Ask Pastor Mike Live

Speaker 1

Carol has written in already, and she says, when reading the Bible, how do we know what we should apply to our lives and what we should not apply, but we read just as observers. Great question. That is a question that's going to take a whole semester to figure out. Yeah. That is basically the question that we tackle in a class that we teach here at Compass Bible Institute, which we call hermeneutics: how to interpret the Bible or Bible interpretation.

Yeah, we've got to figure that out by looking at what we're reading. It's not that we can't figure out some kind of application from almost every section of the word, because we can. Even as Paul says to the Corinthians when he says, you know, we read in the law of Moses, you shouldn't muzzle the ox while he's threshing out the grain. And Paul says, you know, we can learn a principle from that. What he says there is, you should be able to pay your pastor when he's preaching the word of God to you.

Now, how do we get from not muzzling the ox while he's threshing to paying your pastor when he preaches to you? He tries to describe the pathway from not putting a muzzle on your ox all the way to trying to talk about how you are paying soldiers when they're fighting for you and how, you know, if you're a farmer, you're going to eat some of the food that you're going to plant and use to sell in the marketplace. And, of course, you're not going to keep the oxen from putting his head down and eating some of the grain that you're making him thresh out.

And, of course, you're not going to muzzle the ox while he's threshing. The pastor who's sowing into your lives spiritual truth, you're going to pay him material wealth for the work he does to teach you. And he's saying, yeah, you can derive a principle from a text like that, and you should know that we can learn from that. Paul had already taught that, and he's teaching the Corinthians by quoting the Old Testament. He does that in First Corinthians, chapter 10, when he says, look at the Old Testament people as they came out of Egypt and they sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play. They did whatever they wanted, and God destroyed them because all they cared about was doing whatever they wanted.

He said, we can learn a principle from that. He says, don't be like they were, and God struck them down, or even talking about their complaining, and don't do what they did. So we learn from the narrative of the text or even principles about what God commanded them to do with their oxen. We can derive principles from that.

We can look at what was done in Old Testament texts or any narrative text, even in the Book of Acts or in the Gospels, and we say, what is the timeless principle and the timeless truth that represents the nature or the attribute of God? Then, how do we take that out of that text and say, okay, here's a principle that reflects God's nature, God's values, and now say, what is the way in which we can rightly apply this without doing any damage to that principle and apply it to our lives today?

Now, we need a lot of practice with that. That's what hermeneutics textbooks do, and that's what we try to do in biblical interpretation: learning how to not violate any principle of the Word. That's why someone who knows the Bible really well can make sure they're keeping all of the Bible in view when they interpret the text. That's what hopefully your pastor is good at. He knows all of the scripture and can take a text of scripture, show you how to extract the principle of Scripture, and then make sure he's not violating any other text of scripture, because there's ultimately one author of Scripture.

He gives you an application of that scripture that ensures that none of it is being violated and provides you with a proper application of it. That's what we all need to learn to do, and that is biblical interpretation. So, Carol, that's the work that we need to learn to do. What I try to teach people to do in that is a process called then, always, and now.

In the text, we always need to work first and say, what is the original authorial intent? What is the author intending for this to mean? For example, don't put a muzzle on an ox when he's treading out the grain. We need to figure out what that means in its original context. What does it mean that the people sat down to eat in the desert? They just cared about their food, whether it's, you know, we want meat or we want manna or we want food or whatever, and then we just want to get up and do whatever we want.

What does the text mean in its original context? What does the author mean when Moses is talking about these things? Then, what is the always principle? Let's extract a principle that's always true in any context, and then we can finally, from that principle, think about the now: how does this affect life in the 21st century where I live? I can extract from that timeless principle how to apply it to my life today.

Carol, that's the work that we do in everyday Bible study: then, always, now. At our church, we call it tanning. To work at just the basic plan as to how to do that, I've written that out in something we call our Partner's Manual. The Partner's Manual is just our discipleship workbook. If you want to get ahold of that, you can contact us at Focal Point, which is our radio ministry here. Just go to pastormike.com, which is basically our radio ministry website, and you can request one of those.

You can talk to our leader of that ministry, Jay, who is in charge of that, and just request one of those. Hopefully, maybe your church can get involved in doing that discipleship manual, the Partner's Manual, and you can train each other on how to do that in your church, Carol. That will help you get good at that. Some people in your church can train other people in your church to get good at that. You can always keep each other accountable at making sure you handle the word properly, because it's not just your pastor who should be doing that publicly on the weekend at church.

It should be all of us that are digging into the scripture to know what the then is all about, what the always principle is, and then how to effectively put this into a now kind of application. Then, always, now. I think that's the way I figured out at least how to help people to do this in a way they can do it every single morning as they dig into God's word. So go to pastormike.com, and we can give you about 25 or 30 pages to try and help you work out a pattern that you can do with a piece of yellow tablet every single morning, or a journal. You can do it electronically on a word doc or whatever on your computer.

You can practice every day, every day of the week. You can do this. And Carol, you'll get real good at it if you just keep practicing it. Sam.