okay pull out your syllabus or your syllabi as is the plural of syllabus yes then look off Aaron Aaron do you have one oh you just have the aims and requirements would one of you guys who has one of you guys who's at a table with multiple copies there share with those guys four for the time being all right under part one introduction when we say hermeneutics if you would this is you took a picture of this beautiful artwork right all right if you would walk up to someone on the street and you would start asking actually if you would walk up probably to someone in the pew at church where it will even make will even make this a little more a little more direct and you started talking about hermeneutics the response that you would get would probably be something something like this Herman who who who is who is this person hermeneutics what we mean when we talk about hermeneutics and you'll find do you guys stick with us through the you Timothy training stuff you'll find that a lot of the big scary sounding theology words are really just big scary sounding theology words that express some pretty simple ideas okay what these big words usually are is a really handy way to say a whole lot of things in one word that almost no one actually understands right so you guys are going to be initiated into the intellectual elite and as we talk about some of these words no in all seriousness though hermeneutics simply is the methods techniques and rules or principles that govern our interpretation of scriptures so hermeneutics are the rules that we follow when we when we interpret the Bible and by interpret I mean when we sit down and figure out what in the world it means okay so I will try and do things like this for you guys what's the key concept here when you think of hermeneutics a set of rules you see it's in all caps and it's underlined three times so that tells you hermeneutics really are there a set of rules all right there are set of principles that we're going to follow as we sit down and we try to understand what Scripture means all right uh the the word hermeneutics you can hear this in there it's taken from the name of the Greek god Hermes now do you guys remember what Hermes did he yeah you you were there yesterday you cheater all right yeah uh yeah I believe that's right so he's the messenger of the guys yeah Matt Matt gives me the head nod so yes that makes me confident yeah he's he's the one when the gods wanted to communicate with the mortals they sent Hermes right and so it it moves over naturally to our english word hermeneutics because what are we trying to do we're trying to understand the message that God has sent to us okay so they take Hermes and they bring that Greek paganism into our good solid Christianity but it gives us a useful term all right it gives us a useful term and that is the rules that we follow in order to understand what the Bible says now when we talk about understanding what the Bible says let's talk about our goal here what is it that we want to do in this we want to understand two things really we want to understand the single meaning of the authorial intent of the verse or passage or book or whatever portion of scripture it is that we're studying again what's the important part of that statement what are the two key concepts we have how many meetings we have one meaning all right we have a single meeting and what determines that meeting who determines that meaning the author right we have one meeting and the author is the one who determines the correct meaning so we are trying to understand what the Apostle Paul meant or what God meant through the Apostle Paul when he wrote to the Colossians to the Ephesians to the Philippians to Titus to Timothy all right and that is what we want to do there is one and only one meaning to scripture okay only one and that is the meaning that was intended to be conveyed by the original author what we see here in single meaning is that each portion of Scripture has one and only one intended meaning which is determined by the authorial intent now how many of you have been sitting in a small group Bible study together or something like that and you guys read your passage for the for the evening and the small group study leader who may or may not have been you I'm going to assume it was none of you looks at the looks at the rest of the group and says here what's the question he's going to ask what does this passage mean to you right god bless all of the well-intentioned small group leaders who asked that question but it is totally totally totally the wrong question to ask okay we're going to get to where I'm important in the process but not until after we understand what the what the passage already means what's the question that needs to be asked what does this what does this passage mean period that would be a question mark actually so what does this passage mean question mark right the to you is irrelevant at this point okay we are going to get to the point where after we understand what the passage means the single meaning that is determined by authorial intent we're going to get to the point where we say what's the significance of what that passage says for me okay but what the passage means to you should be what the passage meant - how to know Martyn lloyd-jones - John Calvin - Augustine - Paul Wright or the Colossians okay there's only one right answer to that question now I say that and I stress this because the modern movement in the field of hermeneutics in the academic field of hermeneutics is to say that it is impossible to understand what the author actually intended to convey we're going to talk about some of the difficulties in understanding it but not impossible to overcome but what we're going to see is or what you'll see today in modern hermeneutical studies is that they say we are so far removed from the authors and we are so far removed from them in time and geography and in and in culture that there's no way that we can possibly understand what they were trying to trying to communicate what they intended to communicate we're going to see that's wrong but the implications of that for them are this what they say in light of that they say there's no way we can understand what the what the author intended to convey therefore the best that we can do is interact ourselves with the text and then in that interaction there's meaning so they say there's there's they say there's going there's some sort of meaning that's derived out of me taking part in the text and reading it in and thinking about it and all of that and all sorts of mumbo-jumbo comes out of that but but we're going to see that the gaps are overcome Abul I believe to a large degree we can understand what the author intended us to understand for a number of different reasons so our goal is to understand the single meaning the one meaning of the passage of scripture that we are studying and that meaning is are trying to we're trying to understand what the author intended to communicate to his original audience all right so that authorial intent is the truth that the original author of scripture intended to communicate to the original audience of the book or the letter okay now I am going to say I do want to point out here just just one thing as we talked about this I don't believe that the principle of single meaning means art rules out rhetorical devices or literary devices such as a wordplay you know we have words that kind that can mean more than one thing or have more than one flavor of meaning right you guys you guys have a good idea of of some of those types of things well that's true in biblical times as well and sometimes the author will play off of sort of the two flavors of the meaning of that word all right so there's wordplay that's involved there but still the word play includes or the word play is included then in the author's original intent okay does that make sense so by single meaning I don't want to rule out that but that it's not it's not an issue of there's sort of this surface literal meaning and then there's a spiritual meaning and then there's a figurative meaning and then there's a there's a I don't know what other allegorical meaning and sort of all of these some Bible and this is not necessarily unique to today is not unique to today at all but some people have compared this idea to like the Bible is like an onion and if you peel off one layer you get to the next layer meaning in the next layer of meaning and the next layer of meaning that would make interpreting the Bible and understanding the Bible really really difficult wouldn't it the nice thing is based on what we understand scripture to be and based on how we see scripture treat other passages of Scripture we can say look this is the meaning it's straightforward it's sitting there for anybody who's willing to do the work to figure it out and to understand it okay so we believe that there is a single meaning and that that meaning is the plain meaning of the passage all right now we are also going to see that once we have a handle on the meaning of a passage there may be and there probably will be many different applications of that meaning all right but the application of a text the application of a passage we're going to see is very important it comes after the interpretation step okay so certainly a hundred percent absolutely we need to get to the application of a passage of Scripture right our study is all essentially for naught if we don't apply what we learned but that step of application is a separate step and a later step then understanding what a passage of Scripture means does that make sense essentially what the the current the the modern movement is is to move application to the front of the to the front of the of the process instead of making it after the process now we will talk about application and we will talk about understanding the implications of a passage in this class but it's very very important that we understand that that part of the process that applying the process that understanding the implications of that process is a separate step from interpreting what scripture has to say does that make sense okay it'll play out as we go but that's going to be important that we keep that that we keep that in mind so now when you say hermeneutics and somebody says Herman hoop then you can say hermeneutics is the art and science of biblical interpretation okay and we're going to see that there's both art and science involved there's science in that we're trying to come to that single meaning right and we have some steps to follow in order to put that together the art part is that you know applying that steps applying those steps can take some skill okay it's not always super duper easy sometimes there's a challenge involved it's not a bad thing that it can be challenging from time to time it's good for us to work for our food on occasion right so we are going to go to work as we work through hermeneutics let's take a minute here a couple of minutes here let's talk about why hermeneutics why do we need to interpret Scripture why is it that sometimes it's hard why is it that sometimes it takes work by the way I will generally try and give you guys about five minutes somewhere in the middle of class I know an hour and 40 minutes or 45 minutes a long time to try and power through and concentrate on the same thing so we'll try and break things up we got started a little later today so well we'll just move right through today but I will I will try and give you guys a break and if I start to just get past if I just get way past the top of the hour some some afternoon just kind of wave at me and say hey we need a break we need to break or like football player you can tap out and say hey guys I need a sub so but why hermeneutics why do we need to interpret scripture look at some of the difficulties or consider some of the difficulties the Bible was written in three languages Hebrew Aramaic and Greek no English is not included in any of these languages all right do we have any native ancient Hebrew Aramaic or Greek speakers yeah that's what I thought all right so there is a gap here there is a language gap all right the Bible was not written in our native language inherently we're going to have to do some work to understand what is written in the Bible you'll also notice that books and letters of the Bible the books and letters of the Bible were written between 2,000 and 3,500 years ago okay Moses probably wrote the earliest of the of the books of our Bible job may predate Moses but Moses is the earliest known author he lived about 1500 II see so do your math there we're in 2013 yeah so 2,000 plus 1,500 give us 3,500 years that's a long time right that's a long time the book of Revelation the most recent book written was written in 98 II again that's still a long time ago that's were 1900 plus years ago okay almost 2000 years ago you'll also note that most of the Bible was written in Israel or somewhere in the Roman Empire nearly 6,500 miles away from Lincoln Nebraska that's a little less far away from Hammond Indiana but not considerably all right so we're a long ways away geographically from where the Bible was written all right we've got some guys here who grew up in Jordan the geography is different there than it is here yeah hills and valleys and rugged terrain and all sorts of stuff like that Nebraska Midwest Indiana we've got a lot of flat land those those Minnesotans call us flat lenders right so you I mean we are we are a long ways away we're a long ways away in time we're a long ways away in distance we're a long ways away in culture even today the culture in Israel is somewhat different from the culture here in the United States all right so there are lots and lots of differences we are going to in order to understand what's written in the Bible we're going to have to span some of these gaps okay some of the things are pretty natural right some of those gaps are pretty easy to overcome but some of them are not so easy to overcome we're going to have to overcome this language gap here's what we're going to have to do in order to do that we're going to have to work hard at understanding lexical information lexical information is information about words all right so there is some work that we're going to have to do to understand different words different vocabulary that's used all right also the grammar and syntax in Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic is different from grammar and syntax not so much grammar grammar is pretty grammar is pretty similar would you say Matt Matt just got done taking Greek so there are some different that Greek certainly does things differently than English in a lot of ways right now we're going to find that there are there are a lot of elements of grammar that are consistent from language to language a verb is a verb a noun is a noun a preposition is a preposition a conjunction is a conjunction they all there are certain things that are consistent throughout language and throughout grammar at least Greek does go from left to right Hebrew if you've ever learned it goes right to left and that's a challenge so there are some things that we're going to have to work at to understand some of the grammatical nuances some of the syntactical nuances that are going on in Scripture there there's work that needs to be done alright in that culture gap the Bible will talk about geography customs instruments all sorts of things that are unfamiliar to us right there are certain things we can imagine one of the nice things about geography is if you ever have the chance you can go to Israel you can go to you can go to Eastern Europe you can you can see some of the things that are that are geographically there even if you can't go you can see pictures the Internet believe it or not has lots and lots of pictures of most every place on earth so you can you can you can look up pictures and and get an idea of what's going on geographically one of the other things that is created by this culture gap is there will be unfamiliar thought patterns words will have some different connotations and different in different languages in different cultures ideas vocations will have some some different connotation now those are all things that we're going to have to work at understanding in order to understand the Bible right what's the significance of the fact that Jesus spoke to a Samaritan woman at the well right okay you're at the drinking fountain and you strike up a conversation with a random lady okay that's the to understand some of the some of the impact of that passage you have to understand Jews and Samaritans don't talk men and women don't talk they don't eat at the same places they don't they don't drink from the same Wells they don't do things together so that's weird right it's odd it's out of place so there are things that we're going to have to learn and and and work at to span those gaps but are any of those things totally out of line any of those things totally and completely beyond understanding the difference in our cultures not not really right there are people who don't get along their groups that don't mix in Nebraska today just like there were people who didn't get along and didn't mix in in Israel at the turn of the era right so those things are things that can be understood and overcome there's a culture gap unfamiliar geography customs instruments I already talked about that there's also a literary gap there are lots of different types of literature in the Bible there's history there's law there's poetry there's wisdom prophecy there are letters written and you know what the way that the way the Jews the ancient Jews did poetry pretty different from the way that we do poetry today right we do poetry today like this mary had a little lamb her fleece was white as snow and everywhere that mary went the lamb was sure to go we use rhyme right to drive our to drive our poetry Hebrew poetry is built on on the foundation of parallelism you have two lines in Hebrew poetry that work together to say the same thing in different ways or say the same thing in both what in the same way to say the same thing in a building way that's the fundamental you of Hebrew poetry and that's going to help us understand what we're reading when we start reading through the the poetry that we come across in Scripture okay so these are things that we need to learn that we need to work to overcome these things these genres utilize a number of different rhetorical devices in a rhetorical device is simply a a method that the writer uses to advance what he's doing okay so this gives you an idea a narrative we have stories in the Bible parallelism the Hebrew poetry ki Azzam allegory parables all of these things are used in different types of literature in order to help our understanding of what's being said so it's going to take some work on our parts if we're going to be good at interpreting the Bible it's going to take some work on our part to understand some of these things to understand some of the differences between wisdom literature or poetry and it and epistolary literature and historical narrative okay it's going to take some work on our part to bring out some of the some of the implications and some of the nuances of different passages as we work to understand parallelism and narrative and parable and all that kind of stuff it takes some work but we find out under number five here that that work is going to be worth it okay the work that you put in to be a better interpreter of your Bible is going to be worth it here are some of the things that the Bible says about understanding the Bible alright look at Revelation chapter 22 verse 7 if you've got your Bible with you Revelation chapter 22 verse 7 now I believe this is a specific promise about understanding and applying the book of Revelation but it is true of all of Scripture Jesus himself says behold I am coming quickly blessed is he who heeds the words of the prophecy of this book you know what God promises for the one who studies and understands and pays attention to what is contained in Scripture he promises blessing now if God promises blessing for something do you think that God is going to come through on his promise he'll be faithful right and if God promises blessing you think the blessing is going to be worth obtaining I would say probably so God is God is pretty good at coming through on on what he has promised and God says look if you understand if you read and heed the words of the book of this prophecy there will be blessing for you and that blessing will be great another thing we see about the importance of understanding reading and understanding and applying God's Word is that God's Word is alive and it molds and it shapes us if we understand it look at Hebrews chapter 4 Hebrews chapter 4 verse 12 says the Word of God is living and active it is sharper than any two-edged sword and piercing as far of the divisions of soul and spirit both of joints and marrow and is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart what do we see that the Word of God does when we understand it it changes us right it molds us in shapes us it is the one thing on all the earth that is empowered by God to reach us at the innermost most indivisible parts of our being what's significant about joints and marrow in your body they together right you can't have the joint without having the marrow soul and spirit same concept the two things are are essentially the same they go together and that is the level of humanity on which the Word of God works and so as we understand God's Word as we read it and we we take it in and we live in light of it God promises that his word will change us at that level of our being it will renew us and make us new at that very level of our being ultimately this is true and this adds to the importance of understanding Scripture ultimately this is true it is alive and it is active because it is God's revelation about himself okay scripture is not a bunch of men telling us about God scripture is what God has told us about himself it is what God has communicated about himself so as we understand scripture and understand the implications of what I'm about to say we understand God alright so as we come to a deeper and fuller understanding of God's Word we come to a deeper and fuller understanding of God himself now hopefully as you think through the ramifications of that it becomes very clear the huge importance of that right to say man I I understand God in light of this and you see why it's a life-changing thing to understand scripture right who can encounter the holy righteous infinite God without being changed impossible to have happen all right ultimately scripture is God's revelation of himself here in Hebrews look in Hebrews chapter 1 verses 1 & 2 says God after he spoke long ago in the father's and in the prophets and many portions and in many ways in these last days has spoken to us in his son whom he appointed heir zuv heir of all things and through whom we also are through whom also he made the world so you have you have the the implications of that and you have who is it that's given a scripture God has and what is he telling us about he's telling us about himself now look at the practical ramifications of that in 2nd Peter chapter 1 verse 3 seeing that his divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness in other words God by His divine power has provided everything that we need in order to live a life that is pleasing to him through the true knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and excellence for by these he has granted us his precious and magnificent promises so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust what does knowing God better do what is knowing Christ better do it it makes us more holy right it makes us more righteous it changes the way that we live practically speaking okay so you cannot walk away from understanding the Word of God without being changed by it because with an understanding of God's word comes a greater understanding of who God is and what he's like and what he expects of us Who I am and how he's made things so I realized at this point we're talking on a Sunday afternoon at 5:30 in the afternoon when you guys could be watching football I realize I'm preaching to the choir right now right understanding the Bible is important and you guys obviously are here because you you hold that priority highly so the solution to these gaps the solution to filling these gaps are what we call grammatical historical hermeneutics okay we're going to span the language gap we're going to span the cultural geographical gap we're going to span the time gap and we are going to do that by interpreting the Bible using the rules of grammar and the facts of history okay we're going to do that by interpreting the Bible using the rules of grammar hate to break it to you guys but to be good at understanding what the Bible says you have to have some understanding of grammar no two ways about it okay I told the guys yesterday morning and I'll tell you guys this if that means that you need to go buy a 5th grade English book and read about what a verb is and read about what a noun is and then buy a sixth grade reading or sixth grade English book and read about what an adjective is and an adverb and all that kind of stuff and if that means that you need to go watch the what is that the Saturday morning the schoolhouse rock and you need to memorize the song conjunction junction what's your function do it learn your grammar you don't have to be a grammar whiz you don't have to know you don't have to know grammar to the deepest detail but understanding a little bit about the fundamentals of grammar the basis of grammar is going to help you immensely in studying scripture immensely in studying Scripture so we are going to bridge the language gap by by studying it in a grammatical way we're going to follow the established rules of grammar and syntax and here's the good news about this while each language may work its verbs a little differently or in in decline its nouns in a little different way and arrange its words differently the rules of grammar are pretty consistent from language to language to language right so a verb is a verb in Greek and in English and in Hebrew and an Aramaic and German and a verb is a word that that explains action right a noun is a noun a noun does what a noun does it it denotes a person place thing or idea right and a noun can serve as a as a subject or an object in Greek it can do a little bit of describing as well but ask mad about that he'll be able to tell you all about it but while it while each language may switch around a little bit how it denotes what each thing is doing they do the same things okay they do the same things the other good news in that idea is that you can be a very effective study of the Bible if you simply understand your own language okay if you guys have a working knowledge of the English language and I'll define working knowledge pretty loosely then you can be an effective study of the Bible you know what one of the greatest truths about this book is right here it's that it is a very very very very very very good interpretation or translation of the Bible you can take any of your non heretical translations of the Bible and you can have a great great degree of confidence in your English Bible okay there are certain things that it will it will aid you if you understand some Greek if you ever have an opportunity to study Greek I recommend it highly okay but you can know what the Bible says if you know and understand what your English Bible says okay the other thing I the other thing is I often tell people if they try and go to the language to make a point or to try and argue a point you may have had had this happen if you've ever had a guy white white shirt and tie and a little name plaque on his if they try and go to the language to the original language to make a point with you tell them if they can't make the point in the language that they're trying to use and like if they can't actually speak the language then chances are pretty good that that they they don't understand what they're talking about okay the language the language is here the original language is is there in your translation now there are some nuances and maybe some there are some things that might be beneficial for your study to understand a little bit about Greek and Hebrew and I suppose Aramaic but your English Bible is a reliable is a reliable Bible it says what the original language said okay you're good to go if you understand your English Bible excuse me as you study your Bible grammatically the immediate context will be important there right how the words are all working together how they're working in a sentence how the sentence works in the paragraph how the cent how the paragraph works in the section all of that important so we are first going to study our Bible following the rules of grammar second we're going to study our Bible in observation of the facts of history okay what is what is our what is our goal we want to understand what we've said it already not a trick question single meaning which is determined by authorial intent right so in order to understand your Bible you have to understand what your author was trying to say in order to understand what your authors trying to say you know it's going to be helpful understanding the author's historical context right it's going to be helpful to understand what was going on what the culture was like what the geography was like what the what the situation in circumstances were like it's going to be it's going to be helpful to understand those things so so we're going to also have to observe the facts of history as we do our interpretive work all right as we do our hermeneutical work to understand authorial intent we need to understand what the words grammar syntax and structure would have meant to its original readers into its original authors that means that sometimes we're going to need to understand physical geography of the time we're going to need to understand some of the cultural literary and other customs of the time okay we're going to it's going to help us if we can take ourselves and put ourselves in the author sandals let's see what I did there author sandals it's going to help us if we're going to be able to get some of the dust of the turn of the era Palestine on our feet alright if we walk with him if we can look out over the from the Mount from the Mount of Olives and we can look down on the city of Jerusalem if we can stand there with Moses from Mount Sinai and look down and see the goal there they're going to be things that are going to help us if we can if we can understand something about the culture and the geography and and all of those sorts of things alright so in addition to being students of grammar it is going to help you greatly if you were a student of history and a student of geography and there's this wonderful invention called the internet that will help you a lot in an awful lot of these things like I said you need a picture of what Jerusalem looks like from the Mount of Olives guess what I can go on Google actually I probably can just bring up my web browser and I can put in the top bar Jerusalem from the mount of olives click right and if I'm really advanced I can go to Google I can put that in and then I can click on images and then I can click search and you know what pops up a whole bunch of pictures probably of Jerusalem from the mount of olives pretty cool stuff right there all sorts of tools that you guys can use that are at your fingertips to do this a good Bible Dictionary a good a good Old Testament New Testament introduction any of those kinds of things are going to be great in fact when I took Old Testament introduction in my in my seminary classes my professor picked the survey book that he picked the textbook for the class that he picked and he said you know what one of the major reasons I picked this book was this is because the pictures are awesome right I see it helps to be able to see individual visualizing and get a sense of what it would have been like to be there so we need to understand something about the history of the time in order to be effective in our Bible study all right one question here and I'll leave you with this for today why grammatical historical hermeneutics why sometimes along with grammatical historical her medical grammatical historical hermeneutics a lot of times you'll hear them called literal literal interpretation all right grammatical historical interpretation a lot of times you'll call it you'll hear it called literal interpretation why do we follow this type of interpretation why do we understand literal interpretation to be the best type of interpretation a couple of reasons oops as I try and pull my mic off couple of reasons first of all it's how the Bible interprets the Bible right when we see one passage of Scripture talk about another passage of Scripture how does it consistently understand that passage of scripture consistently understands it literally right in passage after passage after passage after passage we see but the Bible interpret the Bible literally how does the Bible expect prophecy to be fulfilled literally right you want proof of this open the book of Matthew read the book of Matthew and highlight every time you say this was to fulfill but up it up Buddha right and what has happened every single time it happens Jesus does something that is exactly what it was said in the Old Testament would happen so how did Matthew understand prophecy to be fulfilled literally right prophecy said this was going to happen and guess what this is what's going to happen that's what Matthew expected we also see that the Bible treats the grammar of the Bible import as important in Galatians chapter 3 verse 16 Paul is making an argument about the mosaic or excuse me about the Abrahamic covenant right and he points out then at the end of the Abrahamic covenant do you remember what the last promise of the Abrahamic covenant is in your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed right and you know what you know what Paul says he says he's talking about that passage and he's using it in his argument saying the Abrahamic covenant looked forward to the coming of Christ and he says he didn't say in in your seeds plural all the nations of the earth will be blessed but specifically God said in your seed singular all the nations of the earth we blessed you know what implication Paul draws out of that that there is one descendant of Abraham in whom that promise would ultimately be fulfilled do you know what that is folks that's grammar he's saying look the pleura or the singular is used here not the plural okay so the Bible treats the grammar of the rest of the Bible is important how does the Bible understand the history in the Bible first Timothy chapter two one of the most controversial passages in all of Scripture today Paul says I do not allow a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man because Adam was created first and then Eve and it was not Adam who was deceived but it was Eve now sounds to me an awful lot like Paul there really thinks that Avenue for some allegorical things that just kind of were the beginning of it no what does Paul understand about Adam and Eve Adam was a man he was a woman God made Adam God made Eve and the events of the creation account and the fall account in Genesis two and three Genesis one two and three happened as they were as they were described the Bible understands the history of the Bible to be literal and accurate so why would we understand anything different right I wouldn't make any sense now if there was anyone who would understand how the Bible ought to be interpreted it would be Jesus right how did Jesus interpret the Bible how did he handle the scripture guess what he handled it grammatically and he handled it historically in Matthew chapter 22 Jesus is making a point about who he is or excuse me yet what's he making a point about there Matthew chapter 22 verse 32 yeah he's making point about who he is or he's making a point about the resurrection here and they say they're talking about they're talking about the resurrection and whether this will happen or not and Jesus looks at the Pharisees and he says this was spoken to you in the Old Testament I am the God of Abraham the god of Isaac and the God of Jacob is he not the god of the he is not the god of the dead but of the living so what does he pick up there on the fact that God says I am and not I was she's treating the passage in the text grammatically right in light of its grammar he's saying God says that I am the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob now if the resurrections not going to happen he's talking to the Sadducees here if the resurrections not going to happen guess what God couldn't say I am the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob because they're dead and they're gone and they're not coming back but he is the god of those who are living he treats it grammatically he also treats it historically in matthew chapter 22 verses 43 and 44 he said to them then how does david and the spirit call him lord saying the lord said to my lord sit at my right hand until i put your enemies beneath her feet if david calls him lord how then you see his son he says look here's how the history is worked out david talks to the talks to the messiah who is the son of david in heat he calls him Lord right he calls the Messiah Lord how is the Messiah David's Lord if he's also his son and he says guess who that is other factors here that factor in our intent is to understand what the author intended and boundaries are needed to produce consistency in interpretation what's that I'm sorry what oh do you have a question there Alex Oh oh no problem no problem so we see that that's how scripture treats Scripture we see it's how Christ treated Scripture we we want to understand what the author intended and in order to do that we need to follow these rules to get to that lesson or to get to that meeting and that we need to have boundaries in order to produce a consistency and interpretation so we're going to follow the rules of grammar we're going to interpret in light of the facts of history and that will bring us to a literal interpretation of Scripture that's how we're going to handle it or say here's what scripture means now next week as Jay comes and works with you guys what I want to do is I want to I want to take some time and again Jay is going to do this with you but want to take some time and build for you an idea of the whole process of understanding the Bible okay we need to understand what are the words of the Bible we need to understand then how what to make of the words of the Bible we're going to determine its meaning part of what we're going to do as we study the Bible is we want to organize the meaning of Scripture and that is doing theology theology practice for theology quite simply is taking all of what the Bible tells us about a subject and and trying to organize it in helpful ways okay that's the work of theology so we want to understand what are the words of scripture that we're going to see that work has largely been done for us we're going to determine what scripture means and that's where hermeneutics is going to fall in we want to do theology then once we understand what Scripture means and sort of organize the information that we have from that and then we're going to pass on the meaning of Scripture as well we're going to explain to others what that means so any questions yeah Victor mm-hmm oh I was using that as a as a historical example because Jesus says look this is something that David said and David wrote and so he understands the history of that to be the case so all right you guys have any questions online there all right
