In The Word

Again and again, Solomon takes something initially appealing, and says, “Now wait, don’t look away just yet, Bunky. I want you to see what this leads to.” And then he ruthlessly and relentlessly tears the misty, gauzy mask off of the tempting path. As it were, he grabs us by the scruff of the neck, and says, “Now you look. Keep looking! Now, do you see what happens?”I call this the “Consider the end” theme in Proverbs.

. . .

Sin never presents itself to us in all its repugnant, pustulent hideousness. How would that be tempting? No, it sells itself as harmless at worst, desirable and delightful at best. The knife is always hidden behind the back.

The way of wisdom is to consider the end of this temptation. Relentlessly and mercilessly go beyond the pleasing exterior. If you respond to this enticement, what comes next? And then what? And what after that?

Force yourself to see how the lingering look can lead to a flirtation; the flirtation to emotional involvement; the emotional involvement to physical involvement; the physical involvement to the shaming of the name of God, the heartbroken betrayal of every loved one, the destruction of character, to ruin and shame and misery. Connect the dots.

And then?

If you shrink from the destination, don’t take the turnoff.
Dan Phillips, Temptation: A Key Element is. . .

Ben Witherington, an author I know best from his books New Testament History: A Narrative Account and The Gospel Code: Novel Claims About Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Da Vinci has a wonderful post entitled Hermeneutics— A Guide for Perplexed Bible Readers

1) ‘What it meant is what it means’. Meaning comes contextually not from just having words in isolation but words in conjunction with one another in a specific sentence or larger context.

. . .

2) ‘Context is king’. One of the great, great dangers in modern interpretation of the Bible is proof-texting. What this amounts to is the strip-mining of certain key terms and ideas, linking them together with similar or the same words in other texts and contexts, and coming up with a meaning which none of the original texts had.

. . .

3) Genre matters. Before we can interpret a particular type of literature we need to understand what literary type or kind of literature it is. Prose should be interpreted according to the kinds of information prose is meant to give, poetry should be interpreted as poetry, historical narrative as narrative, parables as the literary fictions that they are, and apocalyptic prophecy must be interpreted as the highly metaphorical literature it is, and so on.

Good stuff! Be sure to check out the whole article. It’s short, to the point and informative.

(HT:Participatory Bible Study Blog )

The Shepard’s Scrapbook has a fantastic weekend project: Building your own Johnathan Edwards Blank Bible. Sweetness. I gave it a shot last weekend with some success. I purchased a center-reference hard bound ESV and brought it to Staples where I had them cut off the binding, cut a ream of paper in half and punch the binding holes. I only wish I had gone to a copy shop that specializes in this kind of thing because almost all of the cuts were off. Even so, the end result was usable. I found the most difficult part about the process was lining up the holes correctly so the binding ring would thread properly. But all in all it was much easier than anticipated.

Last weekend my girls and I drove out to Helena, MT for a family reunion and before I left I downloaded a few sessions of “How to study the Bible” from First Baptist Church, Durham. To Date it has been one of the most helpful resources I’ve found on the subject.

One of the most difficult, yet important aspects of Bible study is the ability to trace the authors argument and discover the main ideas.  In his book “Greek for the rest of us”, Bill Mounce discusses an approach called “Phrasing” which has been a wonderful tool in my study.  Along the same lines is a technique used by John Piper called “Arcing”. The idea is to visually link propositions together with their relationship, being a visual learner this makes a ton of sense to me.

Checek out the free booklet from desiringgod.com for more information and let me know what you think.  I’ll try to post some examples of both Phrasing and Arcing in future posts.

While browsing the sermon illustrations for “Bible” on bible.org I came across this very helpful excerpt:

Norton Sterret, in How to Understand Your Bible, states very concisely some of the major principles that need to be adhered to when building a theological system from one’s own study of the Bible:

1. Base doctrine on the literal statements of the Bible rather than on the figurative portions.
2. Base doctrine on plain statements rather than on obscure ones.
3. Base doctrine on the didactic (teaching) passages rather than on the historical ones.
4. Base doctrine on all the relevant passages, not on just a few.
5. Do a word study to learn some doctrines.
6. There are doctrines which have no one word in the Bible to describe them.
7. There are passages in which a doctrine is presented but the actual word does not occur.
8. Some doctrines have more than one word to express them.
9. Be sure that each passage is understood through the general principles of interpretation.
10. Be cautious in formulating doctrine by inference.
11. Beware of doctrinal speculation.
12. In forming, holding, and teaching doctrine, emphasize what the Scripture emphasizes.
13. Seek the practical import of the doctrine.

Hans Finzel, Opening the Book, (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1987), p. 318

Matt Waymeyer over at Expository Thoughts posted an outstanding article entitled Guidelines for Studying Proverbs . It’s definitely worth a read.

I took some time to compile a Bible Study “Quick Reference Card” which has a sample method and some basic principles to keep in mind when studying. Check out the pdf version and feel free to send me any feedback.

If you’re like me, when reading through the Law portion of the Old Testament you were uncomfortable and somewhat confused, and frankly glad that you don’t have to worry about that stuff anymore. Unfortunately if you’re like me then you probably don’t have good thinking about the purpose of the law in the OT which can make NT theology difficult and incomplete. For example, consider the question “How were God’s people of the Old Testament saved”? If the answer is by following the Law, then we have some issues with Paul’s doctrine in Romans (among other things). If the answer is by faith, then what is the purpose of the law? I recently listened to a lecture by Daniel Block which he gave at the 2005 “For all its worth” conference. This lecture was one of those huge “Ah-Ha” moments for me where all of a sudden disjunct and seemingly unrelated ideas, concepts and contradictions gel together. I started a rough outline of the main points of the lecture . If you decide to listen to it and want to add to the notes, send me an email and I’ll add you to the list of collaborators.

Whew,
I just made the one month cutoff mark, or the “blog that faded into obscurity” threshold. It’s been a busy month, both in terms of work and family life. I’m gearing up for leading a church fellowship group during which we’ll be going through the book of acts. This will be my third time through the book of Acts in two years, which is alright with me. There is so much to dig into!! I’ve discovered a number of resources in preparing for this group that relate to Bible study in general, which I’ve found to be invaluable. First, I checked out a book from my local library (which they got on loan all the way from Illinois), called “Grasping God’s Word”. I highly recommend this book. It’s a seminary quality textbook that is written for the lay person, complete with practice studies and questions. Next, there are two courses available for free on www.biblicaltraining.org which are worth checking out Inductive Bible Study, Taught by Dr. George Guthrie and Greek Tools for Bible Study Taught by Dr. Bill Mounce. Both of these courses are very informative and well worth the time. Be sure to check out Dr. Guthrie’s Class Resource Page for some of the reference material presented in his class. Finally I stumbled across a conference called “For All It’s Worth, Reading and Studying the Bible for Life” which contains 12 lectures on a variety of Bible study topics with lecturers such as Dr. Gordon Fee, author of How to read the Bible for all its worth and How to read the Bible book by book and the previously mentioned Dr. Guthrie.
I hope these resources are of some value to you as they have been an enormous help to the way I approach the Scriptures and I will continue posting resources as I find them.