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Guest (Male): All right, we are zipping along to outline number two, language and literary context. We're taking our cue from the Swiss confessors, the second Helvetic Confession. We need to pay attention to the language and to the like and unlike passages and many and clearer passages.

Again, thinking about things that were taking place 500 years ago. One of the wonderful things that God in his providence designed was that the Reformation was pretty much tracking along with in Europe a rebirth, a renaissance—Renaissance. I don't speak French, but you know that word, right? A rebirth of interest in ancient things, including ancient languages.

So there was a rebirth of learning, a rebirth of focus on Latin, classics, Greek classics. The Reformation benefited from that because they said, well, if scholars in the humanities, in the various arts, are interested in that sort of thing, shouldn't we be interested in going back to our roots, back to the sources, back to the founts? It was even kind of a watchword. Of course, everything cool in the 16th century was Latin, right? Ad fontes, back to the roots, back to the source. Let's go back to the original languages of Scripture.

And so the reformers did. Luther translated the Bible out of Greek and Hebrew. Other translations were taking place into English. There's this wonderful statement I put it right up front there again on this second outline about why God used the languages he did to give the portions of his word, and then drawing two conclusions from that.

So the Westminster folks in the 1640s said the Old Testament in Hebrew, which was the native language of the people of God of old, and the New Testament in Greek, which at the time of the writing of it was most generally known to the nations, being immediately inspired by God and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical.

You may be never heard that word before. I hadn't until I read this. It's something between authentic, which it sounds like, but even more, it's absolutely authoritative. They said it in other words in the quotes that we looked at in the last hour. They are the absolute authority. So as in all controversies of religion, the church is finally to appeal unto them.

What they're emphasizing there is that in their arguments and discussions with representatives of the Church of Rome, those representatives would appeal in particular ways to the Latin translation that at least the scholars knew. Ordinary priests probably didn't know; he may be able to recite Latin Mass, but he didn't understand Latin. But they would go back to the so-called Vulgate, the Latin translation produced by Jerome for the sake of people who actually spoke Latin as their heart language in the Roman Empire.

But now we're talking centuries later, and nobody in Northern Europe speaks Latin as their heart language, and only the scholars speak it, and not even all the pastors speak it. The reformers are saying no, we can't just go back to Latin, we can't just go back to Jerome, we have to go back to the Scriptures as the Holy Spirit breathed them out in Hebrew—now there are actually a few chapters in Aramaic too, but that's close enough, right?—in Hebrew and in Greek, Old Testament, New Testament.

First of all, we need to go back to the Scriptures when we want to discuss what God has actually revealed. We need to go back to the original languages. But notice now they make another conclusion from the fact that God inspired the Old Testament in Hebrew and inspired the New Testament in Greek, and it's this: we need lots of Bible translations.

In the middle of that paragraph, because these original languages are not known to all the people of God who have right unto and interest in the Scriptures and are commanded in the fear of God to read and search them, therefore they, the Scriptures, are to be translated into the vulgar—that's a word that's changed a lot over the last 500 years, 400 years—into the common everyday language of every nation unto which they come, that the word of God dwelling plentifully in all—you hear the echo of Colossians 3:16, let the word of Christ dwell in you richly—that the word of God dwelling plentifully in all, they may worship God in an acceptable manner and through patience and comfort of the Scriptures may have hope. That's an echo from Romans chapter 15, so they're embedding the words of Scripture.

Here's the beautiful thing about them. They're saying God spoke Hebrew, why? When I was in seminary a few miles east of here, we went up into Bryn Athyn and saw the big Swedenborgian church; some of you may have seen it. We were told that Swedenborgians taught their children Hebrew because that was the language of heaven that Adam and Eve spoke. Not so. Why did God speak Hebrew? Because that's what the Israelites were speaking at the time of the Exodus, right? He wants to give five books through Moses; they speak Hebrew, God spoke Hebrew because he's talking to his people's heart language.

Why does God speak the New Testament not in Hebrew but in Greek? All kinds of potential misunderstandings if God switches languages to Greek. Greek, for example, has a term for God, theos, we get theology from it, that's applied to all kinds of pagan gods. Do you really want to trust the New Testament to that language that uses this word that can be applied? Yeah, why? Because at the time of the New Testament, because of the influence of Alexander the Great in an earlier generation and the influence of Greek culture generally, even though the Romans are in charge and they speak Italian—Roman Latin—out in the west, basically everybody speaks Greek. God wants to speak the language of the nations.

If God chooses to speak the language that his people understand, whether it's Israel, the family descended from Abraham, or whether it's all the people who are the spiritual children of Abraham now by faith in Christ but they come from all these different language groups but they all speak Greek, well, shouldn't all of God's people have the Bible translated into their language? That was the impetus in the early centuries of the New Testament.

We have translations into a bunch of different languages, not only Jerome's Latin translation but we have translations into languages spoken in Egypt, upper Egypt—which you know up is down in Egypt, it's the southern part of Egypt is upper Egypt—languages spoken in Armenia, various places. That's what happened in the early centuries. The reformers said we need that again because God's people all need to be able to hear in their own language. You need to be able to hear in your own language. That's why we're so thankful for Bible translations and the abundance that we have in English.

That means we need to pay attention to the language. If you can learn Hebrew and Greek, it's a good thing because it gives you some insights that maybe even the best translations don't. But good translations do a great job. Language includes a bunch of different things: word choice, which scholars would call lexical semantics, what the individual—a lexicon is a snazzy word for a dictionary—and what words mean as we see their usage summarized in dictionary entries.

But there are issues with focusing only on words in isolation rather than words in specific passages. When I went to seminary in ancient times—actually it was in the '70s—biblical studies were kind of in recovery mode out of a kind of a fixation on trying to do theology on the basis of individual words rather than on whole passages where words are combined to make points.

At that time or just before that time, it was being subject to that approach. Doing theology by doing word studies only was being criticized by people like James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language, and he said this is not the way any other language works. Why do we think it works that way in the biblical languages? As he talked about—I love this because this will be on the final—illegitimate totality transfer. That's something to keep you awake on a Friday night, right?

What that means is, this is my way of picturing it. Words are not like a snowball rolling down a snowy hill. Now we've been in Tennessee one whole winter we got no snow, but you can probably picture snowballs rolling down snowy hills. We've been seeing, I don't know, I mean, you don't have any hills, but you have hills. Yeah, you do.

Words are not like a snowball accumulating meaning every time they bounce, every time they're used. That's not the way words work. They may be used in different ways in different settings, but they don't carry all that meaning into every usage. Take the word house, for example. What is a house? It's a structure in which a family lives, right? But what's a greenhouse? Does a family live in a greenhouse? If they like plants a lot and if the glass is well insulated. But a greenhouse is a particular kind of house.

What about, can houses speak? Well, we would say normally no, right? But the White House issued a statement the other day. Suddenly the White House is not so much a building, is it? How about when Joshua challenges Israel at the end of Joshua, "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord"? He's not talking about where he's going to go home and close the door, right? He's talking about his family.

How about this: the Lord actually builds a wordplay into 2 Samuel 7. David wants to build a house for the Lord, house as in a structure that will be a temple. God says, "You can't. No, you may not build a house for me, but I will build a house for you." And we're not talking about a temple and we're not talking about a palace. We're talking about not just a family, but a dynasty from one generation to the next. So depending on the context, house can mean various things, but it doesn't mean everything everywhere.

What's reassuring for us is that careful Bible translators think carefully about what particular part of a word's meaning makes the best sense and fits the purpose of the author in any particular passage. So you don't have to have a secret knowledge of Hebrew and Greek to be able to do theology by tracing these words like snowballs through history. You can trust your Bible translation.

Some are closer, more formal equivalent, like the New American Standard Bible, English Standard Version is a little bit leaning toward formal equivalence. Some are a little bit more dynamic equivalent—these are terms that are thrown around—a little bit more "we won't try to stay as formally close to the original languages but we want to capture the meaning", such as the New International Version or the New Living Bible. But basically, you can trust them.

There are times, though, where getting a sense of where a word has been before is really helpful. So I put a couple of these in here and one of them, at least some of our English versions will help us with. Luke 9:31 is Luke's account of the transfiguration of Jesus. And he, like the other synoptic—Matthew, Mark, Luke—all see Jesus together, that's what synoptic means, they're all looking at him. That's why we find so many parallels in those three and then John gives us a somewhat different perspective.

Luke only says that when Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus, they are speaking to him of his exodos. This is the Greek for the evening, okay? Exodos. Sounds like Exodus, doesn't it? Well, your ESV translates it departure, and that's fine. But it gives you a footnote and it says actually it's Exodus. It's Exodus. There's a reference back to Israel's Exodus in what Jesus is heading for the cross, and heading for the cross he is leading his people out of slavery into freedom at the price of his own lifeblood. Think of the Passover the night before the Exodus, the lamb dies, the blood protects, and then the people of God go free. Luke chose that, you see. And it's kind of handy to know Greek for that, or to have an ESV with the footnote. Look at the footnotes.

Another one that most versions won't show you, but I gave it to you here anyway. Acts 4:34 talks about the generosity that the Holy Spirit produced in the early church, where they were more than happy those who had extra resources were more than happy to sell the extra resources, bring it to the apostles so it could be distributed among the poor. And Luke says there there was no needy person among them because of this movement of the Holy Spirit to move them to generosity. No needy person among them. The term, you can see it there kind of, endees.

What's fascinating is that this is the only place in the whole New Testament that that word appears, needy, needy person. In the Greek translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, it took place about 150 to 180 years before the birth of Christ. It appears several times over in Deuteronomy 15, and then about 14 times in Proverbs and once in Isaiah and Ezekiel. But the Deuteronomy passage is the interesting one because in Deuteronomy God says if my people bring their tithes and they're collected to provide for the widow and the fatherless, I am going to bless you and there will be no needy person among you.

Isn't that cool? It's like Luke under the inspiration of the Spirit—Luke is a Gentile, but he knows his Old Testament very well in Greek translation—it's the Holy Spirit is saying help people see that what God promised to Israel if they were faithful and generous as he commanded them to be is actually now taking place in the new Israel, in the people that belong to Jesus. No needy person among them. That would be harder to do without an English version. But in any case, it's worth thinking about and if you read some commentaries they may bring you to it.

We are going to use actually, I didn't tell you this at the beginning, we're going to use the account of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17 as a kind of a case study all the way through. So let's take words, and not particular words so much, but if you read 1 Samuel 17—oh we all know that story, right?—well, it's a long chapter and I don't have time to read it, but I would give you some homework to read it between now and tomorrow morning and let me just right now sum up. There's a lot of discussion about armor in 1 Samuel 17.

There is detailed description of Goliath's armor. There is the description of Saul's armor that he wants to put on David. Saul won't go out to fight Goliath; we'll come back to that. But David's willing to go and Saul wants to put his armor on David. "Well, thank you for volunteering. Here, let me help you." And David says, "I can't because it's too big." No, he doesn't say that. That's what I thought when I only saw the Sunday school pictures of David and Goliath. He does not say that. What he says is, "I can't go out in your armor, O king, because I have not tested it. I haven't put it to the test. I don't know whether I can trust it."

So David goes out to fight in with the armor he knows has been tested, tried, and proven. And when he actually says to Goliath what he's come out against Goliath with, it's not his slingshot and five smooth stones. They are instruments to be sure of Goliath's defeat. But what David says is—and he's talking about armor—he says, "Goliath, you come against me with sword and spear and shield. I come against you with the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied, whom you have dishonored." That's David's armor. So armor is an important theme, and paying attention to words is important in that, just one illustration. We're going to come back again and again to 1 Samuel 17 in these next three messages.

Now words in combination, syntax. Words convey substantive meaning when they're combined with each other in phrases. And actually, in the last hour, I stole my thunder here in talking about Galatians 2 and Philippians 3. But especially in Galatians 2 where Paul three times over talks not about Gentile outsiders but about what he said to Peter when Peter, having preached the gospel of grace fully and freely and enjoyed hospitality at the home of Cornelius, suddenly under peer pressure from some Jewish Christians who didn't approve of Peter hanging out with the wrong kind of people and eating the wrong kind of food, Peter pulls back.

And Paul says when I saw he was not walking in line with gospel truth, I rebuked him and I said, "We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is not justified by the works of the law but through faith in Christ Jesus, so we have believed in Christ Jesus in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified." Three times over: not by works of the law. Three times over: by faith in Christ we've believed to be justified.

Guest (Male): By grace you've been saved through faith, not from yourselves, not of works, so that no one can boast. For we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

Guest (Male): Not from our works in any way shape or form, but when God saves us by grace, it is for good works. It is for, as we would say in theology, justification flows out by the power of the Spirit into our sanctification, but it doesn't rest on our sanctification. It rests on the perfect righteousness of Jesus.

Guest (Male): Sometimes in narratives it's important too and I put that in your outline as well. Sometimes in a historical narrative, it's really important to pay attention even to little words and how they're connected. For example, Luke chapter 7. Jesus is at dinner, invited to dinner by a prominent Pharisee; his name is given, Simon. And these kind of dinners were pretty much public events so they're reclining at a table in the center of the room and people could come in and watch on the edges.

Well, one woman comes in, she has a history and a reputation, and she's so overwhelmed with emotion that she weeps, she kisses Jesus' feet, she anoints Jesus' feet, and Jesus' host the Pharisee is shocked. How in the world, if this guy, if this is a prophet, how would he let such a woman get close to him? And you remember Jesus tells him a little story about a money lender who has two debtors, one owes this huge amount, one owes a little. He forgives them both for some mysterious reason.

And then Jesus says to Simon, "So which one is going to love him more?" Not which one's going to be more relieved to have the debt forgiven. He raised the stakes: "Which will love him more?" And Simon gets the logic. He says, "Well, the one who's been forgiven the greater debt is going to be the more grateful, they're going to be the more loving." And Jesus says, "Exactly right. Now compare the two behavior, yours and the woman toward me. You're my host, when I came to the door you did not kiss my cheek to greet me, as would be customary. You did not order your slaves to bring some water to wash the dust of the road off my feet. You certainly did not anoint my head with anything that would take the smell of the sweat off after the long trip. You didn't do anything basically. She has washed my feet with her tears, kissed my feet, anointed my feet."

Guest (Male): "So I say to you her sins are forgiven for she loved much." For she loved much. What's the logic there? I have read commentaries where the commentator has said look at how much this woman loved Jesus, so he responded by forgiving her sins. You see a problem with that?

Guest (Male): Huge problem with that! Huge problem with that! For one thing because Jesus, the next thing out of his mouth is, "The person who is forgiven little loves little." So he's already showing the logic is forgiveness to love. Little to little or great to great. But because the whole story that he's just told says great forgiveness, forgiveness of a great debt, provokes, brings out, great love.

Guest (Male): So what he's saying, Simon, is, "Look at her. You see that love? Doesn't that tell you the greatness of the debt she has been forgiven? She's been forgiven. See the logic? For she loved much." Really important little word to get right, okay?

Then there's structure, a larger text. A narrative typically is structured as I said sort of chronologically. This happened then this happened then this happened. 1 Samuel 17 gives us a great example of that because we actually have six scenes in 1 Samuel 17. Verses 1 through 11 shows Israel's problem, which is really Saul's problem. The Philistine champion Goliath has challenged Israel to send out one representative combatant. One-on-one. Whoever wins, the other will be the slaves.

Who should be the one to go out? King Saul. King Saul should be the one. He's even tall, maybe not as tall as Goliath, but he's tall. He's too fearful. Everybody's too fearful. Scene two, David gets sent by his father Jesse to bring some provisions to his brothers. Scene three, David hears the taunts of Goliath, and he's outraged and he's ready to go fight Goliath. And his older brother—his oldest brother, actually the text says his great brother and he's the little brother, great and little—says, "You're too big for your breeches. What do you think? Go home, go tend the sheep. Did you leave the sheep out there to be preyed on by somebody?"

And since we've read chapter 16, we're going to get to that, we know that Samuel thought he was going to anoint that oldest brother. And God said no, he's not the one. And then number two, three, four, five, six. And then finally gets to the end and he says to Jesse, "Don't you have any more sons? None of these guys the right guy." "Oh well yeah there was David but I forgot him, he's out tending the sheep." And so anyway, there's something going on there for sure. And the narrator here in 17 wants us to remember what happened in 16.

The fourth scene is when the word is out that David is ready to fight the Philistine as he says. And King Saul says, "But you know you're just a kid and he's been fighting since he's a kid." And David gives him some of the, you know, his track record of fighting beasts. But he also says, "The Lord who protected me from the bear and the lion, he will protect me." And this is where Saul tries to put his armor on and David says I can't, I haven't tested it.

The fifth is the battle proper, when David and Goliath each do a little trash talk on one another. But basically David gets the better of it because he says, "I've come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, and the Lord will deliver you into my hand so that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and this assembly may know that the Lord saves not with sword and spear, for the battle is the Lord's." And the battle is the Lord's and he guides David's stone and Goliath falls. David takes Goliath's head off and suddenly all the Israelites find courage and the last scene is they're running after the Philistines and all kinds of reactions to David. All of that is really significant looking at the structure of a passage.

That's one kind of structure; there are other kinds of structures such as doctrinal discourse where there will be argument back and forth. I've given you a little sample there; just sometime read through Romans with this watching for this term "by no means". Paul has not preached to the church in the capital of the empire yet in Rome. So he's writing this letter to prepare them for his visit, but you can almost hear him in all of his discussions in the eastern part of the empire having all these objections thrown at him and him having to say "by no means, that's not what I meant".

"When sin abounded, grace much more abounded." "Oh, so what you mean is let's sin all the more so that God will give us all the more grace?" "By no means! We've died to sin, how can we keep living in it?" "The law was the occasion for sin coming into..." "Oh, you're saying the law is sinful, huh?" "By no means! Sin is that tricky that takes God's good law and uses it as a weapon against us." All the texts are there, just read it sometime, hearing it as an argument. Read it out loud. Read it out loud with a friend. That's an argument, that's the way that structure works.

We must move on. You've noticed probably, if we think about bigger structures in epistles, the larger structure of a prose discourse. This is now under 3.B.3. Pauline epistles, letters of Paul, at least those written to churches, tend to be structured in terms of laying a foundation of what God has done in the gospel of his grace through Christ, and then at a certain turning point saying, "Now then, you know what this means for the way you live, right?"

So in Romans chapters 1 through 11, although there are some special things going on in chapters 9, 10, and 11, fundamentally they're about this gospel which is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, Jew and Gentile. And how it's salvation from the condemnation and the wrath of God, justification, basically through chapter 4 and into chapter 5. Toward the end of chapter 5, where Adam sinned and therefore we're all counted as sinners, Christ obeyed and therefore everyone who is in Christ is counted as righteous.

Chapters 6, 7, 8. And not only are we counted righteous, but God the Holy Spirit starts to apply the death and resurrection of Christ to us inside, so he turns us around, turns our heart toward him, and we're no longer enslaved to sin. So he comes really at a wonderful climax in chapter 8: there is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, for the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free, set us free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do—the law is God's holy, just, true commands—but what the law could not do was to make us alive and turn our hearts so that we want to obey. What the law could not do, God did by sending his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh so that we who walk now not according to our own unaided, unborn-again sinful nature but walk by the Spirit, the righteous requirement of the law is being fulfilled in us. God is changing us.

Then he comes to chapter 12: "I urge you therefore, in light of the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice." And from 12 basically through the up until the greetings in 16, it's all about how we now live in the light of all that God has done for us, saving us from sin's guilt and condemnation from the divine wrath, saving us from the controlling, dominating, enslaving power of sin. So offer yourselves as people alive from the dead. Similar in Ephesians 1, 2, and 3 with the great resounding conclusion at the end of 3, and then, "Therefore I, Paul, the prisoner of the Lord, urge you to walk worthy of the calling with which you've been called in unity and newness." And he unpacks that. So that's again, structure, very, very important.

And law and wisdom and poetry other Old Testament texts. I'm mostly sadly a New Testament guy. I am glad I'm a New Testament guy, but I'm sad that I don't know the Old Testament even better. All of those have structural features that are important to pay attention to. Now literary context. Not only the language of a particular passage, but the passages around it also help us—we need to pay attention—we can't just pick a verse out of a paragraph. We really shouldn't even pick a paragraph out of a larger section simply and interpret it all by itself. We need to see the flow. We need to see the flow.

So in form, this gets us back into this question of genre that I talked about, and then in terms of literary proximity. I want to talk a little bit about each of those. Okay, like and unlike passages. Second Helvetic Confession, we need to read each text in the light of like and unlike passages, and some passages are like one another in terms of form. Often we talk about genre.

Guest (Male): When Jane and I took our English lit majors a few years ago, one of the books that were assigned to us was a book by John Ciardi, C-I-A-R-D-I, which I see Amazon is still selling or at least Amazon sources are still selling, called "How Does a Poem Mean?" How does a, not what does a poem mean, how does a poem mean? And so Ciardi was helping us to think about the way that poetry delivers its message, which is not quite the same way other things deliver their messages. It's in symbolism sometimes, it's in great brevity, it's in alluding to other passages and other great literature. How does a poem mean?

A genre, a type, a family of texts require common reading strategy. So the language in these texts are used in a similar way to convey truth and all the members of the genre evoke the same expectations in readers about how a poem means or how any kind of literature means. Quick example. Let me read you three opening sentences, and you can think about how you would expect to interpret others in this text.

Guest (Male): Number one: On June 6, 1944, allied forces under the command of US General Dwight D. Eisenhower landed on the beach at Normandy, France. Got it? Number two: Once upon a time there were three bears. Okay? Number three: A certain man had two sons and the younger went to his father and said give me my inheritance and he was off for a far country.

Guest (Male): Those three different genres, right? First one is basically journalism or historical narrative; it's describing events, plain and simple. Second one, fairy tale: once upon a time there were three bears. Third one is fictional. Jesus introduces it the way he does and a certain person or a certain man, there are a bunch of those. A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, remember that? That's a signal. Jesus says I'm telling you a story now but I've got a real point to it, and it's about you. It's about you. Three different genres and others in each of those genres we would read in the same way.

Guest (Male): A biblical example: Exodus 14. Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea and the Lord drove the sea back by the strong east wind all night and made the sea into dry land and the waters divided. I'm not going to read you the whole text, but the people walk forward in the midst of the sea, the Egyptians pursued and went after them into the midst of the sea, all Pharaoh's horses, chariots, horsemen, and the Lord in the pillar of fire and cloud looked down on the Egyptian forces and threw them into panic, clogging their chariot wheels so they drove heavily. And the Egyptians tried to flee. It goes on and on like this. There are some things here. It is a description of actual historic historical events. There are commentaries here because it's prophetic history that the average secular historian would not probably say this way, such as the Lord threw the Egyptians into the midst of the sea. That's in chapter 14. But it's all about that event which took place, and with some theological interpretation along with it in the midst of it.

Guest (Male): Exodus 15, same event. But now we read Moses singing, "I will sing to the Lord for he's triumphed gloriously, the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea." That's about the clogged chariot wheels. The floods cover them, they went down into the depths. Your right hand glorious in power shatters the enemy. At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up. Well, in chapter 14 he said it was a strong east wind. Now you almost have the picture of God breathing out, right? It's poetry, it's about the same event, but it tells the story from a little bit different angle. So there are genre differences between 14 and 15, even though it's the same author talking about the same event but he's talking about it in different ways.

Guest (Male): Let me give you just one example of how this helps. Leviticus 19:19 says don't wear cloth made of two different types of fabric. Does that apply to you and me? I'm a little nervous. How do we know it doesn't apply to us? There's nothing in the New Testament that says okay it's okay to wear cloth made out of, you know, synthetic blends of wool and something else. How do we know? Well because Leviticus 19:19 is part of a genre, a family of regulations that God gives to Israel that says I want you to stay separate and I'm going to embed separateness in all kinds of ways.

You don't plow with an ox and a donkey, you don't plant wheat and barley in the same field, and you don't wear mixed synthetic blends. Well, maybe not synthetic, but you know. Okay. And you don't eat non-kosher food. Stay away from the bacon.

Guest (Male): Now God has spoken in the New Testament about that last issue, and he declared all foods clean, remember? That wasn't that long ago this evening, we remember that. Doesn't that then also apply in this other area where isn't Leviticus 19:19 really part of that family of "here are things in your external life that God is saying to Israelites you need to keep separate because I want you to know that you're separate"? But now that we're under the new covenant and God's gathering people in from all the nations, we need to stay separate from evil, but it's not the externals any longer. A possibility.

Psalm 88 is the one I've given you there. It's a Psalm that probably there might be an echo slight echo of it in Luke in the account of the crucifixion of Jesus. But it's iffy whether there's any place in Psalm 88 is probably the bleakest lament Psalm. It is it is just crushingly discouraging and the psalmist is—I mean—his he ends with something like "darkness is my closest friend". That's the conclusion. It's just crushing. What do we do with a Psalm like that? Does it connect in any way to anything we know in the New Testament? Well, frankly, and this may be just a coincidence of numbers, but 88 divided by 4 is 22, and Psalm 22 begins "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Psalm 88 has virtually that same statement, "Why have you forsaken me?" And we know Psalm 22 because we've heard it on the lips of our Savior.

I would suggest because they're part of this same genre, not just Psalms, but lament Psalms, bleak lament Psalms. Psalm 22 does take a turn toward hope toward the end as we know because it's quoted in the New Testament elsewhere as speaking of Christ declaring his name his Father's name to all of us. But Psalm 88 is a portrait also not just of the anguish of an individual Old Testament poet, but an a preview of Christ's suffering as well. So genre very, very important to pay attention to. And there are all kinds of genres that we want to pay attention to in the New Testament.

Let me take just a few minutes. I'm still using up this hour's minutes. The last hour somebody else spoke too long, but not now. Literary proximity. We need look at a text in the light of its surrounding. So let's take David and Goliath, 1 Samuel 17, and let's take it out. Actually, one thing you need to know is that in the Hebrew listing of the Old Testament books, Samuel is one book, not two. It's divided in half in scrolls because it's so long but it's counted as one book. So if you think of Samuel as all the way from 1 Samuel 1 to 2 Samuel 24, that's a book.

And what's interesting is at the bookends of this book there are songs about God giving his people a king. At the beginning, 1 Samuel 2, Hannah sings a Psalm when God says that she will have a child and her child Samuel is to be offered—he's not the king—but he's to be offered to the Lord. He will become a prophet and a judge. He will anoint the first two kings of Israel, Saul first then David. And in her song, in her Psalm, she says, "The Lord will give strength to his king and exalt the horn of his anointed." That was decades into the future when she sang that. But she had reason to expect that God would give his people a king. Stay tuned, we'll be back to that in a couple minutes.

End of 2 Samuel. David is coming close to the end of his reign and we read about one of his Psalms, 2 Samuel 22: "Great salvation he brings to his king and he shows steadfast love to his anointed, to David and his offspring forever." And right after that we have the last great prophecy that God gave David. David actually calls it his last words, an oracle, a prophecy that talks about this perfect king who does justice and who is so fair, has so much integrity, has so much wisdom, has so much well, perfection actually, that he is to his subjects like the sunshine after a rainstorm. He's perfect.

David is not that king. In fact, after the last words of David we list read a list of David's mighty men, and the last name in the list is Uriah the Hittite. That faithful, loyal soldier who had started his life as a Gentile pagan and became loyal to the God of Israel and a faithful servant of the king whose wife, Uriah's wife Bathsheba, David stole while Uriah was on the field of battle and then he finally tried to do away—succeeded in doing away with Uriah to try to cover his sin. And the author, the Holy Spirit moved whoever the human author was to say don't forget David is not that perfect king.

Then chapter 24 talks about David counting his troops, which is exactly the sort of thing that Saul would have done. Not the David of 1 Samuel 17 who says "the Lord is going to give you into my hand and I'm not going to trust in weaponry." Two serious failures by David. But it points out that the issue in Samuel is the King. And when you think about the book of Samuel and then put it alongside the book of Kings—again, counted as one—and you end up at Kings with Israel in exile with their king, basically the point is we need somebody better than David, we certainly need somebody better than Saul. What kind of a king what kind of a king do we really really need?

And the answer ultimately is we need a Son of David but one who's far better than David. That's the big picture. There are a lot of king themes in 1 Samuel that lead up to 1 Samuel 17. So you have the issue of Israel wanting a king in the light of what had happened through the period of the judges when they kept disobeying and God kept subjecting them to pagan powers and then they cried out and then God raised up a judge. So they wanted a king to fight our battles for us. Well, that's pretty right; that's what a king's supposed to do and to judge us. They wanted a king like all the other nations; that was not so good.

We see Saul's failure in chapter 13 and 15 leading up to 17. First of all when he sacrifices when Samuel told him to wait and then when he spared the king of the Amalekites when he should have killed him and Saul's disqualified. God's looking for another king. How about Saul's son Jonathan? A good man, faithful man. Chapter 14, Jonathan takes his armor bearer along and he says, "You know the Lord can save by a lot or by a few. If he's with us, he's going to give us victory." And the Lord does. But Jonathan's not the Lord's choice and that's okay with Jonathan; it is. David is anointed as I mentioned almost forgotten by his father but anointed in chapter 16. Then the battle in chapter 17. From there Jonathan honors David. Jonathan takes some of his royal robes and other things and says David you're the man, you're the one. And Saul's upset at that as we see later on, but Jonathan honors David.

A lot of David's suffering, David's finally sending the throne, victories in 2 Samuel, his desire to build God's house but God says no I'm going to build your house. It goes on and on; it's all about what kind of a king do we need? And 2 Samuel ends with this: we need a king that David's described, but we need a king who's far better than David. See that all fits this theme, that all fits this theme.

And if we look even further back into older texts of the Bible we would see that God had promised and announced through Jacob that a king was going to come from the tribe of Judah. A scepter would not depart from Judah, that's Genesis 49. That God announced through a pagan prophet Balaam who was compelled to speak God's word truthfully even though he was getting paid to curse Israel; he couldn't and finally ended up saying a star will come out of Jacob and a scepter shall rise out of Israel and it shall crush the forehead of Moab. Deuteronomy 17, now Moses is getting the people ready to go into the promised land. Deuteronomy 17 says when you go when you get into the land and you say I want a king, you may set a king over you whom the Lord your God will choose. He needs to be one of your brothers. He mustn't acquire many horses for himself or many wives lest he turn his heart away, nor too much silver or gold, and he needs to write for himself in a book a copy of this law and read it every day.

So see there's a lot leading up to the book of Samuels and obviously then judges. If you look later in Scripture there are two texts that bring this David and Goliath account into some beautiful focus. David says to Goliath, "You come against me with sword spear and shield. I come against you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel." I come in the name of the Lord. That construction, that those words, Hebrew English doesn't matter, that construction appears only in that text and in one more text in the Old Testament and it's in Psalm 118.

Toward the end of Psalm 118, after the speaker of the Psalm who is clearly a king—it's not doesn't have the label of David on it—but is clearly a king and there's clearly echoes of David in the Psalm. And this speaker of the Psalm has talked early in the Psalm about being surrounded by enemies and he says three times over, "They surrounded me, they surrounded me like bees and in the name of the Lord I cut them off, in the name of the Lord I cut them off." At the end of the Psalm the crowds welcome the victorious king and they say, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Who comes in the name of the Lord."

It's interesting that that's also toward the end of the Psalm when the crowds have saying that they have already that the king has already been described as the stone that the builders rejected, that's in the Psalm, which have been made the head of the corner. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. The stone that the builders rejected has become the head of the corner. Those two passages appear in Mark 11 and 12. In Mark 11, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David" on the lips of the crowd that welcomed Jesus into the capital as he's on his way to the cross. Palm Sunday. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

Later in the week, Jesus is talking with the great leaders and they obviously do not believe that he's the one who's come in the name of the Lord. Jesus tells a parable, a story, and then he concludes it with a quote from Psalm 118: "The stone that the builders rejected has become the headstone of the corner. You the experts are rejecting my claim to be the Messiah, the Savior of God's people, but God will raise me up." Isn't that amazing?

From 1 Samuel 17 David is a preview of Jesus. At that point, he's doing what he should be. He's doing what he should do and he's being what he should be. He's the preview; he comes in the name of the Lord to wage war against our great enemy. Not just Goliath, but against the Satan who stands behind Goliath. And actually at the very end of 1 Samuel 17, when he comes back in victory, everybody's praising him. It doesn't quite have the words "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord" there but it's clearly there that he's being received as the champion. Jonathan is happy, the women of Israel are happy, even Saul for a moment is happy until they compare Saul not so favorably to David and then Saul is jealous.

You see there's looking at this passage in the context of the flow of the whole Bible and not just the things that have come before it but those passages that come after like Psalm 118 and then as those are picked up in the New Testament. Well, language and literary context. Wonderful, wonderful opportunities to look at and these are things that we can see as we look at our English versions and pay attention to what's going on there.

So let me close us in prayer, give us a brief break. I think we're going to collect questions, right? And we'll look those over for just a minute or two and then we'll get into our Q&A. Let me pray. Father, we thank you that you have sent Jesus who came in the name of the Lord to wage war against our great enemy. Not just Goliath, but against the Satan who stands behind Goliath.

And thank you, Father, that he came to lay down his life for us to win the victory, not just by risking his life as David did but by laying down his life and then taking it up again in resurrection victory. Now Father, we ask that you'll guide our conversation as we think about some questions that our reflections have generated this evening. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

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