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.