Why Study the Bible?

I hear what you're feeling when you say the Bible is too difficult.

There are parts of it that are excruciatingly difficult. But at the other hand, I want to remind you that there is enough there that you can grasp even without a formal education in biblical studies that is of eternal significance for you. We live in a time in which access to the Word of God has never been easier, particularly for those living in the West.

In addition to the many copies that you likely have on a bookshelf or on your nightstand, our computers and smartphones can instantly search multiple translations and even drill down to the original languages. This is an incredible stewardship of blessing from God. And as you'll hear this week from R.C. Sproul, we shouldn't be content with simply reading the Bible. We should study it in depth. You're listening to the Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and today R.C. Sproul will be providing helps and principles to aid you in interpreting the Bible. I'll also tell you later about a special edition DVD and MP3 CD set featuring eight series from Dr. Sproul to help you go deeper in your own study of God's Word.

And of course, you can learn more about this special collection of teaching series at renewingyourmind.org. To help us see the importance of diligent study of God's Word, here's Dr. Sproul with a message from his Knowing Scripture series titled Why Study the Bible. In this course together, we're going to be considering principles of how to study the Bible. The goal of this time together will be for all of us to increase our ability and our skill as interpreters of the Bible so that we can read that book for ourselves and understand it and be able to deal with it in a responsible, a mature, and a diligent way. I would love to be able to give a course in how to study the Bible in three easy lessons.

But so far, I haven't been able to find those three easy lessons that will do it. This course is going to take work. We're going to try to stretch our knowledge. We're going to try to stretch our understanding and get better tools so that we will know how to handle difficult passages in the Bible. And in this first lecture together, I'd like to explore the most basic question of it all, and that is, why should we study the Bible at all?

Every year, the results are the same. The Bible continues to be the perennial national bestseller of all the books in print. But the cynics, of course, respond to that by saying, yes, everybody buys a Bible, everybody owns a Bible, but there are precious few who read it and even less who diligently study it. It's one thing, of course, to be involved in a daily devotional where we skip over a very small portion of Scripture and meditate on it.

That has its real value. But that's not the same thing as studying the Scriptures to deepen our understanding of the things of God. And there are many people in the church who feel at times a burden of guilt because the preachers keep telling us that we ought to be diligent students of the Scripture, we ought to know it better than we do. And I find as I talk with Christians that many of them are very sheepish about discussing this matter, but sometimes in the right circumstances privately they'll say, you know, I really haven't even read the whole Bible, or I'm really not very disciplined at studying the Scriptures.

And many say to me, I've tried many different ways, I've followed all different kinds of programs, but I've never really been able to get into it. A recent poll by the Gallup people indicated that people still have a very high regard for the authority of Scripture. But the poll also revealed what most of us already expected would be the case, and that is that there were very small segments of the population whose actual values and ideas and thinking has been conditioned and informed by Scripture. And that's something that is measurable from time to time and from generation to generation, and for a multitude of reasons I guess, somehow this era of Western civilization has not produced a burning desire among people to master the Word of God. Now we don't have time to explore all the reasons for that, but there are two problems that I hear again and again that I'd like to comment on briefly.

The first one is also somewhat cynical. People will say to me frequently, I don't study the Bible because it simply is no longer relevant to our culture. Why should I give myself to intensive study of such a thick book and of so many obscure things that cover history that took place so long ago about a Jewish nation of which I'm really not all that interested, and all this business of religious detail that we find in the Scriptures, why should I give myself to that in this day and age? We can no longer be guided by a book that was written in a pre-scientific environment by primitive people who don't understand the sophisticated dimensions of modern life. You've heard that objection as often as I have, and maybe you've even been one of those who has uttered the objection. I think that that particular problem is not new. People in the third century were quarreling about the relevancy of Scripture, and that's been a problem down through every generation.

I guess as the period of time lengthens from antiquity, maybe the problem becomes more severe. One of the goals for this course is to be able to see how the Scriptures are still very relevant to our lives in the 20th century and to give us the key tools to translate and transpose biblical principles and biblical content to the present-day generation. But there's another objection that perhaps is even raised more often than the charge of irrelevancy, and that is that the Bible is too difficult.

Maybe you felt that. One of the little polls that I do with student groups that come through the Ligonier Valley Study Center is that I'll get a group of Christians there that are studying a particular theme, and I'll say, how many of you people have been a Christian for at least a year, and the vast majority of them have been? And I say, okay, how many of you in that first year since you've become a Christian have read the entire Bible? And let me assure you, perhaps for your own comfort, that a very, very, very small percentage of people who have been a Christian for a year or more have actually read the Bible in its entirety.

So after we get that settled and everybody realizes that the majority haven't, then I say, okay, let's go back to the beginning. How many of you have read the book of Genesis, and almost everybody's hand goes up? And I say, okay, keep up your hand if you've read the book of Exodus, and maybe one hand will go down. People are basically familiar with the general themes of Genesis and Exodus. They read the narrative history of creation and of the patriarchs and the exciting adventure of Moses in the Exodus and so on. I say, okay, how many of you completed Leviticus, and now hands start coming down? And how many of you completed Numbers and Deuteronomy? And as soon as we get into that difficult, complex, pedantic information that we get in the book of Leviticus with all of the ceremonial and dietary laws and into the book of Numbers and into the legal sanctions of Deuteronomy, people say that's when their patience breaks down. Or even if they persevere through that, they have difficulty following the chronicles and the kings and so on. And they say, R.C., the book in many ways is just too hard for us.

It's too foreign to us, too difficult to read. When I hear that, my thoughts immediately go back to the 16th century Protestant Reformation to one of the most important principles of Protestantism. And if I can continue in this mode of alliteration by speaking about important Protestant principles, let me add to this while I'm popping my P's on the important Protestant principles, the principle of perspicuity. Now there is a technical word. What does perspicuity mean when it's used to describe the Bible? This was an idea developed by the Protestant Reformers and very warm to the heart of Martin Luther. Perspicuity refers to what we call the clarity of Scripture.

Now you might jump up and down at this point and say, well, that's exactly where I have my problem. Scripture is not clear to me. It seems so entangled. And one time I'm reading from James and another time from Paul, and at times they seem to contradict each other, and I don't know how to put them both together. How can somebody talk about the clarity of Scripture when you read the book of Revelation or the book of Daniel or the book of Ezekiel with all that cryptic symbolism that's in there that's so difficult for us to follow?

It seems like our guidebooks don't really give us a clue on how to understand these things. Well, when Luther and the Protestant Reformers set forth the principle of perspicuity of the Scriptures, they were saying that the Bible is basically clear or essentially clear. And what they meant by essentially clear was clear with respect to the essentials, clear with respect to the essentials. That is to say, a child who has an ability to read at perhaps a fifth-grade level can make his way through the Bible. There are going to be lots of words he doesn't understand. There are going to be lots of concepts that are going to be beyond him theologically.

There are going to be lots of symbols that he will miss altogether, but the basic message will get through. That basic message that Luther was speaking of is the basic message of redemption, the message of salvation, the message that says to us that we as human beings are created by a holy God, and that after God has created us, in many ways we have violated the trust of that creation. We have, in a word, sinned against God. And we can understand the message that God takes that very, very seriously, and that that sin has not only disrupted our relationship to God, but also our relationship with other people, and not only with other people, but even with ourselves. And we can also get the message that God is concerned about that, that God wants to redeem that disruption, that break, that kiddiable fall of mankind, and that throughout history He is reaching out to His fallen world, and that the acme of His work of redemption is found in sending His Son into the world as our Savior. My children, when they were six years old, understood that Jesus saved them from their sins. They didn't understand complex theories of the atonement. They didn't understand the complicated debates in theology, but they understood that they had been bad, and God was mad, and now He was glad because Christ was putting them back together. Very simple stuff, very simple.

It was a childlike understanding. But that's the essence, and that message in its most rudimentary form, its simplest mode, is the most important message that the world needs to hear. And when the Reformers said the Bible is clear, that's what they're talking about.

It's clear on the essentials. Luther himself said not every part of the Scripture is equally clear. There are some parts of Scripture that are so obscure that even PhDs in New Testament studies or in Old Testament studies scratch their head and toss a coin trying to figure out exactly the precise nuance of meaning of that particular text. And the most erudite, the most brilliant, the most accomplished and skilled theologians wrestle for decades over thorny questions of theology in the Bible. We know that, and we're not suggesting that the Bible is so clear that anybody can understand all of its ramifications simply.

No. But the essential message is there. God is not an elitist. I remember I was speaking on one occasion, giving a lecture. It wasn't a sermon even. It was a lecture to a group of people who had asked me to come and explain to them the relationship of the Old Covenant to the New Covenant. And I was going through all the stipulations and formats of the Old Testament covenantal structure and how in the person of Christ in the New Testament an atonement was made to satisfy the demands of Old Testament law. As I was explaining that, a gentleman shouted out spontaneously from the back of the room, that's primitive and obscene.

Well, you can imagine my chagrin. Here I am trying to lecture to an audience. It wasn't, again, it wasn't even a sermon.

It wasn't an evangelistic pitch or anything like that. And as I get to the place of the atonement, a man gets so angry that he interrupts my lecture by screaming out, that's primitive and obscene. I didn't know what to do, so just to take time, I asked him, I said, would you repeat that, please, just so I could collect my thoughts. And he said, no, that's all right. I said, no, please say it again. And he said, I said, that's primitive and obscene.

And I said, you're right. And I particularly enjoy the two adjectives you've used to describe it. primitive and obscene. Certainly there's nothing in human history more obscene than the cross of Christ. For in that moment, all of the filthy ugliness of sin was compacted by imputation onto the back of Jesus of Nazareth. When Christ hung on the cross in and of Himself, He was the Holy One of Israel, beautiful. But by imputation, once the sin of the world was laid on Him, He was the incarnation at that moment of obscenity. But more important for our consideration today is the other adjective the man used, primitive.

I said, that's right. You do have very, very high levels of literary prose and poetry to be found in the Scripture. But on the other hand, the basic message is exactly what you're calling it.

It's primitive because God cares enough about His fallen people that at times He lisps, He condescends to speak to us in our lowest state so that the simplest child, the most primitive savage, can understand the gift of eternal life. You know, in the academic world, we understand something that to simplify difficult matters without distorting them is the true mark of an excellent teacher. Any professional academic person, any scholar ought to be able to speak to other scholars using scholarly terminology and scholarly jargon. But the real test of whether or not one scholar understands what he's talking about is can he state it in terms that a six-year-old child can understand. Because if I really understand something, I ought to be able to communicate it. And if I can't communicate it, that may be an indication that I really don't understand it in the first place.

So what I'm saying is in a sense twofold. I'm saying, yes, I hear what you're feeling when you say the Bible is too difficult. There are parts of it that are excruciatingly difficult. But at the other hand, I want to remind you that there is enough there that you can grasp even without a formal education in biblical studies that is of eternal significance for you.

But I don't want to just leave it there. I want to say, and this is again a goal of this course, that we can all, no matter who we are and no matter how much education we have and how far we've progressed academically, each one of us can improve our skill in handling that book. And my goal is that particularly for those who are frightened by the weightiness of Scripture or a little bit scared of some of its strange and foreign ideas, we'll be able to get comfortable with it, and that we can learn some rules and some principles together that'll give confidence and fun and excitement to those who endeavor to study the Word of God. Now why should we do it?

Two reasons, which I'll try to state quickly. The first reason why we should study the Bible, not just read it or casually examine it devotionally, but why disciplined study should be our goal is this. Because, dear friends, it's our duty. I know that speaking of obscenities, that the four-letter word that's become perhaps the most despised obscenity in our culture today is that four-letter word D-U-T-Y, duty.

We can't avoid it. God does in fact require of each of His people, not just of the priests and the prophets, of the scholars and the theologians, but He requires of each one of us that we be diligent in the study of His Word. Let me go back to one of the most important texts in the Old Testament, one that I'm sure you've heard at least in passing, one that is very important to the Jewish community because it was at the heart of Jewish worship in the Old Testament.

It comes in Deuteronomy chapter 6, beginning in verse 4, which includes the Shema, the, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might. That's the great commandment, isn't it? But the Bible goes on, and these words which I command you this day shall be in your heart, and you shall teach them diligently to your children.

You shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them for a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes, and you shall write them upon the posts of your house and on thy gates. And he goes on to say that you should be so absorbed in a study of the things of God that you talk about these things when you sit down, when you stand up, when you go to bed, when you're at the table, tie them on your forehead, tie them on your wrist, put them on your doorposts. In a word, God is very much concerned that we are diligent in the study of His Word, but it's not enough to speak of duty.

With that duty comes a sacred privilege. Our Lord told us that He came that we might have life, and we were also told that the Word of God is life. And so God requires this study from us, not just because He's a stern past master like Pharaoh that won't give us any straw for our bricks, but He requires it so that we can live, so that we can experience the fullness of life that God has ordained and designed for each one of us. But let us move then to a consideration of the principles that are important to become masters of the Word of God. Why would we neglect the study of the Bible when we have access to the very Word of God, the one who made us and knows us and knows this world and the world to come better than anyone? You heard a message today on Renewing Your Mind from R.C. Sproul's very popular series Knowing Scripture, and this 12-message series, along with seven others, are available on a special edition collection titled Bible Study Basics. Not only will Dr. Sproul help you understand how to study the Bible, you'll also have it modelled for you as he teaches through the parables of Jesus and visits other Old Testament and New Testament books. Call us at 800-435-4343 or visit renewingyourmind.org with a donation of any amount to request your copy of this eight-series special collection, Bible Study Basics. This offer is only while supplies last, so request yours today at renewingyourmind.org. As you read the Bible, how can you tell if something was a cultural custom only relevant to that time or if it is a principle to be applied today? R.C. Sproul will tackle this question of Biblical interpretation tomorrow, here on Renewing Your Mind. .