Peter Krol | Knowable Word

How to Respond When People Treat the Bible Like a Code to Crack

August 2, 2023 By Peter Krol

I really appreciate this recent piece by Mark Ward entitled “The Secret Meaning of YHWH.” He responds to a widely shared social media post about how each Hebrew letter has a particular “meaning,” leading the posted to identify the meaning of the Lord’s name as “Behold the nails in my hands.”

When such “deeper” or “secret” meanings of Scripture get circulated, how ought we to respond? How does one evaluate or rebut such claims?

Ward’s primary approach is to show what sort of absurdity results when the method is applied to other biblical words or sentences. By this method, God’s title Adonai must mean “Ox door serpent hand.” And the secret meaning of Genesis 1:1 is “The house’s head ox had a tooth in his arm—marked with a house head ox, in fact. And an ox goad in the window had a hand on the water ox. But, mark well, the window tooth also had a water arm, a water hook, and an ox mark window. Ox heads are papyrus plants.”

Ward show us how to respond to such theories with grace and kindness—along with a strong dose of reality. Remember that studying the Bible is not code breaking.

Check it out!

Better Than a Wild Guess: Poetry

July 28, 2023 By Peter Krol

I’ve argued that you can get the main point; you’re not reduced to making a wild guess every time you study a passage. A few key skills will be most helpful:

Observing the structure
Asking and answering interpretive questions
Tracking the flow of thought

Last week I gave some examples of how this works from narrative and discourse texts. Now let me show you some brief examples of poetic texts.

Proverbs 2

This chapter of Proverbs functions almost like a discourse, with tight logical reasoning.

If you listen and search for God’s wisdom – Prov 2:1-4
Then you will find it – Prov 2:5
For God loves to give it out – Prov 2:6-10
It will guard you – Prov 2:11
- From the way of evil men – Prov 2:12-15
- From the forbidden woman – Prov 2:16-19
- For the way of the good – Prov 2:20-22

The thesis clearly comes in the first five verses. The rest of the poem supports that thesis with a variety of reasons and consequences.

The main point: The Lord delights to grant a delivering wisdom to those who listen and search for it.

Proverbs 31:10-31

It’s easy to get lost in the details of this famous poem. However, my colleague Tom Hallman, who recently preached the most helpful sermon I’ve ever heard on this text, demonstrated beautifully how the structure and train of thought communicate the poem’s main point.

You can find Tom’s extended outline (color-coded!) in this Google Doc. The outer frame of the poem (Prov 31:10-12, 27-29) sets up a large chiasm—a structure where the second half mirrors the first half in reverse order. But instead of continuing a single, long chiasm, he embeds two shorter chiasms in the middle.

The main ideas of each of those embedded chiasms are brought together in the poem’s conclusion (Prov 31:30-31).

The repeated idea that keeps coming up is how this woman is to be praised. And the woman in view is not a young woman, a potential marriage partner. She is an older woman, having lived a life of wisdom. This poem is not a checklist for a potential spouse but a lifetime achievement award for a woman of wisdom.

Check out the linked doc for details. The structure and train of thought demonstrate that the poem’s main idea is to show what sort of woman is worthy of praise.

Try This at Home

I admit that the Prov 31 example gets a little complex. And Tom told me he didn’t see all this himself. He noticed a few things, and then tracked down and assimilated the helpful insights of others. It took him some time to sharpen his observation and interpretive questions and answers.

But I hope all of these examples give you some hope that this can be done. You don’t have to make a wild guess at the main point. Keep observing. Keep asking and answering questions. Nail down the structure as best you can, and figure out how the author moves from the beginning to the end. Where does he draw conclusions or highlight particular ideas?

Please know that I am not offering these main points as definitive or unquestionable. These main points are only the best I can do with my current understanding of those texts. But they are open to debate or sharpening.

Some of my favorite small group discussions take place when others challenge what I thought was the main point. When folks do that well, through careful observation and interpretation of the text, we all win.

As you improve in these skills, you’ll gain both facility and confidence at identifying the main points the Spirit of God wishes to communicate through the Scripture.

Guidance for 1 & 2 Kings

July 26, 2023 By Peter Krol

Caleb Cangelosi explains three things you should know about 1 & 2 Kings.

The book of Kings was written during the exile to explain why Israel and Judah were in exile.
Kings isn’t just about kings; it’s also about prophets.
Elijah wasn’t a fearful, self-pitying prophet in 1 Kings 19.

That third thing will help with just one chapter of the book, but it’s a good reminder of how we love to give gold stars. Let’s not be so quick to condemn (or glorify) Bible characters until we’ve considered all the evidence of their nuanced portrayals!

Check it out!

Better Than a Wild Guess

July 21, 2023 By Peter Krol

I’ve argued that you can get the main point; you’re not reduced to making a wild guess every time you study a passage. A few key skills will be most helpful:

Observing the structure
Asking and answering interpretive questions
Tracking the flow of thought

Let me show you some brief examples of how this works.

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

Luke 18:1-30

This passage consists of four brief scenes:

A parable: God’s elect ought to never stop praying for justice against adversaries – Luke 18:1-8
A parable: Everyone who exalts self will be humbled; those who humble self will be exalted – Luke 18:9-14
A conversation: Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it – Luke 18:15-17
A conversation: Whoever leaves some things for the kingdom of God will gain everything – Luke 18:18-30

According to context and flow of thought, this passage sits within the section of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, where Jesus is answering the question: When will the kingdom of God come (Luke 17:20)? So the parable about praying (Luke 18:18) is not about just any prayer, but about the prayer for the kingdom to come, and with it to bring justice for God’s people (Luke 18:5, 7, 8). It’s all about the timing of the kingdom: “Will he delay long over them?” (Luke 18:7).

The following three scenes then flesh out the answer to a crucial question. Even if the kingdom were to come, would the Son of Man find faith on the earth? (Luke 18:8). That answer comes in three pieces. The kingdom of God comes when people:

humble themselves,
receive it as children, and
leave some things to gain everything

That’s what true faith looks like.

So what is the main point being communicated through this structure and train of thought? The kingdom of God comes when people humble themselves, receive it as children, and leave some things to gain everything.

Ephesians 4

The chapter has two units of thought, each beginning with a command to “walk” (Eph 4:1, 17).

The first section issues a call to unity (Eph 4:1-3) along with two reasons why diversity shouldn’t divide the church:

Eph 4:4-6: The unity of the diverse Trinity
Eph 4:7-16: The gracious gifts of the ascended Christ

The second section explains what to do when diversity does end up threatening unity (17-24) with a series of four case studies (25-32) that demonstrate the exact process laid out in 22-24.

Eph 4: 17-24: Don’t be like the Gentiles, but put off the old humanity, renew your mind, and put on the new humanity
Case studies that demonstrate all three steps:
- Eph 4:25: Lies
- Eph 4:26-27: Sinful anger
- Eph 4:28: Theft
- Eph 4:29: Rotten speech
- Eph 4:30-32: Concluding summary

The main point: Diversity shouldn’t divide the church, but when it does, stop thinking about it the way Gentiles do.

Ephesians 5

The “therefore” in Eph 5:1 signals the conclusion to the previous chapter, which becomes the thesis for the following chapter. The repetition of “walk,” along with shifts in metaphor then signal the supporting arguments.

Eph 5:1: Thesis: We ought to imitate God. We do that by:
- Eph 5:2-6: Walking in love
- Eph 5:7-14: Walking in light
- Eph 5:15-21: Walking in wisdom
  - Eph 5:18: One aspect of wisdom is being filled with the Spirit.
    - Eph 5:21: One aspect of being filled with the Spirit is submission to authority.
      - Eph 5:22-6:9: Three case studies in such submission.

According to the logic and grammatical signals, Paul continues drilling his argument down to a finer and finer point. But as we study (or teach) what he says about marriage, parenting, or slavery, we ought not miss the fact that these are all, ultimately, examples of how to walk in wisdom in imitation of God.

The main point: We imitate God by rooting our lives in his love, his light, and his wisdom.

Conclusion

Next week, I’ll give a few more examples from poetic texts.

Recapitulation in Revelation

July 19, 2023 By Peter Krol

Jim Davis and Skyler Flowers argue that the book of Revelation doesn’t have to be so difficult and mysterious if we would only grasp the author’s use of recapitulation: a literary device where the same event is addressed repeatedly from different angles or perspectives.

Revelation isn’t meant to be read merely as a chronology of fantastic events. It should be seen as one set of events repeated seven times, each with increasing intensity. Revelation is apocalyptic—a genre defined by images, symbols, and references to the Old Testament and John’s ancient world. It’s intended to help the churches to whom it’s written see the world in a different way.

Their analysis is worth considering, though I concede that they don’t provide much evidence for the presumption of recapitulation. What do you think? What evidence is there in the book itself to suggest the author is or is not using the device of recapitulation?

Check it out!

You Can Get the Main Point

July 14, 2023 By Peter Krol

Have you ever felt like, when asked to state the main point of a Bible passage, all you can do is make a wild guess? Or that the best you can do is pick out something that strikes you as important and label that the main point?

The good news is that you can get the main point. You can search it out and identify it with confidence. You can learn to defend your statement of the main point with evidence from the text. You don’t have to just guess.

What the Main Point is

The main point is the climax of interpretation. This is what all your efforts of observing and interpreting culminate in.

Usually, the main point is a declarative statement, a conclusion. That’s because the author is trying to persuade his audience of something; the main point is that thing.

It’s possible that the main point could be a question or a command; though I’d want abundantly clear and explicit evidence in the text before accepting a question or command as the main point. If someone poses a question as the main point, I suspect the true main point is actually the answer to the question. If someone hands me a command, I suspect that command is the author’s intended application, and we need to do a little more digging to understand what conclusion he’s arguing for in order to produce that application.

Exceptions to statement-main points often arise from particular genres or intentions. For example, I believe that the heartbreaking poem in the fifth chapter of Lamentations is really a question for which the poet has no answer: Why does God forget us? Will he remain exceedingly angry with us? And since the psalms are often recounting the human experience—rather than teaching some particular truth—my mains points for many psalms often look like topics rather than declarative conclusions. For example: The prayer offered in faith (or, three descriptions of impudent prayer)—Psalm 17. Five solutions to overcoming envy—Psalm 37.

I’ve also heard people say that the main point must be a declarative statement about God, but I don’t fully agree. Yes, the entire Bible is the revelation of God in Christ, so we will learn something about God, and especially the person of Jesus Christ, on every page. But if a particular passage is focused on humanity, or creation, or sin, or something else—I’m most interested in following the author’s lead and not requiring his point to center a particular object (i.e. God).

How to Get the Main Point

My posts over the last few months have all been directed at helping you with this skill. All Observation and Interpretation skills matter, but some skills get more significant results than others. So really work those key skills! Especially:

Observing the structure
Asking and answering interpretive questions
Tracking the flow of thought

If you nail these skills, the main point often presents itself in vibrant color. But if you struggle with observing the structure, asking and answering interpretive questions, and tracking the flow of thought, then getting the main point will always feel like staring at a Magic Eye painting. You know: the 2D images, that pop out into 3D if you cross your eyes.

In a future post, I’ll give some examples to show how these particular skills often carry much weight in helping us to identify the author’s main point.

God’s Kingdom in Obadiah

July 12, 2023 By Peter Krol

As the shortest book of the Old Testament, Obadiah may not receive as much love as some of the better-known heavyweights. But it has much to teach us about the kingdom of God.

In particular, according to Jeffrey Stivason, this dense book shows us that God’s kingdom is an opposed kingdom, a victorious kingdom, and a gracious kingdom. Stivason’s reflections on these themes in Obadiah are well worth your time.

Check it out!

Don’t Fail to Capture the Train of Thought

July 7, 2023 By Peter Krol

One of our greatest failures in Bible study is our tendency to treat the text atomistically.

We look for inspirational words or sayings, while failing to grasp how the author used those words or sayings to persuade his audience of a message. We love to grade the behaviors of Bible characters. We distract ourselves with endless word studies. We fail to grasp the context.

For example, we treat Daniel and post-conversion Paul as “good” and Jacob and Samson as “bad.” We think of “Immanuel” as little more than a prediction of Messiah. We apply “don’t be anxious about anything, but … make your requests known to God” as a generic encouragement for the Christian life.

But how much changes when we form a habit of boarding a passage’s train of thought!

The Train’s Value

When you observe well, and you ask and answer good interpretive questions, you are going somewhere. These skills are not merely academic exercises. They have an end goal: to determine the author’s main point.

And the way you pull together all of your observation and interpretive work is by capturing the author’s train of thought in the text.

If we fail to capture the train of thought, it will be very difficult either to get to the main point, or to have much confidence that what we’ve got is in fact the main point. We’re left with only guessing, or landing on whichever atom in the text excites us the most.

So please understand: the value of the train of thought lies in its power to surface the author’s main point. When we have captured that train of thought, we are well on our way to mastering the text. Which, frankly, is primarily a matter of clearing out the rocks and weeds so it can master us.

The Train’s Capture

By “train of thought,” all I mean is: How does the author get from the beginning of the passage to the end of the passage? How does he shape his message in such a way as to bring his readers along with him, to persuade them?

We can capture this train only after we’ve gotten lots of good answers (from the text!) to our interpretive questions. We then investigate those answers with further questions. We circle around and around, back and forth between observation and interpretation, like a cyclone—all funneling into the author’s single main point.

As we follow this process, we start to see the shape of the author’s argument. The author wanted to persuade his audience of something, and our task is determine what that was so it can shape our hearts and lives as well.

Because the train of thought has to do with the text’s shape, in your notes it will typically look like an outline. But it’s not simply an outline of the contents. It’s not a list of what the passage says. It is a list of conclusions—or sometimes a list of commands—that capture what the passage means.

The train of thought can be an outline as simple as this, for Ephesians 2:1-10:

You were one thing – 1-3
But God has made you another – 4-6
So that his grace would be evident to all – 7-10

Here are three more quick examples I’ve given from other texts. And here are two examples drawn from narrative texts. See our interpretive book overviews for examples of what it looks like to follow the train of thought over entire books of the Bible.

In your Bible study, please do not fail to capture the train of thought.

Is the Bible Suitable for Children?

July 5, 2023 By Peter Krol

Amid calls to censor the Bible and remove it from school curricula, John Stevens proposes that the problem is not with the Bible but with what and how we instruct our children. Here is a taste:

The real question is whether God intends [the sexual and violent bits of the Bible] to be kept from children. I suspect that we are shaped more by a romantic vision of childhood that owes more to Rousseau than Scripture, and Victorian notions of childhood innocence. In most of the world, and certainly, in Bible times, children were familiar with harsh reality and the simple ‘facts of life’ from a much earlier age. After all, families shared a single room and yet there were multiple children! Kids on farms know a lot about sex.

God commanded parents to teach the Law to their children and make it part of daily life. They were to talk about it. This includes the vulgar and violent parts, which are crucial to the identity shaping of the people of God. The Bible does not shy away from reality. Most of the time God’s people lived in threat of violence & in proximity to idolatry with its sexual immorality. The Bible is not sentimentality but realism. It is the fallen world seen red in tooth and claw. Israelite children were not to be isolated from this, but taught how to live faithfully in it and resist its temptations…

I think we need to be on the front foot and stop hiding reality from our kids, but truly teach them the Bible (in an age-appropriate way) and not shy from preparing them for the real world.

Stevens’s argument is well worth considering. As a father, I enjoy reading some children’s Bibles to my children. But I have always sought to give them a steady diet of the entire Bible.

Check it out!

Let’s Not Employ the Gospel as Justification to Keep Sinning

June 30, 2023 By Peter Krol

In Romans 6:1, the apostle Paul asks a crucial question to clarify a potential misapplication of his gospel: “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” In other words, does the grace of God give believers permission to continue in their sin without ever having to change?

By no means!

An Old Problem

Misconstruing God’s grace in this way was not unique to Paul’s mission or Paul’s gospel. This problem is not a strictly Pauline one. Consider Jeremiah’s fiery words in the Jerusalem temple of his day, shortly before its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar:

Thus says Yahweh of Armies, the God of Israel: …Behold, you trust in deceptive words to no avail. Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are delivered!’—only to go on doing all these abominations? Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?
Jeremiah 7:3-11

The people of Israel committed all kinds of sin against their God, yet they trusted in God’s grace to get them through. They believed God’s grace was big enough to prevent them from having to actually change their behavior.

So the Lord goes on to tell them to look at the ruins of their previous sanctuary in Shiloh (from before the Philistines conquered them centuries earlier). This temple would end up the same way.

Today’s Gospel

Of course, we must be careful to preach Christ and him crucified whenever we lead Bible studies and teach the Scriptures. The good news about the Christ is the center of all of God’s revelation.

But we have misunderstood that message if we make it sound in any way as though people won’t have to change. As though coming just as they are means always remaining just as they are. As though repentance (change) were not the indispensable companion to belief (Mark 1:15).

I’ve found we must use caution with such phrases as “struggling with sin.” If by that phrase you mean that it is hard to put sin to death—but you are making progress in that direction—then well and good. Keep on keeping on!

But if by that phrase you really mean, “I’m sad about it, but I’m just going to have to live with it for the rest of my life,” then please reconsider what the whole point of the “struggle” ought to be (Col 3:5, Titus 2:11-14).

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