FIRE Conference Session 1

Well, we want to welcome you here to the Rue Baptist Church. It's our privilege to host this 2016 FIRE Midwest Regional Conference. Our church joined FIRE, I think, if I'm not mistaken, in the second year of its existence. And Charlie, one of our elders, was instrumental in getting us involved. And so we have enjoyed this fellowship now for several years. and it's been a great encouragement to us.

My name is Tim Pasma. I'm the pastor here. I've got to remember that. The Lord has given me the privilege of ministering here for 31 years and we've just had a wonderful time. Not all the time, but most of the time. And I'm just thankful that we can do this.

We are actually delighted that you found LaRue. And as I talked to some of you, following your GPSs and everything else, it just blew my mind where they took you. It's ridiculous. But then again, I'm just thankful that you have LaRue on your GPSs. Seriously, you can look at some maps and we're not on it. And so we're just thankful that you're here.

We hope, my hope is that this conference will not only encourage you, but equip you. And we're looking forward to the ministry of God's word these next couple days. And we're just thankful that you can be here. So let's pray, shall we? our sovereign God we are thankful for your great mercy to us in Jesus we thank you for the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ we thank you that we can be here and worship together and fellowship and encourage one another and we just pray that you would Lord we just want to pray your blessings on this conference.

We want to pray that you would give us greater insight into your word and prepare us for ministry in the age in which we live. And that after we leave here, that there would be folks who have truly been encouraged and equipped to minister in ways that honor you Thank you again in Jesus name Amen Well, I've enjoyed the singing already. You know, for you folks who have never been here, I need to tell you something.

We always stand up when we sing because you can't sing sitting down. And we always sing all the verses. Okay? It's just the way we do things here. Never want to leave out part of the story. Last year, about this time, Greg Withrow asked if LaRue Baptist would be willing to host the Midwest Fire Regional Conference.

And I said, sure, you know, there's no place to eat or sleep around here, but if that's okay with you, we'll do it. And I would say soon after, but it was much later, that I said, you know, we really got to get going on this thing. In fact, I think Greg called me and reminded me of that. And now I don't want you to take this wrong. Okay. Do not take this wrong.

I will explain. So I started looking for someone who could speak. And no one would. And I'm thinking, who are we going to get to speak? And one Saturday, we, Becca and I, my wife Becca and I, went down to, boy, Christopher, Delhi, Delhi Hills. My dear friend Kevin pastors down there. because Dr.

Jarrell was doing a seminar for his church on the Messiah I never knew. And so we went down and spent about four or five hours there, and we were just blown away. And I thought, God's providence, this is why. Everyone else was saying no. So Christopher is not like the last choice It was God providence All right It was God providence I am thankful that everyone else said no Okay?

I am thankful for that. Because I thought, man, this is so good. And I don't want to bilge up Christopher, but it was really helpful to me. As I look at Old Testament narrative, I'm preaching through the book of Genesis right now. and how do we look at the Old Testament and how do we look at it through new covenant lenses and all that sort of thing. And Christopher started bringing all that together in ways that were just exciting to me.

And so I thought Christopher would be the guy to come. And he said yes. All right. So Christopher, come and minister the word of God. I am really looking forward to this, brother. So I originally had other plans for this weekend, but they kind of fell through.

The family got... I'm delighted to be here. There's no place else I would rather be than to share the scriptures with you this evening, especially in what God has taught me over the years as I have grown in my own understanding of the Scriptures and I have studied and as my faith has been transformed through knowing not only what the Scriptures say, but how they say it.

And that I can be confident to know what the Scriptures are saying, what the Scriptures mean, what God is saying to His church today, including me. in this seminar we're going to be looking at an example of that but there's two particular questions that we're going to focus on as we look at the books of 1st and 2nd Samuel the first question is is Jesus the Christ? is Jesus the Christ? the second question we want to consider is how should we read 1st and 2nd Samuel? how should we teach 1st and 2nd Samuel? How do we read and teach the story of David as God has given it to us here in Scripture Now as for the first question is Jesus the Christ When we hear that for the first time that might sound tautological. Of course he's the Christ.

What else would he be? Isn't that his last name? Who is this Jesus otherwise? We all just know him as Jesus Christ. The words go together. It's kind of a non-question to ask, is Jesus the Christ?

Or we might be thinking of it as an anachronistic question. That's not a question that we need to answer today. That was perhaps an important question for people in the first century to figure out. But for us, perhaps we should consider, is Jesus really God? Or is Jesus really the only way? But is Jesus the Christ?

It doesn't seem to be a particularly relevant question to us. and yet I think it is not only the critical question of the first century but it is still the critical question for us today and I hope to show that to you before our series is over tomorrow. The second question, how should we read and teach the books of 1 and 2 Samuel? That question comes up because there are many possible approaches to reading the scriptures.

No doubt you've been familiar with more than one of them. One approach to the scriptures is the critical reading. This dominates scholarship. If you read scholarly journals or what is being taught in the universities and the seminaries, some of us are more isolated from that because we choose the literature we want to read and avoid scholarly or critical studies. but really critical studies dominate Bible study in the academy.

Critical study deals with questions like, how did this book come to be? What were the different philosophies in ancient Israel that may have produced this particular book? We have the northern perspective that we see in these chapters, but then there's some southern perspective that comes in here, and we're taking the book apart to try and understand what different ideas could have been thrown together by various sources to produce this book.

Well, my assumption is that that's not how the book of 1 and 2 Samuel came together at all. And I think you share that with me if I understand my audience correctly here. But another approach to reading scriptures is the reading of the Bible. from back-to-front approach, I might call it. This is the finding Jesus in the Old Testament. We know that the Old Testament is all about Jesus.

So some approach the Old Testament by looking for Jesus in it. Let's find Jesus in between the lines if we have to. Let's find him in the contours. But let's look to the Old Testament to find Jesus. That is a well-motived response, but leads to certain problems. In fact, the problems of looking for Jesus in the Old Testament or looking for anything else in the Old Testament, of course, is that you're going to find it.

You're going to find whatever you look for. In 1997, Michael Drossman produced a book called The Bible Code where he found Abraham Lincoln assassinated in the Old Testament. You can find anything you look for, but that doesn't mean it's really there. And so it's fine if we start with an understanding that the Old Testament is about Jesus, but we need to back up and first ask the question, what is the Old Testament saying of itself first?

Before we consider, where does Jesus fit into that? This question is as old as the church. There was a famous dispute in the 3rd and 4th centuries between a scholar from Egypt, Origen, who was all about finding Jesus in the scriptures, and he would find it everywhere. He had a way of describing the tabernacle, and every little detail of the tabernacle had some kind of prophetic application to Jesus or numbers in the Old Testament.

Somehow, if you graph the numbers on a chart, you get the cross or something like that. And in Antioch, another great center of Christianity, Isidore of Pelusium was highly critical of that approach because Origen was finding things that simply were not there. Isidore's approach was, Jesus isn't in the whole Old Testament, that is, in every single verse.

He's in the Old Testament as a whole, points to Jesus, but that doesn't mean every little passage of Scripture has something to say about Jesus. It was Isidore's approach to it, and there was conflict between the two. So reading back to front is another approach to reading 1 and 2 Samuel. Find Jesus in it. A third approach is what I might call kind of the treading water approach.

This is history and that all it is We know that there are promises from the Old Testament that foretell Jesus but some of this is just the development of the nation of Israel And somehow we have to get from the giving of the promise back to Abraham or even going back to Adam and Eve. Somehow we've got to track the history until we get to the actual Jesus. And this is just giving us some background information.

This is how we got to Israel in the New Testament. And that's where we're really concerned with Jesus is in the New Testament. So this is history. This is giving us information about the past. A fourth approach to reading the Old Testament, books like 1 and 2 Samuel, is the, I'll call this the search for a role model, where we look for the individuals in the Old Testament and we hold them up either as this is the way you should live, this is what it means to be a man of faith, or this is the way you should not live.

Here's a poor example of what it means to follow God, be a man of faith. Now, there's definitely value to the approach of looking for those role models. There are role models all over the Old Testament that are designed to guide us in our faith. That's very clear. But the problem comes when that's our first approach. When we first approach the Scripture, simply looking for, should I be like him or should I not be like him?

Often that's not the main concern of a passage of Scripture. and so we miss what God is really saying to us if we're simply looking for and comparing myself to the various individuals in Scripture. We need to back up and take a more consistent approach first. The first problem with that approach is distinguishing between a positive role model and a negative role model.

In a lot of cases, there is no commentary. The narrator doesn't tell us that this individual is sinning or this individual is doing well. The voice from heaven doesn't come condemning an action or praising an action, so we're left on our own to decide whether this is something we should be emulating and following or something we should be condemning.

David is characteristic of this problem. He is generally regarded as a hero. Who can fault David in the David and Goliath episode? We know this is a model of a man of faith. And yet at other times, David is often regarded by interpreters as a weak king or even as a villain at points. And so when we take the search for a role model approach to scripture we sometimes find Moses the murderer or Joseph the snitch and the braggart or we might come across Abraham the self chauvinist pig who would throw away his wife's honor to save his own skin.

Now, I understand all have sinned. The individuals of the Old Testament are all sinners. They do have their weak points. But I think if those are the conclusions we're coming up with regarding Moses, Joseph, Abraham, we're missing the point. We're missing something great in those stories that God is trying to put right before our face. Now, with David, he's different, right?

Because Scripture presents David as a notorious sinner. God's condemnation of David is obvious in the case of Uriah the Hittite. He murders, he commits adultery, and the prophet is right there calling him out on his sin. That's obvious. He takes an unlawful census. Debatable why it's unlawful, what was wrong with the census, but it's clear that God was not happy about it.

God brings judgment. This is David the sinner. His actions in moving the ark lead to the death of a man named Uzzah who touches it. And we can see here, yeah, David is at fault. He did not do what he should do. We see plenty of examples of David the sinner.

But sometimes we take that and run with it. and feel we have permission to therefore judge everything that David does. And sometimes we see David the polygamist taking multiple wives, and we use him as a negative example there, or a man who is scheming to get Nabal's wife, Abigail, for himself. This is the bad David. Or this is David the traitor who goes over to the Philistines.

Or David the deceiver who's actually committing genocide against tribes that are neighbors of Israel later in the book of 1 Samuel. Or maybe this is just David, the weak king, who is an unjust ruler through his passivity. He just doesn't do anything regarding the sins of his sons later on in his reign, and so he is a poor role model of a king, of a father.

Have we really pegged those correctly? Is that really the view of Scripture regarding each of those cases that I raise? Or am I simply putting my own view and my own construction on what the scripture shares regarding David? Commentators take the same approach Some commentaries have described David as being a desecrator of holy things when he gives the showbread to his men to eat One commentator, a commentary published recently, even found fault with David in the case of Goliath here.

When David repeatedly asks, what is to be done for the man who faces Goliath, this commentator has seen that as, This is David who's in it for the money. He's in it for the reward. So already in his youth, we see some seeds of David's downfall. Walter Brueggemann, another commentator, sees in David and his interaction with Nabal as a thug who is demanding protection money from him.

And my favorite is Baruch Halpern, whose commentary, well, not really even a commentary, but his book on the David stories is called David's Secret Demons, Messiah, Murderer, Traitor, King. There's a fun read if you're interested in something juicy on David there. His proposal is that the whole book of 1 Samuel is basically propaganda that the real historical David had to try and put a positive spin on all the nasty stuff that he was really doing.

Needless to say, it's not written from a position of faith. So these are the questions that we aim to address this week, today and tomorrow here, as we look at 1 and 2 Samuel. How do we read 1 and 2 Samuel? Apply that then to how do we read the Old Testament and how do we read the Bible, especially narrative in the Bible. And then use that to shed light on our first question, is Jesus the Christ and why does that question matter for us? now my goal this evening is actually to set a foundation for the work that we're going to be doing tomorrow you have in your materials a handout regarding session one i believe and you may want to look at that uh that describes an approach to the old testament but i'm gonna give a little background before getting into that let me ask this question next why should we study the old Testament at all.

Some may well ask, what's the point of even raising the question of the teaching of 1 and 2 Samuel? Isn't that the Bible for ancient Israel? Isn't that a Jewish Bible? Don't we have the New Testament? Isn't the teaching of Jesus the New Testament for the church today? Why should we, as pastors, be teaching from the Old Testament.

Is it worth the time? Is it worth it for our congregations to lead them in studying the Old Testament? And our answer should be an unequivocal yes, absolutely. This is for us today. Why? First, this was the apostles' approach to the Old Testament.

Romans 15.4, the apostle Paul speaking to the Roman church, believers in Jesus Christ, says whatever things were written before were written for our learning. that we, through the patience and comfort of the scriptures, might have hope. Paul says the Old Testament was written for the Christian. It was written for the believer in Jesus Christ in our day, the day of the church.

So Paul says the Old Testament is for us. We see that, second, if we look at the books of the New Testament. Several books of the New Testament, all of them are making reference to the Old Testament, but several such as Hebrews and James and 1 Peter are actually nothing but Bible studies from the first verse to the end. All they do is walk through the Old Testament trying to show you this is what the Bible says, the Old Testament.

This is what the Bible says. And expecting us to be reading our Old Testament and following along with them as they study and learn about the nature of God and his work in Jesus Christ. So much of the New Testament is Bible study of the Old Testament for the believer. And thirdly, the New Testament assumes an intimate familiarity with the Old Testament.

The writers of the New Testament have written in such a way that they assume that you know the Old Testament. And in some cases, this is more obvious than others. The book of Matthew, most people are well aware, is full of phrases such as, this was to fill the scripture which says, by doing this, Jesus fulfilled. and all the fulfillments of the Old Testament are laid out, or at least many of them are.

Mark is not so obvious. In fact, there's only one or two, I say one or two because one is textually uncertain, the reading is not quite certain there, but only once or twice in the whole book does Mark ever say this fulfills what was written. Now that's led some readers of Mark to reach a wrong conclusion. It sometimes said that Mark is the gospel written for Gentiles who don know the Old Testament And so he writing he doesn make reference to the Old Testament But that really isn the case at all Mark is assuming such a deep familiarity with the Scripture that he doesn't even bother putting in the references, and this fulfills the Scripture.

He expects you to know that, Church of Jesus Christ. If you've been reading your Bible the way Paul taught Timothy to do, and the way the churches should have been doing, the way Christ taught his church to do. Let me give you an example of that. If we take Mark chapter 6, we read the account of the feeding of the 5,000. And there we read near the beginning of the account that Jesus looked at the crowds who had followed him around the lake and he saw them like sheep without a shepherd.

A few verses later, when it's revealed that there is a need for food, for sustenance, Jesus gives his disciples the responsibility for feeding them. they point out the lack of food available only a paucity of materials here a few loaves couple fish here and then we read that jesus made the people recline on the green grass in groups and he distributed to his disciples who then fed the people now as you're reading here they are like sheep without a shepherd, and Jesus makes them lie down on the green grass. First response, who cares what color the grass is? We're going to talk about the principle of selectivity.

Why does Mark even tell us that? But now, speak with me, I assume of a certain degree of biblical literacy with this audience here. What comes to your mind when you hear that? Psalm 23, right? He's making a reference here to Jesus being the good shepherd. He makes them to lie down on the green grass.

That's the only reason for saying that the grass is green. He's already said they were like sheep without a shepherd. That's what Mark wants from us. To be able to say, oh, I know where this is going. I know what he's referring to. Now, the problem is, we're also supposed to be thinking of, ah, that's 1 Kings 22.

That's Ahab looking out and being told that the people of Israel are like sheep without a shepherd because they're without their king. This is like Ezekiel 34. This is like 2 Kings 4 when Elisha receives a little bit of grain and he tells his servant to give to 100 people and the servant says, what, put this before 100 people? Elisha says, do it. He does it and they have some left over.

Unfortunately most Christians who read the feeding of the 5 read that as though this is something new that Jesus does here and not realizing Mark whole point is look Jesus is doing exactly what God's messenger Elisha had done and Moses before him. So we need to be, to accurately handle the New Testament, we have got to know the Old Testament scriptures. The New Testament expects it of us.

Jesus' apostles expect us to know our Bibles, to know our Old Testament. Because if we don't have the Old Testament, the fact is we don't have the New either. Because it will not mean anything or it will mean the wrong thing to us. So, we must study the Old Testament. It is important for our congregations. It's important for us as individuals to know God's revelation of himself in the Old Testament Scripture.

So how are we supposed to approach it? It's hard. sometimes to understand it. It's hard to understand the New Testament oftentimes. Well, I'm going to take a particular approach this evening, a distinct approach. Why do I take the approach I do? For that, I'm going to get a little bit autobiographical here to tell you a little bit of my history in reading the scriptures and why I've come to look at the scriptures the way that I will be presenting them with you this week.

I was raised in a church-going family. We were at the church every Sunday at least, sometimes every day of the week. We were very observant, very faithful, taking sacraments and whatnot. And so I grew up feeling like I was a very religious person. But the Bible was not a part of that. The only Bible I knew was what made it into the children's books.

Those stories I knew, famous parables, David and Goliath, whatnot. But I thought I believed the Bible. And I thought I had a general idea of what the Bible said. It wasn't until I went to college where I discovered that the Bible didn't say what I always thought it had said. Evangelical believers confronted me on my soteriology, my understanding of salvation.

And salvation, they asserted being by faith alone in Jesus Christ and in his atonement, in his lordship. And this was something that I challenged and was turned to look upon the scriptures. I realized I didn't say what I always had said. Well this produced a great change in me I became a believer in Jesus Christ He truly became my Lord I became born again at that point But because I had always simply rested on the ecclesiastical authority of the church and accepted that teaching, it created a real thirst in me for the scriptures.

I couldn't get enough. I was like a starved man with food. And in the first couple of years after having been saved, I went through the scriptures at least a couple times, two, three times just reading. But it also produced something else in me. And that was a distrust of authority of any kind. And so my approach to scripture was, I don't want commentaries.

Don't give me what some man says about the scriptures. Because I had a fear. I had a fear that if I listened to commentators, that once I looked at the scripture, all I'd be able to see is what they told me. And I wouldn't really be sensitive to what the scripture actually said. I felt, hey, I've been deceived once. I don't want to go through this again.

And so I didn't read anything but Scripture alone. Now, I'm not recommending that at all. This is not a commendation, but I want you to understand where that comes from, that background here. Eventually, I discovered that teaching the Bible is what I wanted to do. I love the Scriptures. And I knew to do that, if I wanted to do that in official capacity, I needed to have a seminary education.

But I was leery of a seminary education because, once again, here's the authority coming in. I wanted to just listen to God on my own and not be influenced by the views of others. So I did go to seminary education, and I think I got a good seminary education. But as often happens, and some of you might be able to relate to this, if you've done Bible study in an advanced degree, the Bible started becoming a little bit dry as a textbook that I faced every day. and the Bible also I began having doubts about the Bible.

I was going to an evangelical seminary and so everything I was reading about challenges to the Bible's authority or the Bible's reliability I was hearing second hand and it left me wondering if I really read these guys who don't believe the Bible would I be won over to their point of view and it just made me nervous and I started to have doubts in the reliability of the scriptures and therefore in my faith in Jesus Christ. Well, I reached the point where I knew I just had to do something. I just had to start afresh to have a a solid foundation for my faith.

And so I went to the scriptures, and I decided just nothing to do with class, with my required reading. I just want to read, and I started with Mark's Gospel. I don't know why. I'm glad I did. I started with Mark's Gospel, and I guess you could call it a prayer. I don't know if it's really a prayer if you're talking to a dead guy, and not to God himself.

But I said to Mark, I said, all right, Mark, you saw something in Jesus. I'm listening. Tell me what you saw. Tell me what you want me to know, and I'll consider it. And so I went back again to the Scriptures and started from square one again. And that was a turning point for me because that was the first time in all my study that I ever really listened to the author, the human author of Scripture.

My approach before was listening to God, what God might have said through the Scriptures, through that author, but never really paid to the author at all, as though he didn't have anything to do with it. And I came to understand, no, these are not simply tools that God used to feed his message through, but these are holy men that God trained up. These are holy theologians that have something to say to us, that knew God and have been entrusted by God to share that message.

And I needed to listen to them. So, I had some good preaching during that time at our church that helped me understand the role of the structure of Matthew's gospel and how he uses that to teach. I began teaching an adult Sunday school, and I'm not sure quite what the leadership decision here, but I was put, we had age-segregated Sunday schools, and I, here as a young seminarian in my 20s, was made the teacher of the 40s and 50s group. but it was a beautiful time and I'm very thankful to my wife who worked while I was able to study and to spend just a lot of time on that Sunday school class just looking at the scriptures asking what is the idea, how can I know how can my students know what this passage is really saying what is in it, not something that I put in it or get from somebody else but can any reader look at the scripture and understand what it's saying and how can he do that.

And so that's kind of the background that has led to this approach. Let me talk to you about some of the presuppositions that I take in my study We all have presuppositions There nothing wrong with presuppositions The important thing is being aware of your presuppositions so you can make sure if they the proper presuppositions So on your handout, I've called this first talk here, Robust Perspicuity. There's a mouthful for you.

I'll try to explain that term here in a bit. It's about hearing ancient theologians speak because these are the authors of the scripture. first in developing a hermeneutic that is an approach to interpretation of narrative prose how do stories teach my presuppositions are first that god works in history so as to reveal himself god is not only the author of the scriptures god is the author of history ultimately he orders and directs all of history and he does so with the view of communicating. God has a message in the events of history.

And so what we read in the scripture is not invented stories designed to communicate a point, but they're real events. They're real events that God has used and even orchestrated and allowed and permitted and directed. So God works in history so as to reveal himself. My second presupposition is that all scripture is intended for application. Every part of Scripture is written for the saints of God, God's people, to respond and to live in its light.

There's nothing written here purely for information, just in case you were wondering how the world came about, or just in case you were wondering where Israel was after certain events. It's all designed to lead us to walk in the ways of God. So if God works in all history to reveal himself, and if all Scripture is intended for application, well that leads to a couple conclusions.

Therefore historical narrative is historically accurate in content. We can trust what it says about the events, the facts of history. But it is also didactic in purpose. Didactic means teaching. Its intent is to teach. It is not, while it is fully historical, while it is fully true in a historical sense, it is not history.

Its goal is not to inform you about things in the past for the sake of understanding the sequence of events and how our world developed the way it is. No, its intent is to teach you to know God, to love Him, to find Him, and to walk with Him. So my third presupposition is that the message intended by God is the message intended by the human author They are the same If I find the message that the human author is trying to show me I found God message And if I understand God's message, then that's what my human author is trying to get across.

Now quite often the human author didn't understand all the depths of it, but when I'm trying to seek God's message I'm trying to understand what this author has composed. Now that means if I'm listening to the author if this author has a message for me has something as a theologian that he wants me to know by the Spirit of God then the scripture must have been composed in such a way to guide me as the reader to that message. As we all do when we're writing.

If you're writing something that you want to be understood by someone else, you're going to write it in a way that can be understood. I take that presupposition with me to the scripture. This may be, at first hand, a difficult story to understand. I may not see the point. But once I know that it's been written so that I can understand it, I need to pay attention to the way it's been written because that's the only way I'm ever going to get to the bottom of its message.

Now, how do I do that? How can you tell, especially from something like a story, a narrative, how can you tell what that author can possibly have in mind for us? Five principles, let me suggest to you. As we're using these principles, this would be a good place to explain the interpretation of this title, robust perspicuity. Perspicuity is the doctrine that comes out of the Reformation.

The Reformers upheld this in light of medieval teaching regarding the scriptures. that was full of mystery. You had to be the initiate to be able to understand what Scripture was about. There were allegories. There were secret things in it. You had to be the mystic. You had to know.

You had to be a theologian. The common person could not understand Scripture. It was in Latin, for one thing, which the common person did not understand. But you should not have it in your own language because you could not understand it. You would misunderstand it. So the reformers responded to that by saying, no, God wrote this to common people.

He didn't write it to theologians. He wrote it to churches. Therefore, it is understandable to the common people. That the way God designed it That the doctrine of perspicuity The doctrine of perspicuity is that Scripture in its basic sense is clear to all Scripture in its basic sense is clear to all Now, that's the doctrine of perspicuity. What is robust perspicuity?

Well, if Scripture, in its basic sense, is clear to all, what about the complexities of Scripture? There's more to Scripture than what's on the surface. We understand that. This is an artfully written literature. It's human literature. It's meant to be understood, but it is of great quality.

And when we read anything else written for the common people, if I were to read, say, a novel by Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, maybe, hopefully, most of you have read it. If you haven't, go out and do that. It's a good one. I'm not going to read it the way many people read the Bible where you just take a verse at random and say, well, what does that say for me today?

I would never dream of doing that. I would read it from the beginning. I would pay attention to its themes. I'd try to understand the characters. I might look for motifs. What kinds of things recur throughout it?

I might pay attention to allusions. He might use phrases that remind me of something he had said in an earlier chapter. This is all part of reading normal, ordinary English literature. This is not secretive. This is not mysterious. But it doesn't come necessarily natural.

We've all had English teachers who have at least tried to, in my case, help me to see such things in literature. I didn't really pay a whole lot of attention at the time because we need training in it. We have to know how literature works. And the same is true with the Bible. It is written for all men, but it does take work. It's not simply what's on the surface.

We have to pay attention to what the Bible is and how it's written. So robust perspicuity asserts that Scripture is clear to ordinary people using ordinary means. You don't have to be the elite. Scripture is clear to ordinary people using ordinary means, but ordinary means include study, cross-referencing, paying attention to themes. These are ordinary ways that we read literature, and scripture is designed to be read the same way.

And I hope that will be clear as we go through. We can all do this, but it does take some work. It does take attention. All right, so what are these five principles? using this week. The first principle, I call the principle of selectivity. That says that material is included in a narrative only as it serves to support the didactic, that is the teaching purpose of the narrative.

Somebody who's telling a story doesn't just throw random information in. He's going to include the details that he needs to make his story understood, to get his point across, and he's going to leave out everything else. That's helpful to us as interpreters. Because the inclusion of an episode or a detail in an episode is therefore going to call attention to the message of the text.

If I think of that Mark 6 passage, where the grass is green, who cares that the grass is green? Does the color really matter? Well, Mark thought it did. He included it there. None of the other evangelists included it in their gospel account. Why would he put that there?

It's not random. The fact that he included it and didn't leave it out is a guide to us to see what the author saw, to help us look in the direction that he is looking. Or an author might leave material out, and we shouldn't base our teaching and our understanding on a passage based upon something that we're just assuming. That's a bad practice there. Apparently, that's not a fact that's interesting or important to our author.

We want to follow our author with the details he chooses to include. The second principle is the principle of structure. That says that material is arranged to support the didactic purpose of the narrative. He's going to have an introduction. There's going to be a middle. There's going to be a conclusion.

This is the normal way things are written. Well, if we're going to understand his purpose, we better pay attention. Which is the introduction? Which is the middle? And which is the conclusion? Or else we're going to get a false conclusion regarding what our author is saying.

Now, for these first two principles, how are they going to come out in, say, 1 and 2 Samuel? The principle of selectivity. We're not told how old David was. I've heard a lot of subjective. He was 14, right? Does everybody agree he was 14?

I don't know where that number comes from. I hear it a lot. But we're not told how old he was. He's young. We're not told how old Saul was. We're not told where Jonathan was during the Goliath episode.

Why didn't Jonathan go and fight this giant? He was a valorous man, too. We're not told. We not told how David got his training We not told the names of Hannah later children So apparently that information is not necessary to understand the conclusion that our author is leading us to But we are told what Hannah gave Samuel for his birthday every year.

That's an odd bit of information. We're told the name of a rock near a field of battle. Hmm, wonder why. We're told that Saul didn't have any cash on hand for a prophetic consultation fee when he was trying to find his father's lost donkeys. Well, I think the story would flow nicely if you just leave that out. But it's there, and it's there for a reason.

And if we can't account for the reason, we're probably missing the point. That's the principle of selectivity. How about the principle of structure? Why does the book of 1 Samuel start with the story of Hannah, of this woman who wants a child. Why not put it later in the book? Why not put something else at the front?

Why include it at all? Well, that's the introduction. And when we read it, we should think in terms of this is the introduction to the story. That will help us read it correctly. The story of Saul and the story of David are both introduced with livestock. Saul comes into our story looking for his father's lost sheep.

David comes into our story tending, or I'm sorry, looking for his father's lost donkeys David comes into our story tending his father's sheep well that's a curious way to meet each man why not leave the whole donkeys episode out in Saul's case why put it right there at the beginning and why make it so long it's important, it has something to do with what our author is trying to tell us about Saul and about David we get a summary of David's reign in 2 Samuel chapter 8 which is the formulaic way of rounding out the history of a king we have the names of his officials listed how long he reigned, his great accomplishments and you expect it to end there and yet we have an entire book after that point talking about David's reign well that's funny to put the conclusion in the middle I wonder what's going on here that's your author giving you a clue I'm starting something new here Pay attention. Compare it with what I've already told you. The third principle is the principle of juxtaposition.

Juxtaposition is the placing the positioning of two things next to each other And the author will do that in terms of narrative to highlight something He wants us to see something Look compare these two He puts them next to each other. See how the one is different from the other, or see how they're both doing the same thing. We need to pay attention to what gets put next to what in the scripture, because that's our author speaking to us again, saying, look at this.

I want to show you something. For example, we get in 1 Samuel the account of a man named Abishai. In a chapter that follows the account of a woman named Abigail, they both have a very similar decision to make, whether to support David in a certain scheme to kill the enemy. And they make the opposite conclusion. Our author wants us to see that comparison between the two.

In 2 Samuel, we get a story of David's victory at a place that gets named Baal-Perezim, the Lord, the master of the outbreak. And then immediately there's a story that takes place at a place called Peretz Uzzah, and both places get their name. Peretz is the singular of Perezim, so two different stories with a very similar name, and they're put right next to each other.

Why? Our author is saying, Now I want you to notice the contrast between these two. What do you observe? What do you conclude? Juxtaposition is a way an author can call our attention to what he wants us to see by God's Spirit. The fourth principle is the principle of emphasis, which states that an element that is given focus is there to draw attention to the purpose of the narrative.

So repetition, placement, tone, direct dialogue. etc. If the narrator says something over and over again, that must be of particular importance to the story. I better listen up. I better pay attention to that. For example, we see in the account of Saul and the donkeys, over and over again we read about three different times we see some formula of somebody saying about Saul that your father is no longer worried about the donkeys, but now he's worried about you.

It's fine to see that once. interesting, but why get that repeated so many times? Why is that so important? That's a clue that your author is giving you as far as what's going on there. Naming is another way of drawing emphasis When scripture gives somebody a name or a place a name or an object a name usually there a conclusion being drawn there Pay attention to that name It often a moral to the story, so we need to attend to those names.

There's an emphasis being drawn there. We're going to see that as we look at 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel as well. So naming, even who speaks. As we look at the Hannah story tomorrow morning, we're going to see that some of the characters actually have direct dialogue and other characters don't say anything. The narrator just reports those to us. Well, that's on purpose.

We want to pay attention to what's emphasized. Then the last principle is probably the one that's been most meaningful to me and that's what I call the principle of tension which asserts that there are features of the text that leave the reader unsettled. Oh, that doesn't read right or that sounds like a contradiction or would God really say that? Something in the text that would leave us unsettled that may be used to signal a theological theme.

Things like irony, incongruity, things that just don't go together, paradox, something that seems like a contradiction, or an unanswered question. A question gets asked and there's no answer for it. Or an unsatisfactory resolution. The story just ends wrong or at the wrong point. Or an apparent contradiction even. Now it used to be that these things really bothered me and I joined kind of a club that would try to fix them.

Try and say, well no, it's really not a contradiction. and really it means something other than it says, so trust me here. And I try to hide those until I realize, no, I'm supposed to be bothered by it. That's the point. The writer's trying to shake me up and say, well, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense. And that's how he leads me to see what he wants to see.

We're going to see that in 1 Samuel with the question, is it right for Israel to ask for a king? They get rebuked for asking for a king, and yet it's in the scriptures from the time of Moses that God planned for them to have a king. Well, there's something wrong here, so I need to come up with an explanation that makes the problem go away. No, that's on purpose.

That tension is supposed to be there. We're also going to see a tension regarding when Saul becomes king. We're going to read about five different episodes where Saul becomes the king. And this is where the critical scholar comes in and says, well, see here you have the different competing theories or legends regarding how Saul becomes king. And they kind of got thrown together, and the editor didn't really notice the contradiction or didn't care about it.

And so now we've got all these competing accounts for how Saul became king. I hope you'll see tomorrow, not at all. The author saw very well the tension over this question. How come he seems to become king here and now he doesn't seem to be king anymore? That's in there on purpose to lead us to the message of the whole thing. Likewise, when Uzzah dies, how could God kill somebody who's trying to steady the ark of God, this holy relic that's slipping off an ox cart?

He holds out his hand just to keep it from falling and getting smashed, and he's killed for touching it. Well, how fair is that? that's wrong. God, how could you do that? He was just trying to help. What was he supposed to do? Just let the thing drop and smash?

It's a no-win situation. Yes, that's what we're supposed to feel. That's what we're designed to feel. Those tensions I have grown to really appreciate because they're there to help me understand they aren't problems that I need to somehow get rid of in most of these cases. Alright, now, all I've given you tonight is method. Tomorrow is when we're actually going to put that into practice.

So if you not able to come tomorrow you really missing out So you going to have to find some way to get what you missing here But no I be glad to talk about these with you But what do we have already tonight? What have we looked at? I want it to be clear to you, one, I want it to be filled with thanksgiving. Thanksgiving that God has decided to make himself known.

I mean, imagine it. God didn't have to. In fact, there's many religions that assert that, no, the only way to find God is to somehow search out there and come up with him on your own. But we assert that there's a God who so wanted to be known that he wrote a book in the common people's language and using the common people's literary techniques. Because he wants us to know him and have fellowship with him.

We need to be thankful for that. We also need to appreciate that what God has given us in the Old Testament is for us today. And he is known in the Old Testament. And he speaks to us as his church in the Old Testament. And when we understand how it works and what it has to say, it will richen and deepen your walk with him and your faith And I hope you can take some of that away from you this week but more and more as the week goes on So scripture is for us.

Praise the Lord. And scripture speaks of Jesus Christ. We're going to see that too. But we don't have to go looking for him. He's going to pop out pretty soon as we get into the scriptures. So please pray with me.

Lord God I thank you for Lord for even caring to be a part of our lives Lord you could have easily remained hidden and you would have done us no injustice no wrong we have all sinned we don't deserve access to you that you've been willing to give and yet Lord you've condescended but Lord you do want us to seek you at the same time and you have put some work into it. Lord, I thank you that you do give us teachers. I thank you for men who have more time to devote to study than many of us do or have more resources and background And I thank you for those and I have underappreciated those in my life too Lord you given them to us to help us grow But Lord I pray for each soul here in this room that you would use your scriptures to convince each one of the utter goodness and beauty of the Lord Jesus Christ, that you would bow each one's heart to your purposes and to your plans and your truth.

Lord, help us to persevere in knowing you. It's difficult to know you in the trials of life. It comes with challenge, and yet it's in what is difficult where we actually come to know you best. Lord, I've seen that to be true for the scriptures too. Help us to persevere to know you and to be satisfied in the feast that you give us when we're willing to commune with you and to pray with you and to listen to you carefully.

Lord, make yourself known to this congregation here, to the glory of Jesus Christ, that his name might be lifted up as the favorite of each one of us and as the hope for eternal things. I pray in Jesus' name. Amen.