Lesson 09 - Why and How Should We Study the Bible?

Lesson 09 - Why and How Should We Study the Bible?

Introduction

Welcome back - we’re now past the halfway point of this semester, and will be handing out a survey for all of y’all to fill out. We’ve been doing this youth ministry approach for about six months now - we want your perspective on what’s worked, what hasn’t, what you’ve enjoyed hearing about, and what you’ve hated, and where you want things to go from here.
But we’ll do that after we finish our study for this morning, so let’s continue looking at this book right here - the Bible.
We started looking at it last Sunday and Wednesday and we’re going to continue moving through it today.

What We’ve Learned about What the Bible Is So Far

We’ve covered a lot of ground regarding the Bible in the last two times we’ve had together. Let me briefly recap what we’ve learned so far:

The Bible is Complete - the 66 books we have in it are the correct books, they are inspired by God, and there is nothing missing. The Apocryphal texts are not inspired, have never been considered inspired, and only the books we have in our Bibles are the correct ones.
The Bible is Accurate - the thousands of manuscripts that we have demonstrate that our English Bible translated correctly and precisely. What we have is the English translation of the actual words inspired by God. We’ve got the right words that we learn from.
The Bible is Internally Consistent - Peter and Paul recognize the Bible as having authority and being inspired by God, and they recognize that all of what has been written has this stamp of God’s authority on it.

In addition, the Bible is completely internally consistent - even though it was written by many different people over thousands of years, there are no inconsistencies in its pages.

The Bible is Historically Precise - the archaeological record confirms what we find in the Bible as it relates to the times kings and rulers were in charge, the locations, the ways of traveling, the lifestyles. It all matches up with what God has told us.
The Bible is Under Attack - Satan has been at work since the very beginning to undermine and attack the Bible. He wants you to think it’s not what God said, or that somehow it doesn’t matter or that God is trying to withhold something good from you. This attack continues to this day.

So what else do we have to address? We want to talk about how you should approach the Bible when we read it or study it. How do we figure things out that it says?

What the Bible Isn’t

First, let’s talk about what the Bible is not, then we’ll talk about what the Bible is.
The Bible is not a story that is primarily about you - it’s not about you discovering yourself or you “finding yourself.” It’s not a story about you, primarily.
The Bible isn’t a list of rules you’re supposed to follow to make God happy - it’s not the book that tells you whether you should wear the red tie or the blue tie this morning. Now, as we’ll talk about, it provides some really important things we should be obeying if we’re walking with God. But it’s not primarily a book about rules.

Plus, if it was supposed to have a bunch of rules, it’s kind of bad at that, don’t you think? I mean, if I was trying to write a rulebook I don’t think I would have written historical things and other stuff - I just would have flat out made a list.

The Bible also isn’t a Magic Eight Ball (ever seen those? You ask it a question, and it provides an answer?) that tells you the answer to every decision you should make. It’s not like you say, God who should I marry, flip your Bible open, see “And Isaac married Rebekah” and think that means you should marry a girl named Rebekah.

I’m sorry, the Bible is telling you who Isaac married - it’s not a magical book that reveals the answer to every decision you are supposed to make.

So what is the Bible then?

What the Bible Is - The Revelation of God to Us

The Bible is a story, a message, about God. It’s God’s revealing himself to us. He’s telling us who he is, what he is like.
It’s God’s self-revelation. If we want to get to know him, it’s how we do it.
It’s stories that are primarily about God.

So David and Goliath, one of the most famous stories in the Bible where the teenager David, who worked as a shepherd, goes out and kills a nine-foot-tall giant by himself on the field of battle with nothing but a sling and a handful of rocks, is not a story about how you can overcome obstacles in your life - it may have some applications for that, but it’s primarily telling us something about God.
David and Goliath teaches us that God does not look to physical strength, but rather to the heart of a person. It shows us God is more powerful than any physically strong person. David is a man after God’s own heart and God honors his heart for him.
It’s teaching us about God, you see?
So all of the Bible is about God showing us who he is, how he’s worked through history, and us discovering more and more about him and what he’s like.

Glory of God

Now how many of you have ever heard the phrase “glorify God by how you live” or bring “glory to God” by what you do. Do we have any idea what that even means?
Too often instead of understanding God through his revealing himself in the Bible, we just think of God as some kind of far-off concept.

We view him as someone who made everything, makes rules about how we should live, generally doesn’t like it when we have fun, or is way, way out there that we can’t really know him.
Or he’s part of our life, but only one piece - he’s kind of like the Force from Star Wars - he’s out there and does things, but isn’t anyone that we actually know or interact with.

So glory - what is it? According to Tim Keller, glory has the concept of weight. So I’ve got in my hands a 25lb weight and a paperclip - which one has more weight?

Obviously, the 25lb weight does - it’s not even a close question.
Something that is weighty, like a giant boulder, if you roll it off a cliff into a pond, there’s going to be an effect. Giant waves coming from it, water flooding out - the weight has a great impact on the world around it. It has a lot of “glory.”

See the problem is this - we’re all born convinced that we have the most “weight.” We think we have the most influence and understanding of anything around us.

So what do we do about God? We say we know what he’s like from our own minds - we get wacky ideas like God hating it when we wear particular colors, or that when we light candles we’re being really spiritual because we feel that way. Or we start saying well, God’s ok with me living with my girlfriend because he loves everybody.

When we say things like that, we’re not glorifying God - we’re not giving him any weight at all, because as we’ve seen with the Bible, he has absolutely spoken!

Glorifying God is saying God, I’m giving you the weight here - you know what you’re doing, I’m looking to you as the weight that impacts my entire world.
We say, God, you know what you’re talking about, and I’m willing to listen to what you have to say about who you are instead of trying to make you in my own ideas.

My view of God isn’t based on my weight, which is more like a grain of sand against a massive boulder, but instead is based on who God says he is and what he says he’s like.

And the only way to know that, to give God glory, to give him weight, is to look in the Bible.

So we’ve been focusing on this issue of the Bible, and some of you may be wondering if we’re ever going to finish this topic.

But we can’t get past it - the Bible is how God has revealed himself to us.
That’s why we study it - we exist to give God glory, to give him weight, so that who he is and what he’s like means that the way we live life is different because of it.
We study the Bible so we learn who God is as a person, not just some far-out concept or principle that we don’t really understand.

And when Shelley and I pray for all of you, which we do a lot - more than you can imagine - we pray for your personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.

We pray that you all would get to know God as a person, as he’s revealed himself in the Bible, not just as a concept.
We pray that your lives would bring him glory - that you would show the world by how you live that God has weight, that who he is matters and changes how you approach the world around you.

So that’s the idea of glory - weight - the Bible is God’s revelation and giving him the weight he is due means we learn about who is from him, not from our own ideas or imagining how we would do things if we were God.

The Metanarrative

And this bring us to another critical point when we come to approach the Bible. It’s the concept of the meta-narrative. Now, I know there’s this buzzword going around that says “dude, that is so meta” referring to layers of abstraction (like footnotes to explain footnotes or things that refer to themselves.

What we’re talking about with the concept of a metanarrative is a grand part of a story that explains the rest of the story.
If I were to ask you what the book the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis was about, you could give me a lot of different answers.

You could say well, it’s about the Pevensie children and their adventures while staying out in the country during World War II.
Or you could pick your favorite part and say oh, it’s all about talking animals.
Or you could say it’s an allegory about Jesus redemption of us demonstrated through a magical adventure in another world that you get through in a wadrobe.

Metanarrative is that third answer - it’s not the individual plots and subplots of particular stories. It’s about the grand theme of what the author is communicating to us by what he wrote.

Think of a lot of movies or books that are out there - whether you realize it or not, you’re being giving a philosophical message by that story.
So we all know the story of Robin Hood, right? He had to steal from the rich to give to the poor because the laws of his time in the 1200s were unjust, right?

That’s the story, but what’s the metanarrative?
It’s that sometimes, it’s ok to break the law to help people when the government won’t do it.
Is that a Christian idea? Something to ponder - just about every story you read or hear is going to be communicating messages like that, and there are metanarratives everywhere.

So when we look at the metanarrative of the Bible, it’s the grand theme, the overarching story, the thing that the author is communicating to us.

You don’t say the Bible is stories about wars, although it has those. It’s a story about Jesus and his disciples, yes. It has stories about miracles.
It has all of those things, but none of those things are its grand theme.

The metanarrative of Scripture is all about God’s revealing himself and his work to redeem everything back that was broken by sin.

We start in Genesis, and the story we told last week about how sin entered the world. And at the moment it did, it shattered God’s design for everything - death entered the world and God’s design was distorted in every way possible.

So food, which God designed to be enjoyed and to point our attention to him, becomes an end in itself where people eat for their own satisfaction instead of out of gratitude.
Everything good God designed, from food to family to sex - it all got broken by sin.

And from that very moment, God announced his plan - when he was punishing for the sinful actions Adam and Eve took, Jesus promised there would be a rescue from this sinful destruction that had occurred.
And next, God picked out a man named Abraham, and revealed himself to Abraham, promising him land, children, and blessing.
God worked in the children of Israel, eventually leading them out of captivity in Egypt and making them a unique nation.

God provided the Law - very specific commandments he gave to Israel, in part to reveal something more of himself - showing them how he is holy and just and perfect and different from us.
He provided a sacrificial system, showing how seriously he takes sin - that innocent animals had to die because of what people did wrong.
Then he worked in the history of Israel through kings, eventually leading to David and Solomon, then judgment when God’s people failed to obey - he sent them into captivity.

But then he demonstrated his mercy by rescuing them from being slaves in Babylon and brought them back to their own land.
Then Jesus steps onto the scene, and announces the fulfillment of God’s plan for redemption, which he had been doing since the moment of the Fall.

Jesus offers us something incredible - he lived a perfect life, completely innocent, never did anything wrong. And then he was killed unjustly, sacrificing himself just like all of those Old Testament animals.
Then he offers to take on himself every bit of our disgustingness and rebellion against God, and he hands us in exchange his perfect life that he lived.
His blood made possible this unbelievable exchange we’re offered in the gospel, continuing the process of redemption.

If we accept that exchange, then every time God looks at us, even on our worst day, he doesn’t respond with hatred, but instead with love - because he sees us as having the perfect approval of Jesus on us.

It should be absolutely overwhelming to us that that’s what we’ve been given.

And this work of God is continuing toward the day when he is going to make everything right again - when he restores creation fully just like he’s restoring us.

When Jesus sits on the throne, ruling the world perfectly.

So the metanarrative - the grand theme and purpose of the entire Bible is to reveal to us this story - who God is, and what he’s doing in redeeming everything back to himself perfectly.

It’s also the message of the gospel - and it’s why as Christians we never get past the gospel, because it constantly reminds us of what is really true about what God is doing in this world.
And if we truly get a grasp on this, so many other things about life begin to fall into place.

So as I get to know God, the priority isn’t whether it’s “legal” in Christian terms to do something, but rather whether it’s something I would do when Jesus was with me.

When we say it’s about the relationship, that’s what we mean - we approach things from this gospel perspective, the metanarrative, of life.

Why and What Do We Study?

When we go to study the Bible, then, we’re not studying something in isolation. Bible study is not going through and reading your particular verse here and your favorite verse there. Bible study isn’t random word studies on one verse, although that can be helpful.
Bible study is rooted in learning more about God, more about the metanarrative. Everything we study should relate back to the gospel, back to the work God is doing in the world around us.
And how do we do that?

One word - CONTEXT.
Context is the single most important thing we can do when we’re studying the Bible.
If you don’t look at the verses around the verse you’re reading, you can get a very twisted view of what God is saying in particular places.

How many of you have ever heard Matthew 18:20: “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”?

Nice, sweet verse, right? Reminds us that when we gather in church, that Jesus is here with us, right?
Wrong! The context of Matthew 18 has nothing to do with whether Jesus is present at a church service. The context is about church discipline - when you have someone at the church who is doing you wrong, you’re to go to them by yourself, and if they don’t listen, you take a few people with you to try to help convince the person. If they still don’t listen, you take the issue to the church.
That’s the context for Jesus saying that where two or three are gathered, there he is - he’s there in judgment, in agreement with you if you’ve followed this Scriptural process for dealing with sin in the church or someone who has done you wrong.

And this can seriously mess up your theology, because if you think this is about oh, let’s gather as a church, then you may start to believe that somehow Jesus isn’t with you all the other times when you’re by yourself.

Let me give you a hint - if you know Jesus, you have the Holy Spirit - the third person of the Godhead, living inside of you.
So when you’re by yourself, no matter what you’re doing, he sees you. And he knows, and he’s there.
So this verse is one that we pull out of context a lot.

Let me give you another example that isn’t as relevant, but shows how important it is to have proper context.

It’s a verse about relationships within families.

Let me give you an example - you can read the verse Ephesians 5:22 that says “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.”
Down through the years, lots of men have used that verse to justify all kinds of abuse - woman, you’ve got to submit to me! You’ve got to obey what I said in the same way you obey what God says, that means you don’t get to choose - you have to obey.
But if anyone EVER says that to anyone, it’s clear they have no idea what God is actually saying through Paul in the book of Ephesians.
Paul is talking in that chapter about everyone in the church humbly submitting themselves to each other just as Jesus has done for us, recognizing in thankfulness for what Jesus did.
Then he tells the husbands to love their wives as Jesus loved the church - what does that mean? Jesus loved us as his church so much that he completely gave up his life for ours, served us in every way possible, washed us clean, and gave and gave and gave.
So the context of “submit yourselves” isn’t about exacting obedience without question at all - it’s about honoring each other in love as Jesus has loved us - living out the gospel at home.

Another example may really surprise you because it’s one you hear a lot.

How many of you have ever heard the verse II Chronicles 7:14, “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”?

Did you know that that verse has nothing to do with America at all?
Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t as God’s people, humble ourselves before God and pray and seek God’s face - not at all.

But if you try to use that verse to justify God restoring America, I’m afraid you need to look at the context.

The context is God’s words to Solomon about the temple. The verse right before it says, “If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people;” THEN if my people pray and seek my face, etc.
The promise is also given only to Israel - no where else in the Bible is there a promise that if a nation which is not God’s chosen people, he will do this healing of their land.

Context is king when it comes to reading your Bible - make sure you’re always learning the context of the immediate passage and always relating it back to the metanarrative - the grand story of what God is doing in the world through full restoration of everything back to himself.

So our goal in Bible study is to learn about God, learn what to observe to be more like him, learn what he’s doing in the world.

Our goal is to do what Jesus talks about in Matthew 28:19: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: “
The term “teach all nations” is better translated, “make disciples of all nations.” A disciple is a disciplined one - someone who is learning and being taught by someone else.

We’re all disciples of Jesus when we’re walking with and learning from him - we’re students of his, which is why we study the Word, so that we can know him more fully and more deeply.
We all should be seeking to be students of the Word, like Paul talks about in II Timothy 2:15 - studying the Word so that we will be able to know God fully and completely.

It takes time and effort for us to do this, but we’re learning about God, we’re gaining insight into life from him.
It can be hard to figure out - Peter makes that clear that not everything Paul wrote or everything that is written in the Bible is easy to figure out.

Where Do We Start?

In order to start studying the Bible, you have to know the story. The metanarrative, obviously, but also what the book says in the first place.

So if you’ve never done it before, think about getting on a Bible reading plan. Getting into places where you can read the Bible.
This will depend on your individual circumstances too - if you are a quick reader, then maybe you can start with a few chapters a day. If reading is more of a struggle, start with one chapter a day and work to really understand it.
Or if you have some challenge or learning disability, start maybe with just a few verses a day.
What’s important is not the quantity of how much you’re reading, but rather you building a good understanding of what you’re reading.
You can try to read six chapters a day and then walk away not remembering anything - that’s not really accomplishing the goal we have of getting to know God better by reading his word.

So we start with reading. Then we also start by making observations and asking questions about a particular text.

What you need to be doing is interacting with the text of the Bible so you can gain some understanding of what exactly God is saying in those verses.
That involves asking good questions - so approach it like a mystery - why is this included?
Why are all these names listed out in Chronicles? Usually you can find good answers - like the fact that God was moving forward the story of redemption by showing that Jesus came from just the precise family that he promised he would come from.

Without that evidence, we couldn’t be sure that God kept his word, but we have proof positive that he did.

Reading, making observations and asking questions - this is the beginning of the process of studying the Bible.

Wednesday what we want to do is build this out some more - walk through more specifically how you should build your time in the Bible, and practice asking some questions and making some observations about particular verses.

We’re going to see that the Bible is limitless - just as you can never reach the depths of knowing God because he is an infinite being, in the same way you can’t ever reach the end of studying the Bible.

It’s a lifelong journey, and it’s one where you can always dig deeper.
We’ll talk specifics Wednesday.

But does anyone have any questions or comments about the metanarrative, God’s plan for redemption, or beginning the process of Bible study?