Rightly Divided s02e2 Context John Beeson

In this podcast episode, the importance of biblical context in studying the Bible is discussed. It is emphasized that reading the whole book or a large section of Scripture is crucial before diving into a single passage. An example is given using Philippians 4:13, where the context of Paul's suffering and striving towards Christ's goals is often overlooked. The significance of understanding the broader story and context of each book is highlighted. The approach to studying a smaller book like Philippians may involve starting with the first chapter and drilling down, while a larger book like Isaiah requires an understanding of its two distinct movements and the historical context of Israel's transition into exile. The discussion concludes with the recognition that biblical passages have individual applications, but must be understood within the larger framework of God's story and our role within it. This is Truth Rightly Divided, a podcast of PreachItTeachIt.org. I'm your host, Tom Terry, and in this podcast we'll be exploring elements of Bible study so that you can get the most out of your time when studying God's Word. Our guest for this three-episode series on the elements of Bible study is John Beeson. John received his Master's of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary. He is currently the co-lead pastor of New Life Fellowship in Tucson, Arizona, and in addition to his pastoral duties, John is a regular contributor to PreachItTeachIt.org. For this episode, we'll be talking about the importance of biblical context and its role in our study of the Bible. John, many people, myself included, often start their Bible study by looking at a single passage, but a single passage by itself is part of a much larger section of your book. So how important is it to read the whole book or a large section of Scripture before actually beginning the study? In a way, you can't overstate how important it is to read the larger section that the passage comes out of and, in fact, the whole book. I don't know which I'd choose, the redemptive history as being more important or the book, but maybe I'd say the book. Can I take us to an example of that? Yeah. In fact, I'm hoping that you'll take us to an example of a large book, because how do you do that if you're in a passage in Isaiah, for instance? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So let me start with an easier one. Okay. Can we start in the shallow end and work our way to the deeper end? Let me start with the shallow end, and maybe one of the most frequent verses I get from when I ask the question, hey, what's your favorite verse? I often get Philippians 4.13, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. A wonderful passage, right? Yeah. A wonderful passage that's often... I know where you're going. I know where you're going. Go ahead. That's frequently misunderstood and misused, because as you pull out from that passage, it's a passage that's very un-American, meaning the broader meaning and context of that passage, but is applied in very American ways, in ways that it's often read in the Western context at least, where we talk about, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. I can get the grades that I'm trying to get. I can get into the school I want to get. I can achieve what I want to achieve in the world of sports, and yet if we just pull out one verse even, the verse before it talks, I know how to be brought low. I know how to abound in any and every circumstance. I've learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. We have Paul writing from prison, from house arrest, talking, when he's talking about I can do all things through him who strengthens me. He's talking about a context that's very much non-21st century Western in its origin. That isn't to say, of course, that Christ is not present in a high school football game or something like that. It's just to say that the context of doing all things, they're accomplishing the things of Christ, not the things of me, and so it reshapes your entire understanding. In fact, you pull out even broader from there to the whole book, and you start to look at, hey, what's going on here? Just move earlier, one chapter earlier, Paul is talking about straining toward a goal in Philippians 3. Not that I've already obtained this or I'm already perfect, but I press on to make it my own because Christ Jesus has made me my own. Brothers, I do not consider that I've made it my own, but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Doing all things has to be understood with a primary motivation and a primary context of Paul striving toward Jesus Christ and toward the things that are lasting, so that's a smaller context. I have to confess, I've looked at that passage for many years, and for me what's been helpful is to realize the amount of suffering that Paul was enduring when he wrote that book, and so I've kind of looked at that passage and kind of given it my own layman's reinterpretation to say I can endure all things through Christ, instead of the 21st century pull-your-up-by-the-bootstraps type of interpretation. Yeah, excellent. Excellent. I love that. In fact, that word endure is a favorite word of Paul's, and so it's the reading of that book that is lending you that word, which I think is perfectly fitting for that context. And in fact, this is what is so powerful about this. It's not as though the intention of reading a verse in its context, we're not trying to push it away from you. We're not trying to push it away from your heart, from your life. No, no, no, scripture does absolutely apply to us in a very individual way through the power of the Spirit of God, right? But what we are doing is we are part of God's story, and so if we're not understanding the context and the story that Paul's living in, or if we want to shift over to Isaiah, that Isaiah's living in, then what we can tend to do is we're actually making God's story way too small, and we're making the stories that God's inviting us into way too small as well. So it seems to me, to get back to our idea of looking at a passage, you know, for a smaller book like Philippians, if you're going to study an individual passage like you've been talking about, to me it would seem to be good to start with chapter one and get a broader context of what he's talking about and then begin to drill down. But in a larger book like Isaiah, would you handle that differently? Because it's not like you're going to sit down and devotionally read 66 chapters of Isaiah. Well, actually, it's interesting that you bring up Isaiah. Isaiah is a—and I didn't prepare for this—Isaiah is actually a particular challenge because there's quite a bit of academic disagreement. Yeah. Is it really two books? Exactly. About the authorship of Isaiah. So Isaiah actually provides maybe one of the most unique challenges in Scripture. But let's go there. Let's go to the top of Mount Everest here and see if we can navigate that because regardless, as readers we don't need to get actually tied up into that question of figuring out whether or not there's two authors or not. Everyone does agree that Isaiah clearly is written in two parts, that there's two kind of, if you want to say, two different movements in the book. So, yeah, so figuring out kind of what movement, the piece of the book that you're navigating kind of looks into and how you navigate that. So, you know, for instance, you know, as Christians probably the part of the book that we're most familiar with is this section near the end of the book where we begin to kind of hear about this suffering servant and trying to understand, you know, who is this one who is prophesied about and what is the context of these prophecies about this suffering servant and how do we understand that for ourselves. And so if, you know, so for instance, if we go over to Isaiah 52, sorry, Isaiah 53 to this section that many of us are familiar with. Who has believed what he has heard from us and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed for he grew up before him like a young plant and like a root out of dry ground. He had no form or majesty that we should look at him and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our grief and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace and with his wounds we are healed. And he continues from there. So there's this picture of what, again, Isaiah calls this servant. It's this promise of God and, you know, why would the context of this matter? Why does it change the way that we read the book? Well, the book of Isaiah is written right at this, really, this point of transference of Israel as a nation, kind of under its own authority and autonomy to, Isaiah follows them all the way into captivity, into exile. And so understanding even that transition is significant because you have a people of God at the beginning part of Isaiah, Isaiah is calling them back, like, it's not too late, you can still repent, you can still turn to God, the nation, God, you know, the nation's going to crumble, it's going to fall apart unless you repent. And then we have in the whole second part of Isaiah a very different tone, a tone of a people, a written, a book written to now a people in exile that says, what happens now? You know, there's this, if we can oversimplify, there's this very harsh tone at the beginning of the book and there's a gentler tone at the end of the book. Well, this falls in this gentler passage where it's a passage that's saying, it's this what now time, where Israel's like, what now? What happens next? And Isaiah, in really a profound way, he says, here's what happens next, is that you keep your eyes open for God. You keep your eyes open for the work of God. And in fact, what's really neat throughout this section is that Isaiah, in a sense, is holding up the promised suffering servant and really he's contrasting him with the type of faithless leaders that Israel has had. And so in this sense, God is very compassionate toward Israel because they have been led by unfaithful, by unrighteous, by unjust, by power-hungry leaders who have not stewarded their leadership well. And so he turns and he says, look, look, look, look, look, there's one who's going to actually bear your grief. He's going to bear your sorrows. He is going to pay for your sins. That's your way out. That's your way out of exile. That's the hope that you have. And it's this profound and tender moment of a crushed people who look toward the one who will be crushed for them. That, you know, and I could say all of that and you're like, well, that doesn't really change the way that I read it. And I'd say, well, that's okay, that's fine. But here's what it should do, though, is that it should actually, we should recognize in ourselves those places where we feel crushed by shame. We feel crushed by the weight of our sin, the consequences of our sin. And it actually, in a cool way, bridges that historical divide where we feel like actually the heartbeat of the exiles really can connect with us in a pretty spiritually rich way. Okay, you've just gone from observation to examination and application in a matter of minutes. Here you go. You just preached a minister's sermon that you weren't prepared for and you did a great job. But you can't, it seems to me that you can't get there just by casually reading as an example of what you just shared in Isaiah. You can't get there by just casually reading the scripture. You've got to dig deeper somehow. You've got to get a fuller context. You're not going to get that kind of interpretation in a simple devotional reading, are you? That's correct, yeah. And here, we mentioned this last time, the importance of a good study Bible. The book of Isaiah really reveals that to us, right? Now the book of Philippians, for the most part, you could draw most of what we talked about from the book itself, with the exception of maybe some of the details of like Paul being in house arrest. That's less crystal clear in the book. But most of the rest of it is all taken from the book. Now the book of Isaiah really does require a little bit more of understanding sort of the context and the overlay and wait, when did he live again and wait, when did he start his ministry and how long did his ministry last and what was going on in Israel and who were the kings at the same time? That's all pretty complicated stuff. But it's actually made pretty simple by picking up a study Bible. So yes, you're exactly right. There is kind of some heavy lifting that has to be done. But that lifting, we have some nice helps that can assist us with that. Yeah, I think a lot of people get nervous about doing Bible study. I mean, when I first became a believer, I just wanted to soak it up because the Lord just radically changed my life in so many ways in just a matter of one day. One day I wasn't a believer and I could care less and the next day everything was transformed. And so I just began soaking up Scripture. I read from Genesis to Revelation in a month. I was so enamored by what I was learning that I did it again the second month and just kept on going. And I found that I couldn't get deeper unless I went deeper and I needed a study Bible and somebody gave me a great study Bible. If you're going to recommend a study Bible or a set of notes or something of that nature, what would you recommend? My two favorites are still the classic NIV. The study Bible has been around for a while and it's still an excellent resource. And the ESV is what I would consider kind of the heavyweight of the study Bibles. And there's lots of different types of study Bibles out there. There's ones that are a little bit more devotional in nature. I personally, for the sake of a preacher and a teacher, I would just encourage you to go for just the straight study Bible so that it really just helps you provide just some crutches along the way. Those would be the two that I would say are my personal favorites. There are plenty of other good ones out there as well. Now, do you use just a standard, you know, plain paper Bible or are you doing things on your computer? I actually, for the most part, use just a standard plain paper Bible. I do a little bit of the language study for those who have the ability to, who might know Greek and Hebrew. I do some of that on my computer, which is, some of that stuff is pretty readily available. But otherwise, I just use my plain paper Bible, yeah. Well, I'd like to throw out a recommendation if I could, not to be a salesperson for Olive Tree Software, but I love their software on my iPad, which is what I use it on. And the beauty about the Olive Tree Bible software is that you can buy all of those study notes for the different Bible translations as a separate package, so you can choose your study notes but keep your translation the same if you want. So sometimes I'm looking through the ESV notes, sometimes I go to the archaeological notes and I really, I kind of live there in the archaeological notes section. I really enjoy learning more about the intricacies of the culture and the history and things of that nature. But that has been really helpful to me in having a tool that's so versatile to help me not just with my study but even my devotional reading. Yeah, that's great, that's great. Any other tools that you'd suggest? Well, you know, if you're going to be a Bible student, whether you're going to seminary or Bible college or something like that, you've got to get Logos. You know, Logos is the number one Bible program out there. You're going to pay a hefty price for it, but it's worth every dime. So I use that a lot in my studies when I'm going to teach. But my daily go-to is that olive tree. And it's organized, it's so easy to control on the screen. So anyway, I'm not the expert here, you are, but I had to throw in my dime. I'm glad you did. I'm glad you did. All right, let's talk about historic context for a moment. Give us an example, if you want to use again Philippians, about historic context and how that affects your interpretation. Yeah, we already mentioned a little bit of that, but I'll circle back around to Philippians. And so, yeah, so a few things change our interpretation of this. A, who's the author of this? It would change if it wasn't Paul's letter, if it was Peter's letter, right? Why would it change? Well, Peter was the apostle to the Jews, really, and Paul was the apostle to the Gentiles. And so they had very different trajectories, very different kind of ways in which they wrote and the approach that they took it with. Who did he write it to? Paul is writing the church at Philippi, a church that he had a relationship with. You can flip back to the book of Acts and you can see Paul's travels there and you can read a little bit about what happens there. That's very helpful. And then obviously, as I mentioned, the fact that Paul is under house arrest here, again, it changes the way that we read this letter. It changes the context of the, I can do everything through Christ who strengthens me, knowing even, you know, I'll talk about this. So even in a spiritual sense, actually, Paul doesn't do everything through Christ who strengthens him in the way that he thought he was going to. You know, his ultimate destination in his mind was Spain. It appears Paul never got there. And so even understanding who wrote it, what their story is, it doesn't undermine the truth of what's written here, not at all. But it ought to, back to your translation, I can endure all things through Christ. Now, that's exactly what we're talking about here, because Paul, very much the story of his life, a post transformation, a post meeting Jesus Christ, is a life in which he is enduring all sorts of things and really is navigating a life that's, on the one hand, incredibly intentional, but on the other hand, incredibly out of his control. Like he, it's not at all what he plans. It changes all the time. And so very much so, it's not this kind of, as we would so often co-opt this verse in the West, it is not at all a name it, claim it. It is not at all a, you know, a self-willed theology that's at the core of this. And how do we know that? We know that from the book itself. We know that from its author. We know it from its context. Okay. What are some of the common mistakes that people make in Bible study? Mistakes that you find yourself having to correct in real life? Yeah, I think, so I'd start right where we are, which is just very much kind of rifling through Scripture for inspiration, right? It's a, you know, it's the classic kind of bumper sticker mentality of looking for a little phrase, a little something that kind of captures you and inspires you and pumps you up. And sort of pulling that into my life as kind of fuel for inspiration. That's not the work of Scripture. The second thing is the classic mistake in the Old Testament, and actually this happens in the New Testament as well, but in the Old Testament in particular, is to reduce stories to morals and to reduce characters to heroes. And in fact, what we find is most of actually the stories in the Old Testament, the main character is rarely a hero, actually. And there's rarely a simple moral at the heart of the story. So, for instance, you know, the book of Judges is a great example of this. There's not a single hero, frankly, in the book. Well said, well said, right? And yet, and yet how many Christians have you heard say, hey, I'm going to put out a fleece before God? Well, hold on, we're referring to the story of Gideon here and, well, he may have been slightly more faithful than the other judges, but in general, actually, the man's life is a faithless life. And the act of putting out the fleece was a faithless act. He was not someone who was hearing God and responding to God in faith. And so we grab snippets like this and we turn the character into a hero. We turn the narrative into a moral. Actually, oftentimes the moral that is the exact opposite of what the authors want us to get, it misses the whole point. Back to the redemptive thing that we talked about last time, right? Every story, when you begin to see how is the story of Gideon pointing us to Jesus Christ, we begin to see Gideon a little bit more clearly, we begin to see ourselves more clearly. So for Gideon, you know, I'll ruin the story for you. How does Gideon, well, Gideon begins, right, as a wimp, as a fear filled, he's shaking in his boots, almighty man of valor, the angel says with great irony in what is being spoken there. Now, the story actually ends as Gideon, the incredibly presumptive and proud man who has just absolutely been wrecked by the success that God has given him. How has he been wrecked? Well, he's been called by God as a judge. But what we see at the end is he takes on himself the place of a priest. He calls his son, son of a king. He's not supposed to be a king, but he's taken on now, he is prophet, priest and king. Well, he was called to none of those things, right? And so the story itself is this great reminder of who is the prophet, priest and king, Jesus Christ. That was going to be my next question. How does Gideon then prefigure Christ? There you go. If he's not the hero. Exactly. He is the anti-hero, right? He is the self-willed, self-determined man who presumes to take on himself a role that only God can take in the person of Jesus Christ. And the only Messiah, the only rescuer is in the person of Christ. And yet we see ourselves in Gideon. And so I see in Gideon the power of ego, of pride, of self-determination, of self-will, the lure of believing that the work of God in me is my work and work of my own intelligence and strength and charisma when it's only Christ at work within me. Excellent. Last question. How do we take all this and apply it? Yeah, so I would say quite simply, I would encourage, and one of the simple ways as a teacher and a preacher that can help you with this, can help any of us with this, is just to have as your staple preaching through a book of the Bible. One of the pitfalls that we can often fall into when we're just snatching verses of scripture here and there is to conform that verse around us and our heart and the things that make us excited. And there's a danger there. And so one of the gifts of preaching through a book of the Bible is that the book can help course-correct us as opposed to vice versa. And so it can shape us as we preach through the book and it can speak and protect us against going off the rails. So that's one admonition I would say is that expositional preaching that preaches through books of the Bible can be very course-corrected in this. And then just do your homework. Spend time studying the entire book, even if you're just doing one passage or one verse in the book. Spend time in the entirety of the book. Spend time with a study Bible and spend time reflecting on just this very simple question, what was this author saying to the original audience? Once we get that, what was this author, what was Paul saying to the church at Philippi? Once I understand what Paul was saying to the church at Philippi, I know what Paul is saying to me or what Christ is saying to me because it's the same message. It's not, this isn't a code book that we're reading. This is God's word for God's people. And so those would be some of the tips that I'd encourage teachers of God's word to lean into. All right. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Tom. All right. For our next episode, we're going to be talking about how to understand the main point of any passage. So we'll do that on the next episode. Thanks so much, John. Great. You've been listening to Truth Rightly Divided, a podcast of PreachItTeachIt.org. Today, we've been discussing the importance of context in Bible study. This is the second in a three-part series. Our next episode will focus on how to understand the main point of any passage of scripture. I'm your host, Tom Terry with PreachItTeachIt.org. Be sure to visit our website for tools and resources to help you craft your sermon for Bible study. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again next time on Truth Rightly Divided, a podcast of PreachItTeachIt.org.