A Journey Through the Bible: From Misunderstandings to Revelations

Awesome, all right.

Well, good morning and welcome to Madison Church.

I'm Steven Leet, pastor, and I've been really excited for the series that we are going to begin today.

I've been excited for a long time because before it was a series at our church, it was actually a book written by a pastor and leader named Dan Kimball, and when I got the email that this book was coming out, I was very excited about it.

I actually I pre-ordered it because I was like this sounds like such a good book for so many reasons.

One of those is because there's just so much misinformation.

There's so much misinformation about the Bible out there, and if you have a smartphone or a tablet or a computer, if you have any way of getting connected to the internet, you have experienced some of that misinformation.

And what that misinformation does to us, it doesn't just affect our brains, it affects us spiritually because with all of the misinformation that's going on and around God, and specifically the Bible, it hurts people's faith and belief in God.

That's what the misinformation of this text does to our faith.

It hurts it, it certainly doesn't help it, and that's just part of the reason why the Bible is such an interesting collection of books.

It's not just good for wisdom, that, hey, I need a positive word.

What would God say?

It's not just about being entertained with some stories from the Old Testament.

The reason the Bible is so interesting and I would even say powerful today is because of how many, how people react to it.

It's thousands of years old and yet today it's still relevant.

I mean, I want you to think about all the books in your own personal collection.

How many of them were written 2000 years ago and that you read once a week, or you aspire to read once a day, or you have read more than you know a couple of times and perhaps that doesn't describe your relationship with the Bible, and that's okay, that's okay.

But I want to get it there because this book is powerful and I can actually prove it to you, because this week I posted this graphic, this nice little how to know, not that one, how to post it, this nice graphic, and we promoted it on Facebook.

If you don't know, it's like 20 bucks.

You just tell Facebook okay, here's 20 bucks for the next three days.

Give me some more views and Facebook will do that.

They'll pump it up and, oh my gosh, this post, it blew up.

See, this is a shameless plug.

If you weren't following us on Facebook, you really missed out on some good drama this week.

Okay, so find us on Facebook and follow us.

We had people commenting on this.

There were young people who were commenting on it.

We also had old people commenting on it.

We had people who would identify as a Christian, a follower of Jesus that's who I am.

They were commenting on it.

We had people who were staunch atheists commenting on it.

Thankfully, my life wasn't threatened this week there.

We still got more time in this series for that to happen.

It hasn't happened yet, though.

There were some people who called us a fake church, a phony body of believers.

Again, I wasn't specifically targeted, but that's just this time.

It's happened in the past.

There is even some profanity.

I think that there might have been one this morning.

I haven't had a chance to censor out yet.

Why?

Why do people do that?

They're on Facebook one minute posting a picture of their kid or their dogs or what they're doing on a nice Saturday afternoon.

Then this pops up and they're triggered.

How not to read the Bible Young, old, believer, non-believer, triggered angry.

It's a 2000 year old book.

How can they have that kind of a reaction today?

How can it provoke people to anger today?

If you've been with us, let's say it's not your first week.

Let's say you've been with us two weeks.

Let's say you've been with us for a year.

You know that we talk about the Bible every week.

Every week we talk about the Bible.

What makes this week any different?

I think it's simply this statement how not to read the Bible?

It's provocative.

It makes us a little bit defensive because maybe the insinuation, maybe what we're going to talk about the next six weeks, is when we say how not to read the Bible is the way that you read the Bible.

It makes us defensive, no matter where we're coming from.

Even if we don't believe in the Bible or we do.

We believe that what's written in it is God's word or we don't.

No matter what happens, what we're talking about is very challenging to every single one of us how not to read the Bible?

Very challenging, it shakes us.

That's what's going to make this series so impactful.

If you come into this series with an open mind and the humility that we read about in the New Testament, the Bible, if you come into it with the humility that maybe I'm not perfect, maybe I have some ideas about the biblical texts that aren't true.

If I can be humble and if I can seek God first and truth, then maybe at the end of the six weeks, if you can do that, I believe the Bible is going to be.

You're going to have a new and vibrant relationship with the biblical texts.

But back to that thing about the provoking emotions.

You may not believe anything that's in the text and you get ticked off.

We have some of those comments and you may believe everything and we get angry.

And it's not just at the text.

What we found out this week.

It wasn't just at the text, it was people to people.

Have you thought about it like this?

Like Adam, what you think about the Bible might make Dan really mad at you personally, and what Lindsay thinks about the Bible might irritate Sam and he may say I can't even be a part of a faith community with her anymore.

I'm done.

I'm done.

Isn't that just so interesting that this book that we have access to we put it all around you?

It evokes such an emotion out of us that it's not just about the Bible.

We personalize it.

Whatever I think about the Bible, what you think about the Bible.

Now I'm personifying it to you.

If I think it's dumb and you believe in it, therefore I think you are dumb.

But if I like it and you don't like it, well, I think you just don't have enough faith.

We personify it and there's no other book in literature that we do that with right.

Like I mean it's not.

Like if Nicole was reading Green Eggs and Ham and I'm like I hate that book, green Eggs and Ham, like I don't like Nicole anymore, we would say that's dumb.

Like why would you do that?

Right, but the Bible, it's completely different.

It's not just Dr Seuss literature.

It's powerful and we should talk about that and we are going to.

It's so ironic to me that so much of the Old and New Testaments speak to a loving God who pursues you and me, and it speaks so much to how we should treat each other and love each other.

And yet, even those of us who study the Bible, we can struggle with it.

We can read Jesus say love your enemies.

And we can agree with that, highlight it, underline it, maybe even post it up on Instagram Love your enemies.

But then you go on Facebook and you see that somebody calls us a phony church, right or something like that, and we get defensive and visceral about it and we attack people.

No, I'm not saying that happened here because it didn't.

You can still look on the post.

Nobody was attacking.

But it does happen and we have to say why, like, if we read the book right, how to read the Bible?

If we read it right, we would know that we're supposed to love everybody, including our enemies, even if they don't agree with us about the Bible, even if they don't agree with us about God, even if they attack us about what we think about the Bible or what we think about God.

We're told to love each other.

And so let's talk about how not to read the Bible, which, as I mentioned, is based on the book and teachings of Dan Kimball.

But it's not just Dan Kimball, we're also going to be reading the Bible.

Don't worry, this isn't a book club.

We're going to be reading the Bible.

Now, why this series will be relevant for you is because you might be a follower of Jesus, and the more you study the Bible, the more questions you have.

Naturally, you start reading it and you start getting into some of these weird passages, these weird stories, these things that are hard to understand.

You say, well, I've got questions about that, how does that work out?

Or you have someone in your life, a family member or friend, someone you love, and they might be open to God.

They might be open to Jesus, but, man, this Bible, it's just kind of weird.

And it's because of the Bible that they can't get through to God.

Okay, so that series is for them too.

That might be actually you too.

There are people who abandoned their faith.

They believed in God.

They started reading the Bible.

We talked about this a couple weeks ago.

Different atheists, who have quotes about how like they're, wrote to atheism, to deconstructing their faith, to leaving.

The faith occurred after studying the Bible.

People didn't just become an atheist because they woke up one day and say you know, I don't, I guess I don't want to believe in God, but they were reading the Bible and they didn't understand or they misunderstood and they walked away from God.

Now, regardless of where you're at on that journey believer, non-believer, you're just checking things out.

The Bible has been a stumbling block and I intend to try to move that over the next six weeks.

The big step.

It's hard, no promises, but we're gonna try it and I think that, again, we come with an open mind.

We're gonna do a couple things.

One, we're gonna learn what to do when we do come to wild, crazy sounding weird passages in the Bible.

That's what we're gonna do we're gonna read them.

We're gonna read a lot of weird passages over the next six weeks and we're gonna talk about them, and I think that that's gonna be helpful.

Some of the questions that we're gonna ask is God-pro violence.

Have you ever read the Old Testament?

That should be one of your questions.

You're like man, there's a lot of blood and murder in the Old Testament that God seems to give the old thumbs up on.

How does that?

And you're like well, I read Jesus and he kind of seems kind of like peace and he died for everyone.

And again, going back to the enemies, jesus said you should love your enemies.

But if Jesus is God and God is Jesus, then what was Jesus doing in the Old Testament?

Calling for complete genocide at times.

Is the Bible anti-women?

Well, we read some of the New Testament.

Paul has some kind of weird opinions about women.

So does that mean that the Bible is anti-women?

Is the Bible anti science?

Does God endorse slavery?

Again, going back to the Old Testament we have rules about how to treat slaves and who should be enslaved and who shouldn't.

These are the things that, as people who later become atheists or maybe you're a believer and you're reading these things you begin to struggle with, because you come here on Sunday morning and we talk about Jesus a lot from the biblical text and you go in your own reading and you're like this seems just so different.

That's what we're going to talk about.

As for today, we're going to talk about unicorns.

You guys know what a unicorn is, right, got this lovely picture.

I was surprised to find out that unicorns are mentioned in the Bible nine times.

Unicorns mentioned in the Bible nine times.

Check out numbers 2322 of the King James Version, which reads God brought them out of Egypt.

He hath, as it were, the strength of a unicorn.

Now, as I mentioned, this isn't an anomaly.

It's not like Stephen found one verse and said oh, unicorns, let's talk about it.

It happens eight other times.

Where are the cat lovers in the room?

Go ahead, be proud.

You guys love cats, right?

Cats are mentioned zero times.

Just FYI, I'm a dog person, in case you couldn't tell.

Okay, unicorns nine times, cats zero.

Let's build a theology around that, okay, no, I'm just kidding.

Now, for those of you who aren't sure or you don't know, okay, unicorns aren't real.

I just feel the need that I need to state that they're not real.

Unicorns are mythical creatures.

They've never existed outside of fantasy.

I know it's sad.

I'm sorry to bring so much bad news to you.

If you didn't know that today unicorns aren't real.

But unicorns are in the Bible nine times.

So does that mean, if I read the Bible, that I have to believe in unicorns, which aren't real?

Well, if all you did was read one verse and you built your entire theology on this one verse, then yeah, I would probably say you have to believe in unicorns.

But that's one of the ways that we shouldn't read the Bible.

We shouldn't read the Bible like that.

We don't build a theology off of a single Bible verse.

And then our viral society, in which fancy looking graphics with words that make people either feel good or enrages them.

These get really popular and what begins to happen is, even though we have a book of the Bible with thousands and thousands of verses, we tend to pick one and build our entire theology, what we think about God and the universe, and send.

We tend to build everything around this one Bible verse, and we should not do that.

Greg Kokol is an author and an apologist.

An apologist is somebody who gets paid to defend something.

That's why he's like a lawyer to.

The faith is what this guy is, and he says if there was one bit of wisdom that he would give you and me today, that would serve us the rest of our lives.

He said never read a Bible verse.

Never read a Bible verse.

All right, series is over.

Thank you for coming out today.

We're just not going to read it.

That's okay.

No, that's not at all what he is saying.

What Kokol is saying here again is this idea don't take one Bible verse and then put more weight on this one than all of the other ones.

Don't take one Bible verse and then cancel out 10 others.

Don't take one Bible verse and say this is the only one that matters, or because I don't like this one, because the opposite can happen to what I don't like this Bible verse.

So I'm going to build my theology around this on why this can't be true or why it shouldn't be true.

Now, all of that said, let's pause for a moment and take a little detour.

What is the Bible, because that might be what you're thinking right now.

Well, what is the Bible?

The Bible literally translates that word back in Greek as a collection of writings, a very similar word to the one they use for library.

So when we talk about the Bible, a lot of us come into it and we have this idea that the Bible is a book and it physically is a book.

Right, you can see it right next to you.

It's physically a book, but a proper understanding of what the Bible is is a library of books.

It's a collection of writings.

It has several genres, such as history and the gospels.

It has the prophets, it has the law.

It was written by over 40 authors, all these writings in the Bible, over 40 authors, over 1500 years.

So there's no other book in history quite like this, because one nobody has lived 1500 years to write a book just like this 1500 years, 40 authors, the collection of our faith.

Now, one of the other things that we need to kind of think about is that the Bible was written for us and not to us.

I need you to think about this.

It's a little change in vernacular, but it is so important, unless you were a Jew or Gentile living in the first century, none of the New Testament was written to you.

You're not sitting at a church in Galatia, you're sitting at a church in Madison, and the last I checked, there's no letter written to the Church of Madison by Paul in our New Testament.

If there were, this is a completely different topic, but it's not, and so we have to think that the Bible was written for us, not to us, and this is good.

Because this is good, because that means it's relevant to every person who has ever lived, because the Bible was written to you and me today, the Church of Madison in 2022.

Think about the last 2000 years of people who wouldn't have benefited from that.

I mean, you and I will talk and we'll say the Bible is good for all people, all nations, all times, any culture, any language.

But if there was a letter written to us 2000 years later, god was God was quite late in pumping one of those books out, and so when we read the Bible, we need to read it, as this is for us, but not necessarily to us.

What the problem here is is that we can get so bogged down in our Western mindsets, the United States, where we can be reading from the prophets, reading from the New Testament, reading from Revelation, and think that, well, it's clear as day that this is what's going to happen.

What you run the risk of doing is you're reading it as to me, that this was written to me, but we really, when we look at the prophets, we're like, well, no, they were writing to someone specifically, and this is for me now to learn about.

This is, again, good news.

It's good news because we want to have a global view of the Bible.

We're not the only ones who have it.

There are churches in Africa and India.

We support church planters in Iraq and Ukraine who have the Bible and their languages and are studying it, and it is just as relevant to them as it is to us.

And I would want to give them the same advice, which is don't just read it through your Ukrainian mindset, because there are verses about war and the second coming and all of that.

So they may be thinking this is it.

We're living in the end days, but there might be someone, let's say, living in Hawaii and life is pretty sweet right now, and they may not feel that way, and so we need to develop a cross-cultural understanding of the Bible, that it is written for us, not to us.

Now I want to spend the rest of our time together going through the entire Bible, not lying.

We're going to go Genesis, through Revelation today and I'm going to preach on one page of the Bible.

I bet you've never had taught in church and so, if you want to follow along with me in your Bibles, we're going to the table of contents.

We're going to the table of contents.

That should be on the first couple of pages for you, if you need a hint.

It begins with Genesis and it ends with Revelation.

It's got about 64 other books names in between those two.

So we're going to the table of contents and I always, always, always encourage you right in your Bible.

So grab that green pen that you have and go ahead and jot in them.

The first thing that if you're going to jot it's kind of hard to see mine from way up here, but if you want to draw three lines going to Genesis, three lines, because what we're going to see is that there are three different acts, three different movements, kind of like a play three different scenes that take place in Genesis and the first act, if you want to write this down again, just left of Genesis or however your Bible is set up right.

Act one, genesis one and two.

And this is when God creates.

Now, whether you believe that the earth was created about six, eight thousand years ago, in seven days, or six days, with a day of rest for the seventh, or you believe that creation was brought together by God over millions of years using the evolutionary process, whatever it is, whatever you believe, the message is the same the universe was created by an intelligent designer.

God is behind the universe and in this act we see that.

We see that God creates everything and it is good.

We see that God dwells with humans, kind of like how they won't see again until Jesus comes, but they're in the garden, they're in this perfect place and they just walk and they talk with God.

There are people and God on this planet that you and I walk on right now and they were living together.

This is act one.

Act two begins in Genesis three.

We don't know how long, necessarily, you know, depending again on your view if it was six day creation or millions of years.

However long act one lasted, in Genesis three, we see act two begin, which is when humans rebel.

People are given free will.

You have free will, you can make some really good choices and a lot of you have figured out you can make some really bad ones.

But people have free will and despite having a lot of good chances, a lot of good opportunities, a lot of good choices, despite being able to walk around with God and talk to God, humans choose what they want to do.

They sin, they break the relationship with God.

So instead of living in harmony with God, they choose to rule apart from God and this breaks the relationship not just with God, but it ruins the perfect earth.

You see, before act two, before Genesis three, there was no murder, there was no war, there was no violence, there was no abuse, there was no rape, there was no slavery, etc.

Now all of the bad stuff now on earth permeates like a cancer because of sin.

This is act 2, and that happens over the course of Genesis 3 and 11.

Act 3 begins in Genesis 12 and it goes all the way through Malachi.

So if you're taking notes again, we're going to go and you can just draw a line straight from Genesis down, down, down through Malachi.

This is act 3, and what happens in act 3 is that redemption is initiated.

God doesn't abandon people after sin, after we break the universe, as it were.

God doesn't abandon us.

Because of God's great love for me and you, for God's great love for all of us, for any person who has ever lived, god begins to initiate redemption.

Now, this doesn't happen right away.

Like I said, in Genesis 12, it begins, and what happens in Genesis 12 is that God comes to Abraham and says look at the sky and look at all the stars, and that's what I'm going to do for you.

This is going to be your people.

They're going to be as numerous as the stars in the sky.

I'm going to send a savior at some point.

It's initiated in Genesis 12 and thousands of years go by, all the way to Malachi, in which God is pursuing people but redemption isn't provided yet.

Then there is an intermission.

God goes mostly silent for about 400 years at the end of Malachi almost 400 years, I think a lot of us we can kind of relate to that sometimes, when we feel like God is silent or God isn't speaking.

What's going on?

We have to remember that between the old and new testaments, when a lot of us would look back and think that God was in his heyday just doing miracles on the earth.

There were still 400 years in which God was pretty silent, in which case we get to act four and it begins when Jesus is born.

Act four is Matthew, mark, luke and John.

That is act four, as I've written down in my table of contents.

Jesus lives the life we should have lived in act four.

He dies the death we all deserve because we make choices that break the universe and contribute to the harm and death of society.

Because you and I, we rebel every day, don't we?

Anytime we make a selfish choice, anytime we look the other way when we can help someone, anytime we withhold something that we should share, we're rebelling against God's way of life.

For us, now, this is disappointing.

As I've mentioned, as recently as last week, this was super disappointing for the Jews of that time because when they thought of the Messiah coming, they wanted someone with a sword and a shield.

They wanted a ruler on a horse who was going to overthrow the Roman Empire, give them power, right all the wrongs that had ever been done, put them in a place of power so that they could rule the earth.

You see, when they read the Old Testament, that's what they were looking forward to.

They didn't realize that that had nothing to do with how Jesus was going to do something.

Because let's go back to this concept, act one God creates the world and it is perfect.

And so when we're looking at act four and five and as we look forward into the future, we're not looking about a ruler who rules with a sword, who wants to dominate.

We're looking to go back into the garden, back into act one.

We go to act five, which begins in acts and goes all the way through Revelation 21.

Now, despite what a lot of people think, this is not where the story ends.

This is not where the story ends.

You might think before today that we are in an intermission.

You thought, well, yeah, so God went silent after Malachi for 400 years.

God has gone silent after Revelation for 2000 years.

That is not true.

In act five, what we see is that there is a mission to the world.

You see, redemption has been provided.

We are not in an intermission.

This isn't a long break for you and me, but now we have a mission into the world as we wait and anticipate Jesus's return to earth.

Act five begins in acts.

We are now sent into the world.

Our faith isn't just about getting saved and now waiting.

Our faith is about redemption and finding redemption and then being part of Jesus' hands and feet into the rest of the world, offering them the redemption that can only come through him.

Then we get to Revelation 22, in which we see redemption is completed.

This is when Jesus returns and all things are renewed and made new in creation.

It is a return to act one, but better than act one, because in this last act there will be no more war or violence or anything bad after his return.

That's the story of the Bible.

That's God's story, it's people's story.

It means it's your story, it's my story.

We have a part to play in the story.

Every single one of you have a part to play in the story.

That is the story of God.

And this leads us to a very important note about the Bible.

All biblical texts point to Jesus.

It all points to Jesus.

When you read the Old Testament, you ought to read them in light of the coming Messiah.

We read it in anticipation of Messiah, of Jesus.

Whether you're reading Joshua or Judges or Zechariah, we have to read it in light of them.

And when we read the New Testament, in a lot of ways we look back at Jesus.

When Paul is writing about the churches, he writes about Jesus.

We are looking back and when we read the end of Revelation, we look forward to Jesus.

Now, that doesn't mean that every word or every specific little sentence is speaking to or about Jesus, but it's all pointing toward Jesus.

Now let's just make this super practical fix.

I threw so much information.

I hope it feels like a lot, because it is a lot, but maybe you'll catch a little bit of it and that would be great.

But let's make it practical.

The challenge for you today and throughout the series is to simply again have an open mind.

An open mind and to seek God out with a spirit of worship.

And, in truth, if you're seeking God out and you're saying I'm going to put myself aside, then I know that throughout the next few weeks, god is going to reveal things to you that's going to again make your relationship with the Bible more robust and vibrant, no matter what you think, whether you think the Bible is some sort of fantasy, fanfiction, or you think that this is sacred.

Would you seek truth throughout the series?

Because I believe that if you seek truth, you will find God there.

The Bible itself does predict that people will distort it.

It does predict that, and that's not a surprise to any of us.

Dan Kimball, who writes the book, says the Bible says that people will distort it, and that reaffirms what we've been learning that it is critically important to invest time and effort into understanding how and how not to properly read and study the Bible.

Failure to do so is one of the primary reasons why people critique it and misunderstand it.

How to properly read the Bible is so, so important.

So, for application, join us the next five weeks Again.

We're going to keep diving into deeper and deeper stuff.

It's going to be good Read the Bible this week, but not just one verse.

We talked about that.

Read a verse but then read the paragraph that it's in, or read a verse and then read the chapter that it's in.

Or, if you're feeling really brave, read the verse and then read the book that it was written in.

But no matter what, I asked that this week you find time to read the Bible and not just a verse.

And then, finally, if you need a Bible, get a Bible.

We offer the blue and green ones are free.

You can just go ahead and take those home.

You don't need to ask permission there's no cost or you can download the Bible app on your tablet or your smartphone, and so the Bible app is a great resource too.

Now, before we end, I got to tie up a few things that I left hanging.

Okay, back to unicorns for a moment.

I really need a picture in front of this thing before we leave today.

When they were originally translating the King James version some 400 years ago, the translators of the King James version had a very difficult time with the Hebrew word.

The Hebrew word is Reem.

Okay, this is the Hebrew word, and the translators at the time had a very difficult time with it.

Why?

Well, back when the Old Testament texts were being written, reem was a catch all word like how we might use cattle, and it could describe a lot of different types of cows and bulls.

They would use this word to describe one horn or multi horned animals.

If it had a horn, it could be called Reem.

Now, again in King James time, 400 years ago, they see this like one horned animals, one horned animal, and they're looking around the world and they don't see them.

I don't know why they didn't think rhino.

Okay, let's just be clear.

They didn't think rhino, but they thought unicorns, that is, a one horned animal.

So they translated Reem, and anytime it comes up in the Hebrew Reem, they translated it as unicorn.

Why they were doing the best they could with what they knew about the world and the language at the time.

Now, thankfully, you and I are a few hundred years down the road.

Thankfully, our understanding of Hebrew is a little bit better.

Thankfully, our understanding of archaeology and science is better and science actually solves the mystery for us.

Go ahead and show that next image I had up there.

Reem covers animals such as this guy, which I can't pronounce the scientific name of, but it is essentially like a wooly mammoth.

It is a wooly rhino.

Would you believe that this guy's DNA shows up in ox today?

Yeah, you can find his DNA in ox.

Used to be a much bigger dinosaur than what you're seeing there, but essentially this guy had a bunch of descendants and they began to change throughout all of the years.

And now again, as we understand Hebrew society not just Hebrew culture, but we look at Assyrian.

Actually I was reading all about this guy.

We read the Assyrians, we find fossils and what we've come to find out is that when we read unicorns in the King James version.

They likely actually had something like this in mind, and they used it agriculturally.

This was way stronger than a bull, and if you needed to get serious work done, this was it.

This was the tool, this was the machine, this was the ride.

You wanted something like this and, as I mentioned, it's DNA is found in ox today, which we still use for those same purposes.

However, these guys went extinct a long, long time ago, but not before they knew about them, not before they were writing about them and not before they were talking about them and knew what they were.

You see, just because something doesn't make sense.

And so this week you are on Facebook and you see a meme saying that Christians you know, you got to believe in uniforms.

Christians are so dumb because they believe in unicorns.

Remind yourself that they're the ones who are misunderstanding.

Be gracious to them.

Okay, if you've heard anything else today, hear that, but remember that, as we look at translation, we look at culture, we look at history, we look at science, science eventually comes through, and it doesn't disprove unicorns, because they're not real, but it proves that what the Hebrew people were writing about actually did exist at one point.

And so over the next few weeks, this is the kind of stuff we're going to talk about how not to read the Bible and I hope you'll join us for that.

Let's pray.