Learning from the past often brings the present into clearer focus! In this seminar, we explore how Christian thought has often swung between pendulums of biblical interpretation – and we will be better equipped to recognize the extremes.

GYC 2016: When All Has Been Heard

<p>Learning from the past often brings the present into clearer focus! In this seminar, we explore how Christian thought has often swung between pendulums of biblical interpretation – and we will be better equipped to recognize the extremes.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

The Power of God's Word

Chester Clark

1. Power in the Word

This message was presented at the GYC 2016 conference, When All Has Been Heard, in Houston, Texas.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

It's good to see you here at GYC and it's always a blessing to be here myself.

It's always 1 of the highlights of my year and I trust that it will be 1 of the highlights of 2016 for you as well.

How many of you are here at GYC for the first time?

And I just hope that this will be a very special time for you.

I'm going to just briefly give an overview of what we're going to be looking at today.

We have 4 sessions together, and I realize that we may not all be interested in all 4 of them, but today we're going to start with Power in the Word and we're talking about how God's Word is important in our Christian growth, in our Christian life, and we're going to be looking at the Bible.

And I hope, I sincerely hope that you brought your Bibles today.

That's going to be helpful because we're going to be using our Bibles and we're going to be looking at them this morning in our first period, Power in the Word, the Irresistible Incredible Power to Change Lives.

The second session is going to be called The Nature of Revelation and Inspiration.

And basically we're going to be looking at how the Bible was given to us.

We're going to be looking at sort of defining some of the processes, How God worked, how God didn't work, what the prophets' roles were, and so how we can understand biblical inspiration.

Now our views on revelation and inspiration dictate how we interpret the Bible, And you're going to find that to be very interesting.

The third seminar is Brief History on Biblical Interpretation.

And we'll be looking at, starting around the Christian era, the time of Christ, we're going to be looking at how the Bible has been viewed and interpreted and understood.

And what's interesting is we look at these patterns or cycles we see that there's really nothing new.

When we see new methods of interpretation, they're really not new methods.

They're the same old ones that have been used in the past and we are just sort of rediscovering them in some cases, unfortunately.

And then the fourth today is going to be practical pointers for interpreting Scripture and applying it to your life.

So this is how to get into the Bible and to really start applying what it says.

You know, biblical interpretation is a very, very important subject because if you look at Christianity and even within our own denomination, the differences that we have boiled down to our views on the nature of revelation and inspiration and how we interpret the Bible.

And when I say we should all agree on everything, I'm talking about the major things.

We'll never agree on every little minutia, every little detail.

But hopefully if we understand and we agree on our method of interpretation, we'll come to the same major conclusions.

Tomorrow we're going to be looking at understanding prophecy, principles of prophetic interpretation, and then Sabbath we'll be looking at how to get the most out of personal devotional life.

All right, let's begin with a word of prayer, shall we?

Father in heaven, we just thank you that you've given to us an opportunity today to be at GYC.

Lord, so many people, young people around the world have been wishing they could be here.

And they're with bated breath tuning in, going online, logging in, trying to get every benefit they can.

And Lord, you've given us the blessing of actually being here.

I just pray that you would help us to make the most of this opportunity.

And Lord, as we look at your word today, I pray that you'd help us to understand it.

And especially now in this first session, that you'd help us to understand how important and powerful it is in our lives.

This is a story going back to my college days.

It happened in the...in Eastern Malaysia and we were going on a mission trip there and a group of us were visiting a village in a fairly remote tribe where they lived in longhouses.

Now this is a picture of a longhouse, and I think that's 1 of the longhouses we stayed at.

And there's actually, the whole village is like 1 or 2 of these longhouses.

And they all sort of share the same porch and same yards, front yard, back yard, etc.

And we were there doing some medical missionary work And as we were finishing up in 1 village, our guide, who was a native of that region, he said, we've got to go to another village.

This was on a Sabbath evening, as I recall.

Now remember, we've got our backpacks and we're all carrying our gear and he said, well, it's about 1 cigarette.

They didn't have watches, so they measured their time by how long it took to burn a cigarette.

And so they said, that's not far, 1 cigarette.

Well, I decided they must have some very, very long burning cigarettes.

Because we left just before dark and after darkness fell, we started getting a little bit slowed down.

The problem was our guide, he had a torch.

It was just some sort of a stick that was burning, and he was walking along the trail with this stick.

But there were some 20 of us, and I think we had 3 flashlights between us.

This is, you know, I'm sure it's rained in the last 24 hours.

The trail is muddy, at some places it's these steep hills up and down and ultimately you would be going along and you would hear a piercing shriek as another victim fell in the mud.

And sometimes when they fell, they would go down the hill and take out everyone below them as they went down the hill in the mud.

We were wading through rivers up to our waist or higher, And in the dark, we couldn't see where we were going.

What I learned from this experience was that it helps to have a flashlight.

It helps to have a flashlight with batteries and with a bulb and all the rest, the working flashlight because when you have a flashlight you can see where you're going.

And when we returned the next afternoon, we returned from that village, we were able to see some of the places we had gone over the night before And some of them we had been sort of feeling our way and with some dim light of a light nearby we had gone across these logs not realizing there was a creek a long ways down below that we had crossed over in the dark.

So today we're going to be talking about how the Word of God is important in our lives.

And the Bible uses the metaphor of a lamp to describe the Bible.

Psalm 119, 105, Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.

Verse 130 says, the entrance of your words gives light, it gives understanding to the simple.

If we want to grow spiritually we have to go to the source of understanding.

The entrance of your words gives light, it gives understanding to the simple.

If we want to understand, we need to go to the source.

Now, there are many people who, when they become a Christian, they sort of feel like, well, you know, I've learned the doctrines, or maybe I even I've grown up in the church.

I already understand about God's love I already know about these things right what more is there to learn?

It's sort of like becoming a basketball player.

You know once you reach the NBA you decide you know I'm in the NBA I don't need to practice anymore, right?

Would the person that didn't practice in the MBA, would they stay a professional very long?

Of course not, because they need to continue training and practicing.

No 1 reaches medical school and says, I've arrived, I don't need to study.

This is where I wanted to go, I wanted to go to medical school.

No 1 reaches adulthood and decides they don't need to eat anymore, do they?

When we are fully grown, we don't decide, well, that's all I needed, you know, I don't want to get any bigger, so...

Well, some of us, I suppose, we need to do that, but...

So why does it seem like sometimes we don't feel a need to keep learning and growing as a Christian?

So we're going to examine a little bit about the Bible, what the Bible says about itself and how the Bible realizes its own importance.

2. The Nature of Revelation and Inspiration

For other resources like this visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

All right so today we're going to be looking at the nature of Revelation and inspiration.

Some of this may seem to be a bit, just sort of, I don't know, theological or theoretical.

I hope that we can make it practical as well.

It's an important step for us in understanding how to interpret and understand the Word of God, to understand how inspiration and revelation works.

And believe it or not, it is a very relevant topic in today's world, today's Christian world and even in today's Adventist world.

There is a disparity of views about how the Bible was inspired.

You might think that this would be something we all would agree upon, but we don't and that's why sometimes in our interpretive principles, interpretive methods, we don't agree either.

So we're going to be looking at this And I hope that you'll find it practical.

And I hope that you will find it to be instructive.

And we will apply much of what we learn as we look at interpretive principles a little later.

So let's go ahead and begin with a word of prayer.

Father in heaven, we just thank you that today you've given us your word.

We pray that as we study that word, as we try to understand better how inspiration works, how we can understand the role of the prophet, the role that you played, the role that we play, that we would also be able to understand better how we can apply and understand Your Word.

So first of all, our understanding of revelation and inspiration becomes a necessary assumption for our interpretive principles, our hermeneutics of Scripture and its theology.

We look at a couple of Bible verses here.

We're going to be spending some time in God's Word, but mostly we're going to be, well, we'll have a lot of the verses on the screen for you, but you can still take notes.

2 Timothy 3, verses 15 through 17, tells us that all Scripture is inspired by God.

2 Timothy 3, let's go ahead and read those verses together so we can understand the context here.

And by the way, 1 of the principles of interpretation that we should always remember is that the Word of God is most clear when it is talking on the subject that we are interested in.

In other words, If the Bible is talking about something else but we begin to deduce something about death in that, it may not be as clear as when the Bible is talking about what happens when you die, right?

So for example, the rich man and Lazarus.

The Bible isn't talking about what happens when we die.

It's talking and telling a separate story, which actually, if you read the context, is talking about a very different issue, right?

The clearest verses on death are when the Bible is actually talking about death, right?

It's not that those other verses aren't inspired, it's just this, if a verse could be interpreted 2 ways, how do we know which way to interpret it?

Will we interpret it in harmony with the verses that are very clear that are speaking on that subject that we have at question.

So, the Bible here is very clear, because it's talking about the nature of inspiration and revelation.

And how from a childhood, you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, the scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

Remember, if you were here in the last period, we saw that the Word of God is the agent of conversion.

The scriptures make you wise unto salvation.

Verse 16, all scripture is breathed out by God or inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

So this word inspired or breathed is God breathing the Word of God.

There's another passage here, 2 Peter 1, and verses 20 and 21.

Very key text when we seek to understand what happened here.

We're going to understand better that process in a minute, but for now we're going to see what the Bible is saying.

Knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of scripture comes from someone's own interpretation.

For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

This literally means, for all men, literally means being moved.

The ESV as I just read says carried along by the Spirit of God.

Very, very important for us to understand.

Every prophecy of Scripture does not come into being from one's own interpretation.

So this is how The Bible describes how revelation, inspiration works.

The problem is we don't all agree on what that means.

So we all can agree that God is the author of all scripture, but how did that happen?

What was the method or the means by which God inspired scripture or authored scripture?

We have to come to some understanding of the roles played by God and the roles played by the human messenger.

And the answers, the understanding that we arrive to, become leading hermeneutical presumptions or presuppositions.

How we interpret the Bible is going to be Based upon the foundation of our interpretive principles is our understanding of how inspiration works.

So, we're going to look at some definitions here at the beginning.

And These, by the way, are not biblical definitions.

These are definitions that we use in discussing these issues.

There is not in the Bible a distinction made between the words we use, revelation and inspiration.

But for the purpose of our describing the issues in Revelation and Inspiration.

We're using these as 2 different terms and they are defined as follows.

Revelation is the process through which the contents of Scripture emerged in the minds of the prophets or apostles.

What happened that gave them something to write down?

How did they have that revelation to their minds?

The process through which the contents in the minds of the prophets were communicated in written or oral forms.

So the first is basically how God gave that understanding to the apostles or prophets.

That's the processes of revelation and inspiration for our purposes of discussion here today.

Now biblical writers don't use the word inspiration.

Breathe, God breathed, that's a similar term.

When we read the Spirit of Prophecy, the writings of Ellen White do not in general make a distinction between these 2 terms.

So I don't want you to take this and go start applying it to, if Ellen White says revelation, that means this and inspiration means something different.

We're just talking about this for the purpose of our discussion today.

Now, we're going to look first at the different models of revelation and inspiration, the different ways that people understand revelation takes place, and then inspiration takes place, so that we can understand what we're talking about today.

So the first 1 we're going to look at is that of verbal inspiration.

So if we're talking about major models for revelation Inspiration, Verbal Inspiration is the first 1 we're going to explore together today.

Verbal Inspiration basically understands that God dictated the scriptures so that the words of the Bible are the very words of God.

In some sense, this understanding of revelation and inspiration bypasses revelation and just has inspiration.

In other words, God just told the prophet what to write.

Now that means that the prophet may or may not have even understood what he was writing about.

Because the words were given to him, he was just going to write it out.

And we're going to talk about some of the strengths and weaknesses of this understanding of inspiration a little later.

God essentially dictates the scriptures so that the words of the Bible are the very words of God.

This could be described in the sculptor-chisel-sculpture analogy.

God is the sculptor, the prophet is the chisel, and the sculpture is the Bible.

3. A Brief History of Biblical Interpretation

So we're going to go ahead and try to use all the time we can today to get as much covered as we can.

We're going to be covering the history of biblical interpretation.

Now I don't propose that we'll be able to make an exhaustive study of biblical interpretation, but we are going to seek to do as much as we can with the time that we have allotted to us today.

We study this because it helps us to understand some of the trends and some of the moves, I guess you might say, in interpretation today, in biblical interpretation.

And it helps us to sort of see as we've seen the way people have approached the Bible in the past, it helps us to, I think it helps us to know how we ought to approach the Bible today.

So, let's just begin with a word of prayer and we'll get right into this history.

Father in heaven, we thank you that you've given us the opportunity to study and to learn today.

We thank you for the Bible and as we've already seen in the previous sessions, it's a power, it is the power of God that works to change us, the living and eternal Word of God.

And it's the object of our, or I should say it's the, you use it to bring about our conversion and our cleansing as well.

And so as we study today, we pray that you would just guide our hearts and our minds and we thank you in Jesus' name.

All right, so we're going to start with the Jewish age, Jewish interpretation of the Apostolic Age.

We're going to start talking about how the Jews viewed the scriptures at the time of the early church.

And this is not too hard to do because we have a number of thought leaders that spoke or wrote widely about the use of the Bible.

We're going to start with Philo of Alexandria.

Alexandria, of course, was where many Jews were scattered during the Diaspora.

Philo, a Jewish commentator, philosopher, used allegory with great force.

Now, not many of his contemporaries were using such methods of interpreting the Bible, but Philo used this.

For example, an example of how Philo used allegories, he said that trees of knowledge and life in Eden did not actually exist but were symbols just as the serpent who seduced Eve was a symbol of lust.

So basically, what a person does when they take an allegory, they take an allegorical view of scripture, they say, this passage wasn't meant to describe something factual or historical.

We just have to understand what that hidden meaning is.

Now this is a trend that you're going to see coming back over and over in the history of biblical interpretation.

Philo is 1 of the early expositors who use allegories in a very dramatic way.

Philo taught that whenever a text presented difficulties, made no sense, contained contradictions, or was unworthy of Scripture." That's quite a list of possibilities, right?

At that point, the literal meaning should be given up in favor of an allegorical interpretation.

So whenever a text presented difficulties, made no sense, contained contradictions, or was unworthy of scripture, the literal meaning should be given up.

Now there's a problem with this philosophy, or this principle of interpretation.

The problem is, we might think it doesn't make sense because we don't like what it says, right?

Or it presents difficulties because it crosses with my natural desires.

All we need to do is now view this as an allegorical passage.

We read it as an allegory and we just have to understand what those symbols or those actual literal words represent.

The result was that very few of the biblical stories were retained as factual in Philo's commentaries.

Everything was spiritualized and allegorized in a philosophical language appealing to the intellectuals of the age, the Greek Hellenistic world.

It took centuries for the church to recover from Philo's influence.

Now it's talking about the Christian church.

Even though we had the Jews, Philo not being a Christian, he was an influence in the early Christian church.

So we're going to talk a little bit about the early and medieval church, And I think you're going to see some of the same things coming up, the use of the Scripture as allegories, but we'll get into that in just a minute.

Clement, 1 of the Church Fathers, as they call them, wrote to the Corinthian Church as early as 95 AD.

Series

The Power of God's Word

3. A Brief History of Biblical Interpretation

Transcript

Description

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