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Better Than a Wild Guess

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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:

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

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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

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.

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

Recapitulation in Revelation

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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

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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:

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.

Don’t Fail to Capture the Train of Thought

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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!

Photo by ROMAN ODINTSOV

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.

How Would They Have Applied It?

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In recent posts, I’ve been trying to help you get the most out of the interpretation phase of your study. We’ve considered different uses for different types of questions, the power of implicational questions, and the best place to find answers to your questions.

Another Angle

Another way to think of the value of implicational questions is that they help us to grasp how the original audience would have applied the text. When we ask our questions with the original audience in mind, we’re more likely to land on the true message and proper application of the text.

Our understanding of a text will be strongest—and therefore our application will hit home with greatest force—when it is very closely connected to the author’s primary intent for his audience.

So we do as much as we can to put ourselves in the shoes of those who first read this text, and to consider what this passage calls them to believe, love, or do.

Photo by Allan Mas

To do this, we must pull together all of our work in observation and interpretation so far. All our questions and answers, along with our work on the context: historical, biblical, and literary.

An Example

In Proverbs 31:1-9, King Lemuel’s mother offers him wise counsel for kings and rulers. She tells him what not to do with his strength (Prov 31:3) and mouth (Prov 31:4-5), and she promotes what he ought to do with his mouth (Prov 31:8-9a) and strength (Prov 31:9b). There is a time an place for forgetting (Prov 31:6-7), but during one’s exercise of kingly rule is not it (Prov 31:4-5).

Thus far my observation, with some progress on definitive, rational, and implicational questions. But how would the original audience have applied this poem?

It may be tempting to go directly to contemporary application, considering how we make use of our own strength and mouth, and whether we employ them to wise, selfless, and just ends. Such time would certainly be profitable, but perhaps a less direct route will lay an even stronger foundation for application.

The book of Proverbs is something of a manual for training up nobles and rulers in Israel. When Solomon speaks to “my son” in chapters 1-9, he is speaking not only to his direct heir but also to all the youth among the nobility (see where Prov 4:1, 24:21, etc., where the “sons” are either plural or are not in direct line to the throne). So if we apply every passage directly to the Christian “everyman,” we lose something of the book’s focus on training leaders.

The people of Israel hearing Proverbs 31:1-9 may not have immediately considered how they used their own strength or mouth. After all, many of them would be in the category of those for whom it would be appropriate to forget their poverty (Prov 31:6-7)!

Instead, upon hearing this text, they would be far more inclined to consider what sort of king they need to rule them in wisdom. They might expect their king to take this poem more personally than they themselves do. And if he wouldn’t, they would keep waiting and watching for another such king to arise.

Such consideration of the original audience helps us to see Christ more clearly in the text. And since we have been united to him through faith, it remains appropriate to apply the text to us today. But having gone through Christ to get to application, we’ve ratcheted up the urgency and persuasiveness.

One Caution

In order to determine a text’s implications on the original audience, we must be able to identify who that original audience is. Such identification is quite tricky for narratives, for at least two reasons.

The first reason is that we often don’t know who the precise audience was. It would be difficult to nail down exactly which generation was the first audience for Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1-2 Samuel, or Esther. We can’t be too precise about the audience for some of the gospels, as we’re not told. In all such cases, we must remain fuzzy, though it still helps to know “these people needed a king,” or “these people must have been Jewish Christians.”

The second reason the identification is tricky is that we often confuse the text’s audience with the text’s characters. So when studying the sermon on the Mount, we might find ourselves putting ourselves in the shoes of those who were present, listening to the sermon as Jesus preached it. But instead, we ought to put ourselves in the shoes of those reading the book that Matthew wrote.

So the implications of the text on the characters within the text might help you to understand the text. But what’s even more significant is to grasp the implications of the text on those who first read the text.

Conclusion

When you can clearly answer the question of “how would they have applied it?” you’ll be far more likely to get a strong answer to “how should we apply it?”

Why Elisha Called Bears to Attack 42 Youths

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The book of 1-2 Kings has some strange incidents in it. One of them is when Elisha curses forty-two “small boys” for calling him “baldhead.”

23 He went up from there to Bethel, and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” 24 And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys.

2 Kings 2:23-24

What is going on here?

Crossway recently published a wonderful piece by Gary Millar, excerpted from his commentary, where he explains the historical and covenantal context for what’s happening in this episode.

Is this a shocking incident? Yes it is… But this incident is also one that fits perfectly with the flow of 2 Kings 1–2, in which we see very clearly how God not only works in the darkness but will not be silenced, continuing to speak through this prophet. It is the response to this prophetic word that determines whether God’s people experience blessing or curse.

Check it out!

Beware The Leech’s Daughters

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I’ve always been puzzled—but fascinated—by Proverbs 30:15a:

The leech has two daughters: Give and Give.

Prov 30:15a, ESV

The NIV puts the “gives” in their mouths rather than in their names:

The leech has two daughters. ‘Give! Give!’ they cry.

Prov 30:15a, NIV

Regardless of whether “give” is their label or their lingo, what is going on in this proverbial saying?

Image by István Asztalos from Pixabay

Notice what follows

The next stanza, about four things that are never satisfied, certainly relates.

There are three things that are never satisfied, 
four that never say, ‘Enough!’: 
the grave, the barren womb, 
land, which is never satisfied with water, 
and fire, which never says, ‘Enough!’

Prov 30:15b-16, NIV

The demands (or names) of the leech’s daughters are parallel to these four things that never say “enough.” Just as the grave is never satisfied with the size of its membership, and fire never decides it’s time to pack up and go home—so also there are leech fathers and daughters who will always demand more and more and more.

Okay, that makes sense, but what is the point? What wisdom is the sage trying to teach here?

Notice what sandwiches

These sayings about perpetually dissatisfied things come right between two stanzas about a generation that rejects the wisdom of ages past. A generation that believes itself to be on the right side of history, having developed beyond the antiquated wisdom of its ancestors.

There are those who curse their father
and do not bless their mothers.
There are those who are clean in their own eyes
but are not washed of their filth.
There are those—how lofty are their eyes,
how high their eyelids lift!
There are those whose teeth are swords,
whose fangs are knives,
to devour the poor from off the earth,
the needy from among mankind.

Prov 30:11-14

The eye that mocks a father
and scorns to obey a mother
will be picked out by the ravens of the valley
and eaten by the vultures.

Prov 30:17

Can’t help but ask

So what is it that drives such a generation to reject the wisdom of previous generations? To curse and mock fathers and forefathers?

Could it be an insatiable drive for more? A perpetual lack of satisfaction?

Or is it the other way around? Is it the rejection of ancient wisdom that causes the perpetual dissatisfaction of a generation of leeches? Such that, when you lose your grounding in the reality of God’s world, you have nothing left but to make increasing demands of the people and the world around you?

The leech has two daughters. Not only in ancient Israel, but quite alive and well today.

How to Study the Prophets

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Have you ever struggled to navigate the prophetic books of the Old Testament? These ancient poetic texts speak to circumstances far removed from our own, yet with great impact on our understanding of the person and work of Christ. The apostles quoted often from the prophets when seeking to explain the good news of Christ’s kingdom.

Brian Estelle has a few brief but meaty suggestions to help you read these books with greater profit.

  1. Investigate the context.
  2. Recognize the role of the prophets as God’s covenant lawyers.
  3. Learn to be aware of the prophetic idiom.
  4. Hunt for ways in which the New Testament Scriptures cite, allude to, or echo the Prophets.

He explains each point with clear examples to help you along your way. Check it out!

How to Find Answers to Your Questions

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When we study the Bible, most of interpretation consists of asking and answering questions. The questions themselves arise from our curiosity over our observations. But the answers? Do you know where to find those?

The Most Important Place to Look for Answers

At this point, conventional wisdom lists a number of resources and reference works that ought to be in a Christian’s library. I’ll get to such a list soon, but don’t let it distract you from the better portion.

The most important place to seek answers to your questions is in the text itself. Some of you reading this find this conviction self-evident and obvious, and you have already made a habit of seeking answers in the text. But for many others, it will take more practice. Seeking answers in the text itself is a habit that must be formed, and sometimes bad habits are very slow to die.

For example, I recently listened to podcast discussing the creation account of Genesis 1. The teacher based most of his instruction on the proposition that Genesis 1 is in the form of poetry. His evidence for this assertion arose from the assessments of scholars, comparisons with other ancient texts, and his philosophical framework regarding eastern vs. western worldviews.

The problem was that he never supported his primary assertion with evidence from the text itself. Now I’m open to discussing the question of the genre of Genesis 1. And all of the external evidence certainly matters. But that which trumps all of the external evidence is internal evidence from the text itself.

  • Genesis 1 does not present clauses in parallel lines like other Hebrew poetry does.
  • Genesis 1 does not use similes, metaphors, or emotive language the way other poetry does.
  • The Hebrew syntax of Genesis 1 uses verb forms and verb sequences standard to the narratives of Scripture. The same sort of syntax employed in most of the rest of the book of Genesis, which is clearly (and commonly agreed to be) made up of narratives.

Such evidence from the text supports a conclusion that Genesis 1 presents itself as narrative (even historical narrative), just as the rest of the book does. Now this evidence in itself does not guarantee that the events of Genesis 1 must be in a strict chronological sequence, since biblical narratives often rearrange chronology in order to communicate a particular message. But the evidence does strongly suggest that we ought to read the chapter as narrative and not as poetry.

Answers Addressed in the Text

So when your noble curiosity generates questions regarding your observation of the text (questions such as, what genre or text type is this?), your best instinct to cultivate is an instinct that searches the text itself for the answers. Search and search and search.

Let your questions drive you deeper into observation. Let observation and interpretation swirl round and round like a cyclone, in ever tighter loops.

You may be surprised to find how many of your questions can be answered within the text, if you only learn how and where to look. When such examination of the text becomes habitual, you will improve dramatically at being able to defend your conclusions and persuade others.

Answers Assumed in the Text

One obstacle for us today is when the biblical author assumes the answers to your questions. He wasn’t writing to you or me. He had his own audience. So he wasn’t trying to anticipate your questions, but those of his own audience.

This means that there is quite a bit of background information that’s not stated explicitly but nonetheless affects interpretation. For example, the author of Genesis 1 presumes prior knowledge of which “God” is the one engaging in the work of creation. Is it Yahweh, Astarte, Baal, Zeus, or last season’s winner of American Idol? Learning from external reference works about the author and audience of Genesis would help to clarify the answer to this question somewhat quickly.

For another example, comparisons to other ancient creation stories will yield great benefit. What makes this God in this story different from the Gods of Gilgamesh’s epic, or Enuma Elish? Some of these contrasts would have been obvious to those living in ancient times, but we can miss them on account of centuries of distance.

How to Determine When an Answer is Assumed

In the name of “the answer is assumed,” we run the risk of justifying just about any conclusion we can find in a reference work. How do we determine whether the answer is truly assumed, or we are simply importing it where it doesn’t belong?

This process isn’t a perfect science, but the key issue is: Do you have good reason to believe the original audience would have made this assumption? The more reason you have to believe that, the stronger will be the answers you find in reference works.

So ask: Would the original audience already have the necessary background knowledge? Would they have truly been familiar with this parallel text, cultural artifact, body of knowledge, etc.?

If so, then it makes sense to look up your answer in a commentary, study guide, or Bible atlas. We have a wealth of tools available to us today to help us get into the mindset of the original readers. Let’s make good use of them.

When to Let it Go

But if you can’t find the answer addressed in the text, and you don’t have good reason to believe it was assumed, you probably need to make like Elsa and let it go.

Resist the urge to close the knowledge gap simply with systematic theology, denominational tradition, or prior experience. Theology and tradition are important, but they fit best not while interpreting (answering interpretive questions) but while correlating (after determining the author’s main point). We must understand the present passage on its own terms, in light of its original audience, first, before we attempt to connect it to teaching found elsewhere in the Bible.

One exception to the principle in the previous sentence lies with certain implicational questions. Because implicational questions bridge the gap from interpretation into application, they often work best after we’ve determined the main point. So it may make sense to make use of reference works to help draw out those implications and stimulate our own reflection concerning them.

So how do we find answers to our interpretive questions? By shoving our noses back into the text for deeper observation. When further observation suggests that the answer would have been assumed and self-evident to the original audience, we’re then justified in pursuing external resources to help us better understand the mindset or culture of that audience. However, if we don’t have good reason to believe the answer is either addressed or assumed in the text, we’re best off letting the question go until another passage takes it up. There’s no shame in setting aside a particular question for a brighter day.

Why the Spirit is Willing but the Flesh is Weak

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Zach Hollifield has a wonderful article where he makes a keen observation and asks a crucial rational interpretive question:

It’s when Jesus returns from his own prayer to find them snoozing that he utters the infamous line “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” …

Matthew and Mark go out of their way to make it clear that Jesus says this to Peter and Peter alone. Mark even quotes Jesus as beginning the statement with, “Simon, are you asleep—?” Jesus finds all three sleeping, and yet when he makes the statement about the spirit being willing and flesh being weak, he says it directly to just one disciple. Why?

Hollifield finds in the text compelling answers to his question, leading to some really helpful application. This is a great example of strong Bible study skills.

Check it out!