Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 1226 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Mastering the Bible - Let It Be - Worldview Wednesday


Wisdom - the final frontier to true knowledge. Welcome to Wisdom-Trek where our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, to seek out discernment and insights, and to boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before.

Hello, my friend, I am Guthrie Chamberlain, your captain on our journey to increase wisdom and create a living legacy. Thank you for joining us today as we explore wisdom on our 2nd millennium of podcasts. This is Day 1226 of our trek, and it is Worldview Wednesday. Creating a Biblical worldview is important to have a proper perspective on today’s current events.

To establish a Biblical worldview, you must also have a proper understanding of God and His Word. This week we begin a new series to assist us in building our Biblical worldview. Our focus for the next several months on Worldview Wednesday will be Mastering the Bible through a series of brief insights. This is another book from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars Dr. Micheal S. Heiser. This book is a collection of insights designed to help you understand the Bible better. When we let the Bible be what it is, we can understand it as the original readers did, and as its writers did. Each week we will explore two insights.
Mastering the Bible – Let It Be

Insight One: Let the Bible Be What It Is
Dr. Heiser unpacks that statement a bit. Letting the Bible be what it is means interpreting the Bible in its own context. Bible students talk a lot about interpreting the Bible in context. When most readers consider context, they think about the verses preceding and following whatever passage they happen to be looking at. Context involves much more.

There are many different contexts that, even today, dictate how we should understand what we read. For example, the world in which we live provides a context. If I wrote the word “text” on a blackboard today in a room full of college students and asked what the word means, I would hear very different answers than I would have heard twenty years ago. Students today would immediately think of a wireless, electronic message. Their worldview is dominated by technology. That wouldn’t have been true a few decades ago. That was a different world.

The type of writing or document dictates how we should understand what’s written. In literary terms, this refers to a genre. If I was looking at the word “court” in a legal document, I’d interpret the word much differently than if I was holding a tennis magazine. The word “treat” in a doctor’s note means something different than it would if you found it on a grocery list. Genre is a context that is crucial for interpretation.



There are many other examples. Your culture, religious thinking, political system, family unit, and social structure all influence how you process the Bible. We might know that intellectually, but we often fail to embrace the fact that the Biblical writers wrote for their immediate audience, who had contexts quite different than our own.

Interpreting the Bible in context means interpreting it in light of the worldview in which it was produced. Filtering the Bible through our worldview or any worldview that came after the biblical period means altering how the Bible was originally meant to be read. We need to let the Bible be what it is, an ancient work from another time and place. To apply the Bible to our lives accurately, we need to know what it actually teaches.
Insight Two: Don’t Second-Guess God’s Decisions in Inspiration
In Dr. Heiser’s experience, some Bible students are concerned that the worldview disconnection between us and the ancient biblical writers me...