How to Study Your Bible: Closing the Gaps B

God has given us His Word. It is the source of truth. It is the source of blessing. It is the source of victory. It is the source of growth.

It is the source of power. It is the source of guidance. It is the source of hope. It is the path of righteousness.

It is everything we need. We live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. When your grandparents talk about their childhood reminiscing about life without computers or cell phones or the internet, maybe even television, do you find yourself wondering, how can I possibly relate to that? I've never experienced the world they're talking about. Well, in the same way, when you read the Bible, there are going to be some parts you might have a hard time relating to. After all, the Bible was written thousands of years ago in a different language and a different culture. So how do you close the gaps in understanding? Find out today as John MacArthur continues a study that can revolutionize the way you read and study Scripture. It's titled, How to Get the Most from God's Word.

And now here's John with a lesson. 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. I use five principles to close these gaps. Five principles I work with, and this is kind of just looking over my shoulder a little bit.

Number one is literal principle, literal principle. When you interpret the Scripture, you interpret it literally. What does that mean? That means you understand Scripture in the natural, normal sense. You understand Scripture in the natural, normal sense. In other words, the customary meaning of the words is what you accept. There's no secret meaning. There's no hidden meaning.

There's no meaning behind the meaning. You say, well, what about figurative language? Well, figurative language is figurative language, and that's customary and normal. If I say He's as strong as an ox, I don't mean He's an ox. That's clear.

If I say He stood tall like a tree, I don't mean He's a tree and has branches and leaves. You understand that. That's normal language. Figures of speech are part of normal language. There are a number, metaphor, simile, all those things are part of normal language. So you have figures of speech in the Bible, that's part of normal language. What about symbolism? You have symbols in the Bible. We have symbols in our language. We talk in symbols all the time. We substitute something for something else in order to put meaning into it. We say, for example, I'll tell you, I saw that guy going down the street in a rocket. What do we mean by that? We don't mean he was going down there in an ICBM.

We mean he probably had an eight-cylinder engine in a car and he was going very fast. But the rocket becomes the symbol of that, and that's normal language. We have that latitude in language. You don't need to panic when you see a symbol, merely look at the context and the symbol unfolds. You say, what about the book of Revelation? Well, you do have some symbols in Revelation, the likes of which are very unique, but you also have them mark this in Zechariah, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Daniel primarily, and Revelation.

And you will notice that those are all books that major on what? Prophecy. So when it comes to predictive prophecy yet to be fulfilled in the future, you will find many symbols.

Because there are no historical equivalents, those things will unfold in the future. God speaks to us about them in symbolic language. We know it's symbolic.

We know that's symbolic. When we read about heaven, we say there in heaven, in front of heaven's throne, there is a sea of glass. Well, a sea is a sea, and glass is glass.

What is that actually? Is it a sea or is it glass? I don't know. Some of that is sort of figurative. Some of it is symbolic.

We'll have to wait and see because we don't have an actual experience with that. Much prophetic literature includes symbols. When you read in the book of Revelation that a beast rises out of the sea, it will define something about that beast and who he is. The beast is representative of fierce power, and out he comes, and it tells you he's got seven horns, and he's got certain heads, and it defines what those are, and the Scripture unfolds that in the context. Bottom line, God spoke clearly, and so you accept it literally. Once you've said, I'm not going to accept the literal interpretation of Scripture, you're hopelessly lost. Now, the customary meaning of the words is exactly what God intended. When God gave us the book, He made it clear. He said, I want you to hear me speak, right? He didn't give us a mystery.

He unfolded it. The rabbis got all caught up in mystery, meaning they took the word Abraham. Abraham's name has three consonants. The B, the R, and the M in the Hebrew are the consonants. The others are vowels, and so in the Hebrew language, letters in the alphabet have numerical equivalents. So the rabbis said that the secret meaning of the name Abraham is that if you add up the B and the R and the M, you get a total of 318. So the secret meaning of Abraham is that he had 318 servants. You can't find that in the context of anything.

That's just pure fantasy, but that's the kind of thing that was done. Listen, a wafering man, a wafering man, though he be a fool, need not err because God has spoken and he has spoken clearly, and you take it at face value. So that's where you start. You start with an understanding of the literal sense of the word.

Secondly, the historical principle. Having understood the words, and I'm cycling back through what we've been saying from a different angle, you now develop the history, and that's really what I love, is to go back into the history and the backgrounds and the culture and the geography. And this is when I really read. I get to reading all kinds of things. I read the background books. I read the commentaries. I probably read, it's probably maybe average for me to read 15 commentaries on every passage because I want to take advantage of all the best of insights into backgrounds and history, and I'll read Bible dictionaries or Bible histories or whatever it takes.

Just in general reading about the Jewish culture, you accumulate information about how they operate, how they think, and that informs much of Scripture. The point I'm trying to get to here is what did it mean to the people to whom it was spoken or written? What did it mean then, not what does it mean now? What did it mean then? Because whatever it meant then, it means now. So what was their scenario? What was going on? That's the plot.

I go back to that. I've often said a text without a context is a pretext. You can't just yank a verse out and make it mean what you want. There's a plot there. There's a story going on there. There's something happening there to which this speaks directly, and when you understand the plot, then you'll understand the meaning of what was written. That's the historical principle, creating the background to the given scene.

Thirdly is the grammatical principle. Now, this is an exercise that I go through. First exercise, I write down all that stuff about the language, get all the literal stuff, put it all down, write it all down, understand the text. Then I go to all the commentaries, read everything I need to read, get the history, the scene, the background. If I need to understand Pharisees or Sadducees, I look it up, or zealots, or Essenes, or whatever it might be.

If I want to know more about the background of somebody, I go to some book that will give us backgrounds on the individuals of Scripture, get all that scene put together. Then I come back, and I'm still writing all over the place, and I come to the grammatical principle. That's when I begin to look at the structure itself. Now I understand the scene. I understand the plot. I understand what it says.

Now I'm really going to dig deep. I look at the prepositions, the pronouns, the verbs, the nouns. I begin to analyze the passage. I begin to analyze the structure of the passage, put it all together, words, phrases, antecedents.

And this is the exercise that we call inductive Bible study. You know the background. You know the words. Now what do they say?

What are they really saying? And that's when you study the sentence structure. You know, when we were taking English as kids, they used to teach us how to do diagramming. Did they ever do that in your case, teach you sentence diagramming? Very important to learn how to do that.

Very helpful so that you learn how to break down phrases and words and modifiers. And I tell you, I really worry about the next generation of Bible students if they don't learn how to handle their own language. If they only know street talk and they don't understand the components of language, how can they break down language? I think, you know, there are a lot of reasons why people don't rightly divide the word or handle it accurately today. One is they don't understand the importance of that. They just think they ought to stand there till they get a feeling or an impulse or wait till God, quote-unquote, tells them what it means. But another problem is they don't understand the structure of language.

They don't understand that language has rules and laws that are being very carefully followed and that you must understand those. Very important. So you break down phrases, you break down words, you break down modifiers to say, how do these things all connect? Very, very important if you're going to rightly divide the truth. And in doing this, you're really getting at the heart and soul of that passage.

Now let me suggest some little practical things on how you do this, just simple things. You start by just reading that passage and reading and reading and reading and reading and then you find the main point. This is the first thing you do in this breakdown section of grammar, find the main point. What's the main point? And I'll give you a little hint, the main point is usually connected to the main verb. If you're dealing with a paragraph of Scripture, let's say, you're dealing with a paragraph, two or three verses, three or four verses, there will be a main verb in there.

So you start by reading, you find the main idea, then you begin to analyze the structure within the framework of that main idea. Luther put it this way, a great statement, he said this, shake the whole tree, then climb and shake each limb, then each branch, then each twig, and then look under every leaf. And that's, you know, and you don't hear probably a fifth of what I get in that process.

That's what's called for. Well, the fourth principle, first was literal, second historical, third grammatical, dealing with the structure of the language. Fourth is synthetic.

By that I don't mean fake, but I mean synthesizing, pulling together. What do we mean by that? I mean, understand this, there are 66 books in the Bible, 39 in the Old, 27 in the New, written by 40-plus authors, but there's really only one source of every Scripture.

Who is it? It's God. Therefore there's no contradictions in the Bible, therefore the Bible is perfectly in harmony with itself. And when you've discovered the meaning of a given passage, and for example, let's take Philippians 1 passage, and now, okay, Paul rejoices and rejoices for all these reasons.

Wow! How does that fit into the whole of Scripture? That's the next question you ask.

Let me synthesize that. The Reformers called it analogia scriptura, meaning Scripture is analogous to itself. That is, it is completely consistent with itself.

No part of the Bible contradicts any other part because one author, God the Holy Spirit, has written it all. So at this point, I start cross-referencing, and I love this part too. I just chase all over the Bible. Oh, suffering unjustly and rejoicing.

Where would I go to learn about that? How about James 1, right? Count it all to joy when you fall into various trials. Other times in the life of Paul, he had this same attitude, and he expressed it on a number of occasions.

I could go back to Job. I could go back to the psalmist and read David's Psalms where he rejoices in the midst of tremendous distress, and I could begin to see illustrations of this all over the word of God. And I can even dig in deeper, say to James chapter 1, and find out more about the principle of rejoicing and suffering. I can find it in James. I can find it in Peter.

I can find it in the persecuted church in Revelation 2 and 3. That's the synthesis principle. You start moving around the Scripture. That's what cross-referencing does for you. That's why in the study Bible we put C note here, C note here, C note there. I don't know how many times, and a hundred thousand cross-references in there. So you can go chasing all over to your heart's content, following a truth all around the Scripture, and it becomes so rich and fulfilling when you do that.

And then the fifth and final approach when you study the Scripture is what I guess you could call the practical approach, a literal, historical, grammatical, synthetic, and practical. And at this point, I'll make a confession to you. I really don't think that the most helpful thing in studying the Bible is just to give people a bunch of practical little things to do. Like, now folks, what I want you to do is when you go home, the next time your husband yells at you, rejoice.

You know, the next time you fall on your kid's toy and break your ankle in the hallway, rejoice. And the next time you go to work and your boss bad mouths you and somebody else gets a promotion you deserve because you did the work and he took credit, rejoice. Fine.

That's all well and good, and you should do that. But what I've learned through life, and I think it really works, it really makes sense, is...listen to this...the main emphasis of Bible study is to grasp the principle. And when that principle becomes a conviction, then it'll show up in every practical scenario. To me, the practical principle is the principle of conviction.

It's the principle that says, I own this truth. I embrace this truth. I believe this truth. I will live by this truth. I will live by this truth.

And boy, that is a personal exercise that you have to go through. I know when I go through the study of the Word of God, the last thing I want to do is crystallize what I've just learned and make it a part of my belief system and say, okay, first opportunity comes my way. I want to live this out.

I want to live this out. Well, those five things are what puts you in touch with the text. Those are the exercises that I go through in preparing to understand the Scripture.

When I'm done with all of that, I can always think of something to say, as you well can attest. I want to give you just a couple of other key elements if you're going to really know the Scripture. Reading it, very important. We gave you a reading plan how to do that. Interpreting it, we went through all of that.

There's a third that I would encourage you to think about, and that is meditating on it, meditating on it. In Deuteronomy 6, 6 to 9, God said, And these words which I command thee this day shall be in thine heart. Thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, when thou risest up. All the time, all the time is the idea there.

You're talking about them all the time. They're in your heart, they're in your mouth, and you shall bind them for a sign on your hand. In other words, you apply the Word of God in all the work you do.

They shall be as frontlets between your eyes. They are to be the truths of God's Word, are to be the focal point of all your thoughts. You write them on the posts of your house so that you conduct all the matters of life within your house, consistent with the Word of God, and you shall write it on your gates so that everything connected to you as you come and go in the world is filtered through in understanding and application of the Word of God. In other words, you meditate on the Bible all the time, day in, day out, hour in, hour out, when you're sitting down, standing up, lying down, and walking by the way. It's the matter of all your conversation with your family, with your children. It controls what you do in your home and the matters of going and coming as you live out your life.

The Word of God then in that passage in Deuteronomy 6 basically said to write the truth on your door posts. In other words, the Word of God becomes to you like a billboard. You see it everywhere. It has application in your hands. It has application in your thoughts. It has application in your home.

It has application as you come and go. It's like putting up billboards all over the area of your life, all throughout all of the avenues of life, the billboards of the Word of God. You can't drive up and down the streets in our society and our culture without seeing billboards, advertising liquor, advertising beer predominantly, advertising cigarettes, billboards everywhere promoting all of these kinds of things. Now we look at that and we understand why young people are drawn to liquor and cigarettes.

They can't even advertise that stuff on television anymore, but they are using the billboards that are right before the eyes of everybody in our society. The Lord knew human nature. He knew us. He knew that we would respond to signposts, and that's why the Word of God tells us that we are to have signposts, and those signposts are to be consistent with what God's Word says. Signposts of sound doctrines, signposts of biblical truth. Man once was asked, when you go to sleep at night, you have a hard time sleeping, do you count sheep?

He said, no, I listen to the shepherd. You know, it's good to do that. It's good to retire at night reciting some of the signposts that God has revealed in His Word. Meditating on the Word of God is absolutely crucial. Just letting it saturate your mind, just thinking about it.

Blessed is the man, Psalm 1, 1 and 2 says, that walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful, but his delight is in the law of the Lord and in His law He meditates day and night. Now the word meditate really has the idea of constantly ruminating over something. It's sort of a word that's symbolic of, I should say, it can be symbolized by a cow chewing the cud.

It goes out in the morning and while the grass is fresh, the cow eats the grass, and when the sun comes up and the grass is warm and the weather is hot, the cow goes and finds a shady place and just continues to chew on what it ingested in the beginning of the day. And that's really what meditating is like. You take it in and then you begin to meditate on it. You bring it back up and you think about it. You ponder it. Your own mind deals with its proper applications and so forth. That is a very important part of coming to grips with Scripture. And if I can add something to that, I think sometimes it helps to also dialogue about it. I don't think meditation alone gets us into the deep thinking about Scripture.

I think it really stimulates meditation if you have somebody to have a conversation with. That's why I think in Deuteronomy 6 it says, talk about it when you stand up, sit down, lie down, and walk in the way. I don't know how you I don't know how you are, but some of the things that come clear to me in understanding the Scripture come clear to me more quickly in dialogue than they do in my own isolation. So I just put that in because I think it's really important to ruminate on the Word of God, meditate on the Word of God, discuss the Word of God all the time, and you'll be amazed at how that will help you to own it, to make it your own, and to understand its wonderful applications in your life.

Then one other principle that I would give to you, and I'm not going to develop this because this is a whole other subject. If you really want to know the Bible, read it, interpret it, meditate on it, and fourthly, and maybe most importantly, teach it. There's a simple principle that is really true. Whatever you give away, you keep.

Whatever you give away, you keep. The best way to learn is to teach. The best way to learn biblical truth is to be responsible to have to pass it on. Paul said in 2 Timothy 2, 2, the things you've learned from me among many witnesses the same commit to faithful men who shall be able to teach others also. If you want to retain the truth, give it away. You say, why is that true? Well, it's true because, first of all, in order to teach it, you have to learn it.

And then as you're struggling to make it clear to a student, you're struggling at the same time to make it clear in your own mind. This may be one of the secrets I'm not supposed to give away, but I primarily preach what I want, what helps me, what motivates me, what clarifies things for me, what makes sense to me, what makes the Word of God clear to me. People always ask me, well, how do you know how your people think? Well, I don't know how all of you think.

I don't know how all of you think. How do you know what your people's interests are, and how do you know the pulse of your people, and so forth, and the large shirts like that? To be honest, and sometimes it might be a little reluctant to say it, but to be honest with you, the preacher and the teacher winds up preaching and teaching what captures his own heart. And when I struggle to make something clear to you and find a way to do that, that's because it made it clear to me, and I'm passing that on to you. So anybody who teaches is involved in the vortex of this grappling with truth.

I want it to be clear. I have this driving passion to understand the Scripture, and you sort of get the overflow of that. Before I can teach you, I have to learn it myself. And I also find that when I struggle to understand it, it sinks in deeply. And then when I struggle in the pulpit, and sometimes it's more of a struggle than other times, as I'm struggling to communicate it with you, it is also sealing it in my own heart. And the repetition is helpful, too, especially if you have to preach it twice on Sunday morning. But I'll tell you right now, the best way to learn the Bible is to teach it.

And you may not feel you can stand up in front of a Sunday school class or a group of people and teach, but you can sure find somebody who needs desperately to know the Word of God and take on the responsibility to teach them. Now having said all of that, we could draw some simple conclusions. God has given us His Word. It is the source of truth. It is the source of blessing. It is the source of victory. It is the source of growth.

It is the source of power. It is the source of guidance. It is the source of hope. It is the path of righteousness.

It is everything we need. We live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. This immense treasure, we've been talking about this all along, this immense treasure is in our hands.

It is comprehensible if we will approach it faithfully. The Bible demands of us that we believe it, that we honor it, that we love it, that we obey it, that we fight for it and contend for it, that we proclaim it and also that we study it. Colossians 3 16 says that we are to let the Word of Christ dwell in us richly, richly. The Apostle Paul in praying for the Ephesians prayed that their heart would be enlightened so that they would know what is the hope of His calling and what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe. Where are you going to learn that?

Where are you going to find that? It's revealed in the Word of God. He prayed that we would know the truth of God, that we would understand the truth of God. To the Philippians, Paul said, I pray that your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment so that you may approve the things that are excellent in order to be sincere and genuine. Over and over again, the Scripture tells us that we are to understand its truths.

So we've been trying to show you a pattern by which we can apprehend those truths and make them our own. My prayer for you is that you would hear the Word, you would understand the Word, and the Word would go to work in your life as you commit yourself to the learning of it. Matthew 4-4 again, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Feed on that heavenly bread. 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. Some people might wonder if that's simply a reflection of your personality, that you're just naturally interested in the details. You always want to get things right. Talk about that for a minute.

That's an interesting thought. I've never really been accused of being a kind of a detailed person. There are a lot of details in life that I really don't care about at all. So it's not that I'm some kind of fastidious detailed nut and that's why I go diving deep into the Scripture.

No, about the only place in my life where I'm deeply concerned about every single detail, in fact, is the Bible and for a very different reason than some kind of quirk in my personality. I want to know every single detail in the Bible because every single detail reveals God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit and God's purpose and God's plan and God's redemptive patterns and His promises. I want to draw everything possible out of Scripture. I started studying the Scripture when I was in junior high.

I studied it through high school, went to college. That's been my driving passion to know God, not just to know the Bible but to know the Bible so I can know the God of the Bible and live in the joy of that knowledge. We've been telling you, and I'm going to tell you again today, we have available the MacArthur Study Bible and you can place your order today. It's going to be a lifetime help to you spiritually. It would be a great way to finish off the series, How to Get the Most from God's Word, as well. Go to your computer, to our website, and download MP3s on that same series. That's right, John.

It would. Friend, to order a copy of the MacArthur Study Bible, which is our flagship resource, or if you want to download all five lessons from John's series, How to Get the Most from God's Word, contact us today. The MacArthur Study Bible is reasonably priced.

Shipping is free. It's available in the New American Standard, New King James, and English Standard versions, as well as several non-English translations. And to order, you can call us at 855-GRACE or go online at gty.org. And again, you can download all five of these messages from How to Get the Most from God's Word free of charge in MP3 and transcript format.

But if you'd like to purchase the five-CD album for this series, it's a good gift to give to a friend or put in your church library, you can do that as well at gty.org. And when you get in touch, make sure to let us know how John's teaching has strengthened you spiritually. Perhaps you've learned how to study the Bible better, or resist sin more consistently, or someone you know heard the gospel on one of these broadcasts and came to faith in Christ. We'd like to hear about that, so email your story to letters at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur, I'm Phil Johnson. Be sure to watch Grace to You television this Sunday. You can check gty.org for local air times, and then be here Monday as John continues unleashing God's truth one verse at a time on Grace to You.