Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

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Dr. Dennis Johnson: Well, it's great to be with you. It's a delight to come this far north. The advantage, by the way, of being a professor emeritus of Westminster Seminary California is you don't actually have to live in California anymore. So, after I retired last June, my wife and I moved to Southeastern Tennessee, y'all. And I'm practicing, y'all. I'm not going to do it that often. But anyway, it was a quick drive. We took two days. Why not? I'm retired to be up here. We remembered fondly three years that we spent in Philadelphia many, many years ago when I was in seminary. And from here, we're going on to New Jersey where I pastored right after seminary and to connect with one of the elders in the church there, one of two elders who taught me how to pastor after I had a Westminster Seminary degree. They taught me a lot of good stuff there, but those two elders taught me how to pastor.

So, it's a joy to get the opportunity to talk to you about studying the Bible, even though I only have 200 minutes, which is not very much at all, but I'll do my best, okay? So you heard a little bit of the statistics. I was after graduation, I was a pastor for about eight and a half years, first in New Jersey and then in Los Angeles. Jane and I are both Southern Californians originally, so we were back in California for those years. And then, when Westminster got its California campus started, now a free-standing institution for many years, I was invited to come and teach there. So I taught New Testament for sixteen and a half years when I had a really meaty course on biblical interpretation. And then, about 20 years ago, I was invited to teach practical theology. And I also had in a course there, really again, a significant amount of time to talk about studying the Bible. So I love to talk about it, and I may talk beyond time, but not very much because we need to keep on schedule here.

So our first message is going to be largely a way of introducing the whole question of how do we rightly study the Word of God, laying out the big picture. And then, in the next hour, our second hour tonight, we're going to talk about language and one form of context. Promised all kinds of context in that next hour. We're going to talk about language and literary context, reading every text of the Bible in the light of the rest of the texts of the Bible. And then, first thing tomorrow morning, we're going to talk about life context, how important it is to think about what the original recipients of any biblical book, what they were going through, what they should have understood, maybe did, maybe didn't, what their problems were, what their issues were, what their environment was. So we're going to talk about life context and then how that merges into the question of looking at the purpose for a particular biblical book, which is absolutely crucial. Why did God the Holy Spirit use whichever human author he used to speak this book to those people then, and how does their need then connect with our needs now? Is that complicated enough? It's going to get worse.

So that's and then the last one, we have to stop, we have to conclude with Christ as the key to all of Scripture. So that one's pretty much the same. So as you see in the outline, I hope everybody has the packet of outlines. We start with thinking about the Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We just passed a couple of years ago the five-hundredth anniversary of the launch of the Reformation. And those were the original, you know, Luther, Calvin, Bucer, Bullinger, Zwingli, those were the original lions of confessing Evangelicals, I think, don't you think?

The Reformation, as we know, was raising several issues with what the church had, the Western church in particular, but the Eastern Orthodox church was similar, but what the Western church, the church centered in Rome was teaching at the time about how we can become right with God and how we can know that we are right with God. And the church was saying, "God gives you some grace to help you, and then you use that grace, and as you use that grace, you get better and better, if you're really working at it, and eventually at least a few people in this life may be assured that they are right with God." Not the average Christian, but a few people.

And the reformers, Luther, Calvin, and others, were reading the Scriptures carefully. We're going to come back to that, how important that was, that the Lord in His providence made it happen right when it did when there was new access to the Bible in the original languages of the Bible. They discovered that what's actually taught is that God declares people who are in themselves not very righteous at all, right in His sight on the basis of what Jesus has done for them, on the basis of His death for the forgiveness of our sins, also on the basis of His perfect obedience which now we get credited with with righteousness. We're going to talk about that.

And so the reformers often would speak, actually they didn't speak as far as the historians that I'm reading could tell, of all five of the solas, the onlys of the Reformation, all in one place in those centuries. Those came to be pulled together at a later point, but they spoke of all of them. Sola Gratia, it's by grace alone. Sola Fide, it's received through faith alone. Solus Christus, that is it's received through faith in Christ alone. And it is Soli Deo Gloria, it's all for God's glory. Those are the four related to how we relate to God.

Foundational to all those is the other sola, often listed first because really logically it comes first, and that is Sola Scriptura, that Scripture alone is the supreme standard for how we know what we know about God and what He expects of us. The supreme standard. One of the seventeenth-century confessions that many of us find very helpful as a summary of the Bible is the Westminster Confession and the larger/shorter catechisms put together in the 1640s. The Bible was given by inspiration of God to be the rule of faith and life. Or the larger catechism, it is the only rule of faith and obedience. Or the shorter catechism, it is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy God.

And at another point in the confession in chapter one, which all has to do with the Bible, section ten, the supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in Scripture. Now, that last statement, which elevates the Bible over the decrees of councils, the opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, raises the obvious question: if the Bible has that much authority, who gets to say what the Bible says? Who can, how can we rightly interpret the Bible? Who gets to decide if even the traditions of the church that are centuries old, that have been agreed upon by large groups of pastors and theologians, that have been handed down to us, if even they are subject to review through a fresh examination of the Bible itself, who gets to tell us what the Bible says?

Were the reformers really intending to just throw Bible interpretation open to everybody's personal preference, perspective, subjective prejudice? Were those confessing Evangelicals of five hundred years ago actually post-modern relativists before their time? "Oh, what does the Bible mean to me?" Now, I know post-modern relativism sounds like a very high academic thing, and it does take place on university campuses all over the place, but we've probably, you may have heard it in some Bible studies. "Well, what this text means to me is..." Oh, be careful now here. Okay? That's not what the reformers were about. If they were advocating that kind of read it for yourself and make up whatever you think it wants to be, if they were right about that, then you've wasted your time this evening, and you can just go home and just read, see what the Bible, how it strikes you.

But that's not what they were meaning. They were insisting that there is a right way to read the Bible, and we learn that right way from the Bible. They were aware that the church against which they were protesting, the church centered in Rome, had its traditions. They were also aware that there were others who were moving away from the church of Rome but who were very much in terms of subjective reading of the Bible, not because they were somehow post-modern relativists, but because they thought the Holy Spirit would kind of whisper to their hearts what the Bible means. And the reformers wanted to sort of steer the ship between Scylla and Charybdis. They wanted to say, "Now there is a way to read Scripture that is faithful."

So the Westminster Confession, 1640, says, "The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself." Okay, that's okay, but now help us a little. What does that mean, right? So they go on. "Therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture, which is not manifold but one, it must be searched and known by other places in Scripture that speak more clearly." They knew the Bible's not always an easy book. Actually, it's not really so much like a book. It's unified, but it's more like a huge library, right, that God has built over well over a thousand years, 1,500 years, probably give or take, from Moses to the visions of John in the Book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament. They knew it was not an easy book.

In fact, in the confession chapter one, section seven, they say, "All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear to all. Yet those things that are necessary to be known, necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned but also the unlearned, in a due use of ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding thereof." Not everybody understands everything as clearly as others do, and not every text is as easy. And frankly, in admitting that, which is all of our experience, right? They're actually agreeing with what the New Testament says.

The Apostle Peter in Second Peter chapter three speaks of Paul's letters, which he groups with the other Scriptures, which is an amazing statement for one apostle to say about another apostle in that first generation, except that it is an acknowledgment that the Holy Spirit is writing, is speaking through these authors. Peter says there are some things in Paul's letters that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction as they do the other Scriptures. They're hard things. The big picture, what we need to know for salvation is so clear that you can find it, you can learn it by paying attention to the ordinary means of understanding the Bible.

But there are some hard things, and we want to tackle not just the easy stuff, but the harder stuff because it's all God's Word, and it's all useful to build us up. So how do we do that? Well, actually, before the Westminster Confession, before the assembly got going in the 1640s, quite a bit earlier back in 1566 on the continent of Europe, the Swiss churches, sometimes called the Helvetic churches—I collected stamps when I was a kid and I always got the stamps from Switzerland that said Helvetia on them. I thought, "What's up with that?" Finally, I learned about the Second Helvetic Confession. I thought, "Oh, that's Swiss."

The churches of Switzerland had a couple of confessions. The second one, which was put together by Heinrich Bullinger, has this magnificent statement about what it means for Scripture to teach us to interpret Scripture. And I just love it. I used it for all those years pretty much once I ran across it teaching seminary students. If you pay attention to this and do it carefully and well, you're good to go. And I put it here in our outline so that you would have it. It's in the second chapter. It's right in the middle of that first page, which is on interpreting the holy Scriptures, and then they go on to talk about how they viewed fathers and councils and traditions.

But the key statement there you find, and they say, actually they start by saying this, and I left a little bit of it out, but they say, "The Apostle Peter has said that the holy Scriptures are not of private interpretation (Second Peter 1:20). Thus we do not allow all possible interpretations. Some of the leaders of the church that we've been put out of or that we've left say that we just let anybody make their own decisions about, no we don't. Nor do we acknowledge as the true or genuine interpretation of the Scriptures what is called the conception of the Roman church, that is what the defenders of the Roman church plainly maintain should be thrust upon all for acceptance." A little polemic there, okay?

"But," and here's where we come to our quote, "We hold that interpretation of the Scripture to be orthodox and genuine which is gleaned from the Scriptures themselves." and then this wonderful explanation, "from the nature of the language in which they were written, likewise according to the circumstances in which they were set down, and expounded in the light of like and unlike passages and of many and clearer passages and which agrees with the rule of faith and love and contributes much to the glory of God and man's salvation." And the rest of the chapter they go on to say, we respect the views of the early church fathers, both those who wrote in Greek, those who wrote in Latin, but when they write something that doesn't agree with the Bible as we are reading it now, paying attention to language and circumstances and comparing Scripture with Scripture, we modestly dissent from their viewpoint when they are found to set down things differing from or contrary to the Scriptures. They say the same thing about the decrees and canons of councils from the past and from the present.

So basically, this is their little nutshell description of learning to read the Bible from the Bible. It's over 450 years old, but I hope you're not guilty of what C.S. Lewis calls chronological snobbery. "Oh, if it's that old I won't listen to it." No, no, don't do that. So I hope you're willing to learn from earlier generations because I think this is a great summary. Language, literary context (like and unlike many and clearer passages), life context (that's the circumstances that they were referring to), and then the purpose. Those are things we're going to be looking at tomorrow morning. As they say here, the purpose is faith and love leading to God's glory and our salvation.

So let me just give you a little bit of an overview of what these topics are in this introductory lecture, and then we're going to delve in the second hour into the theme of language and literary context. So first of all, I know this is like repeating myself, but I hope it'll be helpful to hear it a couple of times. Language, the nature of the language. Pay attention to particular words and what they mean in various contexts. Sometimes that's called lexical semantics. We'll talk a little bit more about that in the next hour. And how a specific context in which a word appears tends to activate some part of that word's circle of meaning. Words don't carry all that they mean into every place that they're used. There's something about them, I'll illustrate that in the next hour, there's something in a particular conjunction of words that brings to mind for listeners and for the author first and then for listeners what they mean in a particular setting. So looking at the question of the meanings of words, that's what we're going to be looking at in the next hour.

Syntax, that's the connections between words, relationships between words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, how subjects relate to verbs which relate to predicates. You're thinking, "Oh man, I haven't had an English grammar class for a million years and I didn't enjoy it when I had it." Yeah, but this is important stuff. It's good to know, you know? You may not in your spare time, "Hey, I think I'll just outline all the sentences in this book." No, no, don't do that. But pay attention to how the words are used. What modifies nouns? What are the contrasts that are built into say conjunctions like "but" or "however"? Or a flow of logic built into a conjunction like "because"? Really, really important to get the flow of thought because the Holy Spirit is writing through human authors who use language, as the Westminster folks said, we can use ordinary means. Now we need prayer, we need the illumining work of the Holy Spirit, but it's not total mystery. The Holy Spirit has to open our hearts and minds, but we also use ordinary means.

Also part of language is structure. Different kinds of passages have different kinds of structure. Sometimes we talk about passages, sometimes if we want to really impress people we talk about pericopes. P-E-R-I-C-O-P-E-S, which looks like "pericope", which is not "periscope". It is a Greek term that means cutting around something. So it could be a paragraph, or in a poem, it could be a stanza. So it's a discrete section of text, and it will be structured in a certain way. If it is part of a narrative, typically it'll be structured kind of by the unfolding of the plot of the story. Whether it's historical narrative, what things that really took place, events in history, whether it's a fictional narrative like Jesus' parables. When Jesus says a certain man had two sons and the younger said to his father, "Give me my stuff and I'm out of here," he doesn't expect us to think, "Now what town was that in exactly? What were the sons' names?" He knows once he says a certain man had two sons that we're thinking in terms of his analogy. It's a fictional story, although it has a very definite true point that he's going to get at. We'll look at that, one of my favorite parables of Jesus, just briefly at least in a little bit.

So each type, or if we look at the structure of a passage in the Psalms, for example, sometimes there will be a theme that's introduced and then a second theme and then a third theme and then suddenly we're back to the second theme and then we're back to the first theme. Sort of A-B-C-B-A kind of thing. That's typical of ancient Hebrew and to some extent some Greek writing as well. It's a structure thing. And that's really important. So we're going to be looking at that a little bit in the next hour as well.

And then finally literary genre. I was really already talking about that because talking about the difference between a story and a poem and we read stories differently than we read poems because different ways that language work deliver their message in different ways. So a narrative tells a story, it's typically structured chronologically. A discourse such as one of Paul's arguments in his letters usually explains and argues and may even raise an objection and then answer the objection. Or think of Hebrews, which is called an epistle, but it probably the author would have called it a sermon. He calls it a word of exhortation, which was a first-century Jewish way of saying sermon. And there he quotes Old Testament passages and then he picks up particular words out of that Old Testament quotation to explain the implications, what it means. We'll look a little bit more at that again a little bit later on. So a particular genre, a particular type of literature, which really brings us over into this next section, section B there, literary context and ultimately the canonical context.

The Swiss confessors, Bullinger who wrote for them, but they all talked about comparing like and unlike passages and many and clearer passages. Like and unlike passages. Like passages might include passages that talk about the same topic and explain it in very much the same way. So for example, we might put alongside several passages from the Apostle Paul that talk about how we are declared right with God through Jesus Christ. Galatians 2:14-15 pits faith in Jesus Christ over against the works of the law in those two verses three times. Faith in Christ, not the works of the law, not the works of the law, faith in Christ. We believed in Christ in order to be right with God because by the works of the law no one can be made right with God.

Well, some scholars, and I'm going to talk a little bit more about this later, boy I'm really getting you excited about some other talk, right? Some scholars in the twentieth and now into the twenty-first century say that when Paul talks about the works of the law, really all that he has in mind are those particular commandments that set the Jewish people apart from all the rest from the Gentiles, from all the other nations. So what he really has in mind is circumcision, kosher diet, and the feasts and the festivals largely. And that's what he's talking about. That's what he's talking about, they would say in Galatians 2:15-16. He's not, they would say Paul is not so much saying that God declares us right only on the basis of the righteousness of Christ credited to us. He's saying we should believe, but then he also wants us to obey, and that's part of the mix.

Probably not. But if you put a like passage alongside of it, you see 100% not. If you put for example Philippians 3:9 alongside Galatians 2, he's talking about the same subject, same issue. He talks about his own experience. We're not thinking about Gentiles here who are pagans and whether we're going to impose circumcision on them. He's saying his own experience, he had this stellar resume, this great list of credentials as a law-keeping Jew that, yes, started with circumcision, started with being born into the right family and into the right then being belonging to the right party within Israel, the Pharisees who really were concerned about keeping all the regulations. And he says I went as far in that direction as I could.

But when Christ got a hold of me, I realized all that for me, not just for a Gentile outside, but for me, that was all useless. It was all loss. It was all garbage. It's probably worse than that, but you know. It was repugnant. I want a righteousness that is not my own but a righteousness that comes from God by faith in Christ. That's what I need. So you see how Philippians, a like passage, helps us to guard against any kind of a misunderstanding of Galatians. I think Galatians is as clear as can be, but once you get Philippians alongside it, it's super, super clear.

So passages on the same subject are like passages. Passages in the same type of literature, I'm not sure necessarily that the Swiss folks were thinking in these terms but it's true that you have texts in the same genre, same type of literature, which can enrich our understanding of each other. For example, Daniel, Daniel chapter seven receives this vision of four monsters coming to threaten the people of God. And then Daniel sees God, the Ancient of Days, enthroned in heaven and one like a son of man coming on clouds to receive an eternal kingdom so that all the world's nations serve him. Turn to the last book of the New Testament, Revelation, and you have all kinds of echoes of Daniel 7. And they really interpret one another. Probably more than anything else, Revelation helps us to understand what's going on in Daniel's earlier vision because God's final word often makes everything clearer. So passages in the same genre can sometimes, because they're like, in that way they can help us interpret. We'll look more about that.

But then unlike passages that also as we put them side by side help us to understand each other. Couple of examples. On a topic, is there more than one God? Anyone? That's right. A resounding no, I heard it from you all. I heard it from you all, right? No, of course not. Deuteronomy 6, right? "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one." First Timothy 2, we're going to look at that a bunch of times in this in these series. "There is one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus." One God. Is the Father God? Absolutely. Is the Son God? Absolutely. Is the Holy Spirit God? Absolutely. There you have the biblical doctrine that we call the Trinity. One God, three persons, each is God. They're not simply different masks for one person. There are three persons in relation to one another. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was with God, with God, and the Word was God. Personal relationship in eternity between the Father and we know the Word by the time we get to John 1:14, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We know the Word is the Son, Jesus Christ.

So texts that teach that God is one need to be read in the light of texts that teach that the Father is God and the Son of God and the Holy Spirit is God. I don't know if you ever have people from the Watchtower Society come to your door out here in Lancaster, but we certainly did in Southern California. And if I had the time I would love, I would love not to invite them in the house actually, but to chat with them on the front porch for however long it would take to just lovingly show them that the Scripture talks about the Son and the Spirit as truly personally equal to the Father.

Or, and I would suppose probably that the Swiss folks were in the 1560s thinking about reading what Paul says we were just talking about, that we're declared right with God on the strength of Christ's righteousness received by faith alone, not by mixing our works in. Put Paul, and then you do have to put him alongside James. Martin Luther didn't really like to put James there, called him an epistle of straw, but he wasn't ready to buck the consensus of the whole church and kick James out of the New Testament. And reform folks said, "No, we need to read Paul, and we need to read James." And when James says that a faith that does not affect your actions, a faith that has no works is dead, we need to take that seriously without denying what Paul says, that what we receive by faith is the righteousness of Christ and it's not our works that are part of the mix as the basis. We need to put those two together, and we need to read them together.

Or from different ages in the history of the Bible. Now we're going to look a lot at the history in the next couple sessions. Books of Moses, the beginning of the written part of the Word of God, right? The first five books of Moses all written at the time of the Exodus and then Israel in the wilderness, really setting the whole context of how we got where we got where we have gotten with God's creation, the fall into sin, eventually God's calling of Abraham and his family to be not only blessed but a source of and avenue of blessing to the nations. And among other things as God meets with his people and with Moses on the mountain, Mount Sinai, he says now I have a bunch of dietary rules for you. And those rules are not so much to keep them healthy, they are more to make them separate from the nations.

So no pork, no scallops. I personally like scallops a lot, but you know, it's a shellfish, no good. None of those things. Now, that's what God says, that will keep you separate from the defiling pagan nations around you if you observe this particular form of diet. Come into the New Testament, Acts chapter ten, no, even before Acts 10. Go to Mark 7, because in Mark 7 Jesus is being quizzed because his disciples are eating with unwashed hands. Now, that's that has to do with ceremonial purity. It's not just what parents want their kids to do when they've been playing in the mud so they don't get germs. It's ceremonial purity if they've been out in the marketplace, you go through a ceremonial washing. Those things were expected of the priests at certain points when they went into into the temple. But there's no Old Testament rule that says you wash your hands every time you eat. That was a way of overcompensating within Judaism, overcompensating for all their compromise in the past. Now Jesus' disciples are eating without going through this ritual which is beyond the Bible, and now he's being criticized for letting them do that. And he says don't you realize that what goes into somebody's mouth is not what makes them unclean before God? It's what comes out of their mouth, it's the words they speak that shows the heart, right?

Interestingly, all three of the as I recall, all three of the first gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, and Luke record that. Mark, under the inspiration of the Spirit, makes this little commentary. Early church tradition says that Mark was the one who wrote down Peter's remembrances of Jesus. So Mark makes this little commentary. When he said that he made all foods clean. All foods clean. Well, that's significant when you get to Acts 10 and 11 because the Lord has given Peter this vision while he's hungry waiting for lunch to be prepared, and he's gets this vision of God letting down this huge sheet which has all kinds of animals in it. Not just sheep and heifers and goats that you can eat, but pigs. God says "Have at it, eat whatever you want." Peter says "No way, I've never defiled myself by eating something unclean." And God says "What I've called clean, you don't call dirty. You don't call common or unclean anymore."

Now that's it is about diet, and we see later on in the New Testament Paul will say it doesn't really matter where something came from in terms of food because the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. But it's really about people. And Peter gets the point when he's invited by a Roman army officer to go and preach the gospel. And he stays there and he eats his food and he preaches the gospel and the Holy Spirit comes on Cornelius and all of his friends and they got get gathered into the holy into the family of God. And then Peter gets criticized for eating the wrong kind of food. And he just tells the story. So God had given Israel the rules in Leviticus 11, but that was for a particular period of time. And now in an unlike text in the New Testament, because something brand new is happening, God says those rules no longer hold, those dietary rules. Still First Corinthians 10:31, whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, which by the way is in a context of what you eat, do it to the glory of God. The issue is no longer what you eat, but why you eat. Do you do it to the glory of God? That's the important thing. So unlike texts.

Now, I'd better move along here or we will never get to the end of outline number one. So many and clearer passages. They talk about, and I think they're they have in mind largely the fact that you it's important to read visionary symbolic texts in the light of clearer non-symbolic texts. For example, Revelation 1:4 and 5 all talk about the seven spirits of God. In chapter four, a symbolic text, the seven spirits of God are symbolized by torches before the throne of the Father. In chapter five, they are symbolized by seven eyes of the Lamb. Seven spirits of God. So does John believe in the Trinity or not? Of course he does. So we read those even that symbolic number seven in the light of what is clearly taught elsewhere. Ephesians 4, "There is one Spirit, one body," right? There's one Holy Spirit. Or for that matter even in the Book of Revelation where we find "if you have ears to hear, listen to what the Spirit says to the churches." That's all over in chapters two and three, one in each of the seven letters to the churches. So obviously, symbolic language needs to be interpreted in terms in the light of straightforward explanation and instruction that come elsewhere.

And sometimes the less clear passages are older passages and the more clear newer passages, later passages. Ezekiel, just one example here, Ezekiel 34. The Lord is rebuking the kings of Israel under the imagery of shepherds, bad shepherds, unfaithful shepherds who have neglected the sheep, they've exploited the sheep, but they haven't protected the sheep, and they haven't gone out looking for the sheep, and they haven't bandaged the wounded, and they haven't disciplined the bully rams that befoul the water for everybody else. They are and God says, "That's it. You're fired. I will come and do the job myself. I will be the shepherd my people need, my sheep need. I will gather them, I will bind them up, I will feed them, I will protect them against the animals that would attack them. I will do it."

And then a few verses later in Ezekiel 34, he says, "I will give them a shepherd David, and I will be their God and David will be their shepherd." Well, David is long dead, but we know that he's talking about this dynasty of David, the promise that there would be a king descended from David. But still, you've got the question: Is the Lord the shepherd that Israel should look for or is David the shepherd? And it sort of it just sort of sits there in Ezekiel 34 until he comes, right? John 10, "I am the good shepherd." And he's the Lord. And we've known a lot of things in John's gospel has shown us that Jesus is the Lord. He's also the descendant of David. See, those two strands converge in this amazing person, fully God, fully man, the good shepherd of the sheep.

So that's some of what we could talk about there under many and clearer passages. I think I'm going to skip a little bit of that down at the bottom. Yeah, now I'm going to say the Westminster Confession, the pastors who wrote that wanted to make sure that they would emphasize the true and full sense of Scripture, which is not a bunch of different kinds. They knew from the Middle Ages there was a fourfold interpretation of the Bible, every text has four different meanings kind of. And they said, "No, there's one true and full, and we can find it as we look at clearer passages." What they did not mean, but sometimes people have read them as meaning, is that later New Testament texts can't really show us more about that full text. And yet we know they did not mean that because they say in chapter seven, I haven't given you the wording there at the bottom, but if you can get a hold of a Westminster Confession, you can find it. They say that the way that God has related to his people by grace is differently administered under the in the time of the law and the time of the gospel. Under the law was administered by promises, prophecies, sacrifices, circumcision, the paschal Passover lamb, and other types and ordinances delivered to the people of the Jews, all for signifying Christ to come.

All those things that God gave to Old Testament Israel were pointing them forward to Christ. How do we know that? Well, because New Testament passages show us that. We're going to be looking at that in these next lessons. They're all showing us, they're making clear to us what was already being said in the Old Testament, and the later passages make clear what the earlier passages mean. So when they say "many and clearer", it seems to me both the Swiss confessors in the sixteenth century and the British ones at Westminster in the seventeenth century are saying the clearer passages sometimes come quite a bit later. And it's really important to pay attention to that.

Well, life context and purpose, circumstances in which they were written down. Were they homeless wanderers or refugees, farmers or town folk, slaves or craftsmen or royalty? Were they tempted to idolatry by their pagan neighbors or tempted to despair by the presence of a catastrophe, or tempted to fear because of a threat of invasion or arrest? And how much of the Bible was available to them? So all of that is part of their circumstance, part of their wider life context.

And then there's the history of redemption, and we're going to unpack that first thing tomorrow morning, so I'm not going to say a lot about it now, but where did they live on the timeline of God working his agenda for the redemption of his people in Christ? Way back at the beginning in the days of Moses, or even maybe earlier in what Moses records in Genesis? Or at a somewhat later point in the period of promise, maybe maybe the time after Israel has entered the promised land? They're still under the covenant that God made at Sinai and gave to Moses, but they know more than the wilderness generation did. Or maybe later when they've seen that the monarchy, even even the line of David, has failed terribly? We're going to be looking at more of that as well in the history of redemption. Or in the New Covenant? Those 27 books are given to us in the light of what God has done to bring the redeemer who is the one who unites the Lord as shepherd and David's son as shepherd, who is the one who is the faithful Lord of the covenant but also is the faithful servant of the covenant as we're going to be seeing. Where do we live on that timeline?

And then finally purpose. They say we will be guided in a biblical understanding of a biblical text when we come to an interpretation that fits with faith and love that leads us to trust in God and His promises and to love God in response to all that He's done in redeeming grace, and to love others. The two great commandments: to love the Lord with everything in us, love our neighbor as ourselves in response to God's love to us, which we receive by faith alone, which then promotes God's glory and man's salvation.

So we're going to be talking, and I put it here in your outline, but we'll look at it we'll look at it a little bit more tomorrow morning about trying to figure out as much as we can from the text what each particular book is designed to do in in the light of the spiritual need of the first recipients of the book. I used to say first readers, but we have to realize that the first recipients of the biblical books most often received it by hearing it read aloud. Isn't that amazing? Book of Revelation at the beginning, the Lord pronounces a blessing on the one who reads and those who hear. A blessing for those who read, that one person who reads it in a congregation, one of those seven towns, everybody who hears it read aloud and keep it and hold on to it and trust it. Think about hearing the Revelation book read through once, or maybe three or four times, and getting enough of the message to take it to heart and receive the blessing that God's promises there. So first recipients, first hearers usually, okay? What was their need? Why did God move John to receive those visions and record them for the churches of Western Asia Minor? Why did God move the Apostle Paul to write a letter, a white-hot letter of alarm to the churches of Galatia? Why did why did God move the prophet Isaiah to write that vast book, sixty-six chapters, to a generation that was a bunch of generations earlier than the generation that would go into exile but already pronouncing that they would go into exile and that God would bring them back? Why? Well, we're going to try to figure that out.

We're going to try to figure out what Bryan Chapell, formerly of Covenant Seminary and now pastor in the PCA, calls the "fallen condition focus". He says that focus, what is it about the fall into sin, how it's manifested in the experience of the first hearers that led God to speak a particular book to meet that need, and what is it about their need that connects with our need today? I think that's really helpful when we want to know how to apply a book of the Bible or a piece of a book of the Bible, a parable, for example, in the Gospels.

Our God and our Father, we thank you that you have spoken your Word to us. We thank you that you've spoke it in ancient times, that you spoke it to Adam, that you spoke it to Abraham, that you spoke it to David, that you spoke it to Israel through Moses even before David. But especially, Father, that in these last days you've spoken to us in your Son, who is the radiance of your glory and the exact imprint of your nature, who upholds the universe by the word of his power, who has made purification for our sins and has taken his seat at your right hand. Father, thank you for speaking to us in Jesus the living Word and for giving us this beautiful written Word, which is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword and that cuts through all of our defenses against grace, all of our defenses against your sovereign authority in our lives, that cuts us right straight through by the power of your Spirit and in wounding us so severely heals us, heals us by the mercy that you've given to us in Christ. So Father, thank you for the opportunity we have to think about reading your Word faithfully. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

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