How To Study The Bible
Vern Peterman · Jan 13, 2002
How to Study Bible (2001-02), No. 15
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262239473205

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

OK. Everybody get enough wind this morning? OK, just to make sure. Don't want any wind deficiencies. You know something I never figured out is why the air is in such a hurry. Anyway, one of the things, you've got a handout there. And I just want to take a look initially at a few charts. You may need to grab another one over there if it's not immediately available. Big words up at the top.

The bottom line is, this is kind of the layout of things as we see in Scripture. If you read things kind of literally and just in normal sequence. This is generally what is taught here at this church because we take the Bible literally. where they're figures of speech, we take them as figures of speech, but we interpret the Bible literally taking figures of speech when they would come across them. But one of the things you may or may not be aware of, but just to make sure that everybody's on the same page, there are other understandings of what the Bible teaches. And just to make sure we're all on the same page here, This is where we're at now, and my estimation is we're somewhere here with the rapture, the taking up of the church being imminent.

It could happen at any time. The tribulation period is a period of seven years of increasing, ghastly things happening upon earth. God's judgment upon earth. After that, the Millennial Kingdom, Christ will reign on earth And then into what's called here the eternal state, basically on into eternity.

That's kind of the sequential layout of what we teach here. Now, there are, as you have on your sheet there, there are some other teachings out there. Here's another one. Millennialism. It is the standard teaching of the Catholic Church. It is also commonly taught in the Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian Church, and a lot of the Reformed churches. Some Baptist churches and some Southern Baptist churches, typically like Church of Christ, follow this as well.

That's the Ah-Mill idea. Ah-Mill. Mill means a thousand, right? So the idea is this has to do with that thousand year reign of Christ. Ah means what? Not. So, they don't believe in it. Bottom line is, they're saying, we're living now in the church age, and Christ is going to come again, and that's it. There is no millennium. Now, post-millennialism.

It's another one that came up here. This is commonly taught also among a lot of the Presbyterian and Reformed. Yeah? Yes. No. No. What they do is they take all the things we're studying in Revelation and largely it's just interpreted very figuratively. It's very allegorical, pictorial, And that kind of thing. What's that? Oh, I'm sorry. Symbolic. Symbolic. Yes. Yes. It's all very kind of foggy. OK.

And now post-millennialism, they say, well, that some of them are a little more literal about the thousand years, some not. But in the post-millennial idea, they look at the church age changes into this golden age. This is kind of the millennium here. And then Christ comes and on into the eternal state. They really, again, don't believe in any real tribulation. They don't believe in an Antichrist. It's all figurative. It's all foggy. Now, those teachings are out there, and frankly, what we teach at this church is the minority among churches.

I think one of the questions we've got to ask is, how did we get here? How did we get to this place where it's so confused? We need to get you a chair. Anyway, we need to ask the question, how did we get here? Why on earth do we have such an assortment of beliefs? Is the Bible that? that we could end up with all these variations of teachings. Well, let me give you some for-instances.

Post-millennialism was started by a guy by the name of Daniel Whitby. He's a Unitarian Universalist. Basically, his idea is that we can take the book of Revelation and just kind of snip it up and rearrange it however we want. So that's why he'll put the Millennium before Christ's coming instead of afterwards.

And anything that doesn't quite fit into the scheme, we'll just interpret it very figuratively, symbolically. And it'll be something like the Tribulation isn't really anything literally happening on earth, it's more of a a figurative description of the struggles that Christians go through. You get the idea? So instead of looking at, okay, here's this trumpet and this bowl and here's things that are going to happen on planet Earth, instead you just kind of look at it as these are kind of broad stroke, broad brush ideas about difficulties that you're going to go through as a Christian.

Does he interpret the rest of the Bible in the same manner? No. And you see, that's the point we're going to look at this morning. What we teach at this church is let's look at the whole Bible literally unless it uses figures of speech that make sense and we understand them as figures of speech. Unless there's a reason to look at something out of order, we take it in the sequence that is presented. Those who follow this teaching aren't held to that.

Plus, post-millennialism was real popular during the 1800s, and not among Unitarian Universalists, but like Presbyterians, real popular among Presbyterians. And it was actually one of the most dominant teachings up until the First World War. Why? Post-millennialism teaches that everything's getting better and better. And the church's job is to make things better and better until we bring in, because the church is so great, we bring in the golden age. And we make it so good that Christ can come back. You see that? That's the post-millennial teaching. We're going to make it better and better and better. What's that? Yeah. That's right. That's right. What we do is not with the hope that we're going to make things so good that people just have to come to the Lord and we're going to make things better and better. I talked to one post-millennialist when I was living in Carson City, and he said, everything I do to even fix up my yard just makes things better and better. Every board I put up, every time I paint my house, it just makes it better and better.

So you see the picture there? When I was in high school, we tried to attend this Methodist church. I say tried because it was really a struggle. But I can remember one of the songs that they had there was, And the darkness shall turn to dawning, and the dawning to noonday light, and Christ's great kingdom will come on earth, the kingdom of love and light.

That's right. We have a story to tell to the nations. It will turn their heart to the right. That's post-millennialism. We're going to make it better and better, folks. But guess what Paul says? they'll go from bad to worse. It doesn't match up with Scripture.

But anyway, we'll talk about how it happened, how it came about that we've got this teaching. Now, it took a hit in the first and second world wars because everything's getting better and better. That doesn't sound so good when you've got all of Europe and all of Asia at war, right? And so this took a huge hit and it's only recently started to come back up.

And you might hear the term reconstructionist. You might hear that term. You'll hear of, I'm trying to think of some of the, Gary DeMar, Gary North is another one. There's different guys that are real big on this because they're going to make things better and better. The Methodist Church, the Presbyterians, some of the Lutheran denominations are of this mindset.

We're just going to make it so good Christ has to come back. The amillennial teaching now, they're kind of a mixed bag and some will say we're going to make it better and better. Some will say we're going to make it worse and worse. But they basically throw out entirely this idea of millennium. And they throw out the tribulation.

Now, get this. Okay, get this. And boy, this one, make sure you're sitting down. a great many of the Amillennialists and some of the Postmillennialists will teach that Satan is bound now. Satan is bound now. I don't know who keeps letting him loose, but he's bound now. Peter writes and he says, Satan roams about like a roaring lion. I don't know how they reconcile that. Now, not only that, we're in the new heaven and new earth. How about that? Weird, huh?

But this has been the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. It's been their teaching for roughly better than 1,500 years, the official teaching of the Church. They never really talk about it much, but here's what happened. The people that believed what we're teaching here, First of all, in the year 1229, Bibles were made illegal. And I don't mean illegal like we're taking your Bible and here's a ticket. I mean illegal like you have a Bible, you're dead. It's execution time if you have a Bible. The average person could not have a Bible.

If they found writings that described things like this, they would either change them or burn them. So people who believe this had a tough time even expressing that. But this all-millennial teaching, it was basically what took over and that's why when finally the Reformation took place after the year 1500, a great many of the people in the Reformation, they were just thinking about there's some authority other than the Catholic Church and it's the Bible. They were just thinking about there's a way to be saved aside from the way the Catholic Church described, and they really had not gotten around to thinking this one through.

So John Calvin, he wrote a commentary on almost every book of the New Testament, but not the book of Revelation. Why? He says, I can't figure it out. That's my paraphrase. But bottom line is, he could not, he just looked at it and he says, it's just indecipherable. Luther looked at the book of Revelation and he just said, I can't see Christ in this book, which is almost hard to imagine. He was baffled by it because he had gone through Catholic seminary, and there they taught his amillennial teaching. He wasn't trained to take it literally, and so he still carried this confusion around in his mind.

Now, how did we ever get into this spot? Let's take a look at it. You've got also on your handout this little thing. 700 B.C. and actually some of the history of it goes earlier than that. That's why that little squiggle means about. The little tilde means about 700 B.C. The Greek myth started getting pulled together about that time.

Shortly after that time, and focusing especially around the year 400 B.C., a lot of Greek skeptics started saying, this can't be real. You've got these people doing all these crazy, magical, strange things. This can't be real and so they said these myths are just allegories. They're not true.

So now, what happens just around 330 BC, Alexander the Great goes and takes over the world basically. His mentor was Aristotle, Greek philosophy. So Alexander the Great goes and establishes Greek philosophy throughout the world at that time. Along comes, and this is the time when Christ was alive, on planet Earth. He was still growing up when this guy Philo in Egypt, a city called Alexandria. Philo said, this Old Testament here, it's got all this gory stuff, let's just interpret it as allegory. He got it from the Greeks.

Let's just interpret the Bible as allegories. And so it's really not real history, it's just stories. Things we can learn lessons from, but it's just allegories. Didn't look at the book of Genesis as describing how things were created. It's just a story to help us learn some moral lessons. But it's not real. That wasn't the way they understood the Bible in Israel.

But in Alexandria, Egypt, guess who that's named after? Alexander the Great, right? In Alexandria, Egypt, where he lived, Greek philosophy had been first spread by the sword. Because Alexander the Great says, you will believe Greek philosophy, right? Or you'll get run through.

So, Philo went and started writing all these writings about how the Bible is just a bunch of stories. Just allegories, okay? That got well established and now the Christians come into Alexandria and a fellow by the name of Origen picks up Philo's stuff and he says, oh, well that must be how we're supposed to interpret the New Testament too. You see that? Now, so it was from there It was from there that the Christians picked up the idea that we can just start interpreting the New Testament as an allegory, as a story. But look where it started. It started from the Greek myths. There's no Bible involved in how that got started. But that is how the Catholic Church, much of the Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian Church, Reformed Church, Church of Christ, that's how they got their interpretation. It's from Greek skepticism.

Yeah. Yeah, and what they do is they cut and paste. See, anything they don't like, what do you do? Well, you don't have to cut it out. you just allegorize it. See, anything you don't like, you don't have to get rid of it, you just allegorize it. Make it an allegory. And let me ask you this, what controls the interpretation of the allegory?

Nothing. Nothing. And that's why you end up with a gazillion different cults, gazillion different interpretations, all kinds of denominations, thousands of denominations, Once you start breaking into allegory, there is no control over your interpretation. None.

So you've lost it. Now, this kind of interpretive approach had nothing to do with the Bible, but it comes out of the Greek skeptics. Plato is one of the Greek skeptics. You've heard of Plato? That's the guy. He's kind of the main one. Play-doh, yes, there we go Exactly But but that is what that is what has impacted the interpretations of the Catholic Church of much of the Lutheran Church Presbyterian Church Church of Christ even good portions of the Southern Baptist Church other Baptist Because the Baptist Baptist is not one group. It's a whole spectrum But all these interpretations all break out of Greek skepticism. Now, let's take a look a little farther up here. This is the chronology of how it came about for the approach we're taking, which has a different path.

The Old Testament was written by the Jews starting around 2000 BC. It was around the time of Abraham, although Moses is typically credited with with pulling that together and writing the book of Genesis. So you could say 1400. But 2000 BC is a good date for Abraham, for Job, those two characters. And then the Bible, the Old Testament, OT is Old Testament by the way, the Bible of the Old Testament was completed by around 400 BC and the Jews, after the tradition of Ezra, continued to copy the scriptures, continued to study it.

How did they, did they interpret figuratively or literally? Well, they interpreted literally. And case in point, the wise men come to Jerusalem because they see some sign in the sky that tells them the King of the Jews is to be born, or has been born, and they see Herod. And Herod doesn't know the scriptures, so he says he goes to the Jewish scholars, and it says, where's the king of the Jews to be born? And what do they say? Bethlehem. It's just literal. It says Bethlehem. It must be Bethlehem. Really? Real Bethlehem. Yes. And so they tell them, it must be Bethlehem. There's the place.

If you read through the prophecies of the Messiah, and there are some 300 of them in the Old Testament, they were given literally, and they were fulfilled literally. And you read through everything down to, here's Jesus going to ride a donkey into Jerusalem. That's given in the Old Testament. How is the Messiah to die? Psalm 22. He's going to be pierced. What you see is there's literal description. The Jews looked at that and they said, that's literal. And they read it literally. They were sometimes using figures of speech, but you don't see them allegorizing.

Now, what happened is that's the environment that Christ and the apostles came into, so that's what they wrote about. In Matthew 23, the entire chapter, Jesus has woe to the scribes and Pharisees for various things that they're doing, adding to Scripture and twisting Scripture. He said woe to them about this and woe to them about that.

He never attacked their way of interpreting scripture. He never said, you people, you interpret it literally. You should be doing it allegorically. He never said that. He certainly had the opportunity. He said all kinds of things. He never mentioned that.

Here's Acts 1.6.

The disciples, they're thinking everything Jesus has said Everything that they had learned from the scribes and Pharisees in Acts 1.6, they asked Jesus, they say, is now the time that you're going to establish your kingdom. And what were they thinking? Literal kingdom on earth, right?

And Jesus didn't say, oh, you don't understand. Why, I'm not going to come rule on earth. No, there's going to be this long time and the church is going to take over that. No. What did he say? It's not up, you know, it's not up to me to establish that that's the fathers to set.

Set the times. And we'll see here in, like next week studying Revelation, we'll see the exact description of when the father set the time. It's when he handed Jesus the scroll with the seven seals. That's the start, okay? That begins the tribulation period which sets the clock for the millennium.

Literal, okay? Jesus instead then turns to them and says, but when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, you shall receive power, and then you'll be my witnesses. He doesn't sidetrack their question except to say, now is not the time. You see that? He didn't dispute their literal expectations. But what has happened is that a great majority of the church has gotten sidetracked through the Greek mythology skepticism into understanding that all figuratively.

No, Christ really isn't going to come down on earth. Zechariah 14 says that God will put his feet on the Mount of Olives when he comes to reign. And what does it say in Acts 1? Here's Jesus ascending into the clouds, right? And what does the angel say? he's going to come back in the same way that he left. He left literally, he left from the Mount of Olives, and where is he coming back?

To the Mount of Olives. That's the literal understanding. Dr. Tommy Ice, one of my professors at seminary, was in a friendly debate with a fellow who believes in this homilenial system. And he talked to them about what I just described to you. Here's Acts 1 saying, okay, The angel said that Jesus is going to come back in the same way that he left. And then he pointed to Zechariah 14 and says, okay, here it talks about the Messiah, who is God, coming back down to earth, and it says his feet, I mean literally, his feet will land on the Mount of Olives. And he asked this fellow, Ken Gentry, he says, what's your interpretation of that? And he said, I don't have one. He had no idea, what do I do with this? Because it sounds so literal. He didn't know. And he's kind of like the guru of the Amillennial Frederick system.

You get the idea? There's a sharp distinction here. And it's not just a matter of wrangling over scriptures and you got this idea and I got that idea. we're either going to interpret in the way Christ and the apostles interpreted, or we're going to take some other system. And most of Christendom has embraced the interpretive approach of the Greek skeptics. Now what difference does that make? Let's take an example.

This is one we've looked at before, but I think it's just such an excellent turning point Here's 2 Samuel 7.16.

Here is the Lord speaking through Nathan the prophet to David, King David, about roughly, round numbers, a thousand years B.C. He says, Your house and Your kingdom shall endure before Me forever. Your throne shall be established forever. To David, you're going to have a house, you're going to have a throne, and you're going to have a kingdom.

So now, a thousand years later, here is this peasant girl backwater backwoods town of Nazareth that has a visit from the angel Gabriel. And what happens is the angel said to her, and this is Gabriel, do not be afraid Mary for you have found favor with God. Alright, so far so good, right? And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son and you shall name him Jesus.

Now, do you interpret that literally or figuratively? She took it literally. Now, she was raised a Jew in Israel, and they interpreted things literally. She, along with all the other Jews in Israel, was expecting a real, literal kingdom, a real Messiah who comes down on planet Earth. She interpreted that literally. And guess what? The Postmillennialists and Amillennialists also interpret this literally. Don't they?

They look for a literal, real Christ. Now, let's go to the next verse. He will be great and called Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give Him the throne of His Father David." Now, is that literal or figurative? Because here you have a dividing line. Literal interpretation says there is going to be a real Israel. There is going to be a real throne, a real kingdom. Now let's go to the next one.

And he will reign over the house of Jacob forever and his kingdom will have no end. The house of Jacob is who? Is Israel. Now the amillennial and postmillennial interpretation of that is the house of Jacob is the church. Because they say Israel was rejected, therefore the church gets all the promises of Israel. So that's how they interpret it.

They'll say he will reign over the church. forever, okay? And of His kingdom, which they say that's the church, there'll be no end. And that's why you will have some folks in these post-millennial and all-millennial camp that say the Lord is never coming again. He's not coming again because their interpretation is He's done what He's going to do, and there isn't a second coming.

That's it. We're here, folks. This is it. This is the kingdom. This is the new earth, this is the new heaven, Satan's abound, you're here, as good as it gets. How about that? When we come here, we either have to maintain this literal understanding that we have here and carry it through, and that's what we do here, or we're going to take a look at 32 and 33, and we're going to interpret those literally, spiritualize them. Okay? Spiritualism. And that's kind of the dividing line to get into.

What we're doing in the main service, we're going through Revelation. And here's how they look at it. Because when you study through Revelation, it sure looks like, you know, this thing goes this way, right? Remember we looked at the term after these things? It's a term of sequence. There's this, and then there's this. Then there's this, then there's this. everything sounds like it's pretty well linear in the book of Revelation.

What they do is they snip it up. And so in chapter 20 where it talks about, you know, okay, Christ came and here's this millennium and all, they cut it and make that the start again. What they do is they interpret, it's called progressive parallels. They'll take sections of Revelation and they just start over. And they'll say that's really going on back here at the beginning. And they do that seven times.

And they'll just say, these things are going on in parallel all at once. And so there really is no progression of things in Revelation. Instead, it's just a bunch of things that are going on simultaneously. It just looks like it's going on one thing after another.

You see the difference? It makes a huge difference. Because otherwise, if what they're saying is true, teaching you in the next service is all lies. I mean, it's that kind of a division. You're picking one or the other. You're either going to take a literal understanding and continue with it, or you're going to break into the figurative understanding. Now, here's one of the ways. Yeah?

Just to mention something along that line. One person gave me a book on Revelation. by a man who was up in the church. The church of Anderson, Indiana. Do you know which one that is? No. Church of Christ or something. Oh, okay. Yes. Right. Church of God. Okay. And they spiritualized the Book of Revelation. Yeah. Yes. Yes. And the problem is, when you spiritualize, there is no control. Is your idea better than mine? Who knows?

This guy, Origen, that we talked about previously, and you have on your charter, he looked at the rivers in Genesis 2. It talks about the rivers there that go through the garden and all that. And he talked about, oh, those are different elements, different things in the Christian life. And then he said that the seven sons of Job, that stands for the twelve apostles.

Hello! You get the point? There is no control over how I'm going to interpret this. There isn't any. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It was a common thing at Origins time and onward and actually a number of the monks, you know, into the Catholic Church, you know, picked up that same pattern. Augustine was another one. And this goes along with this whole kind of distorted understanding of scripture. There's no chapter and verse where you can look at castrating yourself as being the right way to go, but that's the approach.

Anyway, we could go through lots of different scriptures as examples, but the point is, when they look at something, they're looking at, you know, this is an allegory. This is a story. The difficulty is, where do I stop? You see, all of a sudden they go from literal to allegorical, but the question is, where do I quit? Where do I stop with my allegorical interpretation? Maybe Jesus wasn't really a person, it was just a nice story. Maybe Jesus really didn't die. Maybe he never existed. You see the problem?

Where do I end my allegory if I'm going to start allegorizing arbitrarily? Especially if I'm just going to pick a place where, alright, this is literal and this is allegorical, and just kind of Arbitrarily pick one. Where do I quit? Where do I stop? Ultimately, this comes down to a choice. Do we believe God and take Him at His word? Or do we say, no, it can't possibly mean that and make it say something else? And then ask people to believe it. So there is a choice to be made.

One other major area where it has an impact. What happened is after The Catholic Church started losing control with the Reformation. Covenant theology came out as kind of one of the break-offs there, and that's where a lot of this allegorical interpretation continued. Covenant theology not really understanding the difference between Israel and the Church.

They still teach today. Nancy and I run across it in some of the things we've gotten from people of that background. They teach that the law is your life. The law is your life. And you can find that exact phrase in a lot of the literature. The law is your life.

Galatians 2.20, Colossians 3.1-4 says Christ is your life. So this is not just theoretical. This comes down to how do I live? What is life? So the difference is not just out there somewhere worrying about some distant future. It's right now. How am I going to live my life? Am I going to live my life by the law or am I going to live my life by Christ's life? Are we under the law or not? Galatians, what did Paul write? Oh, you foolish Galatians. It's a serious mistake. Therefore, this is not just something that theologians argue about and it doesn't matter.

Instead, it's something that really matters because the question boils down to where is your life? Amillennialism was a good system for the Catholic Church because it says your life is here and we control it. Okay? But for those who understood that no, that's not the case, we understand that our life is with the Lord and He controls it. And that's a radical difference. Okay?

Let's pray. Lord, we certainly don't want to just get all caught up in argumentation and philosophies that seem irrelevant. But instead, we want to look at Your Word and take You at Your Word and be able to believe You. when you say what you say. And Lord, we indeed want to be depending upon your life because you have had your inspired apostles write that you are indeed our life. And so Lord, we look to you now as we continue on looking at how do we study your word. Lord, we just ask that you would enlighten us, give us understanding and insight based on what you've clearly written. And we just thank you and give you praise for who you are. In Jesus' name, Amen.