Well, welcome to Christian Life Academy. This morning we are in our biblical theology track, being the second Sunday of the month, which means that we are discussing how to study the Bible. So the last couple of months we have discussed the idea of devotional Bible reading and what that looks like. Last month we went over various Bible reading plans, the importance of having a Bible reading plan, and discussed some different ones. This morning I want to talk about Bible study tools. I want to talk about the tools that we use to study the Bible. There is a difference, obviously, between studying and reading. Up to this point we have talked about reading the Bible. This morning we are going to begin to talk about studying the Bible and what that means. Reading, of course, should be done with knowledge and with understanding. But study, we're going to look at the details. We're going to go deeper. We're going to spend more time in the text rather than just continuing to read and to move on. And so we're going to stay in the text until we have satisfied our mind and our soul with the knowledge of God that He has revealed to us in a particular text. So, you know, as we think about studying our Bible, of course, what verse comes to mind first? 2 Timothy 2.15, right? Study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman that needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. So, Paul is telling Timothy there to be diligent, to study the scriptures in order to be approved by God as someone who has put in the work, put in the diligent work. to study the scriptures. So as we talk about studying the Bible, I want to define a couple of key words for us that you've heard likely, I know I've used them before, and the first one I want to define for us is the word exegesis. So you might be familiar with this word, with the concept of exegetical preaching or exegesis of the scripture. We use that word but I want to make sure that we understand what we're talking about. The word comes actually from two Greek words, ex meaning out of and the Jesus part, meaning to guide or to lead. So the idea, when we talk about exegeting the scripture, or exegesis of the scripture, is that we are letting the scripture lead us. We're letting the scripture itself guide us. The ideas that we're getting are coming out of the scripture in order to lead us. The opposing concept is what we call eisegesis, Eisegesis does not mean to isolate a text. What it means, rather, is coming from the Greek prefix eis, E-I-S, which means into. And that means that we're taking our ideas and leading them into the scripture, that we're imposing on the scripture something that we didn't derive from it, but rather we're coming to it with preconceived ideas. And, you know, the fact of the matter is we all have preconceptions when we come to the Bible. So the difficulty for us is to set those aside and let the scripture actually lead us and inform us. So as we study the Bible, that's what we want to do. We want to let the scripture lead us. We want God to lead us through the scripture. So what tools do we need as we undertake to study our Bibles? Well, what's the first one we need? A Bible, obviously. We need a Bible, right? Printed, on your phone, whatever it is, on the computer. You need an English Bible, right? Are any of us here Hebrew or Greek scholars that are going to read it in the original language? No. So we need an English Bible that we can read from. And we need to be thankful that we have this. I mean, this was part of what happened during the Reformation, was the translation of the scriptures into the language that the people could understand. Up to that point, the scripture was available in Latin, and the common people did not speak Latin. Up until that happened, until those scriptures began to be translated, the common person sitting in church, sat in church, didn't understand what was happening and didn't have a copy of the Bible for themselves that they could read in their own language. So we should be extremely thankful that we have the scriptures in a language that we can understand, that we can read. So as we sit down and pick up our Bible each day to read it or to study it, we should begin with thanksgiving to God that we even have the ability to do that. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time talking about scripture translations, but I do wanna spend a moment or two. There are obviously different types of translations into the English language. The two major categories are what we call formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. Dynamic equivalence is more the translators are looking at the original languages and trying to translate the thoughts as they perceive them into the English language. These are translations like the NIV, other translations like this, a lot of the modern language translations. Those can be helpful at times, especially for new readers of the Bible, but if we're going to study the Bible, we need to know what the words of God are, the particular words that were inspired by God. So, we want to look at a formal equivalent translation, one that's looking at the word as the basic unit of translation rather than the thought. We want a translation that is formal equivalence. These would be things like the King James, the New King James, the New American Standard, the ESV, ones that took the single word as the basic unit of translation. Of course, there are the underlying Greek manuscript traditions behind those. whether you've got the modern critical text or a Byzantine text family. We're not going to go down that road this morning. It's a big can of worms. I have my opinions on that. Obviously, I preach from the New King James, which comes from the Byzantine text family. So if you want to talk to me about that, I'm happy to geek out about that. But we're not going to go that way this morning. The big issue is use a formal equivalent translation. one that's going to be as accurate as possible, word for word, as we begin to study. The second thing that we need as we study the Bible is a reading plan, which we discussed last month, but we need a reading plan because we need to not just dig in and look at the individual trees, but we need to keep our eye on the forest, so to speak. We need to make sure that we're seeing the big picture, and as we study a particular text, that we're able to put it in its larger biblical context. So we need to continue to read through the Bible and be familiar with the entire storyline. This is going to help us as we study particular texts because there are biblical patterns of speech and biblical phrases that will come up over and over again in Scripture, particularly as you get into the latter parts of the Old Testament and into the New Testament. There are words and phrases and ideas that come from earlier portions of Scripture. So the more familiar that you are with the overall context of all of Scripture, that is going to help you understand the specifics when you begin to study particular passages. Having a reading plan that you continue to work through even though you're studying specific passages in detail will help prevent you from getting bogged down and missing the larger context. You could dive into a particular book, say Galatians, and study it in infinite detail and kind of get lost there for a long time. It helps to continue to read broadly across the canon of scripture while you're doing that. So that's the second thing we need is a reading plan. The third tool that we need as we read the Bible is a notebook and a pen or a pencil. We need to be able to take some notes. We need to be able to write down some things as we study the scripture. We need to write down, particularly, questions that we have as we read the text. A couple of months ago, as we began to look at this idea of Bible study, I presented us with some of the sorts of questions that we ought to be asking of the text. Beginning next month, we will look at particular biblical genres and begin to look in more detail of how do we study wisdom literature, how do we study the epistles, and what are the specific questions that we ought to be asking as we do that. But it's helpful as you're studying the scripture to be able to write down the questions that you have about the text. I find it helpful myself to actually, if you're studying, and you're not studying a whole chapter at once, but you're studying a verse or two, to actually copy that verse into my notebook and copy it with space in between the lines so that I can circle and underline and draw arrows and connect things and write questions right there next to the text. So a notebook and a pencil is very, very helpful. I will review briefly some of the sorts of questions that we talked about in general. We'll apply these specifically in the coming months as we look at different biblical genres. But we need to ask questions about the content or the context of the passage that we're studying. We need to ask what sort of literature is it? Is it a letter? Is it poetry? Is it a narrative of historical events? We need to ask what circumstances was it written in. We need to ask ourselves, okay, as I'm studying these verses, where does that fit in the larger argument? What has happened so far, say, in Paul's argument as he's writing a letter? I'm looking at chapter two, verses 15 and 16, and I need to know what came before that so I can put it in context. At what point in redemptive history are we in the particular thing that I'm studying? Is this before Christ came, after Christ came? after the resurrection? Where are we in redemptive history? We need to ask some questions about observations that we make about the text. Is there a structure to it? As Paul has led us through so many Psalms on Wednesday nights, we see over and over again there's structure to these Psalms. There's this chiastic structure that we see in Hebrew literature and that can help aid our understanding of the text if we're aware of the structure. What's the main point? Is there anything surprising in this text? Something that I need to dig into? Are there keywords that are repeated multiple times? What's the significance of that? We need to ask questions about the meaning. How does this relate to the text around it? How does it relate to the Bible as a whole? How does it relate to Christ as we're looking at any particular text? What is it teaching us about God? So we need to ask these sorts of questions and then of course application questions too. What is this text doing? Is this text instructing me? Is it convicting me? Is it exhorting me? Encouraging me? Is it challenging me in some way? How do I need to think about what the text is trying to do and how I need to apply that in my own life? So we need a notebook and a pencil or a pen so that we can write these things down as we're studying. The fourth thing that we need is a concordance. And the reason that we need, I'm putting these in order of importance in my opinion. So a Bible, a reading plan, a notebook and a pencil, and now a concordance. The reason we need a concordance is because as we're studying the scripture, we need to look up the cross-references. We need to look up other passages that speak to the same idea or the same subject. So if we're studying a text and there's a particular word in there, it's helpful to look that word up in the concordance and see where else it's used, particularly by the same biblical authors, so we can get an idea of how they use the word. broadly across all of scripture. We want to look and see where else is this subject spoken about? What else can I learn about it? You'll remember that we spoke about some key principles of biblical interpretation and one of them was what we call the analogy of scripture. And that means the interpretation of unclear, difficult, or ambiguous passages of scripture by comparison with clear and unambiguous passages that refer to the same teaching or event. So the cross references are helpful for that. A concordance is helpful because if you run across a word or a phrase you can look it up in the concordance and see where else scripture talks about the same subject. Digital resources can be extremely helpful in this way. If you've got digital Bible study software that you can just be reading a text and click on the word you're interested in and then have it find everywhere that that word is used for you. You can even have it find not just where that English word is used, but where that particular Greek or Hebrew word is used. So those can be very, very helpful. Next, the fifth thing, next fifth tool that we need as we study our scripture is a copy of the Confession, I think. at a minimum, a copy of the Confession, or possibly even a full systematic theology, maybe a multi-volume systematic theology. And this is helpful for us because, again, we want to put things in their broader scriptural context. If I'm studying a passage that's dealing with, say, the subject of adoption, I can look up in the systematic theology and read about the doctrine of adoption and what it means and other passages and what the scripture as a whole teaches on that subject. This is what we call the analogy of faith. This is the use of the general sense of the meaning of scripture constructed from the clear and unambiguous passages as the basis for interpreting unclear or ambiguous passages. It's distinct from the basic analogy of scripture as the analogy of faith presupposes a sense of the theological meaning of scripture as a whole. By the way, I'm taking those definitions from a book that I'm going to talk about here in a few minutes as another tool we might use. So we want to look at what the scripture as a whole says on any particular subject, and so the copy of the confession or systematic theology can be very helpful in that regard. The sixth tool that we need is a couple of dictionaries. We need two of them. We need a Bible dictionary and we need an English dictionary. We need a Bible dictionary so that we can look up people, places, theological topics. Easton's Bible dictionary is very good. It's one that I use. So that's helpful to be able to look those things up. You're reading, say, an Old Testament narrative and it's talking about a particular town. You can look that town up in the Bible dictionary to give you some background, the geographical setting, all the major events that have happened in that town or region. So it can be helpful to aid your understanding of the text to use a Bible dictionary. We also need an English dictionary. And the reason we need an English dictionary is because we're not as smart as we like to think we are. We often read and we think we understand what we're reading and most of the time we may actually not understand how certain words are being used. And so it's helpful to look up the definitions. Now we need to be careful. You look a word up in the dictionary, it might have multiple definitions. They don't all apply every time the word is used, right? So words have meaning in sentences. So the dictionary is helpful to look up words, but we need to make sure we're considering the context. We can look it up, see the multiple definitions that might be available, and then look at the context and figure out which one of those definitions is likely the intended meaning of the word, but we shouldn't assume that we understand what the words mean. If you are using an older translation such as the Geneva or the King James, we need to know that we understand what is actually being conveyed. I read the King James every morning in my personal Bible reading. It's what I use. I've been reading it my whole life. And Lauren will tell you, almost every morning I'm still looking something up because there's a word there that I'm going, How are they using this word? What do they mean by it? Just one example of that is from Philippians chapter 1 verse 27 that says, Well, that sounds like it's about our words and what we say, right? But that's not how the King James uses the word conversation. When it uses the word conversation in most contexts, it's actually talking about our behavior, about our conduct. So we need to make sure we understand the word and how it's being used. This particular one is fairly handy. I've not had a King James Bible that had this before, but this one actually has a dictionary in the back of the King's English. So if there's words that you're afraid you don't understand, you can look them up right here and it'll tell you what the likely intended meaning of that word was in the King James. So that's very helpful to make sure we understand what we're reading. The seventh tool that we can use are commentaries. And this is where people often jump too soon, I think. But commentaries can be helpful, but they are someone else's opinion of what the scripture is teaching. Now they can be extremely helpful because most of the time the commentaries are written by people who understand the languages better than we do, who have studied the scriptures, but we want to be careful that we're using good commentaries and we want to be careful that we're using commentaries that are going to help us in the particular task that we're doing. If you're studying the Bible for yourself just to understand it better, you likely don't need an exegetical commentary that's diving into all the particulars of the Greek grammar and stuff. Now, you may love that, and you may want to do that, but you may not need that, and it may be more confusing than it is helpful. But there are different sorts of commentaries. Primarily, this is how I use commentaries, just so you know. I use the commentaries after I have done all my other study to confirm that I didn't mess it up. I've studied the text, I've looked up the cross-references, I've studied the theological concepts, I've come to an idea of what I think the text is teaching, and then I go look at the commentaries to make sure I didn't get it wrong. That's one of the primary uses of commentaries, I think. Here are some of the commentaries that I would recommend if you're interested in which commentaries to use. If you're going to get one commentary, use Matthew Henry. It's a good one volume. It's very thorough, but it's a good Puritan commentary that is trusted. It's very insightful. It's very pastoral in the way it's written. It'll give you good application for your life, so it's very helpful. Calvin's commentary can be very helpful. It's a multi-volume set. It's incomplete. He didn't write a commentary on every single book of the Bible and on every verse in there, but it is very insightful. Calvin was a brilliant scholar. It's interesting, his commentaries read almost make it sound like he's a Baptist in places. Obviously, he's not, and if you read his commentaries and read the Institutes of the Christian Religion, which is his systematic theology, you'll see some points where they seem to be in conflict. But his commentaries can be very helpful. Another one I find very helpful, I don't have it in a print edition, but there are multiple places online you can find it, is John Gill's commentary. He was a Baptist who was in the same church that Spurgeon was in about a hundred years before Spurgeon. Very helpful, he's a Baptist, he's reformed, he is extremely, extremely gifted with the original languages. So he will comment on those. He is very aware of, even at that time, very aware of all the different variants that existed in the manuscripts. He's aware of the different translations, the ancient translations, not just the Latin, but the Syriac and other translations. So he's got some very good insights into the particulars of the text if you're interested in that sort of thing. And then two other ones that are not whole Bible commentaries but are extremely helpful that I would recommend to you is if you're reading the Psalms or studying the Psalms at all, Spurgeon's Treasury of David is Fantastic. It's three volumes. It is extremely comprehensive. It is Spurgeon's comments, but it is also his curated best of from all the commentaries that he had access to on the psalm. So it'll go verse by, he'll give you summaries of the whole psalm from himself and from other authors, and then he'll give you verse by verse commentary from himself and from other authors. It's very, very valuable. The other one I would suggest to you on the Psalms, and it's available online, if you find it in a print edition, please buy it and give it to me as a gift, would be Augustine's Commentary on the Psalms. It is extremely, extremely Christ-focused. I love Augustine's Commentary on the Psalms because he sees Christ in the Psalms in just brilliant ways and points to Christ. So it's a very, very good one that I think is very helpful. So that's it for commentaries. The eighth tool that we need as we study the Bible, or that we can use, is a study Bible. And I put this all the way down here on the list, and it's one place that people often go first, and grab the study Bible and see what the study Bible has to say. The study Bible really is a Bible with a mini-commentary added to it. That's what it is. It can be helpful, they are often incomplete. I'm sure you've experienced the same frustration that Lauren and I have, is you're reading the Bible, you have a question about a verse, grab the study Bible, open it up, and they don't have any comments on the verse that you're interested in. Because the verse you're interested in was the hard verse in that chapter, and they skipped right over it. So study Bibles can be a little frustrating in that way, but they can be helpful. Primarily, the book introductions, the outlines, those sorts of things can be really helpful in the study Bible. They do have a brief commentary there. Two that I would recommend to you are the Reformation Study Bible or the ESV Study Bible. Both have pretty good comments and helpful stuff, especially the maps. They'll have more extensive maps often than a normal Bible will. So the Study Bible can be a useful tool. It's not one that I would rely on as my go-to study tool. The ninth tool that we possibly need is an atlas, a Bible atlas with some maps. Probably the majority of the time the maps that are in the back of your Bible are going to be sufficient, but there may be times when you want to look up something that's more detailed, that's not going to be in the map in the back of your Bible. If you've got digital tools, you can have atlases that are even 3D, topographical atlases. I actually have one in my Bible study software that you can pull up one of the narrative passages in the Old Testament, maybe that has a battle, and you can click on the atlas tool and it will animate the battle on the map so that you can see the movement of the various forces, and that can be interesting and helpful, and you can see, oh, they went that direction because there was a mountain in the way. I really don't use it very often at all, but it's a tool you can use. The tenth and final tool that we will cover is other helpful books. Aside from studying the scriptures and using your confession and the concordance and these various things, there are other books that may prove valuable as you're studying the scripture. And I'm going to give you a list of five of them that I have found particularly valuable to me. One of the reasons these books are valuable is A, because they're comprehensive, and B, because they actually have scripture references in the back of the book. So if you're studying a text, you can go look up the scripture reference in the index, and then it'll point you to where that scripture is discussed in the book. The first one is, and you'll see a pattern here, the first one is G.K. Beale's New Testament Biblical Theology. It's about this thick, but it is fantastic, and you can look up any reference, Old or New Testament, and it'll point you to where he discusses it, and he discusses how the New Testament theology is built on the Old Testament theology, and so it's got New and Old Testament references in it. It's extremely helpful, especially for getting that analogy of faith. As I'm studying this text, is there a theological concept here that I need to understand? Even if I've missed it, if I go look up the text in that book, he'll tell me what the theological concept is that's being discussed and how it's built on other texts. As I said, there's a pattern here. The second one is G.K. Beale's New Testament use of the Old Testament. Very similar tool, but more specific. He's specifically going to show you quotations, references, allusions, just Old Testament language that's being used by the New Testament writers, where they got it, and why they're using it. Extremely helpful tool. a different author, but a similar tool, Gary, I can't pronounce his name, I'm not even going to try. S-C-H-N-I-T-T-J-E-R. I don't know how to pronounce that. But it's the Old Testament use of the old. And so what he does is he looks at particularly the prophets, and so you look at Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, or any of the minor prophets, and he will show you how some of the language and ideas that they're using are built on things that are written in the first five books of the Bible, or in the Psalms. So it's very similar to G.K. Beal's New Testament use of the Old, but this is the Old Testament use of the Old, and it's very, very helpful. Fourthly is the book that I was quoting definitions from earlier for the analogy of Scripture and the analogy of faith, and this is Richard Muller's Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms. This is an invaluable resource as you study the Bible. If you're going to study the Bible in any depth whatsoever, get a copy of this book. It's extremely helpful. Richard Muller is a brilliant Reformed theologian, and this book, it's not very big, but it's a very helpful dictionary. that you can look up, even as you're reading other books about the scripture, especially the Puritan works, if they use a Latin term, even the solas, sola scriptura or things like that, he'll have those in there and give you a very good definition of them, give you scripture references for where these concepts are built on, what scriptures they're built on, extremely helpful. And then the fifth one, and this may sound surprising to you, but is go to ccel.org, and that's the Christian Classic something or other library. But go to ccel.org and download their digital edition of Pilgrim's Progress. And you know that I reference Pilgrim's Progress and encourage people to read it regularly. But the digital edition is particularly helpful because it has a scripture index in the back that's linked to the text. So you can look at a scripture that you're studying, click the link, and it'll jump back into the story to where that scripture is either being quoted by one of the characters or simply The concept in that scripture is being used in the story. It's extremely helpful because Bunyan was so biblical and so insightful into the Christian life that what this will do is this will give you very good examples of how the text that you're particularly studying is applied in the context of the Christian life. Not just as a theological concept, but how does this actually affect your Christian walk on a day-to-day basis. So that's an extremely helpful tool. is to be able to look things up in Pilgrim's Progress and see how did Bunyan understand this in the context of the Christian life. There may be other books out there that you can find very similarly. I have a couple of other ones that I do check regularly as I'm preparing to preach. Christopher Wright's The Mission of God has a scripture index in the back that I often look at. Craig Carter's book, Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition, similarly, and many of the Reformed Baptist works on covenant theology, say Covenant Theology from Adam to Christ by Nehemiah Cox and John Owen, scripture index in the back. Look it up and see if somehow the scripture you're studying is tied into one of the covenants and is expounded by one of those men. So things like that can be extremely helpful for helping you as you're studying the text to find the theological concept that you may miss or how it ties into that particular theological context. So as you're studying the Bible, looking at the particulars, not just reading the whole, but studying in detail, these are the tools that we would use. Now next month we will begin looking at particular genres of biblical literature and discussing how we would study those particular genres and the things that we need to know as we do that. But that's it for this morning, so let's close in a word of prayer before our power gets turned off.