The Bible Speaks: The Bible is Literal, Figurative, and Personal

Well, good morning.

We're in our third week on a series talking about the uniqueness of the Bible.

In our first week, we talked about the authenticity of the Bible.

How did we end up with these books?

Why do we call this the Bible?

Why do we consider this to have authority in our lives?

Last week we talked about the power of the Bible.

How does that word and the scripture work in our lives and have power to change us?

And today I woke up excited to preach today because I'm preaching on something, 25 years of preaching, and I have never preached on this subject.

And yet, every time I or you read the Bible or hear the Bible, you are dealing with the topic of today, even though when I tell you the topic, you are gonna think this there's nothing more boring than this topic.

Because we're gonna talk about the literary genres in the Bible.

The literary genres of the Bible.

Here's what I mean: I have a box in my garage.

And as my children, as my three girls have given me Father's Day cards and birthday cards and different stuff like that throughout the years, you know, I read it, leave it on the kitchen counter for a while, and then I take it out to this box in the garage and I put it in this box in the garage.

I went out, I took a few pictures of kind of stuff that's in that box.

You know, the cuddle gift cards, one of my favorites.

So waiting for my wife to give me something like that.

That would be amazing.

That's a separate subject.

But you know, you got all sorts of different stuff like this.

But there's other types of writing that my girls have done, right?

Like in English class, they write stories.

They've written letters to friends, or they're away at camp and they've written a letter back to us.

At this point, for my oldest daughter, we're writing college essays, application essays.

All different types of literature.

Those are different literary genres.

The Bible is the same way.

There's all different literary genres that make up this book.

We have books of the Bible, but these books of the Bible are made up of literary genres.

Here's a little bit of an overview, a little bit of a seminary class here for us.

A little bit of an overview of types of literary genres.

When you hear the Bible or you read the Bible, you're doing your devotion, you are dealing with these things.

We have narrative history, which is storytelling, Genesis and Exodus.

We have poetry, which is Psalms and Song of Solomon, and we get parallelism, we get metaphor, we get emotion.

Proverbs is wisdom literature, practical lessons for reflecting on life.

We have prophecy writings in Isaiah and Jeremiah, that's poetry and narrative blend.

We have apocalyptic writings, that's what the book of Revelation is.

And that's symbolic visionary literature about the end of times.

We have legal material, right?

Detailed commands and statutes and ordinances.

The book of Leviticus filled with that.

And we have letters in the New Testament.

We see all sorts of letters that are written by Paul and James and Peter and John and doctrine, Christian living, pastoral teaching.

Let's start with this.

Point number one.

The Bible is filled with meaningful, literal, and figurative language.

Jesus uses figurative language when he teaches.

We read it in John 10.

Let's read it again.

Listen to the figurative language that's used.

John 10, 14 through 16.

I am the good shepherd.

I know my own, and my own know me, just as the Father knows me, and I know the Father, and I lay down my life for the sheep.

So you and I are a sheep, in verse 15.

And I have other sheep that are not of this fold.

I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice, so there will be one flock, one shepherd.

Now we know this is figurative language, and we know it because we know that you are not a sheep.

You're a person.

But Jesus says you're a sheep.

So he's using figurative language.

It's not literal.

Every word in the Bible is not literal.

It's figurative, it's a metaphor, but it's a metaphor for us to understand something that's true.

And that is like a shepherd to his sheep, is like Jesus to us.

Oh, Jesus cares for me.

Oh, oh, like a shepherd guides and protects and sacrifices himself for his sheep.

Oh, that's like how Jesus is for me.

He guides me.

And he cares for me and he protects me.

And he sacrifices himself for me.

Oh, just like a shepherd knows every sheep within his flock, Jesus knows every single one of us.

Oh, so this creator, God, who created everything, he's also personal.

We get all that from the figurative metaphor language, right?

The literary device teaches us that he knows us personally.

We get that all from the metaphor.

All right, point number two is this the Bible is filled with meaningful literary genres.

In the mid-1900s, C.S.

Lewis was a British scholar, theologian.

He wrote all sorts of books.

He sold more than a hundred million books.

He's probably the most famous Christian writer that's ever historically lived.

He's most famous for two different books, Mere Christianity, which is a nonfiction teaching book.

And then a total different genre, The Chronicles of Narnia, which is allegory, fiction, parable.

And he wrote other literary genres.

He wrote letters in a book called Letters to Malcolm.

He wrote Personal Narrative, which a biography called Surprised by Joy.

After his wife passed away, he wrote another biography called A Grief Observed.

He wrote poetry in his book that was published called Spirits in Bondage.

You see what I'm getting at?

One guy writing different literary genres that make up his work.

And yet all those works are all for one purpose.

Who is this God?

What does he think of me?

And how do I walk with him?

Now let's nerd out even more.

In 1987, a theologian named Trimper Longman wrote a book called Literary Approaches to Biblical Interpretation.

Not your evening reading, right?

But incredibly important because every time you have the Bible taught to you or read to you, or you hear it, or you read it, all of us are making certain decisions about what we're hearing.

And this actually can explain why you were taught certain things at certain churches in the past.

Longman says this.

But we don't want to claim everything is literal, because then we have to be sort of absurd.

Here's what he says we want to learn with literary sensitivity and theological integrity.

Longman teaches that by recognizing the literary genre you're reading or hearing, you can better understand the Bible.

Right?

You don't have to think yourself an actual sheep.

You can understand that's a metaphor and you can learn from that.

Now, on the spectrum of literal to figurative, we can somewhat think about this as conservative to liberal, not politically, but theologically.

Typically, the more literal that you treat different passages, the more conservative you are.

And typically the more figurative you treat different passages, the more liberal you become.

And all of us are on this spectrum somewhere.

Every church you've ever been to is on this spectrum somewhere.

I am conservative side of midpoint.

Just that's where I'm at.

You're somewhere else, we're all on this somewhere, but that's where I'm at.

And so that means when I read the book of Revelation, I treat it as an apocalyptic literary genre, not entirely literal, which means I don't believe in a rapture before a thousand-year reign of Christ.

We talked about this when we went through the book of Revelation a couple years ago.

Now, in Southern evangelical America, what's been taught in the last hundred, two hundred years is predominantly that premillennialist view.

There's a rapture, there's a thousand years reign of Christ.

Now, where do we get that?

Literary genre.

So we end up believing what we believe based on literary genre.

And you can listen to our Revelation series to get all that broken out.

Here's my point the genre has an effect on you.

What you understand the genre to be, is the book of Revelation literal?

If so, you'll probably end up being a premillennialist.

And maybe you are.

That's great.

If you believe it's apocalyptic and some of it's figurative, you may end up being a covenantal amillennialist like me and not believe in a rapture.

How do you see Genesis chapter 1?

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

Are the days literally 24-hour periods?

Or is Genesis 1 poetry?

And the day is a season of time.

Well, I believe that Genesis 1 is poetry, Genesis 2 and 3 are historical narrative.

So what that means for me, it means I believe a day in Genesis 1 is a season of time, which means that I'm not a literal creationist, I'm a progressive creationist.

I believe there's a progressive process between these seasons of time.

And then we get to say Genesis 3, I believe that's literal.

It's a historical narrative.

So I believe in a literal snake.

I believe in a literal Adam and a literal Eve.

Listen to the difference between, say, Genesis 1 and Genesis 3.

Just listen to it of how it's written.

Genesis 1, 3 through 6.

And God said, Let there be light, and there was light.

And God saw that the light was good.

And God separated the light from darkness.

God called the light day, and the darkness he called night.

And there was evening and there was morning the first day.

And God said, Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.

And it goes on, right?

And God said, and he saw it was good.

And God said, and he saw it was good.

And God said, he saw it was good.

We get this repetition, structured pattern, and rhythm.

It's poetry.

It's Hebrew poetry.

That same writer in Genesis 2 and 3 switches genres.

Total different feel in 2 and 3 than chapter 1.

Because he's switching genres.

He moves into a historical narrative, storytelling.

Now listen to this.

Quite different of Genesis 3, 1 through 7.

And listen for, you hear plot, you hear dialogue, you hear sequence of events.

Genesis 3.1.

Now the serpent was more crafty than the other beasts of the field that the Lord God had made.

He said to the woman, Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?

And the woman said to the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it lest you die.

But the spirit the serpent said to the woman, You shall not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.

And she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.

Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew they were naked.

And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loinclaws.

You could hear the difference, total different genre, different style of writing.

And here's what we can learn.

We let the genre shape how you read and what you expect a passage to teach you.

Here's just some ideas, rough guidelines.

Narrative invites us to see God's work and history and learn from the characters.

Poetry invites us to see God's attributes and personally worship or lament.

Wisdom literature invites us to learn and apply general life principles.

The law reveals God's moral standards, call for obedience, our need of God's grace.

The epistles, all those letters in the New Testament, they explain the life of Jesus, our need of Jesus, and teach the Christian life.

And all these genres, all these genres are telling one story.

That we don't have the ability to get our acts together.

We are sinners in need of a rescue of God's grace to us, this one-way love to us and Jesus.

Now, what we talked about last week is how we're constantly bringing meaning from what that author meant thousands of years ago to those people at that time, and we're bridging that over to my life in 2025 and Marietta.

And we're making that bridge constantly.

I showed you the image of this bridge in India.

There's these Casa people in India.

Their land is filled with mountains and rivers and gorges.

It's one of the wettest places in the world.

It makes construction extremely difficult.

And the way that they've solved bridge building is they plant a rubber fig tree on each side of a river, and then they build a bridge out of the roots.

And what we said is that this bridge that we are making of what the Bible meant 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, 4,000, we're bridging that over to Marriott in 2020.

It's a beautiful image for us to understand.

We're constantly bridging.

And so we said there's two bridges that we use in Bible study.

The first bridge is this them to us.

What did this mean to those people at that time?

Now, part of that, what we call exegesis, part of that work is literary genre.

Now, part of that can be very overwhelming.

Even at this point, you're like, hey, I just want to read my Bible.

Like, this is a lot.

Like, just let me read my Bible.

But that's also why there's people who've given their lives to this.

You don't have to do all the work, but you can find experts who have written theologians that write things called commentaries.

For me, I use John Stott commentaries because I don't want 30 pages on two verses.

I want like four pages on a passage.

I need somebody who's done the work to bring it down to me a little bit.

There's a commentator series that I use all the time called the Bible Speech Today.

Now, next week we're going to talk about the Bible as one story.

And then the next week after that, Labor Day weekend, Pastor Matt's going to preach and he's going to help resource us.

Resource us.

How do we study the Bible?

Like, how do we do that?

Where do we do that?

What does it look like?

What should I use?

Like, like if I want to figure out what the literary genre is, how do I even figure that out?

Is there somebody who's like studied ancient literature?

Yes, there's people who've studied ancient literature that can be helpful to us.

So the first bridge is all that exegesis.

What did it mean to those people?

Okay, how does that fit into the Bible story of Jesus?

And then what does that mean to me?

What does that mean to me?

We're all doing this work.

I don't want to do it, I just want to read my Bible.

No, you're doing it.

You're already doing it.

We're all doing it all the time.

That's the first bridge, 2,000 years ago, to us today.

The second bridge we talked about is from the head to the heart.

That we're meditating those scriptures past just information?

Oh, well, that's the historical dare to da da da.

No, we're gonna get past just information down into our hearts.

What does this say about God as Him being my creator and my Savior?

What does this say about me?

About my created worth and yet sinful condition.

What does this say about my need of God's grace in Jesus?

How can my heart trust more in God's goodness to me in Jesus?

So we learn something in our minds and then we're meditating it down into our hearts.

And point number three is this the Bible is literal, the Bible's figurative, and it's always personal.

There's a story in Luke 24 where two disciples are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus.

Here's an image of that walk.

If you're to walk it today, this is what it would look like, this road.

It's about a seven-mile walk.

These two disciples, they're puzzled, they're confused.

Jesus has died.

They've heard that he's risen again, he's alive, but but they're saddened by what happened, they're confused, what have they heard?

And then Jesus comes alongside them and walks with them, but for some reason they don't recognize them.

Now, this is a historical narrative, literary genre, so we treat all this as completely literal.

These three men are walking down the street.

Jesus begins to converse with them.

He begins to explain the scriptures to them.

He explains Moses, he explains the prophets.

He's weaving together, helping them see how the scriptures are telling a story of their need of him.

And then we get Luke 24, verse 32.

Luke 24:32

They said to each other, these two disciples, did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road?

While he opened to us the scriptures?

Isn't that interesting?

He teaches in the scriptures, he's explaining a lot.

So they're getting a lot of mental information, but a bridge occurs down to their hearts.

It becomes impersonal.

Did not our hearts hurt?

It always becomes personal.

The disciples are saying, I had a life-changing encounter when these scriptures came alive to me.

They felt accepted and loved in this Jesus.

And what do the scriptures really mean?

Well, we summed up last week is what John Calvin said 500 years ago.

He said all scripture, when correctly understood, testifies of Christ.

See, Jesus is all the forgiveness you need for all the ways Sam said it in the liturgy of our confession prayer.

We don't love you.

Jesus, we don't love you like we should.

We don't love our neighbors.

We just like that's that's enough today to feel like, yeah, okay, I'm not living up to what God has asked me.

I don't love God like I should, and I don't love my neighbor.

At least I love myself.

I love myself a lot.

I need Jesus for the forgiveness of all that sin, plus a lot of other stuff.

And not only that, I'm not like starting at zero, I'm starting as a beloved child, daughter, son of God because Jesus' righteousness is given to me.

And what that means is it means your devotion to the Bible and your ability to perfectly understand the literary genre and get that homilytical bridge over to what it means for you in 2025, Mary.

Wonderful, I want you to learn that, I want you to get better at that, I want the scriptures to come alive to you.

But that has nothing to do with how much God loves you.

Or forgives you or how righteous you are.

The length of your Bible study, how deep it is, how frequent it is, has nothing to do with how much God loves you.

Nothing to do.

Because how much God loves you and accepts you, and how forgiven you are and how righteous you are, that's a whole separate thing because that's completely in Jesus.

He just can't love you anymore.

Because he already loves you fully.

Something burns within us when we hear something like that.

When we're relieved of the achievement, performative Christian faith.

Something stirs within us.

That story of the scriptures, when we see it's not a book of list of rules for us to do, but even the rules are either an expression of how much God loves me or a way to break us down for us to see that we need Jesus, that all this is one story of God's rescue.

The more we see, doesn't that something in your heart sort of come alive that you could be like you could be loved like that before you get your act together, before you understand the Bible, before you have your perfect Bible studies and understand the literary genres of the Bible, like before all of that, you could be completely, perfectly loved.

There's a safety there because it's not based on your performance or your devotion or your spiritual discipline.

Author and Pastor Tim Keller says this about Luke chapter 24.

Luke 24 · chapter mention

I'll close with this quote.

You have in your heart a longing for purpose, a longing for infinite love, a longing for significance and security that nothing in this world can possibly satisfy.

Your hearts are not going to be satisfied until you find him.

And the way you find him is when some particular scripture you see that it is really about him and what he has done.

Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, we're so thankful that our relationship with you is rooted in what you have done for us, not what we do for you, and that everything that we do for you, our love of others, our spiritual disciplines is not for love, but because we have already been fully loved by you and this Jesus, that Jesus really is enough for all the forgiveness we ever need and all the righteousness we ever need.

May we rest all the more in your sufficiency of Christ for us.

In his name we pray.

Amen.