Welcome to the For the Gospel podcast, where we are all about providing sound doctrine for everyday people. My name is Costi Hinn, and I have Pastor Anthony Wood on today, who's one of our regular contributors at For the Gospel, and he's pastor teacher of Mission Bible Church in Costa Mesa, California, and one of my best friends on planet Earth. Pastor Tony, welcome back, brother. It is good to be here.
SPEAKER_01I have such immense respect for you and love for you. So many people know what an amazing evangelist you are and teacher of God's word, but not enough people know how humble, how people-oriented, how gracious you are. And so, as always, it is a privilege to be here with you, my friend.
SPEAKER_02Oh, this is fun. I'm excited to jump in. And I want to talk to you today and really have you guide our audience along on the topic of how to study the Bible. This is a very common question that we get, and we see it on QA's and in comments and with DMs and emails we're getting. So if we were to jump right into this, assuming people have a hunger already, they're saved or newly converted, and they just need guidance, or perhaps longtime Christian, and they're sort of going, hey, I need to go deeper, or things aren't as passionate in my life. I'm seeing other people really excited. So I thought we could start with some scenarios that may match some of the people in our audience. So, first one Sally is a new convert. She left behind her favorite motivational ministry with Steven Furtick. She's now saved. Her eyes have been opened, she wants to go deeper, she's totally over the shallow stuff, but has no idea about the rules of hermeneutics, but she keeps hearing that phrase. Uh, Shepherd Sally along, help her with something maybe she's never heard before. Where does someone like Sally start?
SPEAKER_01Sure. Hermeneutics. I love the big word. Hermeneutics. Yeah, I mean, the obviously, you know, if she's left the Furtic camp, uh, the Furtic cult, whatever you want to call it, I'm I'm I'm happy and I'm glad. I think that's that's that's very important. Um, you know, hermeneutics simply means interpretation. Uh that you know, the basic rules of interpretation are true, not only for God's word, as you know, Costi, but also for you know all literature. Um and a lot of times in you know Bible circles, we'll talk about you know how to interpret God's word, and we want to interpret it literally, historically, and grammatically. Um literally, of course, because we want to read the text as it was meant to be written. We want the plain meaning of the text to speak to us uh historically because we want to understand what was going on when it was written, and then of course, grammatically, uh we want to make sure that we work with the syntax of the text and the grammar of the text. And and and really, a lot of times you hear those big words, you know, literal, historical, grammatical, hermeneutics and stuff. I mean, at the end of the day, it it just means I want to read uh the Bible with the same rules that I would read anything. You know, if a magazine was written today, it's someone has a point when they wrote that magazine. And so I'm just trying to figure out what the author's intention was when they when they wrote the magazine. And so, you know, a lot of that historically, uh the discussions about interpretation go way back to the school of Alexandria and the school of Antioch. Uh there was a guy named Origen who decided that the Bible could have three or four meanings, and so you would have kind of the literal meaning, and then he would teach that there was a second meaning, a personal meaning, then a third or fourth meaning, kind of a mystical meaning. I think one of the famous stories of that was when he he said that Noah's Ark actually precluded or illustrated you know the cross of Jesus because it was made of wood, and so you could pull off a piece of bark, and then that would mean something for you. And there's a lot of funny stories like that. You know, you and I have heard those a thousand times. I think you know John MacArthur tells the funny one about uh you know the couple who went to a church and got married, and they were in counseling with him, and he said, Well, you know, why are you uh you know, why are you here? Well, I don't like her. And she was saying, Well, I don't like him. He said, Well, why'd you get married? And they said, Well, because we were at church, and you know, the pastor taught us a story about Jericho, and then he had us all stand up and he told us, Men, you go march around something, and if you march around that thing, you'll you'll be able to have that thing. You know, it's your Jericho, it'll fall for you. So the story goes. All the men stood up and started walking around the girls, and this gentleman walked around the girls seven times and said, It's God's will that you're mine, and they got married. She's called for him. That's good. Yeah. But it's that kind of allegorization, that kind of subjective treatment of the text, which, as you know, and you you've spoken so much on these issues, uh, that gets us into a world of hurt. We always want to study the Bible, uh, simply put, with the author's intent. So if I'm talking to Sally here, a new convert, I'm saying, hey Sally, you know, what did the author mean when this was written? You know, why did he write this? And then I'm saying, you know, it can never mean what it didn't mean when it was written. Not only is it written by this human author, you know, verbal plenary theory, but it's written by God. And God's never going to write something that changes. So don't read yourself into it. You know, what will it mean after you're dead? What would it mean if you were never alive?
SPEAKER_00Man.
SPEAKER_01And that's what the text means. It's what it meant when it was written, it's what it meant yesterday, it's what it'll mean today, it's what it means tomorrow, it's what it'll mean for eternity, because God's word will exist forever. So find that simple meaning, that theological, timeless truth. And once you have, you can apply it to your life, Sally, and stop worrying about the subjective, you know, here's what I feel, here's what I think stuff. In fact, that's what I think is one of the most interesting things that's come out of kind of the evangelical mystical stuff, uh, the the listen to the whisper, uh, to the um, you know, the hypercharismatic circles. It you take a Bible text and then you get into a study, and poor Sally's sitting there with her friends, and she says, Well, well, here's what it means to me. Here's what it means to me. I think and I feel. And that that's just not good Bible interpretation. You know, what did it mean to the author and to the people who originally read it? Uh and so that would be good interpretation. I'd start there with Sally, something like that. Kind of a long answer.
SPEAKER_02No, that's really good. That's helpful. I think you just hit on multiple key points that might even apply to the longtime convert, but maybe poorly taught, or people in different circles that aren't even new converts. Let's uh let's do another one. I got two more scenarios for you. So uh Marcus is stuck in a rut. He's coming off a couple years establishing the discipline of daily reading, but now he feels like he's missing out on deeper study and application. He's checking the boxes, doing his U version, doing his one-year study Bible, but it's feeling like cold routine. He lacks the excitement that he sees other people have when they're looking at passages and things seem to leap off the page. What's the practical next step for somebody who's got the discipline part right? They're waking up early opening the Bible, but man, there's just not a vibrancy there.
SPEAKER_01I like it. You're so creative, man. That's good. I like the questions. Marcus, poor Marcus, he's in a rut. These have to come from like your ministry, right? These are all real. This is stuff that we really I made these up this morning. Poor Marcus. Yeah, some guy sitting there in your youth group. He's like, Costi, don't tell everyone.
SPEAKER_02Any Marcuses out there, we love you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we love you, Marcus. We've all been there. I I think this is the biggest issue right now in the evangelical church. Uh, everyone's urged to read their Bible, right? And so at a lot of churches, we're always talking about, you know, hey, read the Bible. And we urge people to read the Bible, and you know, we want to go take classes. And one of the challenges, though, is we don't often teach people how to study the Bible. And so there's a lot of frustrations with that. I think also there's frustrations because you know there's a dependence right now on devotionals, a lot of devotionals. Everyone has a Bible with some devotion attached. Uh, I heard who is it, Candace Cameron now, Burr, she wrote it. Just there's constant new Bibles coming out. Um there's a dependence on YouTube and YouTube theology, which I find fascinating, that so many people who've never learned, you know, and I I've been there, we we've haven't learned to study the text, and then all of a sudden we're on YouTube and we're seeing these these high-falutin debates by scholars back and forth, and so we become kind of a YouTube theologian on these very specific issues, but we don't even understand the treatment of the text that arrived. And you know how the Bible works, you got your textual theology up to your biblical theology to your systematic theology, and YouTube kind of exists above that and takes these little Mount Everest points of theology and debates them, and no one's ever actually learned you know, the planet Earth of God's word, the whole thing at the base, the foundation uh of the mountain. And so I think there's a lot of issues. I always, when I'm with people, kind of laugh, you know, when we're talking about these issues because it reminds me of in seventh grade, you know, when I was trying to dunk a basketball, I watched Michael Jordan, and I loved Michael Jordan, and he jumped from the free throw line. Yeah. And you you you played baseball and hockey, right? I don't know who the heroes were for you.
SPEAKER_02Well, I tried to dunk from the free throw line too. Everybody tried to when Jordan did it.
SPEAKER_01See after Jordan, you go out, you you put for me, I put on my fake pro wings. They look like Jordan's, and I drew a Nike swoosh on the bottom. You know, and I'm out there and I, you know, I've I got my hoop at 10 feet, and I'm I got my wristband on my halfway up my arm, and I'm trying to jump from the free throw line. And then you get to high school and your coach says, Man, you just gotta learn the fundamentals. You gotta learn the fundamentals, right? And you Tony, you're a six foot-one white kid. You ain't never gonna dunk from the free throw line. You've got to learn the fundamentals. I think the same is true with the Bible. And then I think people are frustrated because the education system now uh doesn't ever really train people past a sixth or seventh grade reading level. So we talk about Bible study and they never even learned how to how to how to read a lot in English. So there's a lot of frustrations. What I would tell Marcus, though, is I would tell him, hey, practice studying the narratives. Start with the narratives. Uh, and I think there's a lot of reasons for that. You know, obviously the epistles are great, propositional information, here's what you do, here's why you do it, just boom, boom, boom, boom. That's helpful. Um, but for people who are newer to the Bible, the narratives can be so helpful. And by narratives I mean, you know, there there's quite a few in the New Testament, about 43, 45% of the Bible is narrative, but I mean the gospels are huge. Number one, you're a new covenant, you're a church aid saint, so the gospels and learning about Christ are going to just pop off the page. Number one. Number two is that you you've got a familiarity, even if you didn't read a lot in high school or college, all of us have a familiarity with archetypal structure when it comes to storytelling, right? Fairy tales.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_01We understand the basics of you know, there's a bad guy, there's a climax, or a rising action, a climax, and a denouement, and there's a hero that steps in to fix it. Every one of us, from the time we were a kid, right? You know, what's your favorite story growing up? For some it's Cinderella, yeah, I don't know, for others it might be, you know, an Avengers movie or something something like that. The point is, is no matter their education level, no matter their academic understanding or their scholarly ability, everyone knows how to tell a story.
SPEAKER_02That's right.
SPEAKER_01So that when you go to the text and you start seeing there's a problem, there's a solution, the problem is always fallen mankind, the solution is always theocentric, meaning God, or Christological meaning Christ, it's really easy to kind of discern what the problem is, what the solution is, and what the theological point of that particular story or text is. And so I always urge people like Marcus, hey, let's start with the narratives, let's get, for example, in the book of John, you know, and let's kind of begin learning to actually study God's word for ourselves and locate those timeless truths, stuff like that.
SPEAKER_02Man, that's really good. One one other element to throw in front of you for a Marcus, would you say, besides the practical, which you just gave, and is and is excellent, and should bring somebody's faith to life and bring their passion out, is there an element for a Marcus? If that represents a demographic of Christians whose maybe their love has grown cold or they're not praying, is there an element too that could be spiritual where um there's something deeper going on even?
SPEAKER_01Well, first John's pretty clear about that. Um if you don't love God, if if you don't, you know, if you don't love the people of the church, and if you don't love his word, you don't love his truth, then uh it could be a sign that you're not saved. I think we need to number one start there. Uh but the question, the way you asked it, is that Marcus is a believer. Totally. Uh he's in the church. I think the the probably the biggest thing that we we've we've kind of lost in the evangelical church when it comes to um uh the hunger or what Jonathan Edwards calls the affections is the reliance upon the Holy Spirit. Uh we we don't pray before we read God's word. We don't pray before we arrive to church, we don't pray when we're at church, we don't pray after church. And there's so much about prayer that is is me saying, I'm dependent upon you. So when I approached the word, I was talking with uh my daughter about this just the other night. You know, we were working through one of these pericopes together. Actually, I think it was an outline in Romans and you know, Peyton's 12, and we're having this conversation, and she's I think she was in Romans 6. Uh it might have been Romans 6, and she was wrestling through the text and she couldn't come to the the conclusion. Why did Paul include this particular case logic? And so we sit around the family devotional table and we're talking about you know her arrival and uh you know, trying to figure out what that principle is. And and she was like, I can't do it, I can't do it. It's been a whole week. I've been reading over these eight verses again and again and again, and you can just see justification and righteousness are just repeated multiple times in there. And you know, I wanted to just lean over and go, Do you see it? It's right there. You know, he's eight, nine times he says, righteousness, righteousness, righteousness, you know, justification. Uh and I held off and I said, Sweetie, I have one question for you. Have you been praying that the Holy Spirit would illumine you to the text? Wow. And and uh she says, No. I said, Okay, tomorrow morning I got one idea. Get up, take all the week of study, and I just want you to ask the Holy Spirit, say, Holy Spirit, would you please do this for me? Ephesians chapter one and two is clear that you're his, right? And if you know who you are, then you'll know how to live. He's he's already given you everything you need under life and godliness, Peter said. So, sweetie, just simply pray and then try to bring it together. So it was awesome because the next day she's just walking around on cloud nine. I already figured something had happened. And then she gets to uh she gets to the dinner table and and I say, Hey, let's go to our Bibles. Anyone have something to share? And she's like, I do, I do. And she sprints back, you know, and she just nailed it. She nailed it, you know. She walked us through Romans 1, 2, 3, the condemnation, through four, five, and six, or four and five, the justification. Then she laid out for us six the mastery of sin that we've been released from. Uh, and it was beautiful to see her uh have that moment with the Holy Spirit. Uh so I think that's a huge thing. I've been there, I know you've been there, brother, where things grow cold, and it's because we started to make God's word an academic process instead of a heart process. And the Holy Spirit takes it from the mind, takes it into the heart. Uh, and of course, he makes it uh something that is not just informing us but transforming us as well.
SPEAKER_02Such a huge key and the unsung hero of all of it, the Holy Spirit, power of prayer. Way to go, man. What a helpful, helpful picture. Last one. Jill is on fire. She's devouring her McCarthy's MacArthur study Bible. She's reading articles on hermeneutics, she's not, you know, worried about all the petty debate. She's not down the YouTube black hole. She just loves God's word. Uh, she's already listened to your answers on the first couple scenarios, and she understands all of that. And she's ready for the deeper end of the pool, if you will. What does somebody's next phase look like? What would you put in front of them to keep on going and growing that foundation in God's word?
SPEAKER_01Hmm, that's a tough one. Well, do you do you know Jill? So so is Jill, is Jill already studying God's word? Has she been taught how to study it? Or is she basically like, I'm all in on this, I just have never done it for myself.
SPEAKER_02Where are you where are you channeling that passion and that drive? What has she not discovered yet that she's now ready for? Is it okay? Is it types of resources? Is it a various studies? She's ready maybe to start teaching studies. Right, Jill. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Okay, Jill. I think I got you on that. I I would say similar to Marcus, um, she's gotta start, she's gotta start digging into the narratives, but we need to, we need to have Jill, you know, for example, she's gotta be doing the study for herself and synthesizing her theology for herself. Uh what one of the and what I would say to that is is she's basically becoming a Berean saying, I want to know this, this, this word for myself. Um and that's what we do in our classes here with with people who say, I want to know how to study the Bible at our church. Yeah. We'll take a book like the book of John, and I'll just tell them, I'll say, You go home this week. This is week number one, and I want you to read the entire thing two times, skim it. Then I want you to locate the theme. And you know, we know in John 20, 31, it's right there. These things are written so that you may know that Jesus the Christ, the Son of Living God, and that you will believe in his name. Uh and then I tell them, I want you to try as best you can to outline this book on your own in pencil, and then I want you to kind of lay out for me, if you would, the the key themes that you see popping up again and again. Like the Jewish leaders are always there and they're angry. Yeah. They're always picking on Jesus, you know, and you got the signs, the miracles. And so I want them to try to find those. Then I say, last this week, go to a commentary, find an introduction to a commentary, like MacArthur or whomever, and just skim it and try to get a feel for the book. And then I tell them, now I want you to go deeper, and I want you to start working your way through the book, and we'll do this together, where you can grab a pericope, meaning a paragraph, and you know how John's just laid out, and basically it's laid out in about a hundred of these. And what I want you to do in each pericope is I want you to try to locate the problem, which is always mankind. I tell them it's always gonna be us or you, you know, not us, but the Jewish leaders or something. And then the solution, who's always gonna be Christ or God the Father or the Holy Spirit. And I want you to do that by looking for those repeating nouns, those repeating verbs, and then the key is the conjunctions. You look for those conjunctions. You know, these guys are doing this and they're doing this and they're doing this. It's just like a story or a movie. And then it's John will editorial, he'll have an editorial note, and he'll say, but or therefore, right? And you have this turn, and then in comes the truth, in comes Christ, in comes the solution. And so I want them to be checking each one of those nouns and verbs, I want them to be circling those conjunctions, and I want them to be locating the theocentric or Christological or Christocentric uh truth, the principle uh of solution there. And I'll basically just help people walk through that. And so if I'm talking to Jill here and she's on fire, I'm saying, I want you to walk through John with me, I want you to locate that theological theme. Then I tell her this I say, okay, Jill, now I want you to move over to the epistles, to your propositional truth, and I want you to support it for me, right? I want you to show me how that theological truth you've come to is also stated by Paul. And watching her synthesize the Bible to see that here's this beautiful, glowing theological theme, and then walking over to Paul as he lays it down in that crystalline way that only Paul can do, right? That's all Romans is. It's saying what the whole Bible says the best way. That's right. That's all it is. And then she gets to walk in confidence, knowing that she has synthesized the scriptures. Here's the theological truth about Christ, here's how he overcame these issues when he was on earth, here's what Paul says about him now, and what Paul says that means for me as a believer. So if I'm working with Jill, that would be where I want to get her. I mean, a few helpful hints. These are sorry, this is way too long, costy. I'm gonna go to the house. No, this is awesome.
SPEAKER_02Keep going. That's I'm staying out of your way here. Keep going. Totally.
SPEAKER_01Just a couple helpful hints. You know, if if I'm talking to someone, and this happens with our family around the table or or you know, even guys here at the church. I always tell them, I say, as you go through this process, if you can't find the problem solution in in a small paragraph, just telescope out. An example of that are the narratives of the Old Testament, right? You go to 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, you read a little story. Remember like little Samuel and he's waking up at night and Eli is saying, Speak, Lord, thy servant listen, speak, Lord. And we go, why is this in the Bible? And once we telescope out and we see the fact that it's the days of the judges, 1 Samuel 1. And the days are dark, and there's been no word from God. And Hannah's been on her knees crying out, and we see that little thread begin to appear in 1 Samuel 1, 2, 3, and 4. That then came a little boy, a little boy who was put in the temple or in the tabernacle, a little boy who was there with Eli, a little boy who's faithful, and all of a sudden by chapter 4, we begin to see the truth. The problem is broken Israel, and then the solution becomes what? The word of God is back. Right? So you telescope out and you see broken mankind and the solution of an amazing Yahweh. And so you always teach people, if you don't find that in the little paragraph, just zoom out. You know, John 4, for example, sorry, I'm gonna just keep going. No, go. John 4, for example, is is one of my favorites, right? Because you know, we always talk about it through the lens of evangelism because we take little paragraphs. But if we extrapolate out, we see why did Jesus say in the beginning of John 4, why did John say, and why did he want us to know that Jesus said, I must go through Samaria? Fascinating. Six times he says it there in four verses. Why? Then you get all the way to the end of that chapter. After the whole story, and what does he say? He says, Jesus is the savior of the world, and all of the Samaritans believed in him. This entire story is in there. One-twentieth of the entire Gospel of John, not just about evangelism, it's that Jesus was no longer or going to be just the savior of the Jewish people. He's now the savior of the world. He says, I gotta be something greater than just for you. I'm here for something bigger than that. So I always tell people, telescope out. I always tell them, make sure that the little principle you find there about Christ supports the theme of the writer of the gospel. Here's another one. I always tell them, set down your presuppositions. You know, I always say, be a Sherlock Holmes. Go in there, pull out your yellow pad, and as you work through the text, write question after question after question after question, who, what, where, when, why, about the text, and try to figure out uh what the hard truths are that maybe you missed the first time. My wife always gets frustrated, by the way, because you know, she she likes using little colored pens, those microns.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And uh, you know, she's just filled up her Bible to the point. It's like color over color over color, because you know how God's word is, it's just inf infinite and eternal. And so if you start asking all the questions, man, your Bible margins fill up really quick. Uh one final helpful hint, I'm totally just going off on a tangent here. Is I tell people, I say, Hey, when you get into this, trace every rabbit trail. And as a preacher, Costa, you know how this is. You you get in there and you know that feeling. You're looking at a text, you know there's cross references for it, and you know there's a word study to be done, but the devil says, and our flesh, our lazy flesh says, Don't do it. Don't do it, don't turn that page, don't go to that cross reference. Because if you start correlating the rest of Scripture and you chase that word study around the New Testament or even back through the Septuagint to the Old Testament, man, it just shines. The light begins to pop.
unknownUh huh.
SPEAKER_01And I've always told guys and and women too, I say, hey, when you're studying, chase those cross references. Uh-huh. You know, there's sure yeah, there'll be times, you know, 30% of the time where it leads to a dead end. You know what? 60, 70 percent of the time it'll lead to you being in tears. Yeah. You'll be sitting there watching God's word come to life. I had one guy, uh he's a big former NCAA basketball player. He came up to me. We were talking about John 4. He said, Tony, I chased a trail this week, and he's standing there. He's a stoic dude, you know, big man's man. He's like you, he's like you, you know, big tough guy. And he said, This week I chased a trail in John 4, the living water. Why did she leave her water pot? And so I'm listening to him thinking, I wonder where he's going with this. He chased, he traced, traced the living water, that rabbit trail throughout the New Testament. So after five minutes, he's telling me what he found, and all of a sudden this big dude just pauses and he looks at me as the tears begin to grow in his eyes, and he said, He said, Pastor, I realized I have the living water. I have the living water. I learned how to study the word of God, and the Spirit of God showed me more about God, and now I know I have the living water. Now I don't I don't know if that was his conversion or not. I I I doubt it, but to see a big man overwhelmed by the truth of God's word just brings joy to your heart.
SPEAKER_02Incredible. That was really helpful. I think there's not a single thing you need to apologize for for going long. That takes us into so many realities that can encourage people, go down the rabbit trail. I was trailing off in my mind as you were talking, not because I wasn't paying attention, but because illustratively, I was looking over here to the left where I'm sitting, and I've got my my Bible that I've had since um I was at Mission Bible and sitting under your preaching ministry every week. And I can honestly tell you this thing about margins. I can go to passage after passage. I could probably preach your sermons from your own notes because in the margins, questions and answers, questions and answers, questions and answers, questions and answers over and over and over that lead to greater understanding of a text. And then where does that all go to? You know, we go, oh, we're really smart and we feel really good about ourselves. No, we can look back at sections of scripture where we have mined deep and we've drawn from the well. Now I can sit with my kids or I can sit with a friend, and I've already done the work, and it's right there in my Bible. So here's to all of you who are running out of room like Brie. Um Yeah, I have friends.
SPEAKER_01By the way, if you're if you if you're looking at notes from my old sermons, man, that's some crummy, crummy stuff. So I've double, I've double checked them all. I've I've changed it. You better go back and highlight, man. We that was a work in progress, wasn't it? Um I feel bad for you. Yeah, I I have, I mean, we've got friends like you know, the executive director for For the Gospel, you know, Brett Skinner. You know, we're you know, our our men, when we're in our our our pastoral Bible studies and going through it together, you know, he he learned early on, just use post-it notes. He's because he just keeps adding them and adding them and adding them on top of it. And he said, I don't want to mess up my Bible. Uh so there's all different ways to do it. I think the search and the quest is just such an important part of the outcome. The most important part.
SPEAKER_02Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Okay, let's do some more uh rapid fire here. Um what are the genres? Okay, shifting gears here now. What are the genres in the Bible? You talked about narrative, you're mentioning some of these terms, and you've defined them very well. But what are some of the other genres in the Bible? And then what do genres or genres have to do with the way we read books of the Bible? You talked about presuppositions, author intent. Where does genre fit into all that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'm I I I I don't want to, I'm trying not to use big words. A lot of these are those big, you know, academic words, but yeah, genre, it seems so intimidating. All it means is that, you know, when the author wrote it, there was a style, a literature style that he was using, right? So we talked about narrative, which in the Bible, you know, it's kind of people wrestle back and forth. History and narrative are kind of one and the same. About 45% of the Bible opens up to you if you learn to study it that way. Um, you also have law, those are those list uh and the case law for the theocracy of Israel. Uh you've got the wisdom literature, which, you know, your poetry as well, you know, kind of general truth principles. I always say with poetry, like the Psalms, it's just basically uh the author's way of making truth beautiful. And so you want to understand there's figurative language in there. Uh of course we've got prophecy, uh, where God has given us uh the clear predictions of coming events. Uh the epistles are just formal letters of propositional truth. Uh in fact, a lot of people say that with the epistles, Paul almost invented a new genre. That was something that I think scholars are debating more and more. Uh that Paul was virtually in there was never never anything uh that had 15 chapters, 14 chapters, 13 chapters of clear propositional truth and case logic. Uh and so that's that's a helpful epistle or a helpful uh genre. I think with the epistles, it's you want to remember when you're reading through it that usually you'll have about half of it that is set up in doctrine, then the second half will tell you what to do with that doctrine, kind of indicatives than imperatives. When you're studying through the Proverbs, you want to remember these are general principles. A lot of times uh you'll hear people somewhat, well, clearly make a mistake when they'll say, well, uh something in Proverbs is guaranteed to happen. I've heard you even teach some really great stuff on this, Costi, where you Proverbs 22, we raise up a child in the you know the way he shall go, and he will not depart from it. We hear that all the time.
SPEAKER_02People say it's a promise.
SPEAKER_01That's a promise from God. Sure. You raised him up the right way, he'll go the right way. It's gonna be okay. I sound like your uncle, right? Costy baby, costy baby. Yeah. Leave him for another podcast, another time. You're gonna give me PTSD. I'm sorry. Yeah, it's like you know, you have that, that really is true. And we've got to remember that's a general principle. It's an it's a general concept, and it's written that way, proverbial wisdom. So the epistles, the proverbs, uh, like I said, Psalms, you want to understand there's flowery language, this is the heart exposed, it's truth made beautiful. Uh and then, of course, the law, understanding. Uh this is specifically law, civil law uh and ceremonial law for the nation of Israel. And of course, there's the moral law, which we can extrapolate out, and Romans is really clear that that continues to be something that God uh would use to convict and to bring us a low so that the gospel of grace can be seen as our solution. And then, of course, history and narrative, as we talked about, problem solution, kind of an archetypal structure. So I think it's important to know the genres and really important to know when you're entering a book the type of study that you should be doing.
SPEAKER_02So if I'm approaching, let's go down this trail a little bit because I'm loving the way you're you're painting the picture. Um first question. If I am approaching a genre that is law or a book that's in the genre of law, is it accurate to say I'm reading Leviticus and I'm looking at maybe genealogies or I'm in numbers and I'm in Deuteronomy, I'm looking at law. So I don't have to kind of flip out or or give up in confusion every day when I'm reading through those things and try to figure out what in the world is happening and why am I reading this in 2021? Because you're you're not reading Sure. Help me there if I was someone.
SPEAKER_01You probably you know, you probably don't need to abide by, you know, putting the certain size gate on the top of your roof, or you know, some of the the rules about a woman's menstruation, or you know, how to deal with um you know your husband or wife after you've been you know intimate with them. I I think we want to remember that we're we're breaking down the law. We do have moral codes of God, and there are standards for righteousness, the decalogue, of course, and clearly the the Ten Commandments. There's also, you know, or or sorry, the uh yeah, the moral law. You also have the ceremonial law, and you've got the the way that people were to relate to God and the way they were to be reconciled to God, the way that they were going to approach God and have intimacy with God is through the sacrifice of animals and through the priesthood. And of course, with Jesus, that's gone. And so Jesus became our high priest. Jesus came as the atoning Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. At the cross, that that price was paid. Uh of course, in the upper room, he says, on Passover, by the way, when they were celebrating that avenue unto God, he says, Now I give to you a new covenant in my blood. And so that's gone. And of course, the civil laws as well. Uh and so I think it's very important to understand when you're reading through the Old Testament and specifically the genre of law, that you come to know more about your God, you come to know more about his desire for holiness, you come more to know even about uh the beauty of the sacrifice of Jesus and what it means for your freedom and for your and what grace means. Uh but yeah, I I think you'd want to be really, really careful uh to ever try to read the law into your modern church aids existence.
SPEAKER_02Okay, another question. You mentioned earlier that a lot of the epistles are set up with incredible logic and doctrine up front, and then the latter half with the imperatives or what our commands, and you know, now here's how to live it. I've heard this before as a pastor, and I'm sure Christians have heard it or maybe even felt it. Um we are in a section of the text, your pastor is bringing it, and he's telling you what to do, and he's unapologetic, and he's commanding it from scripture, and he's showing it to you. Um help our audience understand what is good and what is right and what we should embrace and actually learn to love with the right view of an entire letter, and then the front half, maybe talk about the book of Ephesians, even uh those first three chapters, and the back three chapters. I would got approached last one illustration real quick, um, you know, several months back, preaching somewhere else, and I was preaching out of one of the epistles, and a guy came up after, and he was really frustrated with me. He said, There's a lot of doing in that sermon there, Pastor Hinn. You have a lot of doing. You can't even you can't even do it without Christ, without the gospel, and you you know, it's a bunch of legalism, all these imperatives, and just do do do. It's all been done. And I I just asked him a simple question and said, Well, man, I so do you wake up in the morning and set an alarm? Do you just kind of float in this mystical like Jesus carries you along? Do you have like angel helpers? So yeah, and I was he laughed, he's like, I understand. We talked through it, but it's sort of Christian ease. It can confuse people when they so what's happening there pastorally, heart issue maybe of we don't like when the imperatives come into play. But are they set up on something? Take us there.
SPEAKER_01Can you can you let's flip it around, right? You're always doing these podcasts, you know, and you're asking questions of others. Let me ask you, Pastor Hinn, what do you tell him? What's your answer? Yeah, let's hear your dogmatism. What did you tell him?
SPEAKER_02Well, first of all, I'm told them that the imperatives are there as commands based on what you know prior in that letter, which is the gospel has saved you, Jesus has transformed you, you've been given the Holy Spirit, his power is at work within you. So, therefore, and now we turn on the conjunction, and what are you gonna do? Sit around and keep being rude to your wife, or sit around and be prayerless, or use coarse language, or you know, not serve and not give and not submit, or are we gonna do the thing that manifests what's been done in our hearts? So the gospel is the foundation and then it propels us forward. And so I think sometimes maybe people just it's conviction. If I was being honest now and you really want to flip it on me, here's what I think. I really believe people get really convicted in the middle of sermons like that, and the way to run away from the commands is to go hyper grace and go, well, I can't do that without Christ. To go, yep, so you have Christ, so you can. Well, I don't know about all that law and illegalism. Well, it's not law and legalism, it's predicated on the gospel, so because of grace, you can. Grace isn't a license to sin, okay? It should propel you forward. And that is really what you know, I think I'm asking you to commentate on is doesn't Paul do such a great job? Don't these epistles have a front-loaded gospel understanding? God has entered you through the Holy Spirit, changed you, so learned to embrace being told what to do.
SPEAKER_01So good. That's why you're costing him the voice of a generation, because you take the things I say and you just make them sound so kind and gracious and good. I love it. Yeah, you're you're exactly right. You know, obviously, you know, from a heart standpoint, right, justification and sanctification always come together. We need to get out of this cheap grace idea that you can be justified but not sanctified, right? You they come together. The God who saves you for heaven is the God who saved you for holiness. They always come together. One thing that we forget a lot is that you know these are letters that were meant to be read in one sitting. We preach them week over week over week over week. Lloyd Jones, five years in in Ephesians, right? I'm I'm reading that and I'm like, man. You know, and and I So we forget that these are meant to be all read together. You know who you are, therefore you'll know how to live. They go together. And the beauty is you think about Ephesians 1, for example, man, the soaring doctrines of the Father's election, the Son's redemption, the Spirit's protection and application. And then Paul immediately in verse 15 goes on and he says, For this reason I'm praying that the eyes of your heart will be enlightened so that you will know what is the hope of your call. It always leads to a heart change. And then he gets there to chapter 4, 5, and 6, and he says, Now here is how you will live. The indicatives always drive the imperatives. Um I I think there's about 1,500 imperatives or so in the New Testament. So to say you're not gonna preach them or talk about them, would you know basically saying I'm not gonna preach the the the New Testament, we have to. God expects and demands and is the one who empowers transformation from his people.
SPEAKER_02Brilliant. All right. Um I already know where this is gonna end up, probably being two podcasts. If I want you to break down a passage for us, I got another question though that I want you to to get into. Would this wouldn't that be a great argument for how much we need doctrine? That you have to embrace that. You've got to come to an understanding. Doctrine matters, it's not stuffy, it's not deep, it's not rigid, reformed, you know, get all into yourself and your head knowledge, all the caricatures which are just bogus anyway. But the idea is we need doctrine. We should spend a great deal of time in Ephesians 1 and 2 and 3. And doesn't that transform the way people think and then lead to how they would live? Speak to doctrine and the importance of it.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I'll yeah, I'll I'll try to give an abbreviated answer, which would be a miracle. End quote. You know that. End quote. Um Yeah, yeah, just to quote Jude, which you you and I spent a lot of time in Jude for for the book, you know, uh Jude was really clear, right? When he says, Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing you contend earnestly for what? For the faith. That definite article is huge there. The faith. Not faith as in, you know, pisteo, I'm I'm I'm actually believing, trusting, repenting, but actually, you know, the idea that the faith is a body of knowledge, a body of doctrine. So Jude actually says, I'm I'm I'm writing, and I felt the necessity that you would appeal, appealing to you that you contend earnestly for this body of truth. If you take away the truth, see here's what we forget. Sorry, I said the short answer, it's not here we go, here we go. This is good. Think about what the when you read through the Bible, and everyone out there who's listening, we read through the Bible, heart, heart, heart, heart, heart, a thousand times in the Bible. And and the immediately the picture we get because of common society is oh, that means follow your feelings. That's what we're we're we we believe. You know, Disney, follow your heart, follow your feelings. The Bible doesn't view it that way. The heart is the seat of the man. So basically, when you see heart, what the Bible is saying is the truth goes into the mind, and then it goes in and impinges the will, and then it comes out the affections, Jonathan Edwards, or the emotions. So the Holy Spirit transforms my mind and thereby transforms my life. It's not just truth known, it's truth lived, it's truth experienced. So the whole point of Christianity is if you don't have the truth, you don't have the doctrine, then you can't have the transformation, you can't have the life. So so we need to remember doctrine matters because actually doctrine is the foundation of everything. If you take away doctrine, then you take away Christianity. Does that kind of make sense?
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Dude, if I was if I'm somebody driving right now, I'm getting fired up. Might be running into the wrong lanes, and you're if you got to run to those fancy cars, your your lane change assist will help you. But uh stay stay come on, you're firing me up. All right, here we go. Um you've already covered author's intent. You've helped us with genre. Um let's talk about two more things. So, first, I want you to help us with application and crossing the time bridge, which is something that I learned from you, saw from you, and it was always so helpful for a modern audience. And then I want you to dig into a passage and give us a flyover step by step from the Gospel of John. We got plenty of time for this. People can, if your commute's over, see you in the morning or talk to you in the morning, but for now, um, two places. How in the world would we apply something in our lives here in 2021 if it was written to people in, you know, like 60 AD or 55 AD or 64 AD, some of the dates when New Testament letters are written around? And is application different than interpretation? So I'm not the original audience that Peter wrote to. I live in 2021. Nero is not the emperor of Rome. I'm not even in Rome. I got President Joe Biden and I'm in America. Um, how there may be similarities. You know what? You're not wrong. I just preached just preached on a little bit of that yesterday. But the idea you did, Pegan America. You know, I'm a I'm a soccer mom, and the biggest fiery ordeal of my week was, you know, traffic, or I'm a I'm a guy who's you know just trying to keep it all together, and I'm not going to the Coliseum to get torn out, torn apart by lions. So but does the Bible still not apply? So help us cross time bridges from original audience to the city.
SPEAKER_01Come to California, Costi, because we're we're gonna be in the lion's den pretty soon out here. That's true. Um Yeah, you're spot on, right? Authorial intent. The idea is we already talked about you got this principle uh that is true. It always was true, it was true when it was written, it's true now, and it'll be true forever. And so we're locating that principle, that timeless truth. Crossing the time bridge simply means that I want to now take that truth and I want to be you know creative, exploratory, prayerful, and how that will change my life today. And so I think that's an important thing to you know, obviously, historically, we've heard the great preachers say, you know, is there a command to obey? Uh is there a warning to avoid, a promise to cling to? You've got those key questions. And usually when you find that truth, there is. Uh what I'm finding more and more, and maybe this is just getting older and having kids and you know, preaching a long time, and even just personal study, I'm I've just become more and more aware, brother, of how evil my heart is, of how sinful I am. I think that's one of the things is you you grow in the truth, you grow in awareness of your sin, and then you grow upward in worship of God. It's just amazing. And so, more and more in my preaching, uh I'm I'm not picking on anybody who's still doing the we must, we must stuff. I think that's important. Uh, but even when I am preaching. Even imperatus, for example, I'm trying to go through the actions down into the heart, down into the desires. And so some of the questions I ask when I come to even a doctrinal treatise or theological high point or questions like this, I wrote them down. You know, what in this text should convict me? Because I'm trying to get to the conscience. And then I, if someone goes, well, it doesn't convict me, then I want to ask them, then why not? Why aren't you convicted by that? Are you seared? Are you are you grieving the Holy Spirit? You know, I want to get down into those questions of the heart. You know, I wrote down, are there tests for my heart? A lot of times you take Philippians 2, for example, and you learn about humility, and we see Jesus as he comes down the ladder, descending into greatness. And then Paul says, do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit. Instead of, you know, we kind of move on and say, well, don't be selfish, instead of pausing and going, let's test our heart right now. Your great podcast you did with Dustin, right? Why are you tweeting these things? Why are you posting these things? Why did you talk to your wife that way? Go ask the deeper question. You know, why do you spend more time on that form of media than you do on your knees in prayer? Ask the deep questions. Do you have idols? And once you go into that heart idolatry place where you realize, like with Ezekiel, you know, he says that these idols are actually blocking your sight of God. You've got these idols up, and not only is it bad that you're worshiping idols, they're actually blocking you to where you can't even see that you have idols in front of your face. So I want to deal with the heart. Uh, are there motivations or incentives in the text? Uh I think you hit on it lately recently in a podcast, you know, seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you. There's an incentive there. That's a pretty good incentive. You make people are making decisions. Where should I live in the country? I want to flee the liberals. Uh, you know, where's my 4,000 square foot home? Instead of saying, you know what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna center my family around that church who teaches the word. Those are my people, that's where I was saved. And then God says, you know what, all the other stuff, I'll handle that. So there's incentives in the text. Uh sometimes when I'm preaching uh or even studying on my own, I wrote down, how does this change my view of self? Ephesians 1. The fact that I was chosen before time, that eons before I was born, that despite and regardless of everything I'd ever do, he chose me. That changes the way I walk. Uh what are the desires of my heart, my affections? Uh I'm always amazed when I study Jonathan Edwards and he describes the inexpressible sweetness. I I'll be honest, you know, I always wanted that. And you and I go way back. So you remember when our church kind of changed trajectory. We were caught up in that attractional Oprah Winfrey stuff.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Uh I actually had a guy come up on Sunday and he's like, What happened? You know, he's like, Yeah, I said, dude, America, you know, end quote. And it's the sovereignty of God. And I used to read Jonathan Edwards, and I would just be blown away because this guy is outside and he's saying, I'm walking under the stars, I'm under the clouds, and I'm brought to my knees. And then he used to say, the sense of God's grace, even the name of Christ, even one attribute of his causes me to weep. And I used to always think to myself, I'd go, whoa, God, I want that. I want to have that level, not only of knowing about you, not only of being able to write treatises about you, I want to know you. I want to know God. I want to walk with him. J.I. Packer called that the personal dealings. I want to feel the personal dealings where I weep as he weeps. I rejoice when he rejoices. You know, I actually feel what he feels. You know, old Leonard Ravenhill used to go running outside. He'd be watching the news with his wife, and then all of a sudden he just, you know, stand up. And he said, I gotta go pray. Because he was watching news that was so evil and in such disrespect to God that he had to run to his room and fall to his knees and kind of repent on behalf of the nation. I always thought, when I see GI Packer or Jonathan Edwards, or even an evangelist like Ravenhill, I want to know God that way. And so those questions come out. I wrote down uh what ambitions should this cultivate? Um, you know, I I on and on. So those are a few. I I could go, I could go on and on.
SPEAKER_02Brilliant. I think you, yeah, we'll have you write an article about some of that and then also um add some more videos of these type of things from you guiding us along. The last question that I would like you to take us into is could you give us an example of how to dig into a passage and sort of walk us through a step-by-step flyover? If somebody were able to grab their Bible right now and look at a certain passage, how would you flesh this out practically?
SPEAKER_01We could do, yeah, absolutely. We could do one real quick. Um, if someone's listening, they could even pause the podcast and grab their Bible. That's fine. We talked a little bit about John. I'll give you an example. So if I'm working through the Gospel of John, I read through it, you know, one or two times, and then I want to kind of get that overview. I actually have friends who read through it 20 times, so good for them. Um, you know, what I'll do is basically I'll find out, okay, John 20, 31, I want you to know these things, and I want you to be able to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. So I've got a theme in my mind. Let me give you an example. So I'm working through John 1. I've got the Lagos who arrives in the beginning was the Word. I've got the witness of John, John the Baptizer, in chapter 1, verse 6 through 13. I've got the word made flesh, beautiful incarnation in 14 and 15 of chapter 1. Uh I've got the uh the testimony of John the Baptizer there in chapter 1. You've got the miracle at Cana, which is a fun little study there in chapter 2. And all I'm doing in each of these is I'm just sitting down with my coffee and I'm looking for those repeating nouns and repeating verbs. Um, but let's do, here's a fun one. Let's do chapter two. Look at verse 13. So let's pretend, just for we'll just for sake of, I don't know, for the sake of um the experience. Let's all pretend we have our coffee. It's it's it's 6 30 in the morning. The kids haven't woken up yet, and we're sitting out on our couch or the patio together, and let's just pretend like we're studying this little paragraph for the first time, and let's see if we can't pull something out of it. So, yeah, I've got on chapter 2, verse 13. I'm grabbing a pen and I'm looking at it, and it says, And the Passover of the Jews was at hand. And Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now, I probably want to figure out what this Passover is. I don't know, and I I want to figure that out, so I may go grab a little commentary or a little blue letter study Bible or something if you're if you have your phone there. And then I keep reading. He found in the temple those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves and the money changers seated. Now, as I'm reading it, I'm looking for repetition. I call them parrot words, repeating nouns and verbs. Already on my little ears are perking up because I got Jesus in the temple, and I want to know a little more about the temple, but then I see selling oxen, sheep, doves, I see a lot of detail here about money changers. Yeah. And I start to just kind of go, huh, maybe I should grab my pencil and start circling those. Then he made a scourge of cords, and he drove them, verse 15, all out of the temple with the sheep and the uh-oh. Now I've got repeating. Oh my goodness. Okay, so John's trying to tell me something here, you know. So I grabbed my pen and in my Bible here. I got little check marks next to all of them. Sheep and auction. He poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. Verse 16 to those who were Oh, what do you see, Costi? What do you got?
SPEAKER_02Some more doves.
SPEAKER_01You got your NESB or your ESV there, selling the doves. Now just go ahead and just think. If you were a regular guy, you read a magazine for the first time, and an author put selling one, oxen two, sheep three, doves four, money changers five, temple again. I got sheep in verse 15 again, seven, oxen eight, coins nine, changers ten, selling eleven, doves. In three verses, I've got eleven references to some issue of usury or fleecing or sales. So I go, huh. That's interesting. So I'm in verse 16 to those who are selling the doves, and then all of a sudden I got words from Jesus halfway through verse 16. Take these things away. Stop making my father's house a house of merchandise. Oh, okay. So we got sales, but I know there's nothing wrong with sales. Jesus doesn't mind there being issues with sales. I wonder why he's so frustrated. Well, he just told me, take these things away, stop making my father's house. Oh, wow. Well, who's this father, and why is Jesus calling him a father? I'm gonna have to study that. A little cross-referencing. I find out there's God the Father, there's this one named Yahweh. I start studying that a little bit, and he says, Wait a second, I don't want this place becoming a house of merchandise. Then look at verse 17. This is interesting. John jumps back in, the author, and he gives me a little note. His disciples remembered that it was written, Zeal for thy house will consume me. Then look at verse 18. I've got a problem of sales and materialism developing, product and sales mentioned eleven times in five verses. And then verse 18, what do we have, Costi? The conjunction. You see it there.
SPEAKER_02Therefore, the Jews therefore answered him.
SPEAKER_01Therefore, now those Jews, every time I see them in John, they're bad dudes. Religious leaders always trying to take him out. So John says, the Jews therefore answered and said to him, and now my ears are percolating, my mind's percolating. Is this really about the cleansing of the temple? Or is there maybe something else deeper here going on? I don't know. I got to ask these questions. John seems to be saying there's a problem up here, but then something's happening. He said to them, What sign do you show to us, seeing that you do these things? So the Jews say, What proof? Give me some proof. Who do you think you are? Why do you think you can come up here to our racket where we're making all the money and tell us what to do? Huh. Now I've got a real problem developing. And Jesus answered them and he said, Destroy this temple. Oh what's that? We're talking about a temple, we're talking about all the stuff they're doing in the temple, and now Jesus says, You destroy this temple and in three days I'll raise it up. And the Jews, therefore, there it is again, said, It took forty-six years to build this temple, right? Herod's temple, and you're gonna raise it up in three days. Now John helps us in verse 21. I love when John's helping us. He's helping us a lot because he knows we're new believers. He was speaking of the temple of his body. Temple, temple, temple. Thank you so much, John. This wasn't about Herod's temple. This wasn't about even what was going on in the temple. This was simply the backdrop where the Jewish leaders show up and they say, Who do you think you are? And Jesus says, I'll tell you something about me. And then look at verse 22. When therefore, there's another conjunction, John's helping us again. He was raised from the dead. His disciples remembered that he had said this and they believed the scriptures. What's our theme in John? That you would know and believe. These things were done, which Jesus had spoken. How fascinating. And all of a sudden, my mind starts to realize maybe this wasn't about the cleansing of the temple at all. At least that's not why John used it. Maybe John used it because it was the backdrop for a truth that Jesus mentioned. And he says, when those disciples were scared out of their wits, hiding in that upper room after Jesus had resurrected, they still were sitting there wondering what was going to happen. They all looked back and they remembered that Jesus had said he would come back from the grave. So for me, what I do when I study through that is I see problem in verses 13 to 18. I see Jesus' solution there, saying this temple is gonna come back in verses 19 to 22. I see John in verse 22 even telling me why it's in here. And so what I do is I go over to my margin and I simply write a little star and I say something like, Jesus is the Lord who predicted his death and his resurrection. Now you roll over to Ephesians 2, verse 19 and 20, and you go, Wow, these are all the things that the apostles told us would take place. So it's just coming to the text, trying to figure out why John put this in the text. And of course, as the author who wants us to know that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the God, he puts it here in John 2 to say, even the disciples look back and remembered that he is in fact Lord over the grave. Come on, man. You know what I'm saying? So stuff like that, you know. And what I do with people and what I for myself and our family is we'll take about a week on each one of those. Because you know how pastors we get in there that first day and we're trying to put it all together. Yeah. But I think for most people, you know, they don't have five hours on one morning and then another six on another morning.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So, you know, you take one morning and you just kind of go through the repeating nouns and verbs. You take another morning and start to look for problems and solutions. It might be the third or fourth morning before you're finding a truth, it might be the end of the week before you're applying it to your life.
SPEAKER_02Man, and you've spent every day, all week long, digging in the word and meditating on what the author is trying to convey and ultimately who Christ is and the promises of God. That's so good. I wanted to ask you a follow-up question that we can use to land the plane here. What are some of the go-to resources for you if you were to recommend to lay people and the average person out there? Um, is it a study Bible? Is it, you know, a keyword, which we can explain what that is? Is it commentaries? What would be your kind of top maybe two or three resources that could help people go deeper?
SPEAKER_01Well, number one, I would say you get a really, really good commentary set that you know is technically and theologically sound. You know, so get a good study Bible, right? And then get make sure you have a good solid commentary for each book of the Bible. You know, you remember the old days when I walked in and gave you the MacArthur, put it on your desk, that John 5, right? Absolutely. So I think that's important. Have a really solid study Bible. Uh make sure you have a good, solid, theologically sound commentary. And then if you just want to go deeper, I wouldn't worry, honestly, for the average churchgoer too much about the languages. I would put my energy into good background material. Julius Scott has a great Jewish backgrounds book. Uh Jeffers has a great Greco-Roman world book. Those are so helpful because as you work through the text, it gives you all that historical and cultural context so that it begins to kind of shine brightly like a star in your mind. That's really good.
SPEAKER_02So you'd say a Bible handbook, like the you got Unger's Bible handbook, and you've got, I think Holman's has some, and you I know MacArthur's got the Bible handbook. So Bible handbooks have all that historical information that really would help enhance a study.
SPEAKER_01Especially in studies of narrative. When you get into the epistles, you're going to want to work a little more on your languages, and there's so many great resources now for that, from interlinears to you know, even the Step Bible is a free program online that takes you behind the scenes on the English, the Greek, and the Hebrew. But I think in general, when you're doing narratives, you just want to get a huge macro meta-narrative in your mind so you understand the culture and the times. And so some of those would be important and helpful resources.
SPEAKER_02Awesome, man. Well, I am so excited. We're going to offer uh some featured FTG content coming up where you actually study the Bible. We'll take people into your study there in the office. We'll do an overhead camera and get some good uh footage of you marking up a passage and taking people deeper in. So you guys who are listening can look forward to that via video and go through with your small group or your family and just in your personal study. Um, Pastor Tony, thank you, brother. Thanks for helping us become better students of God's word. I sure do love you. Absolutely. I love you too. Thank you all for being with us today on this for the gospel podcast for free resources and to give to for the gospel and what we're doing to get free resources to people. Go to forthegospel.org. And then for videos, go to YouTube or connect with us on social media via Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. We're back every Monday with another episode. Until then, keep living for the gospel.