Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Explore the Bible for Yourself, Part 6 of 52
IDEA: While the Bible was written for us, it was not written to us.
PURPOSE: To help listeners appreciate the difficulty of applying the text to our lives today.
Do you think it's possible to prove anything from the Bible?
Do you believe the Bible supports every notion that different people have about how Christians should think and act?
The Bible has been used to justify all kinds of ignorance in human opinions. Most people treat the Bible the way a drunk treats a lamppost: for support, not illumination.
John Calvin said that the Bible has been used like the wax nose that actors use. That is shaped to mean whatever men desired.
I. The Bible was not written to us.
Paul didn't have 20th century Christians in mind when he wrote his letters. The questions he dealt with in his day are not necessarily the questions we deal with in ours.
For example, there were heresies, wrong beliefs, which he had to deal with that we don't face today. For example, he confronted the Gnostic heresy.
The New Testament says a lot about Pharisees and Sadducees. These were a major concern to Luke when he wrote, but we don't meet people who belong to a sect called Pharisees, although we may meet people who are like them.
In Paul's time there were people who were trying to find out how the old Jewish way of thinking fit in with the new Christian way of understanding things. The New Testament writers addressed those problems. They are not the same problems we face today.
When passages confuse us, remember that they did not necessarily confuse the men and women to whom they were written.
For example, 1 Corinthians 15:29 speaks of the baptism for the dead. There are at lease 14 different attempts by modern interpreters trying to make sense of what Paul meant. Do you think the people in the first century had our problem? Why?
II. We cannot start with the here-and-now when we approach the Bible.
We are asking the question, "What did the biblical writer intend to say to the biblical readers?" What was the writer's intent when he wrote? That is the control that we have. If we lose that control, then the Bible can be made to say, "whatever it means to me."
Principle: A biblical passage can never mean what it never meant. What the biblical writer was saying to the biblical readers must be our starting point for Bible study. How we work from that is what relevant Bible study is all about.
