So welcome to our first class of hermeneutics. I call it getting our bearings because that's what we're actually doing. Why are we studying hermeneutics? First of all, where do we even get the word hermeneutics? Well, it's a Greek word. It comes from the Greek God, the messenger of the God, and it'd be Hermes. That's where it comes from. Hermes would speak to the gods. He'd take the messages from man up to the gods, and he'd take the gods' messages down to mankind, and from god to god, and wherever he needed to. So anyway, that's how we come up with this word, because it's a message from God. And since the Greeks came up with the word, and we couldn't figure out one any better, we decided to stick with this. So we call it hermeneutics. It's a big word, It's actually easy to understand, easy to grasp here. So, in this first class on hermeneutics, it's getting our bearings. Why are we studying hermeneutics? Well, is God speaking to me? Does the Bible speak to me? And if it does, what is God telling me? How will I live? We all have this question. How am I supposed to live? Why am I living? Why am I here? And for what will I live? What does God want me to do? These are all reasons that we read the Bible. Because if we're not reading the Bible to answer these fundamental questions, then why are you reading the Bible? What's the purpose of it? And we want to get God's message out of the scriptures that he has for us, because that's really the whole point of the Bible, is to understand what God wants to tell us. But since God doesn't speak to just us, but to mankind throughout history, we have to try to understand what that message is, because he's not writing the Bible today. He wrote the Bible, Well, the last book was closed out 2,000 years ago. And it stretches back over 4,000 years. So it's a very, very, very old book. And so what he wrote to the people back then means something to us today. But we have to find the message. Because we don't live today like they lived back then. And so we have to put it into a context that they understood, not that we understand. And we'll discuss that in more detail as we go along. So here's how people usually approach hermeneutics. There's the, how it feels, the I think. I think the Bible says. Karl Barth, who was a German theologian in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, he popularized this approach. The Word of God is only the Word of God if it speaks to you. So let's say we're reading a passage and you're moved by that passage. You have a feeling about that passage. You think it's talking to you. Then that is the Word of God for you. Doesn't do anything for me. It's not God's Word for me. So we got to pick and choose. Now we reject that, but that was very, very popular. And we hear this constantly in the churches today. When you throw out a question, Usually the first response you get is, well, I think. And who cares what you think? What are you basing it on? I think means I have an opinion. Congratulations, you're breathing. Everybody has an opinion, but we don't want to know your opinion. We want to know what God says. Our opinion should be based upon the Word of God. So, when we have an opinion, we should be able to give book, chapter, and verse. We rarely hear that in church anymore. Then there's the spiritualizing approach, the I believe. Augustine popularized this in the Christian movement. but actually it predates him. About 500 BC, the Greeks were already allegorizing their mythologies. That's their religion. Their stories of Hermes and Zeus and all that, that's their religion. And they're already understanding that they weren't real. So if they're not real, but they're part of our culture and we don't want to throw them out because then we won't be Greek anymore, we got to make them mean something. and thus they would assign meanings to all the mythologies, to all the stories, and make them mean whatever it was they wanted them to mean at that point in time. This got picked up by the Hebrews that were living in Alexandria, and they started allegorizing the Old Testament, because guess what? They felt the Old Testament was not real anymore because the Babylonians had kicked them out of the land. So how do we understand the promises of God if we're not in the land anymore? And according to Jeremiah, God said he was gonna kick us out of the land. Well, maybe it's not real. Well, we gotta have it because we're Hebrew. If we don't have the Old Testament, we're not Hebrew anymore, we're not anything. So how do I make it real to me? Well, I believe it actually says this. And then a gentleman named Origen, around 200 AD, picked this up and brought it into Christianity. And Augustine picked it up, and it became the foundation to Catholicism and one end of Protestantism and is still with us today. This allegory approach, assigning hidden meanings, it's a form of Gnosticism where we separate out the spiritual and the physical. The spiritual is the higher meaning, the deeper meaning, the true meaning, whereas the physical, the base meaning, It's just the base meaning. Only dumb people read that. The intelligent spiritual people find the hidden meanings of God. And believe it or not, that was extremely popular in the 19th century with the growth of higher criticism. And the fundamentals was a reaction to that, trying to get back to discovering what was God's message in the Bible, rather than put man's understanding into the Bible. And we'll look at that in a few moments also. And then there's the always the popular, I don't know. I don't know. When we come to the genealogies, what do you hear? I don't know. I skip those parts because they're boring. Why God put those in there? I don't know. So we skip them. And so we all know the popular stories, Joseph in the Technicolor coat, which really isn't in the Bible. Or as I heard here today, the Judah raped Tamar. story, but that's not in the Bible either. Or God leading the people out of Egypt, out of slavery, into freedom, but that's not really there either. And so you see the problem? If you do not have a way to pull out God's message out of the Scriptures, you put your own message into the Scriptures. And pretty soon you've developed a whole religion, system of works, around something that's not even there in the scriptures. And it's very easy trap to fall into. Well, we want to avoid that. Let's look at these in a little more detail. You have the intuitive approach, I think. The Word of God speaks to you. Understanding the text is limited, guess what, by your understanding. By definition, you can only get out of the text what you understand. So if you're approaching the scriptures by trying the I think method, it's not going to be any more than what you understand. Well, that's the problem, because what we're trying to learn in God's Word is what we do not understand. In other words, we're missing the message. So what's the point of reading the Bible then? If you're just going to get out of it what you already understand, and this is a very popular approach, because you go to the Bible to prove what you already believe, guess what? When you put the Bible down, you haven't learned anything, because you only know what you already believe. But that's not the point of the Bible. The point of the Bible is to teach you what you don't know. which means that we have to pull the meaning out of the scriptures, not overlay it with our understanding, our worldview, our understanding of right and wrong. If it feels right, then it must be right. And this is extremely popular in the last 50 years or so. I gotta have feeling. The music and all that is designed to make you feel. And thus, if you have a feeling, feelings. It's all about feelings. Then it must be right. Right? No. Because we bring our sinful, fallen nature, coupled with our immature, saved nature, to the party. And when you take the fallen nature and the immature nature, guess what? They're not going to get much out of the scripture. It takes work to get stuff out of the scripture. So what happens here is you define what the text means. That's a problem. In the spiritualizing method, the text doesn't make sense to you, therefore it must have a spiritual meaning. It must be hidden. I've got to go find it. So you assign meaning to the textual element. So when Moses parted the Red Sea, it wasn't really the sea, it was all the insurmountable problems of living in Egypt. And his sharp intellect parted those, through those, and he led the people out on dry ground of God's knowledge. In other words, they're saying miracles didn't happen. They wrote them down as miracles, but they're really not miracles. They're stories about conceptual elements, what they thought, what they believed. And so we need to go back and find those conceptual elements. And since we really don't care what happened two, three, 4,000 years ago, we'll assign today's elements to them. And so our own problems, God's Word will part, and you see how ridiculous that becomes. And they make up complex rules for how to allegorize, and then they immediately break them. And there's a reason for that, because you can't bring the same rules to a prophetic text that you bring to a poetical text that you bring through other styles of writing in the Bible. You can't follow the pattern or the rules that you made up. And you make the text meaningful, not God. And guess what? You define what the text means. Once again, that's the problem. That's not why we're reading the Bible. If we're telling God what the text means, we got an issue here. Oh, the shrug the shoulders, not make any sense. It makes no sense. It's not worth your while to have it make any sense. In other words, you have determined that this part of the Bible is useless. So you skip it. And since you cannot define what the text means, you ignore the text. Now that's the problem. If God wrote it down, why are we ignoring it? That shows our ignorance. And I did that quite often in my Christian walk. I'd skip over texts like genealogies. I was too lazy to go through the Bible and link the names up and see what they might have meant and see a pattern and have God teach me. So I was lazy. But I wanted to be considered intellectual. So I just say that text is useless and we'll just ignore it. But there's no part of God's Word that is useless and to be ignored. So if we summarize all these approaches to hermeneutics, It's just like the diagram says here, the Bible plus my interpretation equals my interpretation. In other words, the Bible is in my way. If I can't pull out the passages I need to support what I believe, I just ignore the Bible and continue on with what I believe. This is the approach of the Seeker Sensitive Movement. The Bible's in the way, so we'll remove the Bible and we'll turn it into plays and skits and movies. You know those two Canadians, the skit guys? Secret sensitive. That's why some of their skits are blasphemous. Not just bad taste, blasphemous. And you have to be careful when you watch those guys. Some of them are interesting. Some actually are taken directly out of scripture and kind of bring it to life for you. But a lot of them anymore are blasphemous. Because they're pretending to be God. And now they're having God speak in slang and other things. And that's the problem. You lower God to your level. Well, that's not the purpose in the scriptures. It's to raise you up toward God's level. So, you change the Bible rather than the Bible change you. And your worldview has robbed the text of its power to change you. The Bible only becomes a justification source for what you already believe. So, here it is. Two Greek words, eisa, eksa. Eis and ek. Eis, a Jesus. Eis is in, or into. This is how most people approach the Bible. They read into it. They put their meaning on top of the Bible rather than what we're doing, or learning to do, is ek, a Jesus. We want to pull God's meaning out of the scriptures. Now, with eisegesis, your worldview is extremely important. With exegesis, your worldview is kind of in the way. You got to move that out of the way. Otherwise, what you believe and why you believe it and this whole ball of wax from the 21st century you bring back to the 5th or 6th or 7th century BC and it doesn't make any sense. And those stories remain stories rather than real people in real situations acting like we do today. So the whole purpose of hermeneutics is exegesis, pulling the meaning out of the scripture. Any other approach is reading into the scripture. Easy trap to fall into. Unfortunately, when you say hermeneutics, this is what most people see. Everything in this diagram is true. And everything in this diagram, over time, you will learn. Not in this class. But it's all here, everything you need to know. But look at it. If you look at this diagram and you try to get it all in one gulp, you're not going to get it. It's too confusing. It overpowers you. That's why people avoid hermeneutics. Think of like eating a cow. Do you eat the cow all in one bite? No, not even all in one sitting. Eat it over time, a steak at a time. And this is how we approach hermeneutics. This is how God expects us to study the Bible. We read a passage and we get a meaning out of it. Then we learn and we grow and we read other passages. Then when you come back to that passage, your understanding is changed and you get something more out of it. You see relationships in there you didn't see before. And so, every time you come back to that passage, if you're growing, you'll see new things. That's how we know we're doing hermeneutics correctly. It's constantly changing us. And because the Word of God is written by an infinite God, there is infinite meaning in the message. Thus, we will never completely understand everything that God put in the scriptures. Wow. So you can spend your whole life studying the scriptures and you will not run out of meaning. Ever. Adam lived 900 years. He could not exhaust the scriptures. But little he had. But this is how we're going to do the scriptures. This is the simple approach to hermeneutics. Now notice, this is where we live. Right here, on the right-hand side of the bridge. Cities, towns, factories, skyscrapers, planes, trains, iPhones, computers, quadcopters, all the good stuff in life, right? But all the stuff that clouds are thinking. Because see, we need to get across this bridge over here where they didn't have any of that. But guess what? There are two constants. God does not change and mankind does not change. Sinful man is always sinful man. Righteous God is always righteous God. What changes are the trappings in which we find ourselves in? It's easier for God to write a message back in ancient history where they had fewer things to confuse them. then it would be today, because if he wrote today, talking about taking planes and spaceships and rockets and all this other stuff, and then put those books back 5,000 years in the past, would they understand any of that? No. I'll show you how hard it is. Go to the book of Revelation, starting in chapter 4, and read. And let me know if you understand a stinking word of what you're reading. And yet it was plain as day to the people who read it, at least in some form. That is our problem with hermeneutics. What they understood makes no sense to us, but it's easier for us to go back in time. understand the world as they understood it. But it takes work to do that. And the first thing you have to do then in crossing the bridge is you have to understand your worldview. This is how you see the world. Here's your thoughts. And there it is. It's like an iceberg. There are certain things that are clearly seen by you and everyone. such as results in your behavior and your ideas. That's what's called the visible part of the iceberg. But how about the hidden part, all that down here, based upon your human nature, that'd be your sinful human nature, and your human needs. and your competence, and your education, and your character, and your habits, and your thoughts, and all these things that people normally don't pay attention to in themselves. Why? Because the truth is you're the hero of your own story. Your understanding must be correct because it's yours. And what you consider right and wrong must be correct because it's yours. And that makes you the measure of all things. Ergo, or therefore, it makes you God. So, in your worldview, you are God. This is the essential concept of secular humanism. You're God. That's what Satan promised the woman. If you eat of the tree of knowledge, you will be as gods. Well, here you go. You got it. You are the hero of your own story. Unfortunately, you will die, burn in hell for all eternity by being the hero of your own story. Thus, we need the scriptures. So that we don't become the hero of our own story. Because guess what? We're not heroes at all. That is the problem. That we are not heroes. That we are not correct. We are sinful, fallen people. In fact, I would be correct in calling mankind full of idiots. We're all idiots. It comes from the Greek word idios. And that Greek word means separate, alone. We are ones who stand alone. In fact, it's all about me rising to the top and being on top of the pile all by myself. I'm the winner. That makes me an idiot. So, you're the hero of your own story, makes you an idiot. That puts it in perspective. Now we're beginning to see ourselves as God sees us. We have to destroy the American myth of the rugged individualist, going out into the wilderness, surviving on his own. For about three days. Then he runs out of supplies. And then the Indians catch him, and he's all by himself, and fair game. Or he gets diseased, or he falls down and breaks a bone, and no one's there to help him set it. And he quickly dies. And because he's dead, and there's nobody to help him, the animals come and eat him. Ew. It's an idiot. Pioneers weren't like that. American history wasn't made like that. World history is not made like that. It's made of people working together. And when they can't work together, they kill each other off. And a new group comes in. Why? Because we're idiots. That's how we do it. Nice little cartoon here. Here's the illusion that most people have. They think that they're living without a worldview. They think they can live in a world that has no right or wrong. Yet, well, they also think they live in a world non-judgmentally. But as it shows here, I refuse to be victimized by the notions of virtuous behavior. He's already judgmental. he's already determined right and wrong. In other words, he's already committed the logical error of contradiction. And this is the world that we live in, as sinners, a world full of contradictions. Give you an example out of Buddhism. What's the whole, what is the goal of Buddhism? Well, Desire is the root of all evil. Therefore, I must live a life free of desire to remove all evil from my life. But if that is your goal, then you must desire it. But to desire not to desire violates the law of non-contradiction. If you have a desire, then you cannot not desire. clunk, you violated your own worldview. We do this all the time. And then we turn around and get mad when people point it out. It's like evolution. It's random changes. Well, random implies there's no organization. And yet we look around the world, in the world, and what do we see? Plants and animals grouped in an organized fashion. Ergo, there cannot be randomness, then ergo there cannot be evolution. Because evolution is random. So there's never an upward flow, there's never an organized flow. But yet if you talk to an evolutionist, it's always organized and it's always upward. But it can't be randomness. See, they violated the law of non-contradiction. But if you point this out, they just get hostile. Then they shoot you. Because they're non-judgmental, but you are, so they're going to shoot you. Which means they're judgmental. Well, you get the idea how that goes. But see, this is why we need the scriptures. This is why as Christians we have to come to the scriptures, because the scriptures really are the only source of absolute true knowledge. Now see, if I was writing a book about starting a religion, guess what? I would not start a religion where the first 300 years everyone dies, because that's not helping me. I'm not gonna start a faith, start a movement where I'm gonna die. Because that's not the purpose to start a religion. We look at all the wealth and prosperity preachers today, they're not starting churches so they can go die. They're starting churches so they can get rich. And that's why I'd be writing books and starting religion. And if I started a book, I'd be the hero of my own story, right? When we look in the Bible, Adam was not the hero. Abraham, not the hero. He kept pushing his wife off to save his own skin. Isaac ignored the Word of God, so he's not the hero. And Jacob, he's just tricking everybody, so he surely isn't the hero. And his sons, they're killing everybody, so they're not heroes. Well, how about David? Let's see, he slept with Bathsheba. No, I don't think he's a hero either. Jeremiah, surely he was the hero. He kept quitting, kept whining to God about how he didn't like being thrown into mud pits and imprisoned and eating moldy bread, he was whining a lot. That's why he's called the whining prophet, I mean the weeping prophet. How about Peter? No, he wasn't making it. Christ had to allow Satan to grind him down to show Peter that he really wasn't the hero of the story after all. How about Paul? Let's see, thorn in the flesh, won't go away. Why? Cut you down to size so you pay attention. How about you? How about me? Same thing. See, so the Bible there is to work on our worldview, to work on our fundamental nature. And that's what it does. Because first it has to change us from the lost old man, as we see in Colossians 3.9, to a new nature. And Colossians 3.9 reads, Do not lie to one another, saying that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator." See, that's what salvation is. Putting off the old, putting on the new. But we can't do that. God has to do that for us. And in 2 Corinthians 5, 17, you do well to memorize this. It says, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. All things have passed away. Behold, the new has come. So, this is what the Bible does, both at the moment of salvation and continually thereafter as long as you stay in it. It changes you. If it's not changing you, You're not doing hermeneutics. You're not trying to get God's message out of it. It requires, first of all, that you open up the book and start to read it. No reading, no hermeneutics. So it begins with, how do we read the Bible? Changing worldviews. Once again, we come back to this bridge. And guess what? We are, once again, we're still over here, and we want to get across this bridge to here. But look, we have to understand the time, the culture, the language, situation, even the covenant. Old Testament or New Testament. It's easier if you lived in the time of Christ to understand the time of Moses. In some ways, he didn't live that much different. In other ways, it was very different. But we can't even understand the difference in worldview between people born today and people born in the beginning of the 20th century, or even myself. Do you realize that when I was born, there were no interstates? There were no transistors. Oh, they had developed the concept of transistors. They weren't making any appliances and stuff with transistors. There were no satellites. There was no internet. And a radio was something you had to plug into the wall because it was kind of big. Because everything was vacuum tube technology. I sit down and talk to people about how the world was when I was a very little boy, not a concept, not even an attempt to understand. So if you can't even go back 60 years, how can you go back 2,000 years or 4,000 years? Yet in hermeneutics, this is exactly what we have to do. So we have to ask some questions. The standard questions, who, what, where, when? Whom was the text written? When you're reading in the Bible, or in anything, you have to ask yourself, to who is this being written to? And what is being addressed? What problems? What issues? Where did they live? What was their culture? What was their worldview? How did they understand the message? And where did they live? And when did they live in history? Because that's very important. Because if you go back to 400 B.C. and you talk about the concept of citizenship, they have no understanding of what it is you're talking about. That is a purely Roman concept. So if you try to take that concept of citizenship and overlay it on the events that are happening in the historical portions of the Old Testament, which is what we bring to the party in our worldview, it makes no sense. How can Elimelech go from Judah to Moab without a passport? You didn't have them. There's no such thing. Thus, we can't bring that concept back in time. So, you have to know when they lived. Then you have to put on their worldview. You have to understand the text as the readers understood it. You have to define the words as the readers would have defined it. You cannot bring a definition of today back in time. That's why I do a great deal of word studies, because I want to know how that word was defined back then. And I want to know how it was defined outside the Bible as well as inside the Bible. Because the Bible changed the meaning of some words. Like Ekklesia. In classical Greek, that meant an assembly. Not a religious assembly. It could be an assembly that was called together to meet a specific problem. But in the New Testament, is translated routinely as church. It takes on a whole new meaning inside the scriptures. So crossing the bridge means putting on their worldview insofar as we can all the while not forgetting our own biblical understanding of from the New Testament. In other words, when we go back in time to the Old Testament, we want to make sure that we're not putting on an overlay and putting it on top of the Mosaic Law and saying, see, everything is grace. Why are they killing each other? Why are they doing this? Why are they doing that? Because that's not grace. And God is constant, so it should be grace. And why isn't it like that? We have a great discussion about that. I'm afraid if you don't bring hermeneutics to the party and exegete out of the scriptures, it doesn't make any sense. And that, unfortunately, is how people approach the Old Testament. They say the God of the Old Testament is harsh and mean and we don't want Him. He's mean. He told Israelites to kill everybody. Yes, he did. In the promised land. And he did that for a specific reason. He gave them over 400 years to repent of their issues, their sin. Especially after he called fire down from heaven and destroyed two of their cities on the plain, and they had a visual demonstration of why they were wrong. Did they change? Nope. Got worse. If God had brought them back into the land and left them, left that other culture there, what would have happened to the Hebrews? They would have disappeared. They would have become just like them. How do we know that? Well, that's why they went into Egypt because, saying in the Promised Land, they were becoming just like them. That's why they had to leave. That's why God pulled them out for a while. And so, that is why it's different. Now, once we understand what's going on in that time period, that history and why, and we also come from the perspective that God is God, so He can do anything He wants to. That's why He's God. And it's up to us to say He's God. Then we begin to understand why it's different in the Gospels. because he's not making a specific people anymore, not a specific earthly people, culture. He's not doing that anymore. The Gospel message is going out and the Gospel message is trans-culture. In other words, you don't have to become an American to accept the Gospel. You don't have to become anything to accept the Gospel. You just accept the gospel and it changes you. But it doesn't mean you have to change to be a certain kind of people. Like Americans or Europeans or Africans, no. You just become people of God. And that's what we do with hermeneutics. We study to show ourselves approved. 2 Timothy. Another scripture nice to understand, 2, 15 and 16. Do your best to present yourselves to God as one approved to a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. But avoid irreverent babble, for it will lead people into more and more ungodliness. That's why we avoid babbling. That's why we avoid, I think, and I feel, and I believe. That's why when we taught Bible, What do I always ask you? Where is it at? Because if you're standing on your opinion, you're an idiot because you're alone. Well, I get more people and thus we all have the same opinion. So, if one person is an idiot and you have a collection of people who are idiots, what do you have? Idiots. You're not even closer to the truth, there's just more of you. We're still idiots because the Bible hasn't changed you. You're still trying to change the Bible. Now, our goal is to be, not to be idiots, not stand alone heroes of our own story. Thus, we start with the text, the paragraph, the book. We start with all of this to try to understand it. And we do that from this. Now everyone screams, because on the left is the Hebrew and on the right is the Greek. Now notice, there's no spaces, there's no punctuation. This material was so precious that they didn't waste it putting in spaces. So when you start to read it and translate, you have to first of all put in spaces, divide it up into words. Then you have to divide it up into sentences by putting in punctuation or question marks. Then you have to try and divide it up into paragraphs. So already we're translating it as we're reading the document. But this is how it starts. And guess what? This is where we have to start. is knowing the words. However, before we can first know the words, what we really have to understand is, do we believe the Bible? And that's what we'll be covering next week. Do we really believe the Bible? Is the Bible the Word of God? Because if you don't believe that, then all the hermeneutics in the world aren't going to help you to understand God. There's many people down through history, with many degrees after their name, who have analyzed the Bible and have missed the truth of it. We don't want to be one of them. We want to be approved unto God. Thank you.