Pastoral Musings

Three Things The Bible Does

(And If You Miss Them, You Will Misunderstand It Terribly.)

There are a number of different approaches taken by those who read the Bible. Many of those approaches are errant and only lead to more error.

Among the approaches taken is the approach of declaring that the Bible is either morally wrong, or inconsistent due to there being mentions of such things as polygamy.

The problem with this approach to interpreting the Bible is manifold, but glaringly evident is the fact that the persons making such claims miss the three things that the Bible does.

What are the three things that the Bible does? The reader of the Bible must recognize these three things, or he will misunderstand it and terribly misinterpret it. The Bible prescribes, describes, and circumscribes.

Let me demonstrate this by using the example of polygamy.

The Bible prescribes something concerning marriage. What the Bible prescribes is monogamy. The Bible tells us that God Himself said that two (a man and a woman) become one flesh in marriage (See Genesis 2:17-25;Matthew 19:1-6). No more than two are in a marriage. The Bible prescribes monogamy in marriage.

The Bible describes polygamy. Over and again we find polygamy described. Many times God’s children fell into this sin. Solomon is an extreme example of this. Lest we should think that the description of polygamy is a condoning of polygamy, we need to recall Solomon’s being rebuked because of this. We should also recognize that Scripture often describes the problems that arose from polygamous relationships. Description is not prescription.

Finally, the Bible circumscribes polygamy in that, knowing that some people would be wicked enough to disobey God in this matter, rules were given to Israel about how they were to deal with the issue (See Deuteronomy 21:15-17;Exodus 21:7-11). To circumscribe something is not to say that the whole of the issue is not problematic and sinful. To circumscribe something is not to prescribe that thing that is circumscribed.

Far too many people believe that the Scriptures prescribe things which it often only describes or circumscribes. Wise is the one who will recognize the need to approach that Bible carefully, and seeks to recognize these three things.

If you were going to research the history of the interpretation of the Genesis Creation Account, where would you begin?

What are the oldest Jewish commentaries? Are they available in English for those of us who do not yet know Hebrew?

What sources would you use?

When Is A Prophecy A Commandment? When A Commandment Is A Prophecy.

Odd title, isn’t it? Odd, and now it’s one that must be explained and justified.

One of the things with which we struggle (and I think God’s people have struggled with this for years) today is how to understand the way the New Testament interprets the Old Testament. (By the way, I highly recommend The Commentary of The NT Use of The OT.) I ran into this when I read the following passage.

“Then Paul and Barnabas waxed bold, and said, It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you: but seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles. For so hath the Lord commanded us, saying, I have set thee to be a light of the Gentiles, that thou shouldest be for salvation unto the ends of the earth.” (Acts 13:46–47, AV 1873)

Notice that Paul stated that God commanded the church to carry the Gospel to the Gentiles. The issue is, however, that Paul actually quoted a prophecy concerning Jesus.

“And he said, It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my servant To raise up the tribes of Jacob, And to restore the preserved of Israel: I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles. That thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth.” (Isaiah 49:6, AV 1873)

How does this prophecy become a command?

Well, let me take a bit of an odd route to get to my conclusion.

The prophecy becomes a commandment in essentially the same way that a commandment becomes a prophecy.

“What in the world do you mean, Jason?”

Well, I mean that this is not the first instance in which a text has been understood by the apostles to be of a bit of a different nature than you and I would understand it.
Consider how John understood Exodus 12:6

“In one house shall it be eaten; thou shalt not carry forth ought of the flesh abroad out of the house; neither shall ye break a bone thereof.” (Exodus 12:46, AV 1873)

John spoke of this as a prophecy, saying,

“But when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs: but one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water. And he that saw it bare record, and his record is true: and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe. For these things were done, that the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken.” (John 19:33–36, AV 1873)

 

Note how that John considers the command to be a prophecy. Why? Because John understood that the Passover lamb was a type of Jesus, the lamb of God (John 1:29;1Corinthians 5:7), and that the fact that there was a specific command regarding the bones of the lamb pointed to Jesus and His bones not being broken. Thus the command was also a prophecy.

What does this have to do with the text before us? Much, because this text shows something that is the inverse of what we just saw. Here the text sees the prophecy becoming a command instead of a command becoming a prophecy.

The prophecy was that Jesus would be a light unto the Gentiles, showing the glory of God unto the ends of the earth. That prophecy was not fulfilled during Jesus’ ministry. That prophecy had to be fulfilled, though, so how was that going to happen?

This prophecy had to be fulfilled, but how would that be done without Jesus being present to do so? Wait! The church, the body of Christ, is present. This can be fulfilled by Christ through His people. Did He not command the church to go into all the world and preach the gospel? Indeed He did.

Seeing that prophecy must be fulfilled, it was imperative that the prophecy of the light of the gospel reaching the Gentiles be fulfilled. The necessity of fulfillment means that the evangelistic mission of the church to the Gentiles was a must. For this reason, the prophecy was also a commandment, because the church had to do the work of Christ to the glory of God.

There was no alternative.

There was not another option.

There was only the issue of whether the church would do what she should, or not.

There was only obedience to the prophetic command, or disobedience to it.

Thus it is that a prophecy became a commandment in essentially the same manner that a commandment became a prophecy.

Be sure to click the link at the end to view the complete article.

 

Suppose you’re traveling to work and you see a stop sign. What do you do? That depends on how you exegete the stop sign.

1. A postmodernist deconstructs the sign (knocks it over with his car), ending forever the tyranny of the north-south traffic over the east-west traffic.

2. Similarly, a Marxist sees a stop sign as an instrument of class conflict. He concludes that the bourgeoisie use the north-south road and obstruct the progress of the workers on the east-west road.

3. A serious and educated Catholic believes that he cannot understand the stop sign apart from its interpretive community and their tradition. Observing that the interpretive community doesn’t take it too seriously, he doesn’t feel obligated to take it too seriously either.

4. An average Catholic (or Orthodox or Coptic or Anglican or Methodist or Presbyterian or whatever) doesn’t bother to read the sign but he’ll stop if the car in front of him does.

5. A fundamentalist, taking the text very literally, stops at the stop sign and waits for it to tell him to go.

6. A preacher might look up “STOP” in his lexicons of English and discover that it can mean: 1) something which prevents motion, such as a plug for a drain, or a block of wood that prevents a door from closing; 2) a location where a train or bus lets off passengers. The main point of his sermon the following Sunday on this text is: when you see a stop sign, it is a place where traffic is naturally clogged, so it is a good place to let off passengers from your car.

via Hermeneutics in Everyday Life.

The Bible comes from God; God doesn’t come from the Bible.

Our knowledge of God is a different story. What we know about God, definitively and redemptively, comes from the Bible. And that is, the Bible that comes from God, who himself comes from nothing.

These are the foundational pieces to understanding the doctrine of revelation, and therefore, the doctrine of Scripture. God, utterly independent and essentially revelatory, has made himself known. This is stunning. And it helps to read the Bible with it in view.

Read more:  How to Approach the Bible – Desiring God.

On the 5th page of his book, The Art of Biblical Poetry, Robert Alter states that the first line of poetry in the Bible is Genesis 2:23:

Then the man said,

”This at last is bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called Woman,

because she was taken out of Man.”

What’s the big deal you may ask?

Robert Alter is a professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at arguably the most liberal institution in America…the University of California Berkeley.

Need I say more?

via Is the creation account of Genesis a poem as Rob Bell claims? « seeing clearly.

Related articles

• The Gospel Coalition Blog Looks at Adam And Augustine (pastoralmusings.com)
• Book Review: Did Adam And Eve Really Exist? by C. John Collins (pastoralmusings.com)

It must be remembered that modern western thinkers view events in step logic. This is the idea that each event comes after the previous forming a series of events in a linear timeline. But, the Hebrews did not think in step logic but in block logic. This is the grouping together of similar ideas together and not in chronological order. Most people read Genesis chapter one from a step logic perspective or chronological, rather than from the block logic so prevalent in Hebrew poetry.

via The Poetry of Genesis Chapter One.

This post is interesting, to say the least; though I disagree.

More to come…

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Genesis is, without any doubt whatsoever, most definitely written as historical narrative. Hebrew uses special grammatical forms for recording history, and Genesis 1–11 uses those. It has the same structure as Genesis 12 onwards and most of Exodus, Joshua, Judges, etc., which no one claims is ‘poetry’ or not meant to be taken as history. Genesis is not poetry or allegory.

Genesis is peppered with ‘And … and … and … ’ which characterises historical writing (this is technically called the ‘vav—ו, often rendered as waw—consecutive’).

via Is Genesis poetry / figurative, a theological argument (polemic) and thus not history?.

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• The God of Creation (pastoralmusings.com)
• The Gospel Coalition Blog Looks at Adam And Augustine (pastoralmusings.com)

A the top of the Biblioblog top 50 is Jim West.  I happen to think that Jim is an intelligent and nice guy.  We’ve had a few good exchanges, and I hope to read his book on Zwingli when it is released.  Sadly, Jim has an issue with Fundamentalists and is myopic in that he thinks all Fundamentalists are the same.  That is sad, because it prevents us from having the relationship that Christian brothers should.

Though somewhat strongly worded (I know no other way to deal with it), I’m hoping that the statement below will cause Jim to reconsider his words.

Jim said,

a fundamentalist in iowa is the same as a fundamentalist in islamabad.

 

Sorry, Jim.  Christian Fundamentalism is not Islamist fundamentalism.  After all, the term Fundamentalist came out of the Niagara Bible Conference.  It is first of all a Christian term.  You can read some brief articles about Christian Fundamentalism here.

You may use it as a pejorative, yet you do so either in ignorance or with spite.  I make no assertion which it is.

I distinctly recall someone saying that one needs to read theologians of other traditions before condemning their theology.

What is at stake here?   A misrepresentation of historical Fundamentalism.   Christian charity.  Something that we need more of.

It’s time to stop the skewering of those who disagree with you, Jim.  Disagreements don’t have to be fights.  Straw men don’t help us fellowship.  It’s also time to stop acting like the extremists that you call fundamentalists: those dudes don’t walk in the footsteps of the historical Fundamentalists such as Machen, Torrey, and G. Campbell Morgan.  While despising them, acting like them brings you to their level.

NOTE: This is not about fighting with Jim.  It is about hoping for reconciliation by Jim giving us the same courtesy that he expects to be given to himself and to others.

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• Fundamentalist Hermeneutics (pastoralmusings.com)
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Moreover, if the author expects the general reader to understand the text, the author will represent the text as the central focus of the reader- that is, the author will not assume that the reader will be looking elsewhere for the information the text is meant to transmit.  While it is possible for texts to do this sort of thing and virtually abandon their readers, narrative texts are known for their steady supply of information to the reader regarding the events they are depicting.  Biblical narratives, in particular, are noticeably reader conscious.  In reading them, one rarely has the impression of being left alone.  The authors have their way of guiding the reader along, even though in most cases the reader is unaware of their presences.

John Sailhamer, The Pentateuch As Narrative

Considering this, it would be well to ask this question to those who try to interpret the Pentateuch (especially Genesis) as Ancient Near Eastern Myth: “Is there a strong case for believing that Babylonian and Sumerian tales were known to the average Hebrew who lived in Egypt, was a relatively uneducated slave, and became a nomad for decades?”

Personally, I think it is a stretch to think that texts such as Enuma Elish were in the consciousness of Moses and those who heard him.  It assumes that the texts had traveled far and had a wide reading.  I’m not so sure that has been proven to us, though.

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• Repost: The Book That Influenced Me Most in 2010 (pastoralmusings.com)
• The Unity of The Bible: Genesis (pastoralmusings.com)
• Rules for Studying Genesis (pastoralmusings.com)