How to Study Your Bible: Closing the Gaps

In the Bible, God has spoken.

He has spoken so as to be understood. It is incumbent upon us that we rightly divide the truth, that we handle accurately the Word that God has spoken. Now in order to do that, in order to get the most out of God's Word, in order to really understand what God meant by what He said, we have to close some gaps.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. There are some gaps that everyone needs help bridging, gaps in understanding. And like an orthodontist using his skill to close gaps between teeth, you need certain skills to close the gaps that can keep you from understanding your Bible the way you should and applying its truth to your life. During this half hour, John will help you see how language and culture and other gaps can hinder an accurate understanding of God's Word. It's part of his current series designed to show you how to get all you can from the Bible, the title, How to Get the Most from God's Word.

And I'll follow along with John as he begins the message. I want you to open your Bible as we discuss this matter of how to get the most out of God's Word and turn to 2 Timothy chapter 2, verse 15. In 2 Timothy 2, 15, we have just a starting point biblically that gives us the mandate for this necessity of Bible study. It says, Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, handling accurately the Word of truth. Not to handle the Word of truth is to bring shame upon yourself. When you're dealing with the Word, you're dealing with the Word of the living God. When you're dealing with God, you're dealing with one who is true and in whom there is no untruth, God who cannot lie has spoken. In the Bible, God has spoken.

He has spoken so as to be understood. It is incumbent upon us that we rightly divide the truth, that we handle accurately the Word that God has spoken. Now, in order to do that, in order to get the most out of God's Word, in order to really understand what God meant by what He said, we have to close some gaps.

And I want to talk about the way we do that in the study of Scripture. Now, let's talk about those four gaps, the language gap, that gives you the speech, the culture gap gives you the customs and the idioms. The geography gaps creates the scenery, the actual scenario around it, and the history gap is the plot.

What's going on historically around that? What is the context of history? I have found through the years that spending a maximum amount of time on these matters is crucial to all effective Bible understanding. People often ask me, how long does it take me to put a sermon together? Well, the truth of the matter is, to actually put down an outline and to write down some notes and to bring them up here and present them to you, I might spend an hour doing that. But it could take me 30 hours closing those four gaps because once those gaps are closed and you now have a living scene, you understand the language, you understand the culture, customs that inform that language, you've created the scene and you've got the plot, then the passage just kind of falls off the tree. It becomes very apparent what it means when you've reconstructed all of that. And frankly, that's the fun, that's the exhilaration of Bible study for me, is recreating that current scene to which the passage speaks, which makes it alive.

Now let's talk about that. Let's talk about language, first of all. There are two basic languages, Hebrew and Greek. Hebrew is the more easy language to learn, even though you would be sort of put off by Hebrew because you look at the characters of Hebrew and they seem more different than the characters of Greek.

Hebrew is actually an easier language. It's not nearly as complex, it's much more concrete, but you come to Greek and Greek is very, very complex. In fact, there is not one regular verb in the Greek language that follows the regular formula for varying cases and all of that varying endings.

There's not one single Greek verb in the entire language that is uniformly regular, which means that all you're doing is memorizing irregular parts. And every verb has a myriad of forms. Every time you change any of the grammar in the sentence, the form of the verb changes.

Now we don't have that in English. We say a verb and it's a verb. I ran is I ran.

All we can say, I was running, or there's a few forms. But the Greek language would change the word ran into fifteen different forms, depending upon how it was used in the structure of the sentence. So it's a tremendous amount of memorization. People who take Greek memorize and memorize and memorize and memorize so that you have all of that information in your mind so that you can read.

And eventually as you do that long enough, it sort of becomes familiar to you. But that gets you in touch with the speech. Now let me tell you something very basic to understand. When God wrote the word, He put His message in words. The message is in the words. They must be understood. And it must be understood that the original words were Hebrew and Greek. And the better understanding we have of the meaning of those original words, the better we will understand the passage. For the most part, you can be happy to know that the translators of the Scripture have accurately translated those words. Scripture in the English language has been poured over and poured over and poured over and poured over for centuries, really, and refined and refined so that what we have is an accurate representation of the Greek and the Hebrew. But without the nuances, without the rich nuances that can be brought to bear by a careful study of language.

And so what I do in studying the Scripture is come into touch with that. You deal with accidents, that's with a CE rather than a TS at the end. That means the form of the word. What case is it in? What gender is it in? Is it singular? Is it plural? Is it aorist? Is it imperfect? Is it perfect, plural?

All those things. We have a problem today, you know, trying to deal with people to teach them a language because they don't know the principal parts of English. They don't know their own language. They know how to talk it, but they don't understand how their language is constructed.

They don't understand how it's built. And so when you try to teach them another language, they don't know how to learn a language. Unless you give them a Berlitz tape, you know, and say you learn Hebrew by learning these little phrases, you can't do that.

So it's very challenging. You have to learn the form of words, and that's a great challenge. I remember as a college freshman, I went away, I was determined I was going to know the New Testament. So as a freshman in college, I took five units of Greek every day. I took Greek five days a week the whole year, my whole first year. That's a lot of Greek for an 18-year-old kid. That's an awful lot of memorization, an awful lot of study. And I took Greek all through my four years of college and took a minor in Greek, and then I went into seminary and took Greek for three more years. So I kept taking Greek and Greek and Greek, and when I got to the end, I still don't think I had memorized everything there was to memorize.

Very complicated. But we have tremendous tools today to help us get to those matters, to help us understand the words and the forms of the words. Then there's lexicography in addition to what we call accidents, which is the form of words, and lexicography is the meaning of words. Now you're going to talk about what do these words mean. That gets you into the whole background of words, very rich.

Then syntax, s-y-n-t-a-x, which is the relationship of words, and you're getting into how the words all connect up. That's very important. That is a gap that has to be closed. To give you a little illustration of how I do this, and I've been doing this now ever since I've been preaching and teaching the Word of God. This is a normal thing for me. This is kind of what I do.

This is sort of my trade. I start out with an eight-and-a-half by fourteen pad, and I go to the passage, and I get the original language part of the passage in the original language I'm going to preach on. And I just work through that whole thing until I understand the words, and I understand the meaning of the words, the forms of the words. You know, if I have to parse them or lay them out or show what case they're in or whatever it is in the case of substantives, nouns, and adjectives. And then when that all is scribbling all over the place, and those notes are not for public view, occasionally they leak around.

But I just chicken scratch all that out. And then I get into the meaning of those words, and I look up the meaning of the words, and I go to various source material to find the nuances of meaning. And then I work on antecedents and relationships and begin to connect those words with the passage itself. And then I've got a whole understanding of what the passage basically is saying. The actual words are now clear to me. Very important.

Trying to understand in the original what is the richest understanding I can have of that passage. That's working with language. And that's the first process I do. I start with the original language so that I can come to grips with that. Now not all of you, of course, are going to be able to do that because you don't know the language. But look, there's so much material out there to help you.

There's so many good things that will get you in touch with the best and the richest of the language. If ever there was a time, folks, I have to tell you this, if ever there was a time in the history of the church when lay people had the capability to be good Bible students, it's today. Because of the volume of material.

Because of the sheer volume of material that you have. If you're not a good Bible student, it's because you don't care enough to get into it, or it's because you're buying the wrong stuff. And for all the good material out there, for every good resource out there, there's probably five bad ones. So you have to have a discerning mind and have some help in making those choices. But there never was a time when we had more opportunity to be good students of Scripture because there had never been more tools.

Somewhere along the line while you're reading all these good books written by good Christian people that are helpful to you, start a process where you're actually studying the Bible and get some tools to do that, get more primary in your Bible study. Well, let's go to the second point, closing that culture gap. What I mean by culture is current ideologies, current thought. How did they think? How did the Jews think? How did the Greeks think? When Paul is writing to the Corinthians, 1 Corinthians chapter 11, he starts talking about women having long hair.

What's going on with that? Well, you have to understand, and I found some of this information in a wonderful little bantam book years ago called, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, by Jerome Carcopino, secular book. He is a historian who chronicled the history of the Roman Empire around the time of the New Testament. And he has a whole section on the women's liberation movement of that time, which had focus in the city of Corinth. Women were running around bare-breasted with spears in their hands, stabbing pigs and climbing poles, trying to get equal rights with men.

And Carcopino gets into all of this stuff and shows how that was all the background. And one of the things these women did in demanding sort of this liberation was to shave their heads. With that kind of background, with the understanding of that kind of culture going on, when Paul talks about a woman's hair being her glory, you get some meaning into that. There are a number of problems that have been posed on John's gospel, chapter 1, verse 1, where it says, In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And we all, for the sake of the Jehovah's Witnesses, if not somebody else, wish that verse had said, Jesus was God and don't argue about it.

Right? Why did it say the Word was, you know... Well, I'll tell you why. Because at the time, there was a reigning philosophy.

There was a very famous word, logos, that's the Greek word for word, translated there. And there was the belief that the logos was the floating supernatural divine energy that created everything. And what John is saying is, you know that floating divine supernatural energy that creates everything?

That's Christ. And he's merely capturing the thinking of the moment in the terms of those people's philosophy or religion and bringing it down to the Word of God. You have the same thing in Colossians chapter 2, where he's dealing with a pre-gnostic kind of mentality. Those people who had some sort of secret knowledge and were involved with the angels, they thought, and believed in these emanations coming down from God to man.

And we're all about these kind of bizarre, mysterious affairs and ascetic behavior. And he is answering that in Colossians chapter 2. It's directed right at that current trend in Greek thinking. You have a similar situation in John chapter 8. This is everywhere in the Bible.

It just comes to mind. Jesus stands up and says, I am the light of the world. He that followeth Me shall never walk in darkness, but have the light of life. And you say, well, that's great.

I understand that. Jesus is the light. It's a dark world. He brings light. But when you think about that, and when I thought about it, the first going through the gospel of John, I asked myself, well, why does He just stand up and say, I am the light of the world? Why would He say that?

I mean, what is the context for that? Well, you begin to study that passage in John 8, and you find out that He said it in the Court of the Women, which is the outer courtyard of the temple, and that in the Court of the Women where also there were little receptacles for people to give their money, they would come in, their men and women would come in there and give their money. The men could go into the next part of the...sort of the inner part of the courtyard.

The women remained outside there. But the Court of the Women was where He was speaking, that He walks into the Court of the Women. We also find it, it says in the text, that it was the day after the feast. What feast? The Feast of Lights. What is the Feast of Lights? Feast of Lights commemorated God leading the children of Israel by fire at night by a cloud by day.

That's how He led them in the wilderness. They celebrated that with the Feast of Lights for eight days. How did they celebrate it? You know what a menorah is? Seven-pronged candlestick. They put up a massive menorah, a massive thing in the middle of the courtyard which had no roof, of course, and it shone this, you know, multi-candle powered menorah, shone light out the top like a diamond in the middle of the city of Jerusalem. Eight days that thing was lit, eight days that menorah burned to celebrate God's provision of light in the wilderness the day after it was put out.

Jesus walks into the Court of the Women where the menorah is there, but the menorah is out and He says, I am the light of the world, I don't go out. And all of a sudden there's a context that gives complete different meaning to that and struck the hearts of the people. That's dealing with the culture, understanding backgrounds. Now geography is equally important. One of the wonderful things that you as a Christian can do if you have the opportunity is to tramp around the land of Israel on your own. It will make the Bible come alive to you in many, many ways when all you have to do is be in one storm on the Sea of Galilee and understand why the disciples were afraid.

Especially if you're in a rowboat. You understand the topography, the geography of the land. You understand the relationship of towns and villages and cities. You understand how battles were fought and why they were fought in certain valleys and on the top of certain mountains. You stand there and you see that whole scenario laid out before you. You understand why God has chosen Megiddo to be the place of the Battle of Armageddon, the final conflict of the ages. Napoleon said it's the greatest battlefield on the face of the earth. If you're there and you stand up there and look down the mountain and look at that whole place, you can understand why that would have been in all of ancient history, one of the great battlefields of the world.

Understanding geography is very important. If you understand, for example, something of the geography of Jerusalem, that city way up on a plateau, you understand that, for example, you're reading about the death of Jesus Christ and how He left that night after His betrayal and He went by Judas. Judas, remember, left the Last Supper, went to betray Him. Jesus left, crossed the Kidron, went up to the Mount of Olives.

Significant because at that time, Passover lambs were being slaughtered by the thousands and they were slaughtered at the back part of the Temple Mount. Their blood ran down the back slope of the Temple Mount, which is on the east side of Jerusalem, down into the Kidron Valley. The Kidron Brook runs through it. There's a slope down to the brook. You cross the brook and there's a slope right back up to the Mount of Olives.

Over the little hill is the town of Bethany. To the south is Bethlehem. Jesus walked down that back hill and had to cross the Kidron. At that time of the year, Passover season, the Kidron is still full of water. It's a dry creek in the summer, but it still has water in it and that water though is blood red because of the thousands of lambs that have been slaughtered and their blood is coming down the back of the temple and fills that little stream. There is Jesus stepping across the symbol of His own sacrifice as the Lamb of God.

Those kinds of things are very graphic and make the Word of God alive. When you talk about hell, for example, in the Bible, and the Jews understood about hell as a place of terrible torment, a place of gnashing of teeth and wailing, a place of darkness, a place of pain, a place of a conscience that is fully accusing with no relief ever. It's a horrible place. The way they described it was they used the word Gehenna.

What was that word? Gehenna was the name of the city dump in the Valley of Hinnom just south of the Kidron Valley. They took all the garbage of the city and threw it all down there and it had a perpetual fire going all the time. Of course, garbage was garbage in those days and there were maggots and all of that and that's why the Bible talks about the worm never dies because there was always garbage being poured into Gehenna so that there were always worms there eating it and the fire and the horror of that and the smoke and the stench and all of that. And that was the picture of hell to them.

If you could stand on any of the hills in Jerusalem and look down into the Valley of Hinnom and be very aware that hell was down below in a place of terrible, fearful identity. So, understanding some of that geography, very important. If you understand some of the geography even to the north in Galilee, you understand much the richness of the biblical stories. You have to close that gap. And some Bible dictionaries and atlases, I keep Bible dictionaries and atlases right by my desk all the time to pull them out to check topography and relationships and writing the study Bible, I was out there with my little ruler, you know, on the scale things, measuring the distance from one village to the next, all through the Old Testament. He went from here to there and He went from here to there and He went from here to there. And so you're, okay, this is this far and this is this far and this is this far.

And as you begin to work all that through, the whole story and understanding of Scripture becomes wonderfully rich and alive. Well, then you have the fourth gap. You have the language gap. You have the culture gap. You have the geography gap. Then you have the history gap.

And the history gap is the plot. Scripture has a plot. You know, sometimes I remember my grandmother when I was a little kid had a plastic, a little plastic box with Bible verses in it. Did you ever see those things?

It was just a little plastic thing and it had little cards with Bible verses on. And it always struck me that they could put them in any order, that they had no context. You could shuffle them like a deck of cards and stick them in any order you wanted. And I suppose you could come up with anything, just pull one out, said that, you know, Judas went out and hanged himself and the next one said, go down, do likewise and what thou do is do quickly, you know.

So you could just organize them any way you wanted. You could sort of have your Bible in any order. The Bible wasn't written like that. There's a real plot. There's a real story going on and everything is in a context and framework. It's not a bunch of assorted verses that can be fit into any order. There is history.

There's background. You will never understand, for example, why Pilate scourged Jesus and tried to get the Jews to release Him, why he fought so hard to do that, why he went out and said, you know, he washed his hands of the whole deal and found Him innocent and all of that. And then yet crucified Christ, unless you understand that Pilate was already up to his neck in deep trouble with the Roman Empire because of at least three major faux pas that he had committed while he was governor in Palestine. And the Roman Caesar wanted Pax Romana, he wanted Roman peace, and all Pilate kept doing was stirring up these hostile Jews to a fever pitch and getting them angry with Rome and he was in some deep, deep water and the Jews finally pulled their trump card and they said to him, if you don't crucify Him, we'll tell Caesar. End of discussion. If you understand the background, you understand why that happened the way it happened.

Very, very important. When I was going through 1 Corinthians 12 to 14, I was trying to understand what the Corinthians were doing in the place of the true use of tongues and the true use of spiritual gifts. They obviously were not doing the right thing. Somebody was standing up pretending to have a gift from the Holy Spirit and cursing Jesus Christ. Now that's how bizarre it was. I looked in the library years ago to try to find some source material about the religions of Greece, the ancient world. I came across a fascinating book called The Mystery Religions, written by a man named Angus A-N-G-U-S and published, I'll never forget it, even the publisher, Dover Press in England.

This was a thick book which from a secular viewpoint gave the history of the mystery religions of the New Testament time. And I came across an understanding of two words in the Greek language, enthusiasmos and xtasia, which is enthusiasm and ecstasy, transliterated in the English. And those were words that defined the nature of worship in the mystery religions.

They tried to whip people into xtasia and enthusiasmos. Both of them were sort of altered states of consciousness in which you flipped out and did bizarre and wild things and this was sort of mystically how you connected with the deities. You know who in our recent culture bought that was Timothy Leary and sold it to a whole generation of college kids, told them they really wanted to get in touch with God, they wanted to smoke dope.

That's nothing but that same thing revisited. So there was supposed to be a religious experience. Remember then they all started going from the dope to sitting down cross-legged with some guru and smoking more dope and thinking they were going to commune with deity in this process. Well that was ancient Greek mystery religion stuff just revisited. And I began to read about how they expressed themselves and I began to become familiar with that and I went to read 1 Corinthians 12, 13 and 14 and it was exactly crystal clear what was going on there. They had taken the mystery religion format and they put it right into the church and sanctified it and called it the work of the Holy Spirit and that's what Paul had to sort out. Those kinds of backgrounds historically create the plot in which the story is told.

Very, very important. Now some people say, well, I don't read any books, I just go right to the Bible. I've had people say, I've had preachers say that to me. I don't believe in studying books, I just study the Bible. Really? Well maybe you'd like to tell us all you know about Shor, Moab, Maher, Shilal, Hashbaaz, Calno, Carchemish and Michmash, just off the top of your head.

I don't think so. That's a kind of veiled egotism. We need to be thankful to the Lord that He has provided the material for us to close that gap, right? You need some good commentaries, Bible dictionary. You ought to have a Bible dictionary and a good commentary so that you have a model for interpretation. So that you have something that will deal with difficult passages. We endeavor to do that in the study Bible all the way through. In fact, that's why it's so thick, because we dealt with every single difficult passage. We want to help you through all of that.

Now those are the gaps that have to be closed. Let's pray. Father, it's been so wonderful to be together and studying Your Word and how we can dig in and unleash the truths that are there. I pray for every person here that they would do that, that they would take advantage of this incredibly rich treasure. David said, Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin and there's no other way. We avoid sin when the Word controls us. Fill us with the convictions of Your truth that we might live to Your glory in Christ's name.

Amen. That's John MacArthur showing you four gaps of understanding that you need to close in order to maximize your study of Scripture. How to get the most from God's Word, that's the title of John's current study here on Grace to You. John, as you study God's Word and prepare sermons week after week, which you've been doing for decades now, do things still surprise you?

Does the Bible still catch you off guard in terms of what it says, what it demands, what it offers? Yeah, every time I read it, every time I study it, I'm not surprised by a new doctrine. It's not that. I'm not surprised because, oh, that's a new truth that I've never known. But it's an expression of that truth. It's a nuancing of that truth. It's an aspect of that truth.

It's an angle on that truth. It's the depth of that truth that I hadn't seen before. And you would expect that because as God himself is inexhaustible, so his mind is inexhaustible. And the Scripture is the revelation of his mind. And so it has the same inexhaustible incomprehensibility that God has. So even when you have thought you have understood a passage or a verse, you come back a few years later and a few decades later, and all of a sudden it takes on fresh new significance and depth and breadth, and yeah, the Bible is inexhaustible.

In fact, I would say it is more wonderful to me now than it has been at any point in the past. I discovered the truths, basically doctrinal truths, when I was very young. But even to this very day, the exploration of those truths as you study the Scripture, now being informed by half a century of study of the Bible, is so much richer. Let me mention a book to you along this line called Unleashing God's Word in Your Life.

For many Christians, the Bible goes really untapped or superficially examined. This book, Unleashing God's Word in Your Life, will help you revitalize your study of Scripture, take you deeper into Scripture, show you some of the glories of Scripture you may be missing. It's going to be a tremendous help. It's going to change how you think, and that changes how you live, and that honors God.

It's affordably priced. Again, the book Unleashing God's Word in Your Life, one great step toward knowing, loving, and living God's Word more fully. Order a copy today. Yes, do.

And thanks, John. Friend, this book is filled with practical principles to help revitalize your Bible study, showing you Scripture's reliability and power. Order a copy and take a step toward better understanding, studying, and applying God's Word to your life. Contact us today. Call us at 855-GRACE, Monday through Friday, 730 to 4 o'clock p.m. Pacific Time.

That's our phone number. Again, toll-free, 855-GRACE. You can also order John's book, Unleashing God's Word in Your Life, from our website at GTY.org. Unleashing God's Word in Your Life costs $13, and shipping is free.

To order, call us at 855-GRACE or shop online at GTY.org. And when you visit GTY.org, make sure to take advantage of the thousands of free resources that are available there, including GraceStream. That's a continuous loop of John's verse-by-verse teaching that goes all the way through the New Testament. It begins in Matthew, works its way all the way through Revelation, and then resets just about every two months. So wherever you jump in, GraceStream will focus your mind on biblical truth and help you tap into the spiritual resources God has for believers.

GraceStream and much more is available free of charge at GTY.org. Now for John MacArthur and our entire Grace To You staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Be back tomorrow to continue learning the right methods for studying Scripture and why it's vital that you approach God's Word the right way. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth one verse at a time, on Grace To You.