Mining God’s Word

  As this winter season is coming to a close, God has pressed onto me to share with you how I study the Scriptures, so that you can go deeper into understanding God’s Word. As I’ve talked with people about studying the Bible, what I have seen is that most people read the Bible and just think about it. They might then read a commentary, either one from their study Bible notes at the bottom of the page, or from a commentary series. 

Today, I want to challenge you to go deeper; to begin to see the Scriptures as not only God inspired, but truly Holy Spirit illuminated. There is a general revealing that God does, that we call the Faith, last week we talked about the narrow path and how it’s defined by tier 1 theology, those are what we corporately understand about God, and yet, the Holy Spirit treats us on an individual relational level. 

We have different preferences, we have different gifts, we have different ministries as we are all led by the Holy Spirit. It’s why I error on the side of God’s relationship with his people, rather than on a strict set of do’s, and don’ts. Where the Scriptures give room for freedom, I try to follow that same standard. Understanding the Scriptures through the leading of the Holy Spirit’s illuminating work, is also why I’ll say things like, you don’t need a pastor to understand God. But undisciplined, this can lead into misunderstanding Scripture, which can lead into all sorts of crazy things, like cults. 

So I want to give you the skeletal structure of how to approach the Scriptures to mine God’s word by the leading of the Holy Spirit.

Step One, always approach the Bible by realizing our own thoughts can taint our interpretation of Scripture. It’s easy for us to read our 21st century mindset back into the Bible. So we need to realize that we can do this and work to mediate the impact of our modern eyes, as much as possible. We accomplish this by seeking God in prayer to keep our mind from adding the modern us, to his past revelation. Having this in the forefront of our minds will help immensely.

In addition to that, we need to know two words that you might have heard before. Exegesis and Eisegesis. Exegesis literally means “Draw meaning out of.” It’s defined as the process of seeking to understand what a text means or communicates on it’s own. This is what we want. God spoke to specific people, in specific times, for specific purposes, so we want to understand those people, times and purposes as God intended us to. That means we have to remove our 2024 western glasses and traditions as much as possible, before the application of God’s word to our 2024 world.

Not removing our traditions, ideologies, and thoughts is called eisegesis, which means “Reading meaning into.” Eidegesis is a term used to designate the practice of imposing a preconceived or foreign meaning onto a text, even if that meaning could not have been originally intended at the time of its writing. An example of this, is Jesus giving the religious leaders the sign of Jonah, where the Son of man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth (Matthew 12:40). To our modern ears that would mean Jesus would raise on the fourth day to have three complete days and nights in the ground. Which when then mean he would have raised on the Tuesday not Sunday. But understanding that the phraseology that Jesus uses, is a common saying in his time, helps us understand the passage as being fulfilled in the time it’s revealed in the Gospels. In our study of the Bible, we want to be exegetical as much as possible, so that the word of God speaks as God intended it to speak.

Now that we have it in our mind to always approach the Bible with being proactive in not letting our own thoughts taint our study, we can move on to the how of studying.

Step two, is, first know the big picture of what we’re studying. This is called by a lot of words, Panoramic and Macro-scope are two that I use. 

If we’re at the beginning of studying a book of the Bible, we need to start by researching everything about the book we can. I have seven questions that need to be answered before we even dive into the book. In order to answer these, most Bibles, especially study Bibles, have an introduction to each book. These questions can usually be answered in those introductions. But be careful because depending on who translated your version, they might have an agenda of their own. To remedy this, try multiple commentary intros to the book you want to study. That way you have a larger pool of information. 

The first of these questions is, where is the book found in the Canon of Scripture? Each book is purposefully placed by the Holy Spirit. Is the book in the Old or New Testament? Where in those testaments is it located? Let’s say we are studying the Gospel of Matthew. God has placed it as a transition from the Old Testament to the New. Matthew presents Jesus as the answer to the Old Testament’s prophetic word about the Messiah. This sets Matthew’s Gospel in it’s proper interpretation as we study it.

Next, who is the author? The Holy Spirit inspired the writing, but God used a specific person to pen it, who then is that author. In Matthew’s case, he is Levi, the tax collector, and core disciple of Jesus’ ministry, who’s name Jesus changed.

Thirdly, when was the book written? Matthew was written between 50-55 AD, because he dies around 60 AD. This is important because the timing of the Gospel’s writing helps us understating it’s place within other historical events. The most important one for us when studying the New Testament, being the destruction of the Jewish temple in 70 AD.

Our fourth question is, where was it written? Paul wrote on the road as he did his missionary journeys, but he also wrote shackled to a Roman guard. This type of information gives us insight into the imagery, language, and issues that are addressed in the book.

The fourth question usually leads us into the fifth question, which is, what is the purpose of the writing? Sometimes this comes at the beginning and sometimes it comes at the end. In the Gospel of John chapter 20, in the last two verses of the book, John writes, “30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; 31 but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” The purpose, then helps us understand the reasons behind including some things and excluding other things. 

Our sixth question is then, who is the intended audience? Paul’s books are usually clues to who he writes to, Romans, Ephesians, 1st and 2nd Corinthians. Other books are not so easy, 1 Peter, Jude, 1st-3rd John. Knowing who the writer wrote the book for, helps us understand the Spirit’s intention to them and to us.

The final question we ask in step two is, what is the cultural setting? Is it thirteenth century Israel? Is it the Babylonia exile? Is it a 1st century Jewish context, or 1st century Greek city? This will help us understand language, and imagery in our interpretation. 

Once we have a macro-view of the book we are studying, the nitty-gritty of the chapters and verses can now be examined. This third step is called the microscopic view.

In the microscopic study of the book, we have three parts of examination. We start with singular verses, then we build upon them to passages of thought, and finally understanding them in their chapters of context.

The reason we start with the singular verse is so we can help keep ourselves away from assumptions. Every verse is first treated as a unique thought and therefore examined as such. The questions we were taught in school of “who, what, when, where, and how, are the questions we use to examine the verse. Take the verse John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Some of the questions we might have are: What beginning? When was this beginning?  Is it the beginning of the book or the world? What does “Word” mean and why is it capitalized? What does it mean that the “Word” was with God? How can the “Word” be God?

You might say, well I know all of the answers to these questions, but that’s not the point. The point is to approach the Scriptures as if you don’t know. As if you’re opening up the Bible for the first time. 

And so, once we ask all the questions we can of the verse, without answering any of them. We may then give our observations that can only be gleaned from the verse itself. An example of this might be: It seems at some beginning, there was a unique entity called the “Word,” who is both distinct from God, yet considered God.

After our questions and our observations, we leave that verse and move onto the next, without answering our questions, repeating the question and observation cycle. We continue this until we have studied at least thirty verses. Once those thirty verses are done, we can then go back and answer the questions. This is because, we have given space for the text of Scripture to interpret itself. If we did this for John 1:1-30, we can then go back to our first series of questions about the “Word,” and thanks to verse 14 we know that the “Word” becomes flesh, and thanks to verse 17, we known that this was Jesus.

By being so meticulous, we’ll find that Scripture explains itself to us, without us, assuming we know what it is talking about. 

This verse by verse study, then leads us into entire thoughts, that can carry from chapter to chapter, and then helps us better understand the book as a whole, and it’s place in the canon of Scripture.

 

Notice, that I haven’t told you to answer these questions by looking them up in things like commentaries. Commentaries are good, if you run into a wall you can’t get past. To answer these wall issues, I would suggest prayer first, and commentaries that are first and foremost historical and non-ideological. Meaning you want commentaries that will give you the facts, instead of interpretation. And if you use ideological commentaries, then you must have them from multiple perspectives. In my library, I have Calvinistic and Armenian. I have dispensational and non-dispensational. I have Alliance, Wesleyan, and Reformed. I even have a commentary with three views next to each other to make the research easier.

But understand this, commentaries are the last step after all we’ve talked about so far. If we jump from reading a passage, straight into a commentator’s interpretation, we have jumped from the Holy Spirit’s lead to man’s lead, and that’s not what God wants and that’s not what we should want either.

Commentaries with scholarly and theological work are good resources, but that’s what they are, resources. If we rely on someone else’s interpretation of Scripture as being our go to, then we become less led by the Spirit. But when we seek the Holy Spirit in deep study of the Scriptures, we join the Psalmist when they write, “I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you (119:11).”

And that leads us into the challenge this week. I want to challenge you to study John 1:1-34 the way in which we approached it. By praying that your preconceived ideas, and western mind would be checked at the door by the Holy Spirit. Then looking at the macro-view of the Gospel of John, to understand why it’s where it is and the purpose of God behind the whole book. Then meticulously going verse-by-verse, simply asking questions of the verses as if they were stand alone sentences by God. Then, interpreting the verse by allowing it to speak for itself. And after all that, share with someone any insights that you may have.

This will be a long work if you take this challenge, but understand this, every time I stand in front of you, this is the approach I take. And if you think I have insight, it’s simply because I take the time for the Holy Spirit to speak as he intends to speak. Let’s all be seeking God’s interpretation, for God’s glory. Amen.