ARME 1: Soquel, CA - Aug 2009

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ARME Bible Camp

Isaac Eliot

Ellen White and Hermeneutics

Okay, I'd like us to begin this morning's presentation with a word of prayer, and I'd like to ask, as far as possible, that you kneel with me as we pray this morning.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for this precious opportunity to study the Bible.

We have lost opportunities, but help us to redeem the time recognizing that there is not much time left.

And Lord, in a short amount of time, give us the amount of skills and the wisdom and the ability that we need in order to be effective witnesses for you.

Well good morning I wanna thank you for being here my name is Emmanuel Beck I actually came here from an evangelistic series.

I'm holding some evangelistic meetings in Taos, New Mexico.

We in among our subculture of evangelists, we call it, this is the week when everyone is cooking.

And I want to ask you to pray because we have, we had a small opening crowd.

We're down to about 10, but out of those 10, we have a Baptist minister and his family and some of his church members that have been coming.

And the other night, we gave out a decision card for the true church, and he and his family and his church member that was there with him all requested to join the remnant church.

But I want you to know, I have to explain that we've learned in evangelism that you don't know what's going to happen until the very end, you know?

The devil is active, and there are multitudes of factors that play into people making decisions.

This is an unusual interlude for me to be able to come to something like this.

But I don't know if you realize, I cannot think of anything in the past that has ever quite been like this seminar.

This is not really a camp meeting in the natural sense.

And this morning, my presentation is not a sermon.

So for those of you that are looking for emotional upliftment, this is not perhaps the right venue for that.

But I hope that intellectually and as far as learning that you will experience and gain some new insights and tools to study the Bible.

My first presentation is about hermeneutics and Ellen White.

Before I launch into this, I just have to ask, just by a show of hands, how many of you have heard a presentation that I gave at Advent Hope on AudioVerse called, Teach a Man to Fish, Part 1 and 2?

Just by a show of hands, how many of you have heard a presentation that I gave at Advent Hope on Audioverse called Teach a Man to Fish Part 1 and 2?

Alright, I just wanted to make sure that this wasn't completely redundant.

Alright, I want to talk to you about the year of the fish.

In 1996, I found myself in China, close to Beijing, and I was there with Peter Gregory And we were doing some work at a Adventist sanitarium that was hosted by an Adventist physician there.

And the day was typically a lot of sermons.

And then after some of them, we would have questions and answers.

Well, there was 1 question and answer session that stands out in my mind, and it's because 1 of the guests asked this question.

They said, according to the Bible, will Jesus come next year?

And so we said, well, where did you get that from?

They said that in John 21 11, The Bible says that Simon Peter went up and drew the net to land full of great fishes, 153.

And for all there were so many, yet was the net not broken.

So they said, okay, the Bible specifically says that there were 153 fish, okay?

And if you add 153 to the year 1844, then you come to the year, what year?

Okay, so in 1996, they were asking the question, will Jesus come next year?

Was that a proper or was that a correct interpretation of John 21 11?

Okay now, instinctively you say no and I think that many of you recognize that something's wrong with that.

Now obviously it counters the Bible's teaching that no man knows the day or the hour.

But it's interesting that as you said no, I mean it was pretty much, as far as I could tell it was universal that most of you agree that it's not true.

But how do we go about determining what is a correct and what's not a correct interpretation of the Bible?

So this is where hermeneutics comes into play.

I want to give you 1 more example and I'm going to use an example of an early church father.

And Origen did a study on the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Okay, and I want to just ask out of curiosity, Does anybody know, as far as the history of the parable of the Good Samaritan, what does Ellen White say about that particular story?

What does Ellen White say about the history of the parable of the Good Samaritan?

Unlike other parables, the Good Samaritan was a true story and when Jesus told it, the people who were involved, the actual characters in the story, she says that they were there in the audience.

Now, I say this to you because Origen took this parable, Luke 10, 30 through 35, and this is what he did with it.

He took the parable, and he began to take each of the symbols.

So there's Jerusalem, there's Jericho, there's robbers, priests, Levite, the Good Samaritan, the donkey, and the inn.

Origen said that Jerusalem is a symbol for heaven.

And he said that Jericho is a symbol for hell.

And the man in the story represents Adam.

And now what's interesting is that literally speaking, Jerusalem is on a considerable elevation and Jericho is quite a bit lower.

So in the parable, when it says that a man went from Jerusalem to Jericho, it was literally a downward progression.

Okay, so then he said that the robbers in this particular story represent the devil and his minions.

And if you follow his reasoning, the idea was that Adam's fall was not completely his own.

He, you know, he was deceived and this man, he didn't, you know, he didn't invite this, but of course this fate befell him.

He said that the priest represents the law and the Levite represents prophets.

And so he explained that the law can't save you and the prophets can't save you as well.

He said that the Good Samaritan represents Jesus, that the donkey is a symbol of his humanity and that the inn, of course, represents the church.

The question is, was Origen's interpretation or was his exegesis on the parable of the Good Samaritan, Was it correct?

In other words, how do we know is this an accurate way of explaining or interpreting what this parable is about?

Now I should perhaps add to this that many of the reformers that followed him including Augustine and Luther, Calvin, I think even Wesley, these men all looked at the parable of the Good Samaritan in an allegorical sense.

I'm leaving you these questions because I want to try to introduce the importance of having some set guidelines by which we can determine is this the proper way of explaining a Bible passage.

Well that's where this principles of hermeneutics comes in.

And exegesis, now this is a term that Pastor Myers mentioned yesterday.

Exegesis is determining the meaning of a passage based upon its historical context and its literary context.

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Ellen White and Hermeneutics

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