11. Beginner Bible Course: The literary styles in the Bible - God never intended EVERY word to be taken LITERALLY

EPISODE 11  The simple Bible overview of…GOD NEVER INTENDED EVERY WORD TO BE TAKEN LITERALLY

I'm going to take the Bible as a jigsaw puzzle analogy, a bit further, we've already talked about how important it is to know the picture on the cover, the meta story of scripture. And we've talked about assembling the edge pieces, those eight themes that set the border for what the Bible teaches. I asked my students once the border is assembled, what's your next step? They usually answer organize the pieces by color, once organized into piles. You know, they kind of fit together in a certain way. Similarly, the Bible has piles of colors, literary styles. If you want the fancy word genres, there are many genres and scripture each with its own rules for how to interpret them.

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00:00:51

The bad news is if you read a portion of scripture, not understanding the literary style it's written in, you can get it very, very wrong, but some well-meaning Bible student might say, I take the Bible, literally word for word. If God said it, I believe it. And that settles it while I appreciate that commitment to scripture. No, I mean, I really appreciate that commitment. It's misguided and can even be dangerous. I've got a bit of good news for you. However, you've already got built in John rhe filters, as you read or hear a portion of literature, something kicks in and lets you know, I need to interpret this in a certain way.

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00:01:35

Let's test your filter. I will start a sentence and you tell me what style of literature it is once upon a time. You know, I'm about to tell you a fairy tale. You don't take it. LITERALLY it's meant to do something else. How about this early on the morning of June 6th, 1944. I bet you're thinking this is history. This happened in time and space. How about this? There once was an old woman who lived in a shoe. Yes. I'm about to say a Limerick. You'd never take that. LITERALLY I don't think you're going to go look for this old woman's shoe house or call social services because she spanks her kids and puts them to bed at night.

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00:02:18

Here's another one, his soft whisper cut the darkness like welcome raindrops in her parks. Desert. Yep. Love language poetry. And my middle school students would go, Ooh, gross. Here's another one early to bed. Early to rise a proverb, a general truth that would probably make your life better. And you know, many, many more styles of literature already. By the way, each of the styles I've mentioned are in the Bible. We've got once upon a time stories, many coming out of Jesus' mouth.

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00:02:58

There once was a going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. We've got history on the fourth day in the morning. On the month of Abib, there are things very close to our old woman in the shoe. Limericks, assembly, instructions, poetry, love language, Proverbs. Each of them with their own rules for interpretation while God wants us to take his word seriously, he never meant for us to take every word LITERALLY he used many styles in the Bible learning to recognize these different styles. As we read different parts of scripture is critical to getting the meaning.

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00:03:40

Right? Well, let's get around to start putting these pieces together, but before we do, I want to give us one more tool so that we not only work hard to get the meaning, right. But to know how to apply it to our lives.  We will do that in our next wordpicture.