I heard a story some time ago about a fella who had a cat. And he loved his cat. He was very fond of it. He used to feed it the best cuts of salmon and tuck it into bed at night. One day he had to go away and he asked a friend if he'd look after his cat for him. So the friend said, all right. He gave him a big list of instructions. told him he wanted to write to him every day, tell him how his cat was getting along. So he went away and he got a letter in the mail and it said, Dear Fred, your cat is dead. And he wrote back and he said, that's a terrible way to break the news to somebody. That's terrible. He said, you should have written to me one day and said, Dear Fred, your cat is on the roof and we can't get her down. And then you could have written the next day and said, dear Fred, your cat fell off the roof and is badly hurt, but we've taken it to the vet and it's in good hands. And then you could have written and said, dear friend, very sorry, but your cat's not getting better, not responding to treatment. And then you could have written and said, dear Fred, I'm sorry to have to tell you that your cat has been called home. But to write and say, dear Fred, your cat is dead, that's terrible. He got a letter back in the mail shortly afterwards that said, dear Fred, your mother-in-law is on the roof. So anyway, I thought I would take up a totally different subject. for the next session. I thought I'd try to emphasize the importance of what we call the golden rule of Bible interpretation. If the plain sense makes common sense, you seek no other sense. Doesn't that make sense? In other words, God says what he means And he means what he says. We are always trying to find mystical meanings in plain statements of truth. Supposing a person got a letter and said, Dear Mary, Philip has gone to the mountains for the weekend. He'll be back on Thursday. Love, Naomi. Now that communicates the message. Now if you received that letter and started to handle it the way some people handle the Bible, this is what you do with it. Dear Mary, Mary comes from the word Mara, which means bitter. So obviously there's some area of bitterness involved in this communication. Philip has gone to the mountains for the weekend. Now Philip means lover of horses, and the mountain is symbolic of higher ground, and the weekend is a minor terminal point in time. So that means that I must learn to ride above my circumstances if I'm to cope with the day-by-day issues of life. He'll be back on Thursday. Thursday comes from the old Scandinavian Thor's day, and it's named after the god of war, so that means I can expect him to come back in a quarrelsome mood. Love Naomi. Well, marry equals mara which means bitter and naomi means pleasant so can love can make even bitter things sweet now what do you think if somebody got a letter and instead of just reading the letter they got all that kind of junk on them well you don't do that do you you don't do that to any other book except the bible if you're studying chemistry or physics or medicine When you've got a textbook, you don't start looking for mystical meanings in every paragraph. If the plain sense makes common sense, you seek no other sense. That's the golden rule of Bible interpretation. Now that is not to say that there is not typology in the Bible, that occasionally the Holy Spirit uses figurative language, and I'm going to deal with that in a few minutes, because he does and that there are no allegories in the Bible, because there are. But these things are still intended to convey obvious truth. When we interpret the Bible according to the Golden Rule, we interpret the Bible along three lines. We interpret the Bible literally and we interpret the Bible culturally and we interpret the Bible grammatically. We interpret the Bible literally, in other words, the normal acknowledged meaning of a word the normal meaning we place on words is the meaning that we have at their face value. We don't immediately begin looking for all kinds of hidden meanings in words. We use idioms of course in everyday language. I heard about a fellow one time went out to China and he was invited to speak at a border trade meeting in a Chinese city and he had a translator He was an American. He got up and he said, I'm, he said, I'm tickled to death to be here, he said. A look of agony passed over the translator's face. He said, this poor man scratches himself to death just to be with you. He had completely failed to recognize the common idiom of our language. The Bible contains these kind of things. Idiomatic language. We interpret the Bible literally. We communicate with each other literally. Words have a meaning and some words are understood in our communication. We supply them as a matter of course. For example, if you were to say to me, I should like to meet your wife, and I were to dig in my wallet and pull out a photograph and say this is my wife, you wouldn't go away saying this poor fellow is married to a piece of paper. For you understand that when I say this is my wife, I mean this is a picture of my wife. And this is ordinary, normal communication. When God communicated his mind to men, he used our language. He spoke to us in human language, and he used the idioms of the language. So we interpret the Bible literally. The primary, obvious, intended meaning is the one that we accept in a passage. Interpreting symbols and types and allegories and figures of speech as we normally would. If somebody says, I completely lost my head. Well, you know what he meant. You don't mean that he was decapitated and somehow had it fixed back on again. No, no. We use flowery language, we use idioms, we use these kind of things, figurative speech all the time, but it's still part of interpreting the Bible literally. And we interpret the Bible culturally because the Bible wasn't written in 20th century American. It was written, it wasn't written in medieval Europe and it wasn't written in Norman England. It was written a long, long time ago in another country over a long period of time. something like 1,500 years. So we need to know something, if we're going to understand the Bible, we need to know something about the geography, and something about the climate, and something about the customs, and something about the history of the Bible. The cultural background of the book of Exodus, for example, is entirely different from the background of the book of Malachi. The cultural background of the book of Malachi is quite different from the cultural background of the book of Matthew. There's in fact 400 years between the two books. A lot of things happen in 400 years. If we're going to understand the Bible, you need to know where you are in the Bible. You need to know a little bit about the background of that place, a little bit about the culture of that place, how they did things. You need to know something about the mountains, and the rivers, and the plains, and the cities, and the crops, and the climate, and the seasons, and the vegetation, and the animals that are mentioned in the Bible. You need to know something about Bible geography and Bible history. You need to know something about Egypt, and Canaan, and Syria, and Assyria, and Babylon, and Persia, and Greece, and Rome. Because the Bible is written against this kind of cultural, historical, geographical background. If you're going to rightly divide the Word of Truth and properly understand the Bible, then you have to have a growing database, information base in your mind about the cultural, historical, and geographical background of the Bible. The best single thing you can do for yourself, after you've bought all those exploring books back there, is go and buy an Ungers Bible Dictionary, and then sit down and read it from begin to end. And it'll give you an enormous amount of information about these things. Just think how helpful it is, for instance, to realize that when Moses was rescued from the bulrushes by that princess, that in all possibility, I know that some people disagree, but in all possibility, most likely that woman was the famous Egyptian princess Hatshepsut who was the daughter of a pharaoh and the mother of a pharaoh and the sister of a pharaoh. When her husband died, instead of giving up the throne, she seized the throne of Egypt and held it for decades and kept the powerful Thutmose III off the throne. That's how strong a woman she was. In fact, when Thutmose III came to the throne of Egypt, he had a rage against Hatshepsut, an absolutely beggar's description. And one of the things he did, he went around and obliterated all the monuments. That's how much, how we know so much about the woman, because we've obliterated them. She was a very powerful woman, and she, this is the woman that took Moses out of the bulrushes. And I believe she intended that he would be the next pharaoh after her. She had two young men by the name of Moses growing up in the same palace, Moses the Egyptian and Moses the Hebrew. And I believe that Moses was actually offered the throne of Egypt by his mother, his stepmother, adopted mother. When it says in Hebrews chapter 11, one of those most magnificent statements in that chapter, that Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than enjoy the pleasures of sin, for he ceased to see the reproach of Christ, greater riches than the pleasures of Egypt. He actually resigned the throne of Egypt, made the greatest decision for Christ, probably in the entire Bible. And it was a decision for Christ because Hebrews 11 says it was. How a man could make a decision for Christ 1,500 years before Christ was born may posit you, but he did. That's what all those old believers did. Although they didn't understand what they were doing, perhaps, fully. But you see, this doesn't come out of just reading the book of Exodus. This comes out of a growing, expanding knowledge, not only of the Bible, but of the history and the times and the culture of the Bible. We interpret the Bible not only literally and culturally, we interpret the Bible grammatically, and that's a sticky one because the Bible wasn't written in English, not even King James English. And I am a devout adherent of the King James Bible, as you probably already recognize. The Bible is written in Greek and Hebrew, and not many of us can have the opportunity to study these languages, and wouldn't even if we had the opportunity. I wouldn't, I'm hopeless at languages, I hate languages. I was forced to learn French when I was a kid in school. It was my worst subject. I don't know any French at all. I forgot it as fast as I learned it. I wasn't interested in languages. Now some people are and some people can mop up languages and they're very efficient at learning foreign languages and they go to school and just revel in their Hebrew classes and in their Greek classes. I can't even memorize the Greek alphabet. I can get the first four letters straight, and I know it begins with alpha and ends in omega, but I don't know much about anything else. But, you see, what are you going to do? You're going to interpret the Bible grammatically, and the Bible wasn't written in English, it wasn't written in French, it wasn't written in German, it was written in Greek or Hebrew. And to master the Greek and Hebrew languages is a real task. And it could be an impossible task for those who don't have any bent in that direction. But you're handicapped if you don't have a knowledge of the Greek and Hebrew. But the beauty of it all is, you see, that nowadays we have so many tools available to us that we may not ever be an expert on the synthesis, on the syntax, or on the structure or the grammar of the Greek or Hebrew Bible, but we can understand a great deal about the words. And doing word studies using tools now available to us can be very profitable, even although it is a little time-consuming. It's been one of the most delightful things I've ever done in my life, is probe into the etymology of some of the words of the Bible, using the tools available to us. I'm not a Greek scholar, I'm not a Hebrew scholar. I often make references in my commentaries to Greek or Hebrew words, but I'm borrowing that from somebody that's a scholar. W.E. Vine, or a good prudence concordance. Not prudence, a strong concordance. And other tools, lots of them available to us today to help us master the shades of meaning and the hidden depth in some of these Greek and Hebrew words. First, let me give you one illustration. You read of the rich man who went to Hades and he lifts up his eyes in torment and he sees Lazarus lying in Abraham's bosom I begins to pray, he died a, he lived an unbeliever, he died a believer, he woke up in hell, three seconds after he was in hell he was a believer. And he was a great believer, let me tell you, in praying and in preaching after he died, too late. And he sees Lazarus lying in Abraham's bosom, and the first thing he wants is for Lazarus to come with a drop of water to touch his tongue. because he said he's tormented. And Abraham said, no, no, it can't be done. Between me and thee, there is a great gulf fixed. Now, when you get your, out your lexicon, and look up that word gulf, you discover that the word for gulf is the Greek word chasma, c-h-a-s-m-a, from which we get our word chasm. Well, so far so good, it's a great gulf, a chasm. But then you do a little bit further research into the etymology and the significance of the word chasma, and you discover it was really a medical word, and that one of Vuk, who was a doctor, is very fond of using medical words in his writings. both in his gospel and the book of Acts. In fact, it's a study in itself to go through and trace our group's medical vocabulary. So, the word chasma actually is a medical word, and it doesn't really convey the idea of a chasm like we think of it today. The actual word chasma as used by Luke means an open wound. That's what the word means. So what Abraham said to the rich man was, between me and thee there is an open wound. What keeps Lazarus in heaven? An open wound. What keeps the rich man in hell? An open wound. Between me and thee is an open wound. That will keep people in hell forever, that open wound. Keep us in heaven forever. So, you see, I just point this out along the way, what a beautiful thing it is to Just dig around a little bit and get some good tools. You're going to study the Bible, you're going to teach the Bible. If you want to understand the Bible, you must get good tools. You must buy good commentaries and read them, and you must get good tools like Unger's Bible Dictionary and good lexicons and use them. There are many figures of speech used in the Bible. We use figures of speech, of course, as a part of ordinary, everyday conversation. There was a man by the name of E. W. Bullinger. He wrote a book called The Companion Bible, the most useful Bible that there is, except for one thing, that Bullinger was what they call an ultra-dispensationalist, and he didn't believe that the church began on the day of Pentecost, and he came up with some very weird ideas connected with that. But apart from that, if you can, and he has appendices in the back of the Companion Bible worth their weight in gold, most of them. There's a couple of them that are silly, but some of them are just absolutely fantastic. I never travel anywhere without a copy of that book. And on the Greek and the Hebrew of the text, he's superb, and for instance, in one of his appendices he's got all the different Hebrew and Greek words for sin. There are very rich vocabulary in the Bible for sin, at least 15 different Greek words for sin, and they all have a different shade of meaning. There's one word that means to miss the mark, and there's another word that means to be pornographic, and there's another word that means rank rebellion. Well, you see, when you're reading your Bible, you don't know from the English which particular word is being used. The word for iniquity, and the word for transgression, and the word for sin. Well, they're more or less synonyms in English, but they're used with scientific precision by the Holy Spirit. Every single word is God-breathed, and if the Holy Spirit uses the word that means missing the mark, he doesn't mean armed rebellion. But you don't get that from the English Bible. That's why I find this companion Bible very useful, because every time you have the word iniquity, or the word conscription, or the word sin, there'll be a little circle and a marginal note that sends you back to the appendix where it is, and it'll show you exactly which particular word was used in that case. The same with the word for forgiveness. And there are the same man E. W. Bullinger, he's very much vilified because of his ultra dispensationism and if you buy his books you must remember that and not swallow that line of things. But apart from that he was a great scholar and he had tremendous insights and understandings into a lot of things, very helpful particularly on difficult texts such as Jephthah's vow and things like that. Well, he wrote another book called Figures of Speech in the Bible. He wrote a number of books, most of them very interesting. He wrote a book on number in Scripture that's a classic, never been surpassed. It is the authority on the significance of Bible numbers. He wrote this book called Figures of Speech in the Bible, he points out that in the Bible there are at least 200 figures of speech used by the Holy Spirit. And again, they're used with mathematical precision, and they're used every time for a purpose to accomplish a purpose in the mind of God. Look back at the companion Bible, they're all listed, by the way, and every time you have a figure of speech in the Bible, it will refer you back to that appendix. And you can go back and see what particular figure of speech is being used. All this controversy amongst assemblies and churches, whether you should use grape juice or wine, for example, at the communion, at the Lord's Supper, is totally irrelevant. Because while the Lord talks about the bread, he never talks about the wine, talks about the cup. It never tells you what's in the cup. We assume it was wine. And by the way, the word for wine in the Bible is the word for wine. Christ says, be not drunk with wine. That means wine. And that's the usual word that's used in the Bible. But you argue about whether the cup should have grape juice or wine, or if you can't get either grape juice or wine, whether you're permissible to use apple juice. See, because the Lord doesn't talk about what was in the cup, he talked about the cup, and he did so using figures of speech. And people who don't recognize the fact the Holy Spirit uses figures of speech, Get into endless controversy about things that don't even matter. Split churches over food. Yeah, actually go ahead and split a church over whether you should have grape juice or wine. Why can't you have both? Red glasses, got wine in them. Green glasses, got grape juice in them. I want to show you some of the figures of speech in the Bible quickly before it closes. It's so interesting. I just want to whet your appetite for this. That's all I can do. There is a figurative speech, for instance, called a polysyndeton. Hands up those who know what a polysyndeton is. Yes, using the word and. It's the opposite to an asyndeton. I'm going to illustrate it for you. Luke chapter 14. I want you to know this, verse 13. It's all about being invited to a supper. Luke chapter 14, verse 13, When thou makest the feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and thou shalt be blessed. Now look at verse 21, where the Lord sent out his servants to invite people to his supper. And the servant came and showed his lord these things. Then the master of the house, being angry, said to his servant, Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the hot, and the blind. Now if you're using a modern translation, they've probably taken it away from you. And you have been robbed, let me tell you. You don't even know it. Now people get mad at me for telling them that. That's true. Now you'll notice verse 13. When thou makest a feast called the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and thou shalt be blessed. And verse 21, they've got the same people, the poor, but and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind. Now that's divine inspiration of the Holy Ghost. In the one place he uses an ass in the middle with no ants, in the other place he uses a polysynod using many ants. Why? Because the Bible's God breathed. And because no translator has any right to take away from me what God put in just to make it easier for you to read. It would be far better to spend a little time and learn to study than toss something away just because it's hard to read. I don't know, how would you ever expect to become a gynecologist if you won't read something that's hard to read? How do you expect to become proficient in chemistry or physics if you won't read a hard textbook? Don't tell me you can't understand the King James Bible. That's nonsense. You don't want to understand it. Too lazy to understand it. Anyway. My father left school when he was nine. My father was one of the greatest expositors of the Bible. in Britain of his generation. And the only Bible he had was the King James Bible. Listen to this verse. For the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost. Key verse in the Gospel of Luke. Not a single two-syllable word in that verse. You say, well, I can't understand the King James Bible. Why does the Holy Spirit use an Ah-Synodon in verse 13 and a Poly-Synodon in verse 21? Let me try and illustrate for you just briefly before I explain that to you why, how significant the Poly-Synodon is throughout the entire Bible. Do you know that in Genesis chapter 1 the Holy Spirit uses the word and 100 times? They've taken most of them away from me, I'm sure. In the beginning, God created the heavens, and the earth, and the earth was brought forth, and brought, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face, and God said, and there was an, and. One hundred times. in the first chapter of your Bible. When I was a kid in school, I went to an old-fashioned school, an old-fashioned country, a long time ago. They had an aid to education sitting on the desk called a bamboo cane this long. And it was to reinforce the teaching The basic grammatical principle I learned, one of the basic grammatical principles I learned as a kid in high school, was that you only use one conjunction in a sentence. And our high school teacher taught us, if you have a compulsive urge to use more than one conjunction in a sentence, you restrain that urge, use a period, start a new sentence. If I submitted an essay in which in one long paragraph there were 100 ands, I don't want what happened. Phillips? Yes, sir. Come out here. Yes. Hold your hand up. Yes. Bamboo cane being brought down across the palm of that hand five times. Now the other one. Now remember this, Phillips, one conjunction in the sentence. never forgot. Great aid to education. You read the story of Abraham taking Isaac to Mount Moriah, it begins, and, and, it came to pass, after these things, that the Lord said, and, and, all the way down that chapter, and, and, and, Take the story of the prodigal son, Luke chapter 50. In fact, take any part of your Bible. I challenge you to get, go home, dig out your King James Bible, open it anywhere, and start underlining the ands. And they're all important. All of them. They're all part of that God's mysterious process whereby the Holy Spirit, while using human writers, conveyed exactly what he wanted said, the way he wanted said, using figures of speech that he wanted used, one of which is a polysynodon. Now then, I'll explain to you why in verse 13 he uses an asynodon, and why in verse 21 he uses a polysynodon when thou makest a feast called the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind no ands because in this case what the Holy Spirit wants to do is hurry you to the end of the sentence when thou makest a feast called the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind and thou shalt be blessed that is his purpose in deliberately leaving out any conjunctions and just listing these different kinds of people to hurry you on to the end of the sentence to show you what a blessing God has in store if you do that kind of thing. Now when you come to verse 21, it's quite different. You see, the man made a great supper, bade many, sent his servants. They began to make excuse. One said, I've bought a piece of ground. I must need to go and see it. Please have me excused. Another said, I've bought five yoke of oxen. I go to prove them. Have me excused. Another said, I've married a wife. Therefore, I cannot come. Poor fellow. I just got married, already henpecked. So the Lord says, all right, let's go and fill it up from somewhere else. And he says, go into the streets and lanes of the city, bring in hither the poor and the lame, and the hard, and the blind. Can't you see what he's doing? He's slowing down. And he's deliberately separating each item in the list from the other items in the list. Because what he wants you to do is to focus on each separate individual item. That's the important thing. And he uses a simple grammatical device to do that. For instance, he says, bring in hither the poor. Well, that's the man who is least likely to make the excuse, I have bought. So I can't come. The poor. and domains. A man with a physical impairment, a handicap. He's the man least likely to say, I'm married. So I can't come. The halt. The lame, that is. He's the man who couldn't say, I bought five yoga books and I'm going to prove them. The blind. the man who couldn't make the excuse, I brought a piece of poppy, I've got to go and see it. So you see, just by using a simple figure of speech, the Holy Spirit has conveyed truth. Now you may not recognize that all at once, but it's there just the same. And as I said before, nobody's got any right to take it away from you. There's an old fellow by the name of Barzillai in the Old Testament who brought David a great list of things during the time of the Absalom Rebellion. And I want to read it to you, if I can find it, somewhere in 2 Samuel chapter 17, I think. Chapter 17, verse 27, end of the verse, And Bezillai, the Giladite of Rogallin, brought basins, and earthen vessels, and wheat, and barley, and flour, and parched corn, and beans, and lentils, and parched pulp, and honey, and butter, and sheep, and cheese. Why does he do that? Why doesn't he just give you a list? Oh no. No, no, no. He could have just given us a grocery list. He saw he bought this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this. He didn't do that. Because every single item was precious to the Holy Spirit. And he said he brought beds. Think about that. And basins. Think about that. And what he has done is, by using a simple figure of speech, he has separated every single item from every other item to tell us that there is nothing that we give to our Lord that he doesn't measure as a separate act of giving. He's not going to just lump it all together at the judgment. Oh yes, thank you so much for all those lovely things you gave me. Hallelujah. Come on into my kingdom. Here, I'll give you a crown. Follow. Yes, I remember the day you gave me this. And I remember the day you gave me that. And I remember this too. There's nothing that you've ever given to the Lord, however even being, that isn't infinitely precious to him, and in order to convey that preciousness to us, he used a polyscendent. And if you don't have it in your Bible, I say you've been robbed. And you'll never understand that from your Bible, because they took it away from you. so that you can understand it better. Well, I've run out of time. Did I suppose to quit at quarter after eleven? Oh, eleven-thirty. Oh good, I've got a few more minutes. Okay. Are you all dying to go and get another... You all want to go down and get coffee again? Huh? I'll keep going. I'll keep going until I can't go anymore and then you can go home. Huh? Is that all right?