We have been looking at how to do basic word studies using your Study Bible, at this point we will shift gears and begin looking at some of the other features in your Bible. There are two other features in the Bible that we have yet to look into and those are the cross references and the verse and chapter notes.
Now when you open up your Bible you will see the text split into two columns with a small column of references in the middle in small print. These references are called cross references. Cross references look to other sections of the Bible with similar verses either structure wise or context wise. Sometimes these are helpful and other times they are not as helpful as they seem to be everyone is not created equal. Looking through some of the more advanced ones that are listed for the Beatitudes I see a lot of things that reference, “Sons of God,” and “peace” all of these serve to help and to expound on the meaning of these and also to give a basis of knowledge for what these mean and may have meant to a first century Jew. Now the Beatitudes here serve as a decent example but an even more clear example would be on the last words of Christ as He hung on the cross. These words are detailed in Matthew 27:46, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me.” Now these words to us are very curious however using cross references we can see that this is actually a reference to the 22nd Psalm. Knowing that reference the text becomes by far more important and meaningful.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
The Study Bible Part II
STUDY BIBLE PART II
At this point you should have read the introduction to the book of Matthew, all of chapter five and possibly Chapter 4 as well as 6. I am hoping that some things are starting to either become clear or at least as a gatherer of information you are beginning to see the next steps. However, before we move on there are some things that I am hoping you have gotten out of the first three steps. At this point you should know, the context of Matthew 5:1-11, know the author (at least the name of the Author), the assumed main function of the book (the point the author is trying to get across, these last two points are usually found in the introduction). Last but certainly not least, you should be noticing some key words that have stuck out from reading. If this sounds a lot like what you have we will move on to step 4.
STEP 4
Virtually every Bible study method to date will include word studies. This is because to understand what the Bible is saying means we have to know what the words they are using mean. There is a problem though, there is almost two thousand years of separation from when this was written till today. This means that the words might not mean what we think they mean. Even more, many times translators take the language of today and use it to the best of their ability, but outside of writing a paragraph for many words it is impossible to convey the concept that is trying to be conveyed. This means that this is going to be a very important step. If you are lucky enough to have a Bible dictionary in the back of your Bible, this process can be as long or as short as you want it to be. However, the method I will show, assumes no dictionary in the back, and even if you do have one, doing this process can only increase your understanding.
In order to do this correct we need to look at the correct words, that is the words that convey the largest or most confusing concepts, or the words that are essential to studying the passage. In Matthew 5:1-11, there are several words that become very clear and necessary to understand the passage. A short list would include, "bless," "inherit," "spirit," "comforted," "meek,"...etc. All of these words are very necessary to understanding the passage. If we don't understand or misunderstand even a single one of these words we could end up with a wildly different understanding of the passage.
In this post we will not go through all of the words mentioned, but for the sake of an example we will look at the word, "bless."
To do a word study we are basically looking for the meaning of a word, with a study Bible they sometimes have a dictionary but many times they do not, so how does one get a definition for a word. The same question can be asked of any dictionary, how does one create a definition. Definitions are derived by how a word is used in certain circumstances or writings. Mainly through Context, when we read the Bible we are reading into it our context, but we need to shift that to a context that was two thousand years ago. One of the best ways to do this is to look at the word and how it functions or functioned two thousand years ago, and this can be accomplished by reading your Bible. Virtually every study Bible will have a concordance in the back, this is a fabulous tool, especially for the mission at hand. It will allow us to look at specific words in a context that is close to if not more than two thousand years old. A concordance is a reference tool which gives you every Biblical reference for certain words. This allows you to look up how a word is used in the Bible and only in the Bible, to isolate how a word was used Biblically. With that let us look up the word, "bless," or "blessed." As luck would have it, the concordance in the LSB has the word "blessed." and right from the get go, we can see that this word appears a lot in the Bible, so it is an important one to understand. Looking at this though, it would take an hour to look up all these verses and if we are to do any more Word Studies this might be too time consuming. However, this word occurs 13 times in Matthew alone, which is plenty to see how the word is operating, and not only that, but this will allow us to even further isolate the context of the word to a single book. (note: being that Matthew is writing with knowledge of the Old Testament, it may also be wise to look at a few Old Testament references just for background information, however, if you do not have the time looking up only the references in the book will suffice). Now, yes this word occurs a lot in the book of Matthew, but notice that many of these occurrences happen in our section, so we should probably be looking at different sections of the book of Matthew. So we should be looking up:
Matthew 11:6
" " 16:17
" " 21:9
" " 25:34
We should also look up at least one Old Testament, and one other New Testament occurance to see if they can help us, for the sake of this study I have chosen
Jeremiah 17:7
1Peter 4:14
Now I will give you a summary of what I find for each verse.
Mt 11:6 : This just says a certain group is blessed that are not offended by Him, there is no result of the blessing given. However, given our knowledge of the message of the Bible we know the importance of faith in Christ.
Mt 16:27 : In this text we see that Simon is blessed, with the causal phrase of his faith something that he is "blessed" because he (Simon) could not have gotten this by himself.
Mt 21:9 : again they are just saying that this is Christ quality of being blessed not the causal or result.
Mt 25:34 : This verse shows that a person is blessed when the Father gives him an inheritance, something that is not owed the person, but given graciously by God. this is the second verse in Matthew that lends itself to the idea of blessed meaning to get or gain something not deserved.
Jeremiah 17:7 : This seems to continue the idea we have been looking at in Matthew, in vs 7 and following the suggestion is the one blessed does not fear, because the Lord is on His side, but does not say why the person deserves this, it just says it is so.
1Peter 4:14 : This verse is slightly different, because it is giving a causal, that is the cause for the blessing, and the resultant state, that is the result of the being blessed.
So after all this what can we now say about the word "blessed," a short version of a Word Study using only a study Bible is given below.
BLESSED:
This word moves in a positive direction, usually meaning positive outlook of God on someone. This positive outlook can be caused by the status or something done or something that was done to the person but throughout the book of Matthew (remember however, we did not look at the occurrences of our passage yet) there seems to be a sense that this is done by God alone apart from what we do or don't do. However, even in 1Peter the cause of the blessing was being insulted for the name of Christ, something that if you are proclaiming Christ Crucified would be hard if not impossible to avoid at the time. Zeroing in on our passage we see that we do have a causal i.e. a cause of the blessing, meek, poor,...etc. and a result i.e. inheritance, comfort,...etc. However, notice that even these qualities are something that are not always controllable, usually a poor person does not choose to be poor but they are in the position, maybe even because of a mistake they made in the past, but not a desirable position, yet, they have a desirable outcome, they are "blessed" by God and given something very positive, and Godly. This may not always be at first the person wants, but closer examination (especially with more word studies) will reveal that what they receive is better than what they may have wanted. For example, a person who is poor in Spirit may want any number of things yet he receives the Kingdom of Heaven, I would say that is quite a "blessing."
At this point we will stop until the next post. May God bless your studies.
Peace in Christ,
Pastor Chris
This is not a true video, it is audio set to a picture, it is from Bible Class at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Wausau Wisconsin, The Audio is captured from a Blue Tooth device and is not the best. This audio covers the first three post on this blog.
At this point you should have read the introduction to the book of Matthew, all of chapter five and possibly Chapter 4 as well as 6. I am hoping that some things are starting to either become clear or at least as a gatherer of information you are beginning to see the next steps. However, before we move on there are some things that I am hoping you have gotten out of the first three steps. At this point you should know, the context of Matthew 5:1-11, know the author (at least the name of the Author), the assumed main function of the book (the point the author is trying to get across, these last two points are usually found in the introduction). Last but certainly not least, you should be noticing some key words that have stuck out from reading. If this sounds a lot like what you have we will move on to step 4.
STEP 4
Virtually every Bible study method to date will include word studies. This is because to understand what the Bible is saying means we have to know what the words they are using mean. There is a problem though, there is almost two thousand years of separation from when this was written till today. This means that the words might not mean what we think they mean. Even more, many times translators take the language of today and use it to the best of their ability, but outside of writing a paragraph for many words it is impossible to convey the concept that is trying to be conveyed. This means that this is going to be a very important step. If you are lucky enough to have a Bible dictionary in the back of your Bible, this process can be as long or as short as you want it to be. However, the method I will show, assumes no dictionary in the back, and even if you do have one, doing this process can only increase your understanding.
In order to do this correct we need to look at the correct words, that is the words that convey the largest or most confusing concepts, or the words that are essential to studying the passage. In Matthew 5:1-11, there are several words that become very clear and necessary to understand the passage. A short list would include, "bless," "inherit," "spirit," "comforted," "meek,"...etc. All of these words are very necessary to understanding the passage. If we don't understand or misunderstand even a single one of these words we could end up with a wildly different understanding of the passage.
In this post we will not go through all of the words mentioned, but for the sake of an example we will look at the word, "bless."
To do a word study we are basically looking for the meaning of a word, with a study Bible they sometimes have a dictionary but many times they do not, so how does one get a definition for a word. The same question can be asked of any dictionary, how does one create a definition. Definitions are derived by how a word is used in certain circumstances or writings. Mainly through Context, when we read the Bible we are reading into it our context, but we need to shift that to a context that was two thousand years ago. One of the best ways to do this is to look at the word and how it functions or functioned two thousand years ago, and this can be accomplished by reading your Bible. Virtually every study Bible will have a concordance in the back, this is a fabulous tool, especially for the mission at hand. It will allow us to look at specific words in a context that is close to if not more than two thousand years old. A concordance is a reference tool which gives you every Biblical reference for certain words. This allows you to look up how a word is used in the Bible and only in the Bible, to isolate how a word was used Biblically. With that let us look up the word, "bless," or "blessed." As luck would have it, the concordance in the LSB has the word "blessed." and right from the get go, we can see that this word appears a lot in the Bible, so it is an important one to understand. Looking at this though, it would take an hour to look up all these verses and if we are to do any more Word Studies this might be too time consuming. However, this word occurs 13 times in Matthew alone, which is plenty to see how the word is operating, and not only that, but this will allow us to even further isolate the context of the word to a single book. (note: being that Matthew is writing with knowledge of the Old Testament, it may also be wise to look at a few Old Testament references just for background information, however, if you do not have the time looking up only the references in the book will suffice). Now, yes this word occurs a lot in the book of Matthew, but notice that many of these occurrences happen in our section, so we should probably be looking at different sections of the book of Matthew. So we should be looking up:
Matthew 11:6
" " 16:17
" " 21:9
" " 25:34
We should also look up at least one Old Testament, and one other New Testament occurance to see if they can help us, for the sake of this study I have chosen
Jeremiah 17:7
1Peter 4:14
Now I will give you a summary of what I find for each verse.
Mt 11:6 : This just says a certain group is blessed that are not offended by Him, there is no result of the blessing given. However, given our knowledge of the message of the Bible we know the importance of faith in Christ.
Mt 16:27 : In this text we see that Simon is blessed, with the causal phrase of his faith something that he is "blessed" because he (Simon) could not have gotten this by himself.
Mt 21:9 : again they are just saying that this is Christ quality of being blessed not the causal or result.
Mt 25:34 : This verse shows that a person is blessed when the Father gives him an inheritance, something that is not owed the person, but given graciously by God. this is the second verse in Matthew that lends itself to the idea of blessed meaning to get or gain something not deserved.
Jeremiah 17:7 : This seems to continue the idea we have been looking at in Matthew, in vs 7 and following the suggestion is the one blessed does not fear, because the Lord is on His side, but does not say why the person deserves this, it just says it is so.
1Peter 4:14 : This verse is slightly different, because it is giving a causal, that is the cause for the blessing, and the resultant state, that is the result of the being blessed.
So after all this what can we now say about the word "blessed," a short version of a Word Study using only a study Bible is given below.
BLESSED:
This word moves in a positive direction, usually meaning positive outlook of God on someone. This positive outlook can be caused by the status or something done or something that was done to the person but throughout the book of Matthew (remember however, we did not look at the occurrences of our passage yet) there seems to be a sense that this is done by God alone apart from what we do or don't do. However, even in 1Peter the cause of the blessing was being insulted for the name of Christ, something that if you are proclaiming Christ Crucified would be hard if not impossible to avoid at the time. Zeroing in on our passage we see that we do have a causal i.e. a cause of the blessing, meek, poor,...etc. and a result i.e. inheritance, comfort,...etc. However, notice that even these qualities are something that are not always controllable, usually a poor person does not choose to be poor but they are in the position, maybe even because of a mistake they made in the past, but not a desirable position, yet, they have a desirable outcome, they are "blessed" by God and given something very positive, and Godly. This may not always be at first the person wants, but closer examination (especially with more word studies) will reveal that what they receive is better than what they may have wanted. For example, a person who is poor in Spirit may want any number of things yet he receives the Kingdom of Heaven, I would say that is quite a "blessing."
At this point we will stop until the next post. May God bless your studies.
Peace in Christ,
Pastor Chris
This is not a true video, it is audio set to a picture, it is from Bible Class at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in Wausau Wisconsin, The Audio is captured from a Blue Tooth device and is not the best. This audio covers the first three post on this blog.
Monday, May 24, 2010
The Study Bible
When it comes to Bible Study, there are several methods on how to do it. I have read books with up to 30 different methods, Rick Warren in a magazine article named off 12. The unique thing about this, is that for the most part, most of these methods deal with much of the same material. I will admit that not all of them do, some try to zero in on one particular things such as history or various words, but most general Bible Study methods do include aspects of all of these. In this study I am trying to present a very generic way of studying the Bible, and in that, we will be looking at how to use the tools that are available, and maybe not available to you. However, it isn't just about the tools it is also how you use them and in what order.
I would like this process to be as interactive as possible so I will be doing two things with this study. First, I will be focusing in on one particular passage in this case we will be looking at Matthew 5, the Sermon on the Mount. The second thing will be that the work will not all be done for you. Much of the work that is to be done will already be done, however, I will purposely leave things out to make it more meaningful and beneficial to the person doing this on their own.
Thinking of these two things, we will start with the simplest of books which many have in their homes and progressively work our way up looking at the things that can be done and the benefit of using certain tools which for many are at their fingertips. Today I will be looking at something that many have, the study Bible.
THE STUDY BIBLE
You may notice as you hold your study Bible up that, for a Bible it is unusually large. Not only is it large but as you flip through from page to page you will notice notes and footnotes throughout the Bible, sometimes there are even more notes than text. We may sometimes wonder to ourselves if this is right, should we be reading all of this extra stuff on top of the Bible? However, all of these things are not the Bible, nor would we ever pretend that they are, but they are tools, and just like all tools some are not right for the job, and some are just not good tools at all. This is also true with some of the things in the Study Bible. There will be times when the notes or something else will be wrong in the Bible, but these notes where created by humans and humans are sinful as well as imperfect and make mistakes even when they are not trying to. You will also find that not all the tools are right for the job, sometimes you need the notes, sometimes they do more hindering than helping. In our study we will try to create an order by which to study the Bible using most of the tools available. In future studies we will be doing much of the same work that we will do with the Study Bible, the major difference being the amount of depth we can reach with outside sources.
STEP 1
Today we will be looking at Matthew 5: 1-11. So the first thing we need to do is also the most obvious, before we can do anything, before we can read notes and look at concordances we have to read the text. This is the most important step we can have. we must read the text, we must read it plain, without anything to bog us down, we shouldn't even read the introduction to the book of Matthew, at least not at this point, we should just read the text.
If you have a sheet of paper (I hope you do) I would suggest at this point you create a headline that says something to the effect of, "first read" or something that signifies that this is the first time reading through without any notes or helps in any way. Once the header is written, and you have read the text, feel free to jot down what you think the text means, what do you think it is all about? What gave you problems? Where there any words that popped out at you that you thought were significant or hard to understand. Write all this down in a short paragraph maybe five to six sentences in length.
STEP 2
Now you have read the text we will be studying and you may even have some questions written down, so we move on to step two. Step two handles the second most obvious question, "where is it?" we have handled what it is by reading it, but what is the context? Is Jesus speaking or not, who is he speaking too, is this before or after He has resurrected from the dead. We need to know when and where this is taking place, so we need to read at least the chapter before our text and through the chapter that follows our text to get a general idea of where chronologically this is taking place. If you have time, it would be nice to read the entire book of the Bible, but I know that not everyone has time for that. Looking back at your earlier paragraph, see if anyone of your questions are answered by looking at the context.
STEP 3
Now we have looked at the text as well as the context, but we still have more questions to answer, maybe there are words which we still don't quite know the answer to just yet. One of the first questions will still deal with context, is there anything we can still learn about the context of our text. Lucky for us, most study Bibles including the one which I use the Lutheran Study Bible or the LSB on this Blog, have included an introduction to each book of the Bible, usually these introductions go through the purpose of the book, the people who the book is being written to and so on. At this point it would be good to read that, see if there are any new things that pop out as you read it, does it help to explain anything.
NOTE: It is at this point that we begin using things that are outside of the Bible, written by man and therefore the possibility of errors grow. If, while reading, something that doesn't seem right, or just something that seems wildly new to you pops out, do not be afraid to test where the information came from, if you are wrong you will learn even more about the Bible, if you are right, you will have caught an error and know to stay away from it in the future.
At the point we will conclude this first post. The Study Bible topic will continue in my next blog so begin your study and get to this point before reading it (when it is actually posted)
I would like this process to be as interactive as possible so I will be doing two things with this study. First, I will be focusing in on one particular passage in this case we will be looking at Matthew 5, the Sermon on the Mount. The second thing will be that the work will not all be done for you. Much of the work that is to be done will already be done, however, I will purposely leave things out to make it more meaningful and beneficial to the person doing this on their own.
Thinking of these two things, we will start with the simplest of books which many have in their homes and progressively work our way up looking at the things that can be done and the benefit of using certain tools which for many are at their fingertips. Today I will be looking at something that many have, the study Bible.
THE STUDY BIBLE
You may notice as you hold your study Bible up that, for a Bible it is unusually large. Not only is it large but as you flip through from page to page you will notice notes and footnotes throughout the Bible, sometimes there are even more notes than text. We may sometimes wonder to ourselves if this is right, should we be reading all of this extra stuff on top of the Bible? However, all of these things are not the Bible, nor would we ever pretend that they are, but they are tools, and just like all tools some are not right for the job, and some are just not good tools at all. This is also true with some of the things in the Study Bible. There will be times when the notes or something else will be wrong in the Bible, but these notes where created by humans and humans are sinful as well as imperfect and make mistakes even when they are not trying to. You will also find that not all the tools are right for the job, sometimes you need the notes, sometimes they do more hindering than helping. In our study we will try to create an order by which to study the Bible using most of the tools available. In future studies we will be doing much of the same work that we will do with the Study Bible, the major difference being the amount of depth we can reach with outside sources.
STEP 1
Today we will be looking at Matthew 5: 1-11. So the first thing we need to do is also the most obvious, before we can do anything, before we can read notes and look at concordances we have to read the text. This is the most important step we can have. we must read the text, we must read it plain, without anything to bog us down, we shouldn't even read the introduction to the book of Matthew, at least not at this point, we should just read the text.
If you have a sheet of paper (I hope you do) I would suggest at this point you create a headline that says something to the effect of, "first read" or something that signifies that this is the first time reading through without any notes or helps in any way. Once the header is written, and you have read the text, feel free to jot down what you think the text means, what do you think it is all about? What gave you problems? Where there any words that popped out at you that you thought were significant or hard to understand. Write all this down in a short paragraph maybe five to six sentences in length.
STEP 2
Now you have read the text we will be studying and you may even have some questions written down, so we move on to step two. Step two handles the second most obvious question, "where is it?" we have handled what it is by reading it, but what is the context? Is Jesus speaking or not, who is he speaking too, is this before or after He has resurrected from the dead. We need to know when and where this is taking place, so we need to read at least the chapter before our text and through the chapter that follows our text to get a general idea of where chronologically this is taking place. If you have time, it would be nice to read the entire book of the Bible, but I know that not everyone has time for that. Looking back at your earlier paragraph, see if anyone of your questions are answered by looking at the context.
STEP 3
Now we have looked at the text as well as the context, but we still have more questions to answer, maybe there are words which we still don't quite know the answer to just yet. One of the first questions will still deal with context, is there anything we can still learn about the context of our text. Lucky for us, most study Bibles including the one which I use the Lutheran Study Bible or the LSB on this Blog, have included an introduction to each book of the Bible, usually these introductions go through the purpose of the book, the people who the book is being written to and so on. At this point it would be good to read that, see if there are any new things that pop out as you read it, does it help to explain anything.
NOTE: It is at this point that we begin using things that are outside of the Bible, written by man and therefore the possibility of errors grow. If, while reading, something that doesn't seem right, or just something that seems wildly new to you pops out, do not be afraid to test where the information came from, if you are wrong you will learn even more about the Bible, if you are right, you will have caught an error and know to stay away from it in the future.
At the point we will conclude this first post. The Study Bible topic will continue in my next blog so begin your study and get to this point before reading it (when it is actually posted)
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Purpose
The purpose of this is to talk write and create discussion on various Biblical Topics to increase both my personal, as well as the Biblical knowledge of all. I will try to write as often as I can to on various topics, however, my first few blogs will probably be on some popular methods of Biblical study which will help to get into the conversation.
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