Session Two
Scripture: Selected
Date: October 11, 2008
Speaker: Sean Higgins
In his biographical message on Martin Luther, John Piper remarked:
One of the great rediscoveries of the Reformation, especially of Martin Luther, was that the Word of God comes to us in the form of a book. …Luther calls it the “external Word” to emphasize that it is objective, fixed, outside ourselves, and therefore unchanging. It is a book. …You can take it or leave it. But you can’t make it other than what it is. It is a book with fixed letters and words and sentences. (The Legacy of Sovereign Joy, 77-78)
On one hand, that’s good news. God’s revelation is not in constant flux. It isn’t updated (like the tax codes year by year). It isn’t subjective, that is, it doesn’t depend on how any particular person feels. Its meaning is front and center on the page.
In the other hand, it can be difficult to “wrestle” that meaning out of the Book. We are separated by 1900 to 3400 years from when it was originally penned. It was written in languages not our own, in cultures unlike our own, by God whose thoughts are high above our own. There are chronological, geographical, cultural, grammatical, and supernatural gaps that must be bridged in order to rightly divide our own copies of that Book. So what approach should we take to studying the Book?
These definitions will be review to some. To others they may be new, but hopefully they will get our minds in gear for what we’re doing. Here are four words that belong with Bible study and teaching, and we’re going to build from the base to the top:
Hermeneutics is like the cookbook. Exegesis is preparing the ingredients and baking the cake. Homiletics is like dining etiquette. Exposition is serving the cake.
Our seminar is focused on the very first level. It is the foundation of rightly dividing your copy and of explaining it to others. As we go along, I’ll give some examples of exegesis, of applying the principles. But the primary goal is to get the right tools in your belt, so that when you get home you can put those tools to good use on any passage in the Book.
So what is the best process of study? What is it that we’re trying to do? What follows is an overview of the three step process. These again are probably well-known, but we’re starting at the beginning, and there is no need to reinvent the wheel. The overview of our process is:
We read to observe, to look for what the author/Author has communicated. In this part of the process we’re trying to answer the question, “What do I see in the text?” Not only is this the most important step, it is probably also the most ignored and skipped. Most interpretive problems are caused by insufficient or incorrect observation.
We observe to interpret, that is, we explore to explain, to determine the point of the author/Author. In this part of the process we’re trying to answer the question, “What does the text mean?” Note, this is why we say, It doesn’t matter what the verse “means to you.” The meaning is already there. “A text cannot mean what it never meant.” (Stuart and Fee, p. 30). The goal of Bible study is not to discover something new, but to determine the author’s intent.
We interpret to apply, to figure out what the author/Author wants us to change in our thinking or behavior. In this part of the process we’re trying to answer the question, “What do I do based on what the text means?”
It should be obvious to see how these three steps build on each other. The right application depends on right understanding. Right understanding primarily depends on taking enough time to hear the author speak for himself. Many people read to apply. Others read to interpret, and if it doesn’t seem obvious what the text means, they quickly jump to their study bible notes or to commentaries or asking a pastor or giving up altogether.
But I want you to have tools for making observations apart from secondary resources. I want you to have “firsthand acquaintance” (a term used by Hendricks in Living by the Book, a book which also expands on Observation, Interpretation, and Application) with your copy. I want you to know what to do, because you know what it means, because you saw for yourself the author’s intention by what he said. That starts with identifying the context.
Could you imagine an appropriate time for me to say something like, “It would be better if you had been stillborn”? That is a mean, vindictive statement that would be rude and inappropriate if all that happened was that you spilled my coffee. Yet that is exactly what the Preacher, Solomon, said in Ecclesiastes 6:1-6 regarding those who have everything under the sun, but who don’t have God-given joy to go with their stuff and recognition. The context is crucial.
The context on every page of the Bible makes the difference. Even today, when a politician is quoted in the newspaper “out of context,” or when an interview is edited “out of context,” the meaning is changed. If you take something out of its context, you change its meaning. Therefore, when it comes to studying the Bible, any verse out of context is not God’s Word because it is a different meaning than God intended.
That’s why the three most important rules of Bible study, the three key hermeneutical principles that govern observation and interpretation, are:
If you ignore context, you will most likely mishandle your copy.
So what does it mean to look at or consider context? What levels of context are important?
9 Extrabiblical period literature
8 The Canon (all 66 books of the Bible)
7 The Testament (Old or New)
6 A particular author’s work (i.e., the Pauline epistles)
5 The book
4 Sections (Roman numeral outline points)
3 Paragraphs
2 Sentences
1 Phrases and Clauses
Individual words
When it comes to the Bible as a book, we start with words. Words are amazing. They enable us to convey information and express ourselves to others. But a word is never isolated by itself. Words are always in context (that’s why “context” begins above words themselves).
Context Level 1 : Words are in phrases. A phrase is a small group of words without a verb standing together as a conceptual unit, typically forming a clause, which is a grammatical unit that has a subject (person, place, thing) and a predicate (verb showing action or state). There are main clauses and subordinate clauses.
Context Level 2 : Phrases and clauses form sentences. A sentence is a unit of grammatically complete clauses and phrases, conveying a statement, asking a question, making an exclamation, or giving a command.
Context Level 3 : Sentences form paragraphs. A paragraph is a collection of sentences dealing with a single theme.
Context Level 4 : Paragraphs form sections. As paragraphs are strung together by the author, his flow of thought is seen. Sections are what we might understand to be the Roman numerals in an outline of the book.
Context Level 5 : Sections form books. Books may be letters or history or prophetic messages, written with specific audiences in mind, and written in specific historical situations. Level 6 includes all the books by the same author.
Context Level 7 : Books make up the Testaments (a particularly Bible context). In the Bible there are two Testaments, the Old (39 books) and the New (27 books). Knowing whether a book is looking forward to Jesus or looking back at Jesus is important.
Context Level 8 : Testaments make up the Canon. All 66 books in both Testaments have one Author, telling His story of redemption, covering 3000 or so years from beginning to end, with remarkable unity. And the Level 9 context includes the extra-biblical writings of the time.
Note that I have not mentioned chapters and verses. Verses cover contexts 1 and 2. Chapters cover contexts 3 and 4. But verses and chapters aren’t necessarily the best dividers of context because they were added later (for example, Colossians 2:20-23 and 3:1-4, as well as Colossians 3:18-25 and 4:1). Genres are concerned with context 5. Grammar is concerned with contexts 1-3. The historical context primarily covers contexts 5-9.
No word, verse/sentence, paragraph, section, or book is without a context, grammatical and historical (so “grammatical-historial hermeneutics”). That means we’re concerned with what the original author meant by what he wrote, as we consider how he wrote it (grammar) as well as when and to whom and why he wrote it (history).
You, therefore, cannot simply expect to read any verse by itself and fully understand it, and perhaps not even accurately understand it, apart from context. The closer you are to the immediate/narrow context, the better.
Take John 3:16 as an example.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
If all you had was this verse, could you be saved? Who is the God who loves? Does God only love the world, and if so, why would any perish ? What does it mean that He gave His only Son ? Why is believing so important for eternal life? Why should we believe this verse? Who is making the promise? Why does it matter, or in other words, why are people perishing in the first place? Can anyone believe this promise (cf. 3:6-8)?
My point is, context is key. Jesus, the Son Himself, is talking to a ruler of the Jews (3:1) about how He Himself is the fulfillment of the Old Testament, and the only way to salvation even as Moses lifted up the serpent (Numbers 21:19). God is Yahweh, the Son of Man is the Messiah, a fulfillment of a promise started in Genesis 3 after Adam and Eve sinned.
You can’t take context for granted. Context determines meaning.
Please notice that for each of the following, I suggest that these are study approaches that tend to get out of context. I phrase it that way to leave a little room for a lot of hard work to potentially come to correct understanding.
It is very easy to forget the context when looking up all the definitions for a word or when tracking how a word is used in ten different verses. There is a reason dictionaries typically list more than one possible meaning for a word: the meaning changes depending on context. Only one of those meanings typically works in a single passage. What makes the difference is CONTEXT.
For example, consider the word “salt” in Matthew 5:13. Commentators spend pages talking about all the different things salt means. Sharing salt was an act of friendship, so Christians should be friendly. Salt is white, representing purity, so Christians should be pure. Salt stings when you put it on a wound, so Christians should make the world uncomfortable and sting their consciences. Salt creates thirst, so Christians should make non-Christians thirsty for God. And the most popular meaning is that salt was used to preserve meat, so Christians slow the moral decay of the world.
All of those things are true about salt. All of those things may be said about disciples of Christ. But are all of those things true in this context? In fact, are any of those things true in this context? Not all. Not any.
Jesus Himself defines/limits what He means by salt in verse 13. It is an issue of flavor, of taste, and so of influence. “If the salt has lost its taste/has become tasteless, ” in other words, it is no good. It’s not about making people thirsty, it’s not about having a preserving influence in this passage. Jesus’ following illustration in verses 14-16 also confirm that He is talking about living in such a way that stands out. If you’re insipid, flavorless, bland, you make no impact. If your light is under a bushel, you make no impact.
By the way, knowing Greek doesn’t do anything more helpful than the context. Looking up “salt” in a Greek dictionary or doing a concordance study for salt isn’t the answer.
The first chapter in D.A. Carson’s book, Exegetical Fallacies, is a must read on word-study fallacies. The root fallacy in particular, “presupposes that every word actually has meaning bound up with its shape or components. In this view, meaning is determined by etymology; that is, by the root or roots of a word.” While this may occasionally work, it is difficult to prove that a person thinks of “God be with you” when they say “good-bye.” Similarly, “butterfly” cannot be understood by considering the combination of “butter” and “fly.” We must be careful when studying Greek (or Hebrew) words with this approach, and be suspicious when you hear “what it literally means is…” (pp. 28-33)
Observing context is the answer. If you do word studies, use them to compare and contrast, but never combine, meanings. I believe the old adage is true when it comes to word studies, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. To discover if something is a cake or an omelet, you don’t start by doing an in-depth study on the egg in both (Russell, Cracking Old Testament Codes, p. 288).
Cross-references may be the most abused practice in Bible study. Sure, some are helpful. When a New Testament passage quotes an Old Testament passage, it’s nice to know what passage without needing to read the whole OT to find it. Or when the same event is described in multiple places, sometimes that’s helpful to know.
However, not all cross-references are created equal. Just because the same phrase or idea is found in two or more places does not necessarily mean that both places are related. Remember, cross-references were added by someone else. They may hinder you more than help you rightly divide your copy, especially if they cause you to move too quickly away from the context you’re in.
Books like The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, can be helpful, but they can be deadly in terms of getting out of context.
Unless you can see that the original author intended for his readers to think about another passage of Scripture, be careful. John Calvin said,
Since it is almost his (the interpreter’s) only task to unfold the mind of the writer whom he has undertaken to expound, he misses his mark, or at least strays outside his limits, by the extent to which he leads his readers away from the meaning of his author. (Quoted in Lawson, The Expository Genius of John Calvin, p. 70).
Does that mean we should never consider cross-references? Obviously I don’t think that. In terms of contexts, cross-references do fit into the Level 9 circle since they are within the broadest context of the Canon. (By the way, I don’t consider it a cross-reference if you’re in the same book). But the closer you are to the paragraph level, the closer you are to what the original author wanted his original readers to understand.
Let me suggest three lawful uses of cross-references:
But please notice, the proper uses come after your observation and interpretation of a given passages, or as a last resort when you can’t figure it out. But do not run away from your passage too soon. Running to cross-references too quickly and too often eclipses exegesis, not enlighten it.
And especially for teachers, you don’t necessarily need to show people that God’s Word says the same thing twenty times. If God says it once, that one time has just as much divine authority as the other nineteen times. The closer context is likely to make a more powerful case for a truth then a cross-reference.
I typically don’t go outside a book in my preaching. Context is why. There weren’t a lot of helps in Ecclesiastes. All I had was context. I also tell teachers, if they ever need more material to fill the time, use a few cross-references.
Yes, the Bible is a book. Yes, it is God’s book. Yes, we should pay very close attention to grammatical and historical context.
However, we use grammar and write in particular contexts today, and because of that we have a certain expectations of how we will be understood. An example of over-interpretation might help. (See in the handout packet, the chapter by Silva, pp. 11-14.)
It is approximately the year 2790. The most powerful nation on the earth occupies a large territory in Central Africa, and its citizens speak Swahili. The United States and other English-speaking countries have long ceased to exist, and much of the literature prior to 2012 (the year of the Great Conflagration) is not extant. Some archaeologists digging in the western regions of North America discover a short but well-preserved text that can confidently be dated to the last quarter of the twentieth century. It reads thus:
Marylin, tired of her glamorous image, embarked on a new project. She would not cultivate her mind, sharpen her verbal skills, pay attention to standards of etiquette. Most important of all, she would devote herself to charitable causes. Accordingly, she offered her services at the local hospital, which needed volunteers to cheer up terminal patients, many of whom had been in considerable pain for a long time. The weeks flew by. One day she was sitting at the cafeteria when her supervisor approached her and said: “I didn’t see you yesterday. What were you doing?” “I painted my apartment; it was my day off,” she responded.
Archaeologists know just enough English to realize that this fragment is a major literary find that deserves closer inspection, so they rush the piece to one of the finest philologists in their home country. This scholar dedicates his next sabbatical to thorough study of the text and decides to publish an exegetical commentary on it, as follows:
We are unable to determine whether this text is an excerpt from a novel or from a historical biography. Almost surely, however, it was produced in a religious context, as is evident from the use of such words as devoted, offered, charitable. In any case, this passage illustrates the literary power of twentieth-century English, a language full of wonderful metaphors. The verb embarked calls to mind an ocean liner leaving for an adventuresome cruise, while cultivate possibly alerts the reader to Marilyn’s botanical interests. In those days North Americans compared time to a bird—probably the eagle—that flies.
Society in the twentieth century is greatly illumined by this text. The word patient (from patience, meaning “endurance”) indicates that sick people then underwent a great deal of suffering: they endured not only the affliction of their physical sickness, but also the mediocre skills of their medical doctors, and even (to judge from other contemporary documents) the burdens of increasing financial costs.
Readers of Bible commentaries, as well as listeners of sermons, will recognize that my caricature is only mildly outrageous. What is wrong with such a commentary? It is not precisely that the “facts” are wrong (though even these are expressed in a way that misleads the reader). Nor is it sufficient to say that our imaginary scholar has taken things too far. There is a more fundamental error here: a misconception of how language normally works.
Our familiarity with the English language helps us see quite clearly that any “exegesis” such as the one I have just made up is, in the first place, an overinterpretation of the passage.
My point is, get everything you can from context, and nothing more. Do everything possible to get the author’s intended meaning in a particular passage, to a particular audience, but don’t read into the passage (eisegesis) or over-read (uperegesis) the text.
Never forget the basic process: Observation, Interpretation, and Application.
You should never, never, never read a verse without at least reading the paragraph. Most of the answers are right in front of you.
You should never use a cross-reference without considering, or even quickly explaining, its context.
You should be extremely careful with word/topical studies. They require more exegesis, not less. (This is why verse-by-verse study is better, because it tends to keep you more in context.)