28. Interpreting the Bible Part 1

And here we go. This is the For Freedom Podcast. This podcast exists to bring to light the legalism and abuse in the independent fundamental Baptist movement. And to encourage believers to grow in grace through the scriptures. Now here's your host, John Holyfield. And welcome back to the For Freedom Podcast. How is everybody today? I am your host, John Holyfield. And the other host is here with me today. Big Jimmy Styrofoam. What's up, James? John, I'm doing good. We're getting a little weatherstorm tonight when we're recording this. And I hear you've been snowed in pretty good and got the family in town. Mom and dad's in town. And I'm in like 72% of the 48 states have snow on the ground right now. It's pretty crazy. Really? Yeah. It's incredible that North Carolina, you know, we don't. Not wherever we're at. We just had a bunch of rain. But yeah, tons of snow has been dropped. We're setting records in Texas right now. Yes, I know. We've gotten the winter storm here in my area of Tennessee, Middle Tennessee. And we lost power. We didn't really think we were going to get this episode done. I actually told James, I said, we'll have to scratch it and put out an announcement that James was going to put out a solo episode. And then it just worked out to where we're going to get it. This may be a mess of an episode too, but we got the winter weather, winter storm come through, didn't see snow until like the last little bit, but it was a lot of freezing temperatures, sleet, ice. And then our power went out on Monday at three o'clock. And then it got really cold in the house with four kids, one being a baby. We tried to bundle up as best we could. And then we went the next day, tried to camp out at a place that had some power and get warm for a little bit. And then we came back. A friend of mine, a member of our church, supplied us with a kerosene heater. And, um, and so we were able to, uh, set that up and wall off the living room area with blankets and, uh, yeah. And then we got warm in there, got nice and toasty. And about six o'clock, uh, the power guys got the power turned on. And I just want to say, uh, duck river electric. You guys are awesome. Uh, I know a lot of people give power people grief when the power goes out, but I mean, they can't do anything about it going out, but they're, they're working their butts off. Getting out there in the cold, freezing, rigid, frigid weather and getting it back on. And so I really appreciate that. We got the power back on and all, everybody slept roasty, toasty last night. But, um, uh, I did something pretty stupid last night. I, I, at eight 30, I pulled out some sort of skipped supper with all of the stuff going on with getting the heat and stuff. And then eight 30, I was hungry. So I pulled out some like chicken tenders in the fridge and warmed them up. I'm like, man, this looks really good. And then I ate it and man, did I regret it? I was up like two hours last night. So I'm also like really tired this morning. Yeah. Well, I'm recording. Disclaimer. This episode is not sponsored by duck river electric. This is just a disclaimer that we are not, not being sponsored today by duck river electric. Oh man. Who knows what's going to happen today? Uh, so, uh, James, let's do a little bit of this week roundup. Here we go. So, uh, lots happened since we've done it this week roundup. We've been doing some King James only episodes and we, we skipped this segment, but, uh, since then the super bowl has come and gone and, uh, the, the Tom Brady and the Buccaneers won the super bowl. Yeah, I was wrong. I was wrong. I said that Tom Brady was going to lose, but we were both wrong. Tom Brady is now the most winningest quarterback in NFL history with super bowls. He is actually the most winning franchise. Uh, he's one more super bowls than the other franchise in the history of the NFL. And, uh, you know, he's talking like he wants to go ahead and fill both hands up with rings and win 10 of them. So we'll see where that goes. Uh, but it's, it was a, it was a very boring game. Uh, in my mind, it was not a lot of action, not a lot of things going on. The chiefs really underperformed outside of Patrick Mahomes. He did, I think a phenomenal job. His team just didn't help him win the ball game. Um, and then when you look at, um, the ratings, the, the halftime show was ridiculous. We won't talk about it, but the ratings, uh, it was the least watched. Football, uh, Superbowl game since 1969. So ratings wise was way down, way, way down. Wow. Yeah. Um, a little bit of football trivia before we move on from this subject. Tom Brady has seven Superbowl rings. He does next to Tom Brady. What NFL player and NFL history is, has the most NFL rings or Superbowl rings. Player quarterback. Does it just any player? And he, I'll give you a hint. He is not a quarterback. I'm going to say Gronk. Gronkowski. No, no, no. He's in a, he's actually in a very different era. Okay. He's in the nineties, eighties, nineties. Charles Haley. Haley. Okay. Charles Haley linebacker who played with the Dallas Cowboys and another team. He had five. The closest player to have that as many Superbowl rings as Tom Brady has five. Wow. How many does Gronk have? Cause he's been with Tom a long time. Yeah. But he wasn't there when they won their first two or, you know, when we were, when we were, you know, 12 years old. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So other than that, there's, there's one other thing that I wanted to talk about before we get into our subject today. And, um, I know at the time that this airs, the recovery fundamentalists have already dropped a new episode, which I've already got downloaded on my phone, but I haven't got a chance to listen to yet. Good episode. I've already listened to it. Oh, it is. Oh yeah. Their episode last week on fundamentalism, the live episode that was recorded at idea day was fantastic. I mean, it was like a mic drop on the fundamentalist world and man, it had me amped up. It was like, dude, this was awesome. Yeah. It was, it was fire straight fire, man. It was awesome. I enjoyed every bit of it. I wish I could have been at idea day. I've never been to one. I've wanted to go to one. I was in Idaho when I did, they started and, uh, cause it started there in Vegas. And there are those very few first ones I had an opportunity and I didn't go. Um, and I always wanted to, and I really wanted to go to this one there in Vegas this year. Uh, but maybe we can do it our own idea. Jay John. What ideas would we give out? Oh, you know how to have a horrible podcast and not have to be organized. Oh, I don't say it's horrible. I'm just joking. Guys. Here's our idea day. This is how you can make cheese whiz with, you know, animal crackers and Nutella. Yeah. Uh, anyways. Um, also, Hey, here's something interesting and fun. Uh, the RFP family has a discussion group on Facebook. They do. And something hit this week in the discussion group. It was probably close to home to us. Yeah. And that was the, uh, James Knuff singing, looking for a city. Uh, there. And, uh, James, tell us a little bit about that recording. Well, you know, I tried, I had thought that James Knuff would have officially died in my life. As far as, you know, the sensationalism, I guess would be the correct word for it. Um, you know, person physically died. No, no, no. The whole, the praise over the looking for a city. You know, we recorded that John, this was. Oh, five. Oh, six. It was Oh five. Oh five. It might've been early. Oh six. Because in the video, one of the previous songs, my nephew Isaac is running through there. And getting a little hit. He was born November. Oh five. So he was just learning to walk and run at that point. So it might've been early. Oh six. Okay. So Oh six, we recorded this. YouTube was not out. There was no such thing as YouTube. There was no such thing as things going viral. Um, the iPhone had not yet come out. So we recorded it as just a fun time. Um, and a good, you know, James, he, he thought he could sing. We were young. We were dumb. Uh, we, we made the video and there's six or seven songs, I think on there. And, uh, somehow he song, didn't he? He does a couple of the Perry songs. Um, and somehow my first year of ministry, I'm sitting in a basketball game and, uh, one of the local pastors comes up to me and he says, Hey, you are, are you, are you James safer? And I said, yeah. He said, no, no. Are you the James safer? I said, I'm the only James safer that I know. Uh, he said, do you know who James can up is? I said, we're in Idaho now we're on the other side of the world country. And I said, yeah, I said, I know I'm, I'm good friends with James. I said, wow, what's going on? He said, did you make a video called looking for a city? I watched the other day on YouTube and it's got over a million views on it. And I said, I did who put it on there? He said, I don't know. And so long story short, within a couple of hours, it went super viral. YouTube news was holding it. AOL news. YouTube was, it was blowing up with several million views. Um, and just a lot of craziness was going around it. And so you didn't upload it to YouTube though. I did not know. I, I totally forgot about the DVD. We made it and you know, we would use it when we would go out to concerts and we would trade James can up DVD to singers for their DVDs or CDs, but we didn't, I never uploaded it. I never did. James can up sign like 20 of them. I've got a signed copy, uh, in my office. You're going to, we're going to go to the gospel concert. We're going to bargain. Yeah. And we did. And it was great. Um, or mom who I've come to bargain. So recently, uh, last week, a couple of days ago, a guy posted a video and said, let me see your worst experience in church and posted this video. And I saw it and I was, I think I was the first one to comment and say, I'm the guy that recorded this. We did nothing out of it a malicious way. It was just a good teenagers having fun. Okay. So let me explain to people sort of how this was, because, you know, a lot of people are saying this can't be serious. This is a joke. No, James was serious. Now, um, James can up, not me. Yeah. James can up was very serious. And I, you know, as far as the, the ridicule and making fun of him, I really blame the Southern gospel world for that. Yeah. Um, those of us that were at the church with James, even our youth director had mentioned to him several times, listen, man, you can't sing. But eventually it sort of came around to a thing of like, James is our, I don't want to use this word to be taken the wrong way, but he was like our mass guy. It was like, you know, James, he was ours. Yeah. We loved him and he was ours. And so, you know, he, he would do this, but, but a lot of people in the Southern gospel artists and Southern gospel world, they abused him. Yes, they did. I mean, they, they flew him out just to make fun of him, just to laugh at him behind his back. And he thought they were being his friends. And then he, you know, he actually, did he approach you about wanting to make the DVD? He did. Well, he was leaving to get married. He was going to Kentucky. And I said, uh, cause me and a buddy of mine had made, I think two or three CDs at this time of James, cause he wanted to record songs. He wanted to get his name out there. So I said, Hey, let's record it. I don't care. Oh yeah. He was doing CDs for, for a while. Yeah. And so he said, Hey, I'm leaving. He loved, he loved Southern gospel music. He did. And he still does. He still goes to concerts every once in a while. Um, from, from, from what I know, I don't talk to him. He, he won't talk to me anymore. Um, cause he thinks that I did this in a malicious way when we never did. Um, but he came up to me and he said, Hey, I'm leaving. I'm going to get married. He said, before I leave, why don't we do a farewell DVD last hurrah? I said, let's do it. Let's use the church. I had our associate pastor come and open the door. We went in, we did six or seven songs. We left only the audience was the youth group. It was, yeah, just the youth group. There were real people there and it was our teenagers. And, uh, our buddy, Matt played the piano for the song, looking for a city, uh, which is a very talented man. He's a great guy. Um, and from that, we literally thought, okay, we're done with James can up. He's moving away. We're not going to see him anymore. By the time he moved back, I had already left to go to college. And then I went to Idaho. So we had lost connection. And then all of a sudden the video drops. And so I reach out to him because I know he's hurt because what we had been telling him for years is now on the internet and everyone's making fun of him, ridiculing him. And, uh, his wife, people on people on the internet, it can be very cruel. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And so his wife just simply reached out and said, James doesn't want to ever talk to you again. And, and it hurt because, you know, I, I considered him a good friend, even though we didn't hang out, talk as much as we did. I mean, I spent time with their house and, um, you know, his dad worked at food line. My grandpa worked at food line. So there was a connection there that we grew up at church together. Um, but you know, sometimes friendships break off for unfortunate reasons. Uh, but we didn't make this in, in a way to, to ridicule or make fun of him at all. It was just, he wanted to do it. So, Hey, why not do it? I was 15, 16 years old at that time. So. Yep. And, uh, it, it is, it is an interesting world that we live in and, uh, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll cut off our, our this week roundup from at that point. And, uh, we're going to move into our subject now that we spent six weeks on King James only ism. And there was a couple of things that we didn't get to cover, but we want to take a break from that for a while now. And, uh, I know six weeks and we still didn't cover everything in it, but, uh, but we want to move on to something else. And what do we want to move on to is the area of dealing with legalism and the specifics dealing with specific legalistic teachings within the independent. fundamental Baptist movement and that we have experienced that we have been exposed to and some that we haven't, you know, there are some, you know, there's different pockets of this movement and different, uh, um, what do you say? Uh, preferences within those pockets that are more popular than others. And, uh, before we do that though, I think it's appropriate that as we're going to be dealing with some of these biblical passages that are twisted into legalism, that we understand biblical interpretation first. So we want to do an episode about interpreting the Bible and how to do that. So, uh, in order to, to, to, to cover this topic, what we want to do is now we're just going to tell you, go listen to Nahum O'Brien's hermeneutics podcast, and we'll see you next week. All right, everybody have a good week to God, not the pastor, be the glory. No, seriously, go listen to the Nahum O'Brien's hermeneutics podcast. It is fantastic. And he goes into a whole lot more detail than what we do. Uh, I fully endorse his, his podcast and what he's doing and, uh, some really great stuff there, but we're going to jump into this. And, uh, the, uh, let's, first of all, James, we need to identify some terms. So let's start with that. All right, John, what, why don't you go ahead and give us the first basic definition of the word hermeneutics? Well, hermeneutics is one of those, uh, long technical words, which basically means the science of Bible and theological interpretation. And, uh, so it's not, it's not trying to be smarter than other people. It's just, you know, when you're talking about the technical term of interpreting the Bible, the term is hermeneutics. And let me say this, this is going to be very bottom shelf today. Yeah. Very bottom shelf. You listen to Nahum O'Brien. He's like, he's like up here. He's like, he's like the New York Yankees. And we're like the bad news bears. Okay. This is very, very bottom shelf. Okay. Uh, so, uh, the next term James is I said, Jesus, I said, Jesus, I said, Jesus. So this is where you take your own preconceived thought, your own idea, and you find a passage. We used it last week, which was Psalms 12, six, and seven. And you take your thought of words been refined and you put it into that Bible verse and you put your thought into the word of God versus the next point, which is exegesis, which is taking the word of God and pulling the thought out of it and preaching it. And so it's taking your thought of standards, dress, whatever it is, and putting it into the word of God versus letting the word of God be a mirror and reflect what it says. Yeah. Yeah. And as we approach, I said, Jesus is extremely difficult to avoid. And I say that because what, what we're handling in the Bible, we believe in the inerrancy of scripture. We believe in the sufficiency of scripture. And when you're going to a perfect book, an errant book, but you're going to it as an errant person, it's difficult to not fall into the pit of eisegesis because we all come to our study of the Bible with all kind of already life experience or influence of teachings and different things like that. So I said, Jesus, I believe eisegesis is one of the hardest things to avoid. And there are grosser forms of eisegesis. There's more deliberate forms of eisegesis that's reading into things outside of the Bible, ideas, concepts, thoughts that did not originate in the word of God to the word of God in a way of interpreting it. And so what we want to always try our best and strive for is actually exegesis, which is pulling that which is there out. And we understand this. We understand this in just about every other facet of life, except for when it comes to biblical intention. When you think about detectives who are doing detective work and they have a murder case and going to it and they approach it, they're already looking for what they can find, the clues that they can find there, the fingerprints, those things that are there that can then tell them what happened instead of one of the things that they guard against is going in there already with a preconceived notion of what happened before they walk into the crime scene and look it over. You know what I'm saying? And so that's a little bit of a rundown of those terms as we will use them. In biblical interpretation, there's three fundamental activities, interpreting words, interpreting passages and interpreting purpose. And that last one, interpreting purpose, is this. I always tell people, especially our church, that the Bible means what it meant to those it was written to when it was written to them. Mm hmm. And so you have a lot of people today get in error because they're trying to interpret the Bible to mean something to them today. Now, does the Bible apply to us today? Yes. But the meaning of it means what it meant to the people it was written to at that time. If you're skipping over that, you don't have the meaning of scripture. Yeah, I loved how Matt Chandler, he was preaching a message at, I think it was Stephen Verdick's church, and he got up and he said, you are not David in the story of David and Goliath. David is David. You can take the principles of David tackling his giant and destroying the Goliath, and you can interpret that and you can show that God's a big God. But you are not David. Do not read yourself as David. You are not him. So, yeah. And there's a couple of guys that do discernment ministries that have labeled a lot of that type of idea, like always seeing yourself in the stories of the Bible as instead of eisegesis or exegesis, they call it narsagesis. Meaning you make everything in the Bible about you. Yeah. And that is also a grave error. A couple of quotes here about interpretation. This first one, I believe, is from John MacArthur. James, why don't you read that? A Bible can be the source of truth or it can be a source of great confusion. And it's so true. You know, when we get up and preach, when we get up and study, it can give great truth. But at the same time, you can read prophecies. You can because everyone likes to read in times. And if you don't know what you're looking at, it can be confusing. It would be like me going into a crime scene. We're going to use that same illustration and trying to pull out the truth that a detective would be able to pull out. And it's just going to be confusing to me. I'm not going to see one fingerprint or a blood spike, you know, a blood spread of someone who stabbed someone. I'm not going to know what that means. But yet someone that's a professional can come in and look at that blood splatter and say, OK, I know what weapon was used. I know what angle it was used. They're going to be able to see the truth in it where it's going to confuse me. And so that's where this comes along in is, are we seeing it as a source of truth and asking God to give us that truth that's in his word? Or are we just seeing it and getting confused? Yeah. And you hear this so many times. I've heard this a lot growing up in church. You know, what if I just have my Bible open and me and the Holy Spirit? And I'll know what it means. I don't need all this other stuff and men telling me what to say. And, you know, that sounds good, right? That sounds like, yeah, that sounds like, you know, very independent, very, you know, we don't want any outside sources telling us what the Bible means. Just go to you in the Bible. I'm a Star Wars fan. And one of the new movies that came out, The Force Awakens, there's a scene in there where one of the characters, Finn and Han Solo, are going into this base to try to rescue a character. And they have to shut something down. And so Han Solo looks over at him, played by Harrison Ford. And he says, he says, how are we going to get this and turn this down? Where are we going to go? And he's like, I don't know. And he's like, you said that you knew. He said, yeah, but I don't know. And he says, well, how do you expect us to do this? He said, it's all right. The Force will help us. And Han Solo's character comes and says this line that I just want to change one word of it. He says, that's not how the Force works. And I just want to say to so many people, whatever they say something like, it's just me, the Holy Spirit in the Bible. I just want to say, that's not how the Holy Spirit works. Yeah. I mean, cannot the Holy Spirit work in other people that's gone before you that's done works like this before? And it's just absolutely ridiculous to just isolate yourself. And by the way, let me say this. That kind of idea is pretty much how most cults are started. Yeah, exactly. You're right. Let me move on to the last quote here. Any misinterpretation of Scripture short circuits God's intended blessing for it. MacArthur says this sometimes. He says, unless you have the meaning of the Bible, you don't have the Bible. I mean, that sounds like, no, we got God's word right here. But unless you have the correct meaning of Scripture, you don't have Scripture. That's powerful. Because, again, let me go back to the cults thing. How many cults use the King James Version of the Bible? A lot. Yeah. Many of them are started there. Oh, what's his name? David Koresh in the Branch of Davidians. They use the King James Version. Yep. Creflo Dollar. He uses the King James, baby. You know, we're there. Are we to say that they're basing theirs off the word of God? And we'd say, no, that's false teaching. That's error. That's cultic theology. But what happens is they're going to the same Bible that you do, but they're missing the correct meaning. And therefore, they're not getting the scriptural truth for it. Yeah. So let's get into this, interpret the Bible. And in doing this, we have to begin to ask questions. So, James, you take it from there. First question we want to ask when you begin to look at a passage of Scripture is, what does the Bible say? This goes beyond just your daily devotion. This goes beyond just sitting there and reading a couple of things. It is looking and literally saying, I want to investigate. I want to dig deep and pull out what the Bible is saying in this specific passage of Scripture. Sometimes this means going and looking at the historical context. Sometimes this goes and looks at where was this passage written at? What area? What specific place? Was this on a mountain? Was this in a certain region? Is it speaking to a specific group of people? You know, we want to be able to pull those things out to help us understand what exactly the Bible is saying. Yeah. And this seems like a pretty obvious thing, right? But we have to go starting first with reading what it says and going to the words of Scripture. And the fact of the matter is we live in a time where people just don't want to do that. They don't want to take the time for it. They want shortcuts. And you think about Nehemiah 8, 1 through 3. It says, Now all the people gathered together as one man in an open square that was in front of the western gate. And they told Ezra, the scribe, to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the Lord had commanded Israel. So Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly of men and women and all who could hear with understanding on the first day of the seventh month. Then he read from it in the open square that was in front of the water gate from morning until midday. From morning until midday. You study that out. You find out that he read it probably for around six hours. Now we do Scripture reading at our church. And we broke up. We read like every Sunday. We have a portion in our worship service where we open the Bible and we read a passage of Scripture. We're going through the book of Psalms. We broke up Psalm 119. When we got to Psalm 119, we read 40 verses at a time. Because today's day and age, people can't handle that. They shouldn't be able to. These guys, they sat there and heard the Bible not preached, just read for six hours. Yeah. That's crazy. So this leads us to the next question. What does the Bible say? And then what does it mean by what it says? What does it mean by what it says? And to understand this, let's look at some illustrations of what it says. What are some illustrations of some misinterpretations? Well, a common one would be, and I mentioned earlier, is the Mormons. You know, they look, and I was around the Mormon culture for many months and years, for four years while I was in Idaho. And I actually brought an ex-Mormon into our church, who was going to our church, into our youth group, just to teach our teenagers what the Mormons believed, how they believe, and how to talk to a Mormon. And because they believe a lot of what we believe as far as our standards and our legalism. And it's easy to get caught up into that. And so he really was an eye-opening for me because he said I used to be what they call a Mormon missionary, which would be just what we call a soul winner, someone who's going out and knocking on doors. They call them missionaries. And he said, I remember going out and talking to a Baptist and actually converting them to the Mormon religion because he said, really, the Baptists are so lacking in their faith because they don't know what they believe. And so it was easy for us to catch them and to really call them and bring them into our fold. And so when you look at this, you know, the Mormon, they look at the patriarchs of old, you know, Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. And look, they had five, six, seven. David had wives and concubines and Solomon had thousands of women around him. And so what's wrong with us going ahead and having multiple women around us as old because they did not rightly divide the word of Scripture. And so that is one way. John, go ahead and give us another way. Well, here's one. And this is like reading the Bible, coming to a interpretation or a definition in the Bible and then putting it into practice based on faulty interpretation. One is since the Old Testament sanctioned the death of witches, we should kill them all, too. Is that really what the Bible is teaching us? Which not to live, baby. Because some Old Testament plagues were from God, we should avoid sanitation. Is that what the Bible is teaching us? Because the Old Testament teaches that women suffer in childbirth as part of the curse, then no anesthetic should be used. Is that part of what the Bible is teaching there? You see how misinterpretations can really – misinterpreting the Bible can really lead to bad situations, abuse, death even. All right? So in accurately handling the word of God as we get started here, three errors must be avoided. All right? Three errors must be avoided. And this first one – James is going to read the first one. This first one is huge. Don't ever come to a conclusion, a point or an application at the price of a proper interpretation. For instance, pastors who taught that women should not wear their hair up. Matthew 24, 17. Look up Matthew 24, 17. Yeah. Matthew 24, 17. Matthew 24, 17. You may have the wrong scripture down because what I have, John, is let the one who is on the housetop not go down and take what is in the house. Nope. That's the right one. Okay. Read that again slowly, and I'm going to stop you when it says this. This is the passage this guy used to preach against women letting their hair down. Because when I'm reading this, I'm not seeing anything about hair, but I'll read it again. Read it again. I'll tell you when it stops. Let the one who is on the housetop not go down. Stop. He took the words top knot come down. And preached. Okay. That women should always have their hair in a top knot on their head. And not let it come down. And it should not come down. No. No. No, he didn't. Yes. John, you are kidding me right now. I'm not making this up. I'm not making this up. Can you put that clip in this? I don't know if I can find it. Okay. Okay. But yeah, this is crazy stuff. Wow. Making a point at the price of a proper interpretation is some of the worst. You know, you come up with a point. Can I say this? I've done this before. I'll give you an example. I wanted to preach a message back in my IFB days of why the people in the church should listen and obey the man of God. The pastor. And assert that pastoral authority. So I preached a message from, I believe it's 2 Kings. And this is the passage where Elisha is walking through and they make fun of him because he's bald. And then these she bears come out and devour these kids. That's right. All right. That passage has nothing to do with that. In fact, you will find out if you study that out, you'll find that the ones that were making fun of him were actually not children. They were young men that lived in a nearby village, and they were not necessarily making fun of him. They were making statements that threatened his safety. Actually, what they said to him was a was a expression that was used in that area that threatened his safety. OK, and so that has been I obliterated that passage trying to preach my point of you need to obey the pastor. And not not, you know, be mean to the pastor. So don't come to a conclusion point or application at the price of a proper interpretation. Next, Lloyd, I want to go ahead. I want to say this as well. I was doing a little study this week in Psalm 17. That's what I'm preaching tonight on Wednesday and looking at some stuff that Steve Lawson had done. And he made this statement in one of his books. He said, never add a sub point unless it enhances the main point of scripture. And I loved how that was, because sometimes we'll see something and we'll want to add in five or six sub points to make our point known. But unless it's actually referring to what the scripture is saying, we shouldn't even add sub points. And, you know, it's really studying this exegetical style of preaching has really enhanced. My study has enhanced tons of what we do and what we say as preachers, because it's literally just taking God's word and letting it speak for itself. So give this next one, John. All right. Avoid superficial interpretation. What this means is do not use, quote, this verse means to me, end quote. Just what does it mean? Can I tell you something that I tell our people all the time? Whenever you're listening to a preacher and he says this red flag should go up like crazy. If you ever hear a preacher say this, I want to show you what God showed me this week. Yeah. Let me give you what God showed me. If you hear that red flag should go up because what you're most of the time, what you're about to hear is this guy's thoughts of some idea that came to his head. And he's going to probably put some burden on you with some insane idea that come up. William Grady did this with King James only ism. Whenever he was doing this message on Acts 27, he said, let me show you what God gave me. And basically tried to use the ship that Paul and Luke were on that shipwrecked because it was from Alexandria. And he totally skips all of the passages in Acts 27 that said God brought the east wind. God caused the shipwrecked. God did all this stuff. And he's trying to say that because the ship was from Alexandria, then therefore it was, you know, a bad ship. And Alexandria manuscripts are bad. And that was the point that he was making. And it's terrible. It's terrible. So red flags go up whenever you hear a preacher say, let me give you what God showed me this week. Yeah. And it's hard not to say that because, you know, when we're studying, we're studying God's word. And, you know, a lot of times it's more of what I found in my study versus God divinely given this to me. There's this whole thought of prophets right now. And that's having modern day prophets, which my wife came home the other day. I was like, have you heard of this modern day prophets? People, you know, prophesying about what's going to come. And I said, who are you talking to? But yeah, let's look at this last one, John. Avoid super, I'm sorry, spiritualizing or allegorizing the Bible. This is allegorizing. Sorry. This is what is on the surface and not the meaning, but what is hidden in the meaning. The meaning is only a symbol of what reality is. And your most common example that you have here is someone using John 11 as a rapture where Jesus is speaking there. And he's talking to the Jewish people. Lazarus. I'm sorry. Lazarus. Yeah. Where he raises Lazarus from the dead. Yeah. And so this is where they also do that. And then also, you know, I believe it's in John where it talks about or it's also in Matthew here where one is in the field and one taken away and one not. And, you know, people using that as the rapture and me talking about the rapture. I don't want to make people mad this morning. Okay. Okay. But eschatology can get really dicey. It can. When you're talking about biblical interpretation. And I think we need to check ourselves at the door at how much eisegesis we may be doing when it comes to eschatology. Is what that verse teaching actually teaching a rapture? Or is that what we see because of what we've been influenced by? Yeah. I'm not telling you where I stand on eschatology. But it's just just throwing that out there. But, James, we need to move a little bit quicker because I want to I want to get through these. Let's skip the one on. Let's go to how can we close the gaps in scripture? So this is the idea of interpreting because this is this is and I tell our people all the time at our church. When you're coming to the Bible, you have to understand one major thing. It's an ancient book. It's an ancient book. So you are here in 2021 trying to interpret a book that was written thousands and sometimes over 4000 years ago. So there's gaps, right? There's gaps you have to feel. And in filling those gaps, we need to identify what gaps we have to fill in in order to bridge the gaps of understanding what was meant when it was written to where I'm at today. And so in all and doing all of this, we have tools to study to close these gaps. So let's look at these gaps. Let's break this down. First one is the language gap. This is our actual speech. And I mentioned this a little bit ago, but sometimes it's trying to figure out, OK, where was this written? Who is this written by? Who is the author? But the Old Testament, which would be the Hebrew and the Aramaic and the New Testament, which is the Greek for the most part. Both of these languages are not spoke today. People don't walk around speaking Hebrew. People don't walk around speaking Greek. Now, you know, we've got to understand that. And then it's good to have what we call commentaries, strong concordance, things that are going to help you with this. Not all of us know how to speak Greek fluently. I don't. I struggle at it. I struggle at speaking any Greek word because I don't speak Greek. I speak American. I speak English because I'm from America. And so, John, he's loving it right now. So we've got to use these tools, and that's what it is. It's a tool to help us interpret, to help us figure out what was actually being said here, and to really help us understand exactly what it's saying. Now, some people. OK, so let's go. Let me ask this question. Why is the languages a gap that we have to fill in? Well, it's because whenever this was written, whatever passage you're at in Scripture that you're trying to study, whenever it was written, they did not speak your language. They were not speaking English. This is why King James onlyism is so detrimental to true biblical interpretation because they want to ignore this whole aspect of interpreting the Bible, the language gap. And so, like James said, Greek and Hebrew are dead languages that were used. And so, ideally, it would be great if we all wanted to study the Bible. We went and learned Koine Greek and biblical Hebrew and then some Aramaic. Is that a reality that can happen? No. And so, in the sense of not being overwhelmed by all these things that we can't do and then realizing, well, none of us can study the Bible unless we do this, because, like James was pointing out, there have been many faithful men that God has used to put together tools for us to bridge these gaps. Because many of us are not there, and God desires for all of his people to know the Word of God. So, in bridging that language gap, we have things like commentaries that do word studies. Of course, you probably would have guessed this because of the amount of times that we reference him, but I am a fan of MacArthur's New Testament commentary series. And in his commentary series, he does word studies. And he is actually someone who is, I believe, fluent in Koine Greek. So, had many years of that in seminary. Another one that's a good help is Strong's Concordance or Vine's Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words. And then there's a Brown Stryver Briggs for the Old Testament. Okay. So, those are good tools to use to bridge the language gap. Let's go to the next one. Well, real quick before we move on, John, and I know we're trying to speak to this. We may have to do this in two parts. But when we think of tools, you know, I've heard pastors my whole life growing up saying, just let the Bible speak for itself. We don't need no commentaries. We don't need no dictionaries. Just let it speak for itself. Okay. How many people do you know would go out and till a field or plant a garden or do something outside without using a tool that's going to help them? And that's the problem. We're at this point where you will use certain tools in certain situations, but you won't use the tools for the Bible. And all of a sudden, we're struggling with this thought of allowing tools to help us when ultimately they can help us. But we're not using these tools for the biblical way to really enhance our study when we could. So we really do. Well, it's a self-defeating logic. Yeah. Somebody, and I've heard this in the IFB churches before. Not all of them take this approach, but I've heard this before. You know, you stay out. Keep your nose out of commentaries. Don't listen to what man has to say. Yeah. Well, it's a self-defeating concept. Why? Because who is the one saying it? A man. A man who is supposed to be explaining the Word of God. In essence, what is a commentary? A commentary is a deep study by a man explaining that passage of the Word of God. So if we have an issue with commentaries, we should have an issue with preaching. Yeah. Well, and, you know, it goes along with that same thought, John. I was listening to Kerry Schmitz leading in the gospel even today as I was doing some stuff around the church. And he said that he had a guy call him and ask for some advice because he's at a dictatorship church. And the guy is really oppressive. And he didn't ask the right questions when he got hired on. And he said, what should I do? Should I leave? Should I stay? And Kurt Skelly was on the episode with him. And he said, so you mean the guy is calling you, talking to you about a dictator that's in his church, asking you to dictate what he should do in his life? And too many times that's what we say here is don't listen to those men. Don't listen to those commentaries, but listen to what I have to say. And I'm a man. It's that circle reasoning again of. Yeah. And let me say this. Are there bad commentaries out there? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yes. And there are some that will lead you. But developing critical thinking, knowing what you believe and learning how to discern. Listen, I probably I'm preaching through the gospel of John right now. Right. And I have like 11 commentaries I go through and studying one passage for one message. OK. When you come to a difficult passage where there may be disagreement on it. I mean, quite honestly, it's it's interesting to see. And some guys arguments for why they had to believe a certain thing don't hold up. So develop your it's good for developing your critical thinking and understanding how to discern what makes sense in the realm of argumentation and those kinds of things. Let's let's do this, James. Let's finish up the gaps. And then we will next week we will dive into five principles to close the gaps. OK, sounds great. So the next one is the culture gap, the culture gap. And before I jump into this, let me say this. This is something that I tell our people all the time. One of the most important thing when when studying the Bible is when you approach a passage of Scripture to get the meaning of it is context, context, context. What is the context that you're pulling this out? And this is why I say we understand this in every other facet of life. Yet for some reason in the Bible, we like to cherry pick one verse context and then build a belief system off of it. And that is simply just you can't do it. You cannot do it. All right. So let's go back to the culture gap, the culture gap. What was the culture like when this was written? This is huge for every part of the Bible. But think about the New Testament epistles. You think about the New Testament epistles and Paul is writing these churches in their cultural setting and helping them guard against certain things that they're experiencing and going through. And so bridging the culture gap is a huge piece of the puzzle and understanding what's going on, especially understanding Jewish culture. When you go to the Old Testament or the book of Acts, understanding how the Roman government worked when studying the life of Christ, bridging that culture gap is a huge piece of the puzzle and finding out the interpretation or the meaning of a given passage. Yep. Yep. The next one we're going to look at, the third gap is the geographical gap. This is the scenery. These are your Bible dictionaries, your atlases. I've been taking advantage of. I just got the free version of Logos the other day, and they have on there all these maps that if you're studying the past of scripture, you can pull up the atlas of where it's at, where it was written at, the location of where it was at to really help you understand what's around them. When we speak, we use illustrations of things that are around us. I may refer to a mountain or to a landscape or to some form of location around us, and they may do that same thing. Again, it helps us to get in our mind exactly where this point of view is coming from, what the culture was around that with the region of what they're selling, what their agriculture was, what their mode of transportation, whatever it may be, can help us geographically study the scripture. And then the last one, John. Well, going back to the geography gap, the geography gap is a good one to – an example of this would be like why is geography, understanding the geography of an area helpful for interpreting the passage? And if you – and even the culture gap helps here too. We go into John chapter 4, and when Jesus went to the woman at the well in Samaria. They were traveling, and the road that they were traveling was actually routed around the area of Samaria. So the Jews, whenever they were traveling to Canaan – forgive me. I forget the city that they were going to in John chapter 4. But whenever they were traveling around there, they actually went a route, a long route that went around an area. A straight shot going to that city would have went right through Samaria, but they thought that that was being unclean, even going into Samaria. And that's where the cultural gap happens because they hated the Samarians. They hated the Samaritans. And why did they hate the Samaritans? This is a historical thing. This is where we go to the historical gap. The reason they hated the Samaritans was because whenever you go to the Old Testament and you find out that this country that God used to come and punish Israel with that took them captive and defeated their kingdom named the Assyrians, they killed many of the Jews, but then they began to interbreed them with their own people. And so in doing that, that was just like – for the Jewish people, that was awful. I was watching the other day a TV show that I've been enjoying, and it's been around for a long time, but I'm just now getting around to watch it. It's called Band of Brothers. And Band of Brothers is about this World War II easy company and their journey through from D-Day invasion to the end of the war. And there's a scene where they're going through this area in Europe. I think it's Holland, and they're going through this town, and all these people in the town are just happy to see the Allied troops come in. They're throwing a big celebration, big party. And all of a sudden you see some of the people in the town grab some of these women, and they pull them into the square, and they just start shaving their head and shaming them and punishing them. And it's really sad, and it's very abusive toward these women. And so one of the guys asked, what are they doing to these women? And so the American soldiers were disturbed by this. Why are you treating your women this way? And what they said was is whenever the Germans were in the town, occupying the town, these were ladies that slept with Nazi soldiers. Now, my thing goes back to, well, I wonder how many of these women felt like they had a choice with these Nazis. But to them, it was disgusting that these women had any type of relations to the enemy. And so the Jewish culture was if you had any type of intermingling with the Assyrians, the enemy, that was wicked and unclean. And so there comes the Samaritans. So for that, there was this big racial prejudice towards the Samaritans by the Jews that went centuries, went on for centuries because of that historical situation. And so for the fact when you get to the woman at the well in John chapter 4, the fact that Jesus is speaking to this woman in midday, a Samaritan woman, is a huge act of grace on Jesus' part. So that's why things like biblical interpretation matters. And so I sort of jumped into our last one there on the history gap. So filling in this gap of history. Another example is, and this is what I'm preaching on right now in John chapter 18 and 19 at our church on Sunday evenings, is why did Pilate have so much trouble crucifying Christ? You know the story of Jesus where Jesus comes to Pilate. He interviews him, sends him to Herod. Herod sends him back to Pilate. Pilate says, well, let me give you this other guy. They say no. Finally, he's like, whatever. I wash my hands of this stuff and do away with it. Why did Pilate just have such a trouble with carrying out this sentence? And it goes into understanding the history of what was going on with the Roman occupation of Jerusalem. And Pilate himself, which we have a lot of recorded history of this character of Pilate in his political career in the Roman government. So those things are very, very helpful. James, do you have anything you want to add? You know, I think that, you know, this really gives context to why and what we're preaching. If we can explain this, and I'm not saying take an entire message just to explain, you know, why we have a certain passage, but give some context, a three, five minute spill of why we're, how this can apply to us contextually. It really can enhance our preaching and teaching and in our personal study of, okay, what does this really say? And why is this here? What's the context behind it? It can really enhance the word of God to us. And so that's all I've got for us. All right. We're going to close up right there. We're going to finish. We're going to get into five principles to close the gaps that we just identified. And let me say this. If this interested you at all, and you don't already listen to Nahum O'Brien's The Hermeneutics Podcast, you should subscribe today and listen to it because his stuff is so much better than what we just did. Okay. But we appreciate everybody. Appreciate a lot of the response that we got with Ron Townsend's episodes on the King James only-ism. And we are going to close up shop for today. Don't forget to like and subscribe to podcast. Share it on social media. And until next time, to God, not James Knup. Be the glory. We will be willrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrewrew Thank you.

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