WYC 2011: Alive Again!

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GYC West

Andy Im

Fanciful Interpretations: Profound or Dumbfounded?

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much for continuing to guide and bless throughout WYC.

We pray that you will bless today's meeting as we share some principles on hermeneutics, some common mistakes or errors that are made.

And we pray that you would lead us to truth.

And we thank you, Lord, we ask this in your name, amen.

All right, just as a little review, we ended off yesterday with thought inspiration.

How God inspired the thoughts of the prophets, He did not dictate each word.

And that's generally a new idea for many Adventists because they have this notion that God grabbed the hand of the Bible writer.

He wrote in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Some even go further as to think that he grabbed the hand of those who wrote the King James Version of the Bible as well and dictated every word.

And we see in Ellen White's own writing that that is a faulty assumption.

Ellen White says in First Selected Messages, page 21, just to reiterate, it is not the words of the Bible that are inspired, but the men that were inspired.

Inspiration acts not on the man's words or his expressions, but on the man himself, who, under the influence of the Holy Ghost, is imbued with thoughts.

Nevertheless, the words receive the impress of the individual mind.

The divine mind and will is combined with the human mind and will.

Thus the utterance of the man are the words of God." And so a very, very powerful statement in the context of how the Bible was written from the pen of the prophets of the past.

Same book, page 29, 21 rather, the Bible is written by inspired men, but it is not God's mode of thought and expression.

So some assumptions that we find with this is that in terms of the words used in the Bible, they are not absolutely, they're not absolute, there's not, or we should say that They are not the words that God would have used, per se, if he had dictated or written the Bible himself.

They are how the Bible writers express the truths that God revealed to them.

"'It is that of humanity, ' Ellen White goes on to say, in terms of the mode of thought and expression of scripture.

Men will often say, such an expression is not like God and that's true because sometimes you find ways of expressing truth especially in the Old Testament that you find like hate why did God use the word hate?

And we have to remember that God didn't choose the word hate, but that was the form of expression at the time in that context that the Bible writer used to express the fact that Rachel was preferred over Leah, for example.

However, God has not put himself in words, in logic, in rhetoric on trial in the Bible.

The writers of the Bible were God's Pen men, they weren't his pen.

And so there's a lot of implications that spring out from this thought, but we don't have time to go there.

I want to move on into today's talk, and that's on fanciful interpretations, profound or dumbfounded.

Have you ever actually heard a sermon and the speaker says something that you just wonder how in the world he arrived at that conclusion because it's highly imaginative.

It's profound, it's truthful, but you don't know how he connected the verse with the thought.

And so we're going to look at some principles because what we need to ensure is that although we're preaching truth when we're using the Bible text that that we're interpreting it correctly and that's so important 2nd Timothy chapter 2 verse 15 Be diligent to present yourself approved to God a Worker who does not need to be ashamed rightly Dividing the word of truth and when these words are used rightly dividing the assumption is is that you can wrongly?

And so we need to make sure and ensure that we are rightly dividing the word of truth.

Peter goes on further to say that there are detrimental consequences if we misinterpret Scripture.

If you go to 2 Peter 3, verses 15 through 17, I read in verse 3, our beloved brother, Peter, speaking of Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you as also in all his epistles, speaking in them, in them in which are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of scriptures.

You therefore, beloved, since you know this beforehand, Since you know this beforehand, beware, Peter says, lest you also fall from your own steadfastness, being led away with the error of the wicked.

So would you think that having the right or correct principles of interpretation would be important to know.

We think things connect and are going to connect.

As you can see in this picture, they miscalculated.

A bridge they were building across a body of water and found that as they came closer, there was no connection.

So common mistakes in the interpretation of scripture have to do with how we connect or how we interpret them.

And I find this 1 to be a pretty important 1.

Now, how many of you have read the Bible and you are in the zone, right?

This is your day that God is revealing to you this brand new truth that nobody else has, right?

You're just like, I am the first discoverer, like Columbus, in this Bible truth.

And like this man, you're on cloud 9, cloud 10, as a matter of fact.

And what we have to remember that just because you're in the zone and you're feeling it, it doesn't mean what's being revealed is truth, necessarily, or from the Holy Spirit.

And we have to keep that in mind, that we have to guard ourselves and test it in light of truth.

And here you have a picture of a bunch of Snapple drinks, like Voltage and Spark and velocity.

And as a matter of fact, 1 day I went, I was super thirsty, I was driving home, and from somewhere, I don't even remember, but I went into a convenience store, and I went to a place, and these fruit drinks looked really good.

I was in such dire thirst, I just grabbed, I don't know, I don't even remember which 1 it was.

Probably could have been Voltage or Spark or Velocity.

So I grabbed 1 of these drinks and I went home and I was just drinking this thing.

It was late, it was like 10 o'clock or something.

And here I am reading my scriptures and I have this energy, you know?

And I started getting all these revelations of scripture.

I felt like God was speaking to my heart, and he was giving me this increased energy.

And I studied the Bible from, I don't know, 10 or whatever to like 2 or 3 in the morning, the whole time thinking that God was giving me this burst of energy.

Around like 3 o'clock, though, I started getting a little suspicious.

So I get a little suspicious, and I went to the trash can or wherever it was, and I said, you know what, let me take a better look at what I just drank.

So I went into the trash can, I dug it up, and sure enough, that voltage drink that I drank had caffeine in it?

And so, what I attributed to the Holy Spirit, what I even felt was from the Holy Spirit, actually, caffeine had a role to play in that.

And so, and that's why I'm just saying that sometimes something can feel so good and yet not necessarily be, you know, what you think it is.

You often see this in relationships where you often think God is leading me and you feel it but in fact he's not.

Even though it feels so right it can oftentimes be so wrong.

And that's why in Acts of the Apostles, page 287, in the words of Ellen White, she says, impressions alone are not a safe guide.

The enemy often persuades men to believe that it is God who is guiding them, when in reality, they are following only human impulse.

Place a check on even what you feel is being revealed by God by going to scripture, continuing to dig and search for these truths.

Another common error, so that's the first 1.

The second 1 is that you can actually use the Bible concordance incorrectly, or misuse, I should say, the Strong's Concordance.

And I highly endorse using the Strong's Concordance.

But oftentimes what you do is you look up words, right?

For example, you look up words And you know, it's fun.

You open up a concordance and you want to find everything there is to know about sanctification.

So you go to the concordance and you just start scrolling down And you just go down verse to verse to verse to verse and just keep reading everything that is said about sanctification.

And then you start, what we start doing is start connecting these verses almost like a chain, like some seamless chain.

Because the English word sanctification is the same throughout.

What we need to recognize, however, is that even though the English word may be the same, the Greek word may be different.

And so we may be making connections that are not actually in there in the original.

Now the thoughts may of course be connected there and rightly so, but we have to be careful of that.

So that's something that I think many Bible students need to keep in mind that when you're making connections, don't just make sure that the English words connect, but also the Greek words are also connecting.

Then you're building a stronger case, especially when you're building a sequential, building point upon point type of progression that's leading to a conclusion.

And nowhere more is this important or where it finds its relevance is when you're doing prophecy, right?

When you're doing prophecy and you're connecting words in Revelation to words in the Old Testament or other places in the New Testament, you have to make sure that the words are actually the same, that the context gives you a causal connection there.

And so the other note that I wanna add is that, for example, with the King James version, don't just assume that because the word sanctification is used in 1 portion and it's used in a different portion that you can make that direct equatable correlation.

And I think that's 1 of the assumptions that those who do have a KJV only, or an NASB only, or an ESV only, When you have the assumption that that version is God's version and therefore every word is verbally dictated by God, then you assume that you can make those connections when in fact you can't because the Greek, which is the original version of the Bible or the original text would state a different word or wording.

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Fanciful Interpretations: Profound or Dumbfounded?

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