Welcome to Day 1584 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.This is Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom Bible Study – Bible Concepts and Interpretations – Meditation MondayWelcome to Wisdom-Trek with Gramps! Wisdom is the final frontier in gaining true knowledge. Our mission is to create a legacy of wisdom, seek out discernment and insights, and boldly grow where few have chosen to grow before. Hello, my friend; this is Gramps; thanks for coming along on our journey to increase Wisdom and Create a Living Legacy Today is Day 1584 of our Trek, and it is time for Meditation Monday. Taking time to relax, refocus, and reprioritize our lives is crucial in order to create a living legacy. For you, it may just be time alone for quiet reflection. You may utilize structured meditation practices. In my life, Meditation includes reading and reflecting on God’s Word and in prayer. It is a time to renew my mind, refocus on what is most important, and making sure that I am nurturing my soul, mind, and body. As you come along with me on our trek each Meditation Monday, it is my hope and prayer that you, too, will experience a time for reflection and renewing of your mind.
We are continuing our series this week on Meditation Monday as we focus on Mastering Bible Study through a series of brief insights from Hebrew Scholar, Dr. Michael S. Heiser. Our current insights are focusing on accurately interpreting the Bible. Today let us meditate on:
Bible Study – Bible Concepts and Interpretations· Insight Sixty-Three: Tracing Concepts Through the Bible Is More Profitable than Word Study
Have you ever watched a movie where so much is happening in a scene that you invariably miss something important to the plot? That happens to me almost every time I watch a film adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes story. There are too many things to track simultaneously to think like Sherlock. There’s never just one thing that’s important to notice in any given scene. The Bible is like that—repeatedly.
Developing skills in studying biblical words is essential. But studying individual words often means only discerning one part of a set of ideas that’s important to understanding the meaning of a passage or biblical teaching. The theology of the Bible is often driven by clusters of concepts, each of which might involve one or more words. If you only do word study instead of looking for the collections, your view of biblical theology will be fragmented.
A good illustration of this problem (and the solution) is the Old Testament concept of messiah. It may shock you, but of the nearly forty occurrences of the Hebrew term Mashiach, less than a half dozen refer to a figure who would come well after the Old Testament period. This is because Mashiach means “anointed” and is used throughout the Old Testament for Israelite kings and priests. In other words, you can’t get a theology of the Messiah from the word translated “Messiah.”
This fact notwithstanding, Jews living before the time of Jesus had a well-developed profile of what God’s Messiah would be and do when he arrived. This was possible because the profile wasn’t built on a word study of Mashiach. Instead, it was built by clustering important concepts and observing how those concepts appeared together in various passages to form patterns of usage.
The concept of messiah revolves around ideas associated with the restoration of Eden, faithfulness to God’s commands, servanthood, kingship, and a priestly lineage outside Aaron and the tribe of Levi. Words associated with these themes tend to cluster in passages scattered through the Old Testament.
Careful Bible study, therefore, requires the student to detect and trace threads. Learn to observe terms that occur with other terms. Clustering patterns are often parts of a more remarkable theological tapestry. Biblical writers didn’t write unintentionally.
· Insight Sixty-Four: The Bible Really Can Mean Exactly What It Says
Bible study can be...