Front matter
UNDERSTANDING THE BIBLE Three Steps to Enrich and Deepen Your Knowledge of the Scriptures
By R. Herbert
2020, Tactical Belief Books – an imprint of TacticalChristianity.org
The text and images in this e-book are copyright. All Rights Reserved. ISBN 978-1-64826-109-1 This book is not to be sold. It is made available by the publisher without charge and free copies can be downloaded from: TacticalChristianity.org, LivingWithFaith.org, or FreeChristianEBooks.org. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION® NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. In a few cases, the ESV (English Standard Version ©), CSB (Christian Standard Bible ©), KJV (King James Version), NKJV (New King James Version ©), and KJ2K (King James 2000 Version ©) are cited, and these translations are also gratefully acknowledged.
About the Author: The author served as an ordained minister and church pastor for a number of years and holds an earned Ph.D. degree in the languages, cultures and archaeology of the ancient Near East and biblical world. He writes for a number of Christian publications and for the websites TacticalChristianity.org and LivingWithFaith.org. His other e-books are available for free download from those websites and from FreeChristianEBooks.org.
Cover: Base image © by Oleksandr Bushko.
CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: The Book We Read But Don't Always Understand STEP ONE: LOOKING AT THE TEXT 1. The Meanings of Words 2. Literal Language 3. Figures of Speech 4. Symbolic Language 5. Tools for Looking at the Text STEP TWO: LOOKING AT THE CONTEXT 6. The Importance of Context 7. Context Near and Far 8. Context Old and New 9. Literary Context 10. Tools for Looking at the Context
STEP THREE: LOOKING AT THE BACKGROUND 11. The Significance of Background 12. Archaeology 13. History 14. Culture 15. Tools for Looking at the Background CONCLUSION: Taking Steps to Understand the Bible About Our Books
INTRODUCTION:
The Book We Read but Don't Always
Understand The Bible is the world's all-time best-selling book. Every year since sales figures were first recorded, more Bibles have been printed and sold or given away than any other published work. An astonishing 20 million printed Bibles are distributed each year in the United States alone – and this does not count the millions of electronic copies of the Scriptures that are also distributed. Many Christians own or read more than one translation of the Bible, and there are countless books discussing virtually every chapter in the Old and New Testament alike.
Yet despite all the Bibles in existence and all the books about the Bible, most Christians will admit that the Bible contains a great many things they do not understand. Not only are there occasional mysterious prophecies that may seem impossible to comprehend, but there are hundreds, in fact thousands, of other verses that may seem confusing or difficult to understand when we focus on them. This has led to the Bible sometimes being called "the most-read and least-understood of all books."
Christians understand that we must approach the Bible with respect for what it is – the word of God – and that ultimately we will only understand its truths to the degree that we have that kind of respect (Isaiah 66:2). We also understand that there is a spiritual dimension to much of what the Bible teaches, and we must be willing to prayerfully ask for guidance in understanding its message (Luke 24:44-45; 1 Corinthians 2:14).
But even when we try to apply a right attitude and approach to our personal study of the Bible, we may still find that there are many verses or whole passages we simply do not understand – no matter how intently we read them or think about them.
Admitting the Problem Admitting that we do not understand all of the word of God does not necessarily reflect some failure on our part. We should always remember that no less a Christian than the apostle Peter wrote about his fellow-apostle Paul's writings that "His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction" (2 Peter 3:16). Notice that Peter not only admitted there were difficult things to understand in the writings of Paul, but also clearly implied that there were things in "the other Scriptures" – the rest of the Bible – that people did not understand.
The seeming difficulty of many biblical verses leads a great many Christians to often skip and skim when reading the Bible – to quickly move through verses they do not understand and to only settle on and think about those verses they recognize and feel they understand clearly.
Yet if we believe the Bible to be the word of God, we must remember that it tells us "All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness" (2 Timothy 3:16 CSB). We may know this verse and believe it, but we do not always put it into practice in accepting that all scriptures have the potential to be understood and to help us in some way. In our own study it is usually easier to concentrate on those scriptures we feel comfortable with. But if we do this, there will always be a great number of biblical verses that we will not understand – and perhaps worse, may misunderstand to our own hurt or that of others. Finding Answers In the long run we will grow far more in our understanding and appreciation for God's word if we can learn how to unlock those verses that otherwise would be closed to us – and it is possible to read and understand most of what the Bible says if we can learn to approach it in the right way and, when needed, with the help of what we might call "the cumulative experience of the Christian community."
The Bible itself gives us a wonderful example of this fact. The book of Acts (8:26-40) tells how the early Christian leader, Philip, met a high-ranking government official from Ethiopia who was reading the Book of Isaiah. The Ethiopian was clearly a devout believer who knew a great deal about what the Hebrew Scriptures said. His understanding had led him to travel many hundreds of miles to attend a great religious festival in Jerusalem, yet he admitted to Philip that he was unsure of the meaning of part of what he read: "About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?" (Acts 8:34).
Fortunately for the Ethiopian, an explanation of the verses he found difficult to understand was given by Philip, who was sitting next to him. Although we do not always have such help available, there are a number of principles we can learn that can effectively help us to understand the Bible more fully. That is the purpose of this book: to help you increase your comprehension of the Bible by helping you see how to unlock many of the things it says that may not be clear to you – and perhaps, in some cases, to better understand verses that you thought you understood! Three Steps to Understanding the Scriptures The book takes you through three "steps" or levels that reveal the Bible's meaning to us – the words themselves, the context, and the background – the three aspects of every biblical verse that we may need to utilize to enable us to understand what we read.
The three steps involve respectively looking for and finding the intended scriptural meaning within the specific text we are studying, making proper connections with similar material within the Bible itself, and looking, when necessary, at the Bible's setting – its wider archeological, historical, and cultural background.
In many cases, we only need to take the first step – that of looking more closely at the words themselves – in order to understand a given biblical passage. But when the meaning of what we read is not clear at that level, we need to then progress to the second or even third steps of context and background.
Whether we are relatively new to Bible study or are experienced students of the word of God, this three-step process can be followed when necessary in order to understand areas of the Bible that are not clear to us. It can also be used when desired to increase our comprehension of scriptures that may be clear, but that we want to understand and appreciate more fully. In either case, these three steps can help us avoid misunderstandings and can enrich and deepen our right understanding of the Scriptures.
STEP ONE:
LOOKING AT
THE TEXT