What
follows is the revelation of God’s ministry of reconciling man to Himself. It
contains information about heaven but is not about heaven. It contains
information about the kingdom of God on earth and the spiritual kingdom of God
but it is not primarily about those subjects as much information is left out.
It contains science, history, and other topics but it is not specifically about
those subjects. It is the revelation of what God has done, is doing, and will
do, not about what man has done, is doing, and will do. This is one reason why
the so-called great men of history get little or no mention. Alexander the
Great gets one reference as, “the king of Grecia,” in Daniel 8:21. The subject
matter is about God’s plan for mankind and how He responded to mankind’s
response to His reaching out to them.
As
we study the text of the Bible there are two things we must be aware of. As
educator and author, E.D. Hirsch wrote, the meaning of any text is what it
literally says. Anything you add to it or take from it beyond that may be its
significance to you or mean something different to you but it says what it
says. Another way of looking at this is the old saw, “a text without a context
is a pretext.”[1]
Don’t use the Bible, the foundation of your convictions, in a way that attacks
that foundation to suit an agenda you have; political, economic, social, or
just personal.
Additionally,
as we study the text of the Bible there are two questions which pose themselves
that we, at some point, must consider. As a scholar of Ancient Greece, Stephen
Todd, said about what a historian must consider when approaching an ancient
text, we must ask ourselves why it was written and then, why it was preserved.[2]
These
two sets of considerations will be very important in our study of the Bible,
which the story of God’s efforts at reconciling man, who has fallen away, to
Himself.
[1]
E.D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967).
[2] Stephen Todd, “The Use and Abuse of Attic Orators,” Greece & Rome, Second Series, Vol.
37, No. 2 (Oct., 1990), 164. (From a paper delivered at Magdalen College,
Oxford, in 1988.)
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