do, but also, what did it literally mean?"
And try to get a little more detailed. Now, if I'm reading a story, I'm just reading through the book of Samuel, I might prefer something over here because it's much easier to read as a story. I'm not trying to study, I'm just trying to get the sense. And this, the harder, the more word-for-word it is, the higher the level of reading comprehension is necessary.
This is like an 11th grade reading level as opposed to like a 4th grade reading level. And it is, whatever my reading level is, it's easier for me to read a 4th grade reading level. It's less work and I like to just read through and, "Oh, okay, I get it. I get it. Like, I'm reading a good book." And so, it depends on what, it depends on your reading level in some ways, but it really depends on what your purpose is, what you're trying to do.
Speaking of reading level, there's the International Children's Bible, very easy to understand. Okay, so I wanted to take a little bit of time to think about translations. And this is, there's some subjectivity available here in this. So, we want to think about translation. Before we go on from this idea of context, I just want to say another piece of the context we want to be aware of is where we are in the story.
For instance, we talked about the Old Testament and the New Testament, but that can be a little bit deceptive because I can read something in the New Testament that is still under what we would call the Old Covenant or the First Covenant. Look with me at Hebrews. This is where this word Old Testament and New Testament comes from.
Hebrews chapter 9, in Hebrews chapter 9, the author, the Hebrew writer, takes the idea of covenant and the Greek word for covenant that the New Testament writers use can also mean a will and testament, like whenever you die and you leave something for someone. And so, in a lot of translations, in verse 16, it says, "For where a testament is, there must be of necessity the death of one who made it."
So, let's go back to verse 15. And I'm reading from the New American Standard here, which has the word covenant in all of these spots. It says, "For the reason he, Jesus,
is the mediator of a new covenant, so that since a death has taken place for the redemption of the transgressions that were committed under the First Covenant, those who have been called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance. For where a covenant is, there must of necessity be the death of the one who made it.
For a covenant is valid only when men are dead, for it is never in force when the one who made it lives. Therefore, even the First Covenant, the Old Testament, was not inaugurated without blood. For when every commandment had been spoken by Moses to all the people according to the law, he took the blood of the calves and the goats with water and scarlet wool and hyssop and sprinkled both the book itself and also the people, saying, 'This is the blood of the covenant which God commanded you.'
And in the same way, he sprinkled both the tabernacle and all the vessels of the ministry with the blood. So, just want to notice, so there is a covenant that God had with Israel. He calls it the First Covenant. There's actually other covenants in the Old Testament as well. A covenant was an agreement between God and people, and the covenant with Israel was that I will be your God and you will be my people.
But there was a promise in the Old Testament in Jeremiah that there is coming a new covenant, and these people will have written on their hearts my law. And I'm going to give them a new heart, Ezekiel says, and they will be my people and I will be their God. Okay, so that's coming, this new covenant or New Testament.
But what do you notice here? What is going to happen to ratify this New Testament, this new covenant? Jesus is going to die. Well, I flip my Bible to the New Testament and what do I see? Jesus is alive. Jesus is born in the New Testament. And I keep reading through and he's following the old law. Why?
Because that old covenant is still in effect. But then when he dies, as Colossians says, all of that is nailed to the cross. And then we see the coming of something new, a new covenant. So even though we're in the New Testament, you want to pay attention to where are we in the story so we know whether we're in a place where the old covenant is in effect or the new covenant.
This book is made for you to study and to teach and to live. A study, that's an interesting idea. Young people are about to be on break or maybe are already on break and have no studying for a while. How wonderful is that? But in order to understand the word of God, well, we have to do what Ezra did in Ezra 7 and verse 10, where it says, "He studied, he set his heart to study the law of the Lord and to do it and to teach it."
Ezra 7 10. That word study there is one of two passages that inform my idea of what studying is. Study there means search. To search it, like to take a magnifying glass and to dig into it, it's not just going to always be exactly clear immediately when you just read a verse. You have to search it and dive into it.
It's like in Acts 17 and verse 11, where the Bereans searched the scriptures daily to see if the things Paul was saying were so. And that word for search has to do with interrogating the text, asking it questions, and pulling out what does it say. The other passage I think of, maybe it's a passage you were told to memorize when you were younger, is 2 Timothy 2 15, which the old King James says, "Study to show yourself approved, a workman that needeth not be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth."
Study to show yourself approved. Well, newer translations translate that word study, and they do it well, to give diligence or to do your best. The idea of that word study is it's going to take effort. Study, as the kids know, takes work. It is, but it is worth it. It is good work. It is rewarding work to dive into the word and pull out what it means, to try to travel across contexts and understand what did Hebrew writer mean when he said this?
How does that connect to everything else God said? Then we want to take it and share it like Ezra did. And ultimately, it is a book that is intended to transform. It's intended to be lived, to change how you think, to change what you say and what you do. It is, as Hebrews 4 12 says, living and active, and it pierces you like a sword, and it exposes you, the next verse says, before God.
When you read it with an open heart, this is something that has happened through the ages. You read through the book of Acts, and people hear the word of God, or they read the word of God, and they're changed. Things that you would never expect them to do, they start to do. Changes you would never expect them to have.
There is power in this book as we get into it and try to understand it and start to live it. This book, it was made to change you. It was made to introduce to you, not a book, not a collection of books, but a savior and a God. Someone that you were created to serve and to live joyfully in the presence of, forever.
Discussing the Sermon
Bryan: So of sermon number five here on the series that we've done, I think this is one of those that like, this should be in the rotation of everyone who has a real good familiarity with the Bible, because it's always good to just get reintroduced to a book that you feel like you know, but maybe you don't know it as well as you could, or maybe you've forgotten about some things.
Because the Bible is, it has a lot of baggage, let's just say, in people's minds.
Ryan: Yeah. And one of the things to the point of people who do know the Bible, one of the things that I wanted to do with this lesson is not only talk about the Bible, but with each point that I was making about the Bible to talk about what we should do with that information, to have it affect the way we interact with the Bible.
Because, you know, I've loved the Bible. I think, you know, I've heard it all my life, but I really, when I was 16, fell in love with the Bible and wanted to spend the rest of my life studying the Bible andliving in it. Because it's just such an amazing, wonderful book full of so many wonderful things.
But I didn't really have all the pieces that I needed to properly interact with it. Like, for instance, understanding that it's not really one book. Of course, it is in our bound editions and it all is unified, as I talk about. But all of these books, when you learn to treat them individually for what they are, it changes the way you interact and I think helps you more faithfully interact with the scriptures whenever you see.
You know, Hebrews is doing something very different than Ezekiel is doing. And, you know, Leviticus has a purpose. Proverbs has a purpose. They are different genres. They are meant to be taken as a whole first. And when we start studying and learning from them as books, as individual books first, I think our Bible study really starts to be enriched.
Bryan: Yeah, Ashlyn and I are working through square one right now, and it was, I think we got to the lesson about the Bible, session two and session three. You know, these ideas that we're going back to this book as an answer book for our life, but also as ultimately as a book that leads us to know Jesus.
And, you know, we've been talking about the Bible in like a sort of meta way, trying to explain it, you know, understand how it's put together. And we did talk in our conversations, I tried to make it very clear, this was not like a set of golden tablets that came down from heaven. Like, you know, like suddenly everyone was just zapped and like for one day they wrote the entire Bible, you know, end to end or something like that.
This was such a complex and nuanced collection of these scrolls in the Old Testament and in the different breakdowns of the books that we have in the Old Testament, the Tanakh and everything else there, you know, then leading to the New Testament and all the ways that those letters were collected, those writings were collected, and, you know, just so nuanced, so multifaceted, and in all of that you see the great power of God.
Like, yes, he absolutely could have like zapped a golden book coming down from heaven, but, you know, he used people to do these things, to do this work. And what an amazing thing, you know, kind of going back to what Allen was talking about in his human Satan crusher episode, you know, that idea that like he uses people to accomplish his work.
He uses regular everyday people to do the things that are beyond the scope of epic, you know, in this world. And this book we all have was a product of that human divine interaction, you know, bringing us his work.
Ryan: Yeah, we're going to talk again with Allen next time about the way that he used David's experiences to talk about Christ, you know. And so I think it does. That's another truth about the Bible that you can really get lost and it can mess with your faith. It can mess with your interpretation of scripture when you don't understand that it is a human book and it is a divine book.
It's not one and it's not the other. It is both by God's choice. He has used the mind of David and experiences of David, the mind of Paul and the research that Luke did and the thought that, you know, all these different things. As somebody is collecting Psalms and Proverbs and all these things are a part of understanding what the scriptures are.
When we when we start to see, yeah, this is from the mind of a person, but it's not only from the mind of a person. It's God using the mind and experience and occasions, real occasions in people's lives to to speak through these things. And again, the more you understand that, then you can interpret it within its context.
As I talked about, you know, the old classic way of saying it is it's written for you, but it's not written to you. Because I really think that most false doctrines, most false teaching that come from a misinterpretation of the Bible come from not properly contextualizing the Bible, not treating it within its its genre, its historical context, not, you know, doing the proper work with the language.
This isn't our language, you know, not seeing and thinking through all of these aspects that let us sort of time travel back to that situation and the people that were meant to hear it and thinking, OK, what would they have taken from it? What were they supposed to take from it? And so, again, the point of this isn't just to be a factual introduction, but to affect the way you read the Bible.
Bryan: All of that is, I think, super well said, and I appreciate the tackling you did in this one. You didn't have to talk about translation here, but you did, and I appreciated that in the sermon. It's like, it is so challenging to get past the idea that like Jesus didn't speak English standard,
Or
Ryan: Yeah,
Bryan: like, nor did he speak King James, Like, none of that was even, or even Greek. I think I blew Ashlyn's mind when I was telling her even like, So cool to think about that and like how the work being done to translate these things really is, it's an act that unless you want to read, you know, or learn how to speak Hebrew or Greek, or you want to learn how to, all that nuance, like these books have been put into a place for us that we can interpret them, we can understand them, but as important as the Bible is, the English standard version of the Bible is not, it's not the thing that was originally written down or penned by the authors so long ago.
It's been passed down, it's been translated, and so understanding that like when one word doesn't match up with another word, like there's some work we have to do, there's some thinking we have to do. And just, but generally speaking, the idea that this is giving us a sense of who has done all of these things for us, who we're called to know in Jesus, what a cool book and what a cool way that we have to just think about it every day.
Ryan: Amen. What a cool book. There's the that should be like our tagline. Bible geeks. What a cool
Bryan: What a cool
book. You know, and and the idea of one of the reasons I want to talk about translation is if you're just being introduced to the Bible, it's like an early decision you have to make. You may not even realize you're making a decision, but it does matter and it does matter to there's not a right answer.
Ryan: There's probably some I don't know if I would say wrong answers, but some lesser answers in the translation for different purposes and starting to understand how to how to use different, you know, different translations and realizing that this is a book that that flows together. That the more time we spend in it, the more we're going to be changed by it.
And that's God's intention ultimately is for us to not only meet it, but to make it one of our closest personal friends, an ongoing companion through our lives.
Bryan: I think maybe one of the biggest challenges is like when you think you know somebody, you kind of stop being curious, but like in marriage sometimes it's like, I know you better than I know myself.
And it's like, well, maybe I've just stopped being curious and maybe there are more things for me to know. And maybe there are more avenues for me to explore. And maybe we just get stuck that way with the Bible sometimes, like not thinking about it as a book that maybe we don't know everything about it.
Maybe there are more things to learn. And I think you brought that out really well in this lesson. It's like, stay curious, stay curious about this cool book.
Ryan: Adrian and I were just talking last night about how it's so easy in marriage to lose that sense of curiosity and interest. Because one of the fun things about, you know, about falling in love and, you know, having a companion that you're with and everything is all of these discoveries. Oh, I've never heard this story before.
And now I know all of her stories. She knows all of my stories. And, you know, I didn't know this about you. But that is the the value of continually courting each other. Right.
It's kind of like rewatching an old favorite, like romantic comedy and watching people fall in love. And we want to do the same thing. But the word is I whenever I advise young people and I'm trying to teach them how to study the Bible, the biggest thing I want them to know is every time you open the Bible, expect to find something amazing.
Bryan: Yeah.
Ryan: Expect it. Learn to get on the edge of your seat in anticipation that there is something profound, something interesting, something life changing, something shocking, something weird, as we talked about. So, you know, all these things, but something this book is endlessly rich and deep and learning to expect that and look for it.
It's going to change your Bible study. It's like courting the Bible all over again, not thinking, you know, in the beginner's mind, the old, you know, Eastern saying in the beginner's mind are many possibilities. You know, I come with that beginner's mindset.
Bryan: yeah. Yeah. And I, you know, just to nail this down one more time, it's like, I think sometimes we have viewed, like we talked about, I think in our conversations about the Bible in our Square One series, I think we have often called the Bible one thing or another thing, or we've viewed it in a certain way.
Like, I know a lot of people really nail down that the Bible is like a book of facts and rules and we've got to follow the facts and rules. Or like, it's a book that's primarily focused on like shaping our decisions and making us, of course, there are rules, there are decisions, there are things that we can be shaped by.
But ultimately, like you talked about in this lesson, ultimately the goal of this book is to meet and build a relationship with Jesus. And for everyone going into it, expect something amazing and expect not just a deeper relationship with this book, but especially expect a deeper relationship with Jesus.
And yeah, that's a demand itget out there and make it happen. Because it's there if you're ready to search for it.
Ryan: Amen. Amen. Yeah, we don't we don't want to have a knowledge just of the law, but of the one that wrote the law. We don't want to just know the scriptures. We want to know the one revealed in the scriptures through to whom we're meant to walk and live and love. And though you have not seen him, you love him because you've you've heard of him through these books.
Bryan: Well, I have loved this series so far, and this is our fifth one in the series. We're going to get into, as you said, a discussion with Allen here on the next episode, a really deeply personal lesson as he closes out his involvement in this series.
Conclusion
Bryan: And then we'll be back for a final one for our seventh sermon, the last one in this list. We're excited for all of that. Thanks for surfing along with us. And until the next episode, everyone, may the Lord bless you and keep you
Ryan: Shalom. All