How To Study The Bible
Vern Peterman · Nov 4, 2001
How to Study Bible (2001-02), No. 05
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262237263655

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

OK. Several things to cover. First, last week we handed out some of these kind of rib of binder type things. Anybody lacking that? Everybody not get that? This is the kind of insert in the back of your binder so that when you put it on the wall, on the shelf, it isn't anonymous. Yeah. Yeah. OK. Yeah, yeah, I just it just helps as well as you put on the wall and you know, you don't know what it is, you know, so that makes it easier.

And then next week, I'm hoping to get the CDs already. So everybody will have those and you'll be able to use this massive references in there. There'll be dozens and dozens of volumes. Somebody was asking last week if they could just print it out. And I would not suggest that. Just one of the things I'll be giving you is printed out about this thick. So you won't want to try printing it out. You'll wear a printer out and multiple cartridges just trying to do one of them. So anyway, we won't try to go there.

Any questions so far? I know at the end of last week, we had a few folks with questions. Any questions popping up here? Okay, I have a question of folks here, and that is, we've had a couple of folks that said they didn't have binders yet. Is anybody still lacking a binder? We have a couple of binders of one category here, but I'm asking about the binders of the other category. Did we wear Ralph out, Carol?

Some of the things that you want to take a look at here I ask you to take a look at first 14 pages of chapter 6 and of course you have that all memorized I'm sure But the first thing I want to take a look at in that was he talked about three different kinds of Bible study. And the first kind of Bible study he talked about in chapter 6 is panoramic Bible study.

That is, just getting the big picture. just getting the big picture. And you know you can do that at several different depths. One of the things I'll be passing along to you on this CD, and I think I'll probably get out some paper copies, is people have put together like even single page charts that kind of shows the whole Bible. And you can even get a panoramic picture like a history timeline. That helps too. Anything that helps you kind of get the big picture of what's the Bible all about. because it's important for us, even if we're going to study in detail, to get context. But people can study that panoramic approach and kind of go in deeper and deeper levels. You've seen like Bible handbooks and books that kind of summarize things out of the whole Bible. I've got a fairly large volume at home. It's called Wilmington's Guide to the Bible. And in that, all it is is just panorama, the big picture.

Who are the key players? And if you look at, for example, in the Genesis class or the Romans class, they're doing sort of a big sweep through each of the books, right? Well, what we're talking about in this panoramic study is what's the big picture of the whole Bible? Who are the key players? It was written by about 40 authors over about 40 generations. That's a big picture idea. That's one way that you could study the Bible. Just get a better understanding of the big picture. So that's the panoramic approach to Bible study.

What's the next one? The telescope, okay? And what's the telescope approach? What does that term mean? That means you get the telescope out and put the Bible way far away and look at it? Is that what they're talking about? No? What does it mean? Typically that term is for like a topical study, answering a sort of a general question. Someone might say, for example, what is faith? Well, I might go beyond just one scripture and I might look at a number of scriptures that talk about faith, right?

So what you're doing is with a telescope you're kind of zeroing in on, I'm going to look at this. Even though I could look at this, I'm going to look at this one topic. That's the telescope idea. Can you think of some topics that you might study out of the Bible? Just some ideas. How would you start doing that? How would you look up those topics you just listed?

Concordance is going to give you the places where those words show up, and then you can start looking up the verses. Maybe you should explain what a concordance is. Good idea. It's a computer. In the 1800s, concordance, often times we'll drop the word easily, In the 1800s was the time when the real work on concordances was done.

And a few different fellows, you can imagine, no computers, just pencil and paper, went through the whole Bible and said, what's that? And candlelight, and dipped pens. They went through the whole Bible and they went and said, okay, I'm going to find, here it says God, I'll write that down. And here it says created, I'll write that down. and they went through the whole Bible and indexed where all those things were. So then you can look up at the concordance and you say, okay, let me look up God. Okay, there's God, and it says Genesis 1-1 in every single place in the Bible. It has it listed.

A number of them have also gone one step further, and they've developed codes, and Strong's is one of the number systems that you'll see, where they put a number assignment for each word that's behind that word in English in the Greek or the Hebrew. So that's what a concordance will allow us to do.

And it's a good thing for a topical study because you can pick typically a word or a theme and say, what does the Bible teach about it? You might, however, even run into something where that could be difficult. Let me take it for instance. Suppose you wanted to study the Trinity.

What would you look up? Right. You could look up Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and say that our word Trinity is actually not in the Bible. So if you looked it up, you'd say, well, my heavens, it's not there. What's wrong? The Bible teaches it very clearly and very extensively. Our word Trinity, however, is a Latin term. And the Bible wasn't written in Latin. So you're not going to find it. Another one, it's a Latin term, rapture. The taking up of the church prior to the time of the tribulation. If you look it up, it won't be there. But there are other words. So you may, in some cases, have to dig a little deeper. But concordance is a handy tool. And the truth is, there are lots of topics that we might have.

You can ask questions about, what do we know about David? Not just about his life, but what about afterwards? Because the New Testament keeps talking about David. And as we'll see in our study in Revelation, It keeps talking about it all the way to the last book. You could ask about Adam. Where does the name Adam keep showing up? You could follow personalities. As we did here earlier before we broke up into electives, I traced the lives of individual believers that were under Paul's influence. You can study topically lots of different things. Personalities. All the women of the Bible. All the animals of the Bible. Certain kingdoms. What about the history of this particular city? You find Bethlehem is mentioned all the way back in Genesis. So you can trace things topically. That's the telescopic view.

You're zeroing in on a particular thing and following that through the entire Bible. And the third one that he has listed here, and that's kind of what we're focusing on mostly in what we're doing here and how to study the Bible, is what? What's that? Microscopic. What we're doing is zeroing in on typically one verse or a passage and saying, what does that say?

And ultimately, being able to study the telescopic view requires that we know how to do the microscopic view, doesn't it? If we don't know how to study a verse or a passage, we may end up with wrong conclusions or poor conclusions or incomplete conclusions about a topic.

Somebody start raising their hand here? Yes. We have to understand the big picture, don't we? And a part of that is just a sense of context. Let's take it for instance, because that's a point I was going to get to and now it's the perfect intro. And this wasn't planned either. Let's take this instance. Suppose that you had somehow got sent off on Gilligan's Island and you were there with Gilligan and the crew. Oh boy. And 30 years goes by.

And then all of a sudden here on November 4th, you know, you get brought back in the civilization, the first thing you turn on the television, you're puzzled at what this remote is, you know, you turn on the television and here the United States is bombing Afghanistan. Whoa! Okay, now, why would that shock you? Yeah, no context, okay? It sounds like, man, has everybody in the United States gone crazy, you know? What are we doing?

No, if you understood the context, then it would make some kind of sense. But if you just kind of came out of the blue and hit it, it wouldn't make any sense. So what's going on here is you're going to have a situation where you're going to be looking at a passage, and Nancy's right. The better sense you have of the big picture, the better off you're going to be. The better understanding you're going to have. Anyhow, yes, that context is important.

Now, as you go into the microscopic studies, okay, you notice, how many steps did you put in there in looking at these microscopic studies? Six of them. Oh, wait a minute, I thought there were three. Are we confused or what's going on? Okay. It's a little different when you get that part. Okay. What's happening here is he has broken down the steps that we've given you, the three point, observation, interpretation, application. He's broken those down and put those in smaller pieces. Okay. And so the first one is what? What is he asking you to do on the first one? Pardon? Reconnaissance. Reconnaissance. Okay. That sounds like a military term, but what's he referring to? Yes, that's exactly what it is. When he says reconnaissance, all it's saying is, what's the picture here?

What's the context? If I go and just grab a verse out and kind of yank it out of context and say, okay, that looks good, I'll go and fit it into my life, I may end up totally in conflict with what he's saying. And so the first thing it's asking you to do is get the context. Why is he writing this letter? How does it fit into the big picture? If I just grab some verse and it talks about blessings to David, and I have no idea who David is, and I have no idea what it's talking about, suppose my name's David.

I could look at that and say, well, heavens, I'm going to get a house and a throne and a kingdom. God said, I'm going to get a house and a throne and a kingdom. Sounds good to me. As a matter of fact, Mary had this baby 2,000 years ago just so I could get this house and a throne and a kingdom.

Right? Doesn't that sound right? Lost the context, haven't we? So the first thing we want to do is to get the big picture. That's the first part of observation. It's the first step because we want to make sure we're getting the context. We don't want to be like the folks who come off Gilligan's Island after 30 years and find out the United States is bombing Afghanistan and can't make any sense out of it. So that's the first step. We're going to be looking at the big picture.

For example, if we got one of Paul's letters, we're going to be asking, okay, what other letters did Paul write? Who was Paul? If we know about Paul, what part of Paul's history was this? And who was he writing to? You see, all those kinds of questions are things that we need to know in order to get the big picture.

So that's our first step. And it's really a part of observation. So we haven't misled you here. What he's done is breaking up observation into two parts. And that's the first part. We're going to make sure we understand what's the big picture. And what's the next step he gives us? Observation. And how does he describe that? What's that? Pulling into focus. And what does he mean by that? Which is kind of what we did last week, isn't it? We looked at Psalm 19 verse 1 and we looked at Acts 1-8 and in those We observe one word at a time. What is this word saying? What does that word say? What does this word mean? What does the next word mean?

We're going to look at them one word at a time. How would you go about observing one word at a time? What are some of the things that you could do to study a verse looking at it, now that you've gotten the context, one word at a time? What would you do? Dictionary.

Typically what's happened is, and later on we'll take a look at Yes, there may be some value in looking up the Hebrew and the Greek, but typically what's happened is the translators have put some effort into trying to pick the right word. And so just making sure you understand what the word is.

And one kind of word of, you know, sidelight here is some translations, particularly a lot of older ones, the word meanings have shifted. So we need to make sure we understand, if we're using an older translation, make sure we understand what the word means at that time. There are roughly 400 words in the King James, for example, and there are actually a number of translations up to and about that time. A number of words, about 400, that have either changed meaning or gone out of use.

So you need to make sure that if you're looking at it, that you understand it. Here's a case in point. Remember we said in 2 Timothy 2.15, what does it say? In the King James it says, study to show yourself approved. But the word study meant be diligent. So what's happened? The word has not gone out of use, but its meaning is now different. So we need to make sure we understand the words and how they're used What does it mean?

Here's a for instance. If I say saved, how many different ways do we use the word saved? What's that? Yes, saved. I saved some money. And even that, if we say I saved some money, we can say either I spent less money than I was intending to, or thought I would, or we can say, I saved money as opposed to I put it, meaning I put it in the bank. You see the difference there? Making sure I understand, how is he using that word?

What does it mean here? In some cases, saved may be saved in terms of being eternally saved. Saved from the flames of hell. In another instance, It may simply mean delivered from something, and it may be not an eternal issue, but here on planet Earth. So you need to look up words. Go ahead and use the English dictionary. It's a good point just to make sure we understand every single word that's there. Word by word.

Later on, we'll look at how we can study even in more detail, and especially as we get farther on, looking at the Greek and the Hebrew. How do I find out? What are the tools available for me to look at words and find out more what's behind them? Oftentimes, we'll see a word come through in English and it may have a whole history and significance that escapes us and so deeper study may involve that.

But a good place to start, excellent point, a good place to start, just look up in the dictionary, make sure you understand the word to begin with. If there's any ambiguity, get that resolved. All right, so word by word, there's something else. When you've got this word by word issue, there's also a relationship between words, isn't there? I may have something where I look at it and I say, well, wait a minute, this is explaining that. So I'm going to kind of put those words together and explain the relationship between those words.

All right, what's the third thing down the list? Meditation has nothing to do with what goes on with these people in the lotus posture. That's not what we're talking about here. What are we talking about? It's thinking about it. It's spending time contemplating and the reality is that this is not necessarily a mathematical process. You may have to take time to think about things.

One of the good points that Dave Durland brought up a few weeks back, I said, you know, I said, if there's five interpretations, you know, four of them are wrong. And he brought up a good point. He says, what if all five of them are wrong? And that's an excellent point. It is possible that among various Christians, people have come up with five different interpretations and all five of them are wrong. And you have to look at this passage and find out, okay, wait a minute, what is it really saying? and that there's another interpretation that's actually the appropriate one, and you need to just scratch out the other five. So good point. But you need to think through these things. What are some of the things you're going to be thinking through?

I think I like what it means. OK. Yeah, ultimately, what are we aiming for? Remember, we talked about multiple observations, one interpretation, multiple applications. So we're going to be thinking, oh yeah, this has this relationship to something else. We're going to be thinking, oh, I need to look up this thing, I need to examine that a little further. We can take the time then to think through the observations that we do have, and maybe there's one that we still have yet to make. but we're beginning to put the pieces together or ask ourselves, have I got all the information that I need to make the right interpretation here? Good point. Good point.

Essentially, remember when early on here we said whoever wrote scripture had an intended meaning and it is ever important for us to say what is the intended meaning, not what do I want it to say. A theologian of the 1800s says, give me five dollars and five minutes and I can make the Bible say anything you want. And he's right. If your intent is to make a meaning out of a passage, go to it. You can do it. But if your intent instead is to find out what the author had in mind, then you've got to be diligent.

That's the 2 Timothy 2.15 principle. Do you see the difference there? It's what did the author mean? Plus, there's another depth to this. What did the author mean as he was inspired by the Holy Spirit? It's ultimately, what was God's intent?

And that's how this is different from reading an encyclopedia. It's different from going and reading the newspaper, because those are human words and may well be true with a lowercase t. In commentaries? Huh? In commentaries. What's that? Commentaries can be... Yes. Yes. And that's something... Let's talk about commentaries for a minute. Are commentaries good or bad? Ah, okay. Yeah, I asked a bit of a trick question. The reality is a commentary is what one person has written about typically a particular verse or passage, right? And how might a commentary be helpful? How might it be a good thing?

Okay, you can compare some things, weigh some things. Okay, good. What else? Yeah? Oh, this isn't an answer to that. Okay. It's sort of beside it. Okay. To me, it's very helpful to read different translations of the Bible in the same area. Okay. Because you can get a huge amount of data out of reading just four or five different translations. Yeah. Right. And truth is, I find just in looking at one translation versus another, it isn't an absolute rule that one translation has always conveyed the Greek better than another.

A few weeks back, for example, I quoted 1 Corinthians 1.10 out of the King James because I felt that that did the best job of conveying the original Greek better than some of the modern translations. But good point, you can compare translations and sometimes get some insight from that. Commentaries, back on that.

What are some of the pluses of a commentary? Additional ideas? Yeah? Ah, okay. A lot of times what happens is somebody who's a theologian or a historian or whatever has gone and dug into the background And now with this commentary, you take the advantage of their digging, right? So it's kind of, you put things into high gear, you might have spent a lot of time digging something up, and they've already done it. They've already kind of done some of the homework.

So that's a plus. What's another plus? Yeah? Sometimes it can prevent a heresy that's already been exposed. Ah, OK. They've already pointed out, this is a problem. And so you can see that. So it'll kind of lead you away from going down a wrong path. OK. All right. Yeah.

It can provide some different insights and perspectives. What's another value of a commentary? Depending upon what was written, it may give you a better understanding of a word that you've used. In a translation, okay, all right. And there's another thing that that highlights.

Depending on when it was written, one of the papers that I did in seminary was to trace through the centuries, and we'll be getting to this in Revelations chapter 17 and 18, it talks about what's called the Whore of Babylon. And the question is, over time, what has been the understanding of that phrase? And it turns out that the understanding of that identity, the Whore of Babylon, has changed radically over time.

Since the Middle Ages, the identity has frequently been to say this is the Catholic Church. What happened before the Catholic Church existed? They had a different identity for it, and they didn't say it was a Catholic church. So it's interesting, if you look over time, and you can look at commentaries, and I'll give you copies of some commentaries from the 2nd and 3rd and 4th and 5th centuries, and you can look it up yourself, there are oftentimes ideas out of history that kind of give you a historical perspective and say, oh, well, you know, I better be careful about this, because the reality is that our historical perspective includes a long span of time that earlier ones didn't have. What's that?

Yes, we have that advantage. I could sit there and show, you know, here's 19 centuries of understanding of what is the Whore of Babylon, what's the identity of the Whore of Babylon. You know, people didn't always have that. So we have some tremendous advantages of being able to examine that. Let me suggest one other advantage to the commentaries.

In kind of putting them up, commentaries either individually or sometimes in one particular commentary, you can say, okay, there are about five different interpretations of this particular verse. And one of the things that I will tend to do is say, okay, here's the five, what can I eliminate? And how do I go about eliminating? I say, oh, wait a minute, this is inconsistent. This is a problem, you know. And so you can begin eliminating some of those and saying, well, this is no good because of this and that.

And then you start boiling it down to what's worthy of consideration. This is the meditation part of it again. I can start looking at it and say, well, wait a minute, you're kind of weighing things carefully. I can look at it carefully and say, what really is of value?

Now, what's a disadvantage of a commentary? They are not inspired. One of the jokes I've heard is when the angels want to laugh, they read our commentaries. That's right. They are not inspired. People will sometimes just go grab a commentary and say, oh that's what it means, and then just go put it away. Wrong approach. That would be easy. It's a little too easy. They are valuable.

Recognize their value, but don't just link yourself into a commentary, or even a particular commentator, and say, this guy's always right, because he's not inspired. Wayne's point's well taken. It is man's writing, and there is definitely value in it, but also recognize its limitations, and that God's Word is what's inspired, and not man's writing about it. There's also something else about a commentary that can skew you, aside from the fact that it's not inspired.

And what's that? What's that? Yeah, in other words, it can come off in some particular direction. If you kind of lock in on a commentary, you end up thinking in terms of what that commentary said, and everything looks like that, as opposed to, you know, what did the author intend to say?

Because that's ultimately what we're looking for, isn't it? This is God's Word. God inspired it. The authors that wrote it had a particular message in mind. And we're aiming for that, not just to follow after some commentator. If we're not careful, remember Paul was writing to the Corinthians, and he said, some of you follow after Paul, some after Apollo, some after Peter. If we're not careful, we'll just end up following commentators instead of God. And so we can make a mistake there, can't we?

All right, now what's the next one? Okay, step three is decide what it means. Okay, now we've gone through and said, here's the context. What's that? Oh, I'm sorry. Am I behind here? Well, okay, yes, I'm sorry, step four. Okay, now we're going to be looking at it.

Now it's saying, all right, I'm going from step three and now I'm going to head to step four where I'm going to start saying, okay, here's what it means. and start lining this out. Here's what it actually is talking about. He turns it on page 10, he turns it, hitting the bullseye. Now you're going to start writing out for yourself. Here is what the text is saying.

And again, the point is not to end up with, gee, it means five different things and we're just happy to leave it there. It's saying there was one intended meaning, remember, one interpretation, and now we're going to write down after carefully going through the first steps. After carefully going through the first steps. Now, step five, determine how it affects me. Remember we had observation, interpretation, application, and that kind of simplified sequence. This last line, okay, how does it affect me? And that's where we said, remember, there's one interpretation, there's one intended meaning. This is what the passage is saying. Now, how does it fit my life? How does it fit my heart? How does it fit my mental frame of reference? Nancy and I have some friends down in Texas. As a matter of fact, Nancy was just emailing them this morning.

They came out of a cult. They had been raised from birth in this cult. It's a cult called the two-by-twos or the Kuniites. It's a lesser known cult. They have no buildings. They always meet in homes. And they don't go about publishing a bunch of material. But they're real big on, you know, we go out two-by-two. And so they push things that way. This couple, having been raised in that cult, I mean, that's all they saw. And the cult says, don't you dare read anybody else's material. Don't you dare watch television. And we don't want you reading anything else. You're going to read our stuff and nothing else.

Period. Or you're going to get a what for, okay? That's what they were raised in for 50 years plus. Can you imagine what that's like? I mean, it's like blinders. That's all they see. So now we look at this situation here, the application, I mean, they're so crippled on all the earlier stages, they have a hard time, you know, how do I apply this?

I mean, even if you come to them with an understanding that's better, it's like what they're used to applying is so warped compared to the biblical intent. There's another, what are some cautions that we might have about how we apply these scriptures? What are some cautions you can think of? Actually, when you've done the steps before that, I don't think they probably are that many. And I think that's the key. That's why we're focusing the earlier steps. Make sure we get an understanding.

Where does this fit historically? Okay? Example. Okay, here you start reading some passage out of the Old Testament, and it says somebody commits adultery, you're supposed to stone them, right? So now, here, you know, the year 2001, is that what you're supposed to do? Sounds good to me.

Yeah. Yeah. And so that's where getting the bigger picture is important and figuring out where does this fit in God's sequence of things. And we'll be talking more later even about what are called dispensations and how that fits. Yeah. Ah, yes, yes. This is where the principle that Jesus put forth, you know, look first at the log is actually, the term he used was a structural beam. Look first at the structural beam in your own eye and then you can take the speck out of your brother's.

It's the attitude of this, my sin is the worst. And it's not that I'm out there eager to condemn. It's just as a priority, I need to deal with myself. And I think that's an important point in application. The first thing is to look at how does this apply to me? What is the thing that needs to happen here first?

The scribes and the Pharisees were ever anxious to find out how it applies to somebody else. And that was a great deal of their error, not all of it. But that was a great deal of their error. They were anxious to go find somebody else stumbling first. whereas the order of priority instead should be, let's be looking first at our own lives.

What's that? Yes, and I'm glad you brought that up because ultimately doing this observation, interpretation and application requires humility to do it properly, requires humility. the person who's coming to the scripture and saying, I want it to mean what I want it to mean, is not humble. Yeah, is not humble, is it? That's putting me above the text. That's putting my intent above God's intent. So lack of humility is an interpretation problem. It's also an application problem, because the person lacking humility is going to be looking at the text for a way to nail somebody else. That's not what it's for. The first priority is, how does it fit here? Once I've dealt with that, then I'm in a place to say how it fits somewhere else.

The reason we say multiple applications is that we're all in different situations, aren't we? We all have a past history. We all have a present that is different. We all have a future that has variations. All that's going to mean we'll have different applications, different things.

One person may say, you know, I need to go and confess this. Another person says, you know, I need to understand this better. Another person is going to say, you know, I really need to be looking at doing more of this. Another person's going to be looking at it and saying, wow, Lord, how awesome you are.

You see, there's going to be a number of different ways that each individual might apply it. Even in your own life, you might find multiple ways that you can apply it. So that's the reason we say many observations, multiple. One interpretation, many applications. And we've run out of time here.

What I want to do is have you read through the rest of Chapter 6 there. That'll be page 15 and on. And what he does is he takes you through a particular passage that steps you through it in detail. That way you'll be able to get a better sense of what he means. Hopefully our stepping through this here has made it a little more plain with each part of the process involved.

Okay, here's the way I look at it. Our church's doctrinal statement, and you get a copy in the hallway lobby there, says that the original writings were inspired. And the intent of that is to say that here were the original writers, Paul, Peter, John, Moses, all writing as the Holy Spirit allowed them to carry on.

I don't believe that any particular translation is inspired. And that's one reason just for us to study and look carefully. A translation may very well be the very best of some particular person's effort. But it's one reason why I think to compare translations, that was an important observation made. Another reason, and we'll be looking at it further, is how do I check on what this translator said?

How do I find out? Because the reality is we want to have the understanding that Paul had when he wrote that. That's what we're aiming for. What did Paul mean? What was his historical framework? What was his mindset when he wrote what he wrote? When John was writing the Revelation, what was he thinking when he said that?

That's what we want to look at. And it's possible for a particular translation to have a skew one way or the other, and a bias, frankly. The King James, for example, has had a lot of influence on the English-speaking church. One of the difficulties, if I see one translation, King James, and I look at some other, if I say, well, King James is inspired, which some people teach, if the King James is inspired, and I start looking behind, and I'll say, well, wait a minute, if I study the Greek word, those guys didn't translate it very well. Now I've got a problem. I also start playing the original language against the translation. You end up with real conflicts.

So the better thing is to understand that as those authors, 40 authors, wrote, that the Holy Spirit was carrying them along. That's what Peter writes. The Holy Spirit carried them along. That's what we have assurance of, and that's what we know. Yeah? It's kind of encouraging, too, to know that Jesus used offensive language. Pardon? All Christ's quotations were from offensive language. The Septuagint, yes. Right. Right. Yes. I think there's something to look at as textual as we get in this class, and it's important to be textual.

We may be concerned, gosh, I've got just this translation, maybe you don't know Greek, and I think it's helpful, but ultimately we have to look at, if you are a believer, you have the Holy Spirit. and that takes it beyond just a purely technical scientific realm, because the Holy Spirit is indwelling you, and He is the one who is going to lead you into the truth. It is not a purely... What's that? Yes, yes.

And this is also where the application part comes in too, because ultimately, what good does it do to interpret if I don't apply it? And the Holy Spirit is going to be working in your heart to say, this is what needs to change. This is what needs to be understood. Thank you for asking that, because that's an important distinction and a lot of people struggle with it. Hopefully my answer has helped.

Let's pray because we're kind of late. Lord, we give you thanks. We give you praise. We just acknowledge, Lord, that you have done a marvelous thing in giving your word, and you are indeed worthy of praise and glory and honor. And as we continue studying how to study your word, Lord, we just ask that you would indeed guide and lead us, that we would understand every truth that you have laid out for us. In Jesus' name, amen.