6. Beginner Bible Course: Who decides what any Bible text means?

EPISODE 6  The simple Bible overview of…WHO DECIDES WHAT A BIBLE TEXT MEANS?

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00:00:04

I started class and I noticed one of my students let's call her Tiffany playing with something under her desk. Tiffany is texting another girl in the class who shall remain nameless. As I look at this screen, it only has one word fish in capital letters. F I S H I hold the phone up to the class and say, who of, you know what this text from Tiffany means, Matt, in the back raised his hand. He's a real class clown. He said, Mr. Nelson I know at that text means that is actually an acronym. Tiffany's texting her friend. Fred is so hot.

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00:00:45

The class bus up, Tiffany turns several shades of red in the class bus up, down in the front, Sarah who is more appropriate, raises her hand. She says, Mr. Nelson I think I know a Tiffany's text means actually she said in ancient times, because of the oppression of the Romans, Chris would identify one another with the fish symbol and the word <inaudible>, which means Jesus Christ, God's son and savior. She glares back at Matthew. So it actually is an acronym. What Tiffany's trying to tell her friend is we're sisters in Jesus have a nice day. The whole class groans in the middle of the class, Tyson speaks up.

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00:01:29

He said, Mr. Nelson I know what it means. I bet. If you look back at the text she just received from her friends. It will say something like, what do you have for a snack today? And all Tiffany had time to text back was fish. I'll bet. If you go to our locker, you'll find goldfish crackers. After that word picture, I asked my students who knows what Tiffany is. Texts means my students pause for a moment and hardly any of them ever get it wrong. The correct answer. Tiffany does what I'm about to suggest to you might be the most important thing I have said so far and possibly the most important thing I'll say going forward as students to the Bible, who decides what any text in the Bible means?

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00:02:16

The one who wrote it as we've talked about previously, if there is an average of 10 words per verse in the Bible, there are 88,000 texts. There are about 88,000 individual thoughts or texts from writers carried along by the Holy spirit who decides what any one of those 88,000 texts means answer the writer. Does you say, duh, you don't need to waste my time telling me that. Well, have you ever been in a group studying the Bible? And someone says, what this passage means to me is siren be going off, or have you ever been in an art museum where someone's standing back examining a piece of art says, you know what this picture is saying to me is you better hope the artist isn't standing there with something in his hand, like a big, heavy, solid paint brush, or you're going to get whack.

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00:03:17

People who study words and what they mean, say there's really only three places. Meaning can come from. It can come from the writer. It can come from the reader or it can come from the text itself. I'm not going to get into that last one right now. It's very common in modern literature and art that the text or artwork itself determines what it means. I want to stick the first to the one who wrote it. And the one who reads it, if you want to be a serious student of the Bible, it's critically important that you nailed down this truth. The one who wrote each text determines what it means you say, but wait, these texts are several thousand years old.

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00:04:02

How on earth are we going to discover what the writer of a text means? Well, here I have good news for you. We have meaningful tools. I want to give you just four of them. Number one, master the whole message master the whole meta-story. If you understand the whole big picture story, it's much easier to determine how that writer's texts fits into it. Number two, understand the immediate context what's happened just before and just after it. Someone has said a text in scripture without the context becomes a pretext.

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00:04:42

It's not a good thing. The third tool use a few basic tools. Number three, and learn to use a few basic tools. I'd suggest three tools in your toolbox, whether you have a printed copy or you use your phone or computer to access these online. Number one is a good study. Bible. Number two, a Bible concordance that shows you where certain words and phrases are used in other places in scripture and three, a good Bible dictionary to explain what those words and terms meant at the time the writer wrote them.

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00:05:24

And the fourth meaningful tool is this pray for insight. Pray for insight. That's going to make a whole lot more sense in our next word picture, but some of you must be thinking, man, I just want to read the Bible and understand what it says. Now you're making it sound like hard work. It is hard work. That's why it's called Bible study. But deciding what a passage means, any passage by what you think it means to you is just fishing. So are there any other things that make it difficult for us to understand what a passage, any passage in the Bible means?

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00:06:05

Yes, there are. And I'll address those in our next wordpicture.