Context Changes Everything: Reading the Bible the Way It Was Written | Better Ways to Read the Bible | Daniel Gertson

Good, that's good for us.

So we're talking through this book.

It's by Zach Lambert, it's called Better Ways to Read the Bible.

And the main focus of the book is on lenses.

See what I did there?

It lends the way he's talking about it.

That's an interpretive framework or a worldview, and

that impacts that we apply to how we see the world.

In this case, we're specifically talking about how those lenses affect

the way that we understand the Bible, and the way we interact with the Bible.

Now, an important point that Zach makes is that we all have lenses, okay?

There's no way to not have a lens.

We can try to be objective, and we can try to acknowledge them.

But there's no way to not have a lens, and

they're not inherently problematic.

But they can become so when one, you like ignore that they exist, or

you don't acknowledge them, or you forget that it's there.

They can also become harmful when you apply lenses that then

create hard, harmful outcomes for yourself or for others.

And then it's also harmful when we demand that the lens that I prefer,

the one that I like, is the only one everybody else should use too.

So they can become harmful in those ways.

And so in the book, Zach talks about four harmful lenses that maybe we've

been taught, maybe we've grown up with.

Maybe they've been handed to us as kind of the right way to read the Bible.

But throughout history, and in a lot of our own experiences,

we can see that they can lead to harm.

And so these four harmful lenses that he talks about are the literalism lens.

He talks about the apocalypse lens, the moralism lens, and the hierarchy lens.

We're not going to go into a big recap of all those today.

I highly recommend reading the book,

those chapters to get a better understanding of maybe how you've learned

those or how they're showing up in your life, and really how they can cause damage.

But so he talks about these four harmful lenses and

then contrast them with four different that are healing lenses.

Now the idea is that we can set down the harmful lens and

instead utilize some of these healing lenses.

Lenses that can help us as we say every week here at the arsenal,

that can help us go love well.

And so the healing lenses that he talks about are the Jesus lens.

We talked about this one last week.

This is interpreting the Bible, New Testament, Hebrew Bible, all of it,

through what we know the teachings of Jesus.

So there's a story in the Gospels of Matthew,

Mark, and Luke in which Jesus is asked like, what's the greatest commandment?

Okay, this was a common question to ask of a rabbi in the first century.

Because it would tell you how they interpret all 613

commandments that are found in the Torah.

I know we tend to think of like the 10 commandments, right?

But there's actually 613.

Now, don't tell the Texas legislature, they'll have to mandate.

Not just posters, but a whole wallpaper for classrooms to include all of them.

But so when Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is,

he says there's two actually.

He says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,

soul, mind, without all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind.

That's from Deuteronomy.

Then he says, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

That's from Leviticus.

So Jesus basically says the way that we're supposed to interpret everything in

the law, the prophets, we can assume he would include the rest of the Hebrew

Bible as well as all the scripture in the New Testament is through this lens of love.

If it doesn't help you love God, love others, love yourself better,

then you're understanding it wrong.

That's the Jesus lens.

But this week, we're going to talk about the context lens.

This one I'm really excited about.

And then in the next few weeks, Brittany mentioned she's teaching next week.

Next week is the flourishing lens.

And then we're going to talk about the fruitfulness lens.

So there's lots of good stuff on the way.

So if we've ever gotten the chance to talk for any length of time,

especially if we're having beers, you know that I love talking about

the context of the Bible.

I've said it before, but as I began to understand the Bible,

is less of like this magical book that fell from heaven in modern day English.

And more as an ancient human collection of documents that was put together

from oral and written traditions, spanned thousands of years,

multiple languages, the deeper and more powerful the Bible becomes.

But to talk about the context of such an ancient document,

we can start kind of in the presence, okay, so we're going to play a little game.

Because understanding any bit of language, any language at all requires context.

It's mandatory, there's no word that means something apart

from the meaning that people give it.

So we're going to play a little game.

So for example, what does the word bet mean?

Gen Z, I'm asking you specifically.

What does bet mean?

Yeah, I mean, it's good, yeah, okay, cool, let's do it.

What about cap?

Cap is to lie, slay.

Slay means, yeah, you're crushing it.

These words also have old meanings too, for all of those over 25.

But you have to know the context like how old is the person using the word

in order to understand the meaning, right?

Now, some day centuries from now, this is going to be fascinating,

but somebody's going to be studying 21st century American culture,

and it's going to be so crucially important that they know the difference

between a but dial and a booty call.

Context, right, context, context, context.

Okay, that's today.

And so if you think back a few decades ago, words like bad, sick, gnarly,

that all meant negative things, right?

But it switched, it turned over, and now it means something is great.

I think about the word gay, in the 90s, I feel like I remember my grandmother

telling me how she thought it was great that all these people were talking

about how happy they are.

It's like, awesome, I guess that's not that far off base

when you get to live as your authentic self.

But yeah, why wouldn't being happy be a good thing?

You think back further, you think about Shakespeare, Chaucer,

you have to read like Beowulf when you're in high school?

It's like those are English, right?

From the past like 500, maybe a thousand years,

and they're really hard to understand, and we speak English.

So just imagine if the text is like twice as old,

and it's written in languages that we don't speak natively,

that's going to make things a lot more difficult, right?

We can admit that that's going to be, that's going to take some work.

So what we're going to do today is we're going to take a look

at a few parts of the Bible that kind of illustrate this issue.

First though, I'm going to give you the TLDR.

If you're not an auditory learner, you think this is boring,

you want to go back to watching YouTube videos,

playing a game on your phone, that's fine.

No judgment at all, I see you.

But here you go, so here's the TLDR.

We don't intrinsically understand the biblical context,

so we must do everything we can to understand the various aspects of it.

Things like culture, author, audience, purpose, language, and genre.

Reading the Bible out of context while pretending that we have no biases

is a dangerous proposition because it often leads to incredibly harmful interpretations.

It's on page 135 of the book.

To see how that works, let's look at a few passages of the Bible

and we'll see how an incomplete understanding of words,

the rest of the text around it, and the time frame genre,

that kind of thing can lead us off track.

So like we talked about, the meaning of words varies over time,

culture, eras, so plucking a verse from its original place

and time can cause some problems.

For example, Proverbs 1324, you've probably heard this one,

but it says, "Whoever spares the rod hates their children,

but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them."

Maybe you've heard a paraphrase, "Spare the rod, spoil the child."

Anybody heard that in the context of like corporal punishment?

Definitely in context of spanking your children.

But here's the thing that we miss, because we don't live in the same context,

this passage is probably employing like shepherding imagery.

So the rod here that it's talking about is actually like a shepherd staff.

It's not a switch or a wooden kitchen spoon, like I experienced.

But shepherds, they'd use their rods to direct sheep away from danger,

to prod, just kind of prod them along the proper path,

maybe pull them back to safety if they stumbled into rocks.

It makes sense then that the word that's used here that gets translated is discipline.

It's the word "musar," in the second half of verse.

It's not talking about like any kind of physical harm or physical violence,

but it's instead understood as like instruction, correction, chastisement.

Now that makes more sense, like we don't live in an agrarian society,

but I've not heard of a good shepherd beating their sheep.

So context is important there to understand that.

So in other times, we can miss what's going on around the verse,

and that can often be the case with Jeremiah 2911 that we're going to look at.

Now I want to pre-apologize, if this verse is very meaningful to you,

I'm not in all saying that that encouragement, that confidence that it's given you is invalid

or that it's lessened in any way.

We're just looking at how, if you, we're just illustrating how things can change in meaning

when we pull them out of their original context and only think about it through our present day lens.

So let's look at it.

Jeremiah 2911 says, "For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord,

plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope in a future,

very encouraging to be sure, but I've also seen it used as kind of like toxic positivity,

kind of spiritual bypassing when things are hard during life."

And it ignores the context that's around the verse.

This was written by prophets speaking for God to a people who had been conquered

by a foreign empire exiled from their homeland.

He wasn't talking to recent high school graduates.

God goes on to say that he would gather them from all the nations where I have banished you.

He says, "I will bring you back to the place for which I carried you in exile."

So God sent them away into exile, but promised to bring them back to their homeland

after their time in Babylon.

I guess for some, maybe going away to college can feel like banishment.

I don't think, though, that's what Jeremiah had in mind.

And it's interesting because we can even see this happen to like whole books of the Bible

when we don't understand the genre, when, why they were written.

And this often happens with the book of Joshua.

We'll talk about this.

It can be a problematic book for us.

This is the book.

It's the first one in our Bibles right after the Torah.

This is relating to the conquest of Canaan, so the promised land

when the people of Israel go in and take the land, right?

So if you grew up in church, you've definitely heard the story of Jericho,

the walls falling there.

But the stories throughout this book are actually pretty violent.

There's passages where God commands Israelites to slaughter every man, woman, child,

sometimes animals of the indigenous people groups in the land.

Modern times?

That kind of sounds like genocide.

That makes me really uncomfortable.

Isn't this the same God that like later in the books is defined as love itself?

So what do we do with that?

Well, sometimes people apply.

We talked about some of the harmful lenses.

They'll apply a literalism lens, or they'll apply this hierarchical lens.

And explain it away as just saying, well, the people were evil, so they needed to be punished.

Or if God does it, then it can't be wrong.

Or God's ways are higher than ours.

But I think that God gave us intellect, reason, moral compass.

And they're not asking us just to check those at the door when we come to the Bible.

So if we look at the context, there's not really a need to explain it away when we understand

a few things about where this book comes from.

First of all, scholars think the text was compiled during this Babylonian exile.

So sometime in the mid-500s BCE, probably incorporated a lot of earlier texts.

Some other stories that had come together maybe about a century earlier.

The first part of the book is the older part.

So that's this genre that's known as a conquest narrative.

So this was a popular form of literature that portrays a king or a nation, maybe a God as

like mighty, fearsome, dominant, just unbeatable.

Basically it's a story of like, we're the best.

And it's style of literature that was really common throughout the ancient Near East, Egypt,

Babylon, other Canaanite cultures.

So it makes sense then that the Israelites, the Hebrews, would write their own.

Second, it's purporting to relate history, but there's no archaeological evidence

that any of this happened.

There was the closest that we get is, there's a period where several of the cultures in

a number of the cities in the region kind of declined, but none of it is none of those

cities, almost none of them are ones that are mentioned in Joshua.

And it was happening like from Egypt all the way up to present day Turkey.

So it was well beyond what the scope of the stories in Joshua are.

But there's no like evidence of just this massive swift, you know, obliteration of a

lot of the cities in the region.

And then also like we have to understand, there was no concept of history as we think

of it back when this was written.

The goal of history back then is not to like capture the objective record of what happened.

The goal was, like we said, to demonstrate how much better our King, our nation, our

God is than all the others.

So the point of all this context is to say that it seems the events in Joshua didn't

actually take place.

So God didn't actually command the slaughter of men, women, children, animals.

It's not in fact a book about how God condones genocide when it's chosen people to do it.

It's absolutely not a justification for like manifest destiny or just war.

But when it's taken out of context, it can be used to prop up some of those oppressive ends.

Instead, Joshua illustrates how a conquered exiled people believe that their God and their

nation were once powerful and triumphant because they needed to encourage this nationalistic

and ethnic pride at a time when their identity was just under existential threat.

It helped them process what had happened to them and wrestle with the questions of who

they are and who God is.

And I don't know about you, but that's something that I can definitely relate to.

But we definitely get to very extremely different interpretations, right?

Like God condones genocide or no, he doesn't.

God, see how much context matters.

It's really important.

So in the book that we're talking about, Zach digs into two passages from the New Testament

that have also been used to unjust and oppressive ends.

Specifically, they've been used to argue that women should be kept in a subordinate second-class

role in the church, in home, in society, in general.

And so the two verses that Zach looks at are found in two letters that are attributed to

the Apostle Paul, 1 Timothy 2, 12, and Ephesians 5, 22 through 24.

So first, a bit of context.

We need to understand the time and place in which these are written.

And that's 1st century CE in the Roman Empire.

I know everybody's surprised that a dude's talking about the Roman Empire, but this is

where we end up when we talk about the New Testament.

So, like many cultures throughout history, Roman culture was extremely patriarchal.

Women had no legal rights.

They weren't even considered individuals that were under the purview of the state.

They were absolutely subject to the rule of a man.

So that could be their father, husband, another leading male relative in their lives.

Women were subject to that man in the same way that a slave was subject to their master.

So these texts were born from and speaking to a highly patriarchal context.

Second, Biblical scholars aren't sure if Paul actually wrote these.

So of the 14 letters, epistles, as we call them, that are in our New Testament,

scholars are pretty sure that Paul wrote about seven of them.

For three others, that includes Ephesians, there's some spirited debate.

There's a lot of reasons to believe he did and a lot of good reasons to believe he didn't

write those.

For four others, that includes 1st Timothy.

Consensus is pretty settled that Paul did not write these.

There's a variety of reasons ranging from the subject to the writing style to some of the

words that get used that support that conclusion.

Feel free to read more about the authorship debates of the Pauline epistles for yourself.

I find it really interesting, but that's why I'm the nerd.

I will say this doesn't mean that somebody was trying to deceive people or the authors

were trying to trick anybody.

Instead, they were just trying to speak in the spirit or in the authority of Paul.

It's like saying, I think if Paul were here today, that this is what he would say.

Nobody's trying to be underhanded about this.

With that in mind, let's look at the one, the verse that often gets used to say that women

aren't allowed to preach.

1st Timothy 2.12 says, I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man.

She must be quiet.

Maybe we're missing something in the surrounding verses, maybe in some of the meaning of the

words.

Let's back up.

We're going to look at verse 8 through verse 15.

That says, therefore, I want the men everywhere to pray, lifting up holy hands without anger

or disputing.

I also want the women to dress modestly with decency and propriety, adorning themselves

not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pop or expensive clothes, but with good deeds appropriate

for women who profess to worship God.

A woman should learn in quietness and full submission.

This is the verse we read before.

I do not permit a woman to teach or assume authority over a man.

She must be quiet.

4.

Adam was formed first, then Eve, and Adam was not the one deceived.

It was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.

But women will be saved through childbearing if they continue in the faith, love, and holiness

with propriety.

There's a lot to unpack there.

I'm not sure what saved through childbearing means or why we just want to enforce the women

must be quiet part, but not the requirement the men raise their hands, holy hands to pray,

or that they're not supposed to be angry or disputing.

We're not going to go into all that today.

Zach does talk about several of those points, but let's talk a little bit about some of

the words here.

So the words that gets translated as woman is the same word that can increase, that can

mean wife.

The word for man can also be translated as husband.

So you could understand this as being a prescription directed at married women, okay?

That's different than a blanket prescription of all women teaching, but maybe the writer

just prefers what single women have to say.

I'm not really sure.

But as we discussed, this probably wasn't written by Paul himself, and that makes sense

because of the way that Paul talks about women in teaching and leadership roles in other

books, especially ones that we are really sure that he wrote.

Bacon Romans, Paul specifically mentions Priscilla, her husband Aquila as missionary partners.

He talks about Phoebe, who's a leader at the church near Corinth.

Paul calls her a deacon, sister a patron.

The word deacon is the same word that he also uses to describe Timothy.

Paul commands Junia as a prominent apostle.

That's an evangelist, that's a church planter.

The same descriptor that we use for Paul, and she had even actually been imprisoned for

her work.

There's also a part, so there's a part in 1 Corinthians 14 that says something similar

to the 1 Timothy passage, but there's a lot of debate over whether that was included

in the original text or that got added in later, or maybe Paul was quoting, there's

no punctuation, unfortunately, in ancient Greek.

But so maybe Paul was quoting something that got said a lot at the church in Corinth, because

in verse 36, he immediately is rebutting it.

So not quite sure what is going on there, but either way, it contradicts what he writes

in 1 Corinthians 11, where he's upset at women in the church, but he's upset because they're

not covering their heads while praying and prophesying, not because they're speaking.

And then it's definitely inconsistent with what he writes in Galatians 3, and that's

where Paul really just dismantles divisions and hierarchies within the church.

When he says, "For in Christ Jesus, you are all children of God through faith.

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ.

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer

male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise."

So when we jump over to Ephesians 5, 22 through 24, that's used often to say women are subordinate

to men.

We're ignoring that Roman context we talked about, and many other parts of these writings

of Paul.

So here's the verses in question.

It says, "Wives submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord, for the

husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which

he is Savior.

Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything."

Again, I'm not sure what unmarried women are supposed to do, or women who are not married

to men.

There's no mention of y'all here, so I guess you're just off the hook for any kind of submission.

Which is cool.

Or are you?

Because if you look back at the verse right before this one, verse 21, it says, "Submit

to one another out of reverence for Christ."

So everyone is actually told to submit to each other.

It's like he's setting Galatians.

There's no divisions and hierarchies anymore.

There's supposed to be unity in the body of Christ.

Now, I'm not going to go so far as to declare that Paul is a feminist.

He was still raised and surrounded by staunchly patriarchal culture.

But he spends three verses talking to wives, but then he spends verses 25 through 33.

That's nine verses, three times as many, telling husbands to love their wives as Christ loves

the church and gave himself up for her.

So remember that Roman context we were talking about?

Wives had to submit to their husbands.

There was no choice.

He basically...

So basically he says, "Hey, keep doing what you're doing, except do it for Jesus."

Not a big deal.

But instructing husbands to love their wives selflessly and sacrificially, that would

have been radical, that would have been something unheard of.

But it's in line with how we see that Jesus interacted with women.

The gospels tell us that some of Jesus' first disciples were women.

Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, they're all listed specifically, is going around with

Jesus during his ministry, supporting him financially, bankrolling Jesus' work.

There's a Samaritan woman, a Samaritan woman that Jesus encounters at the well.

She's one of the first people that we ever see in the gospels who goes out and declares

that Jesus is a Messiah.

Mary Magdalene, she's the first person to witness the resurrected Jesus and the first

person to declare the good news to Jesus' other followers.

So she's often known as the apostle to the apostles.

When Jesus kicked off his ministry, he chose a verse in Isaiah to declare, "The spirit

of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind,

to set the oppressed free to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."

So you see, in the kingdom of God that Jesus brought to earth, things are upside down.

The first is last, the last is first.

The servant is the greatest of all.

Whatever you do to the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the prisoner,

that's how you treat the son of God.

Where the Romans saw women as property and less than Jesus and Paul lifted them up.

They were entrusted with the gospel early and often.

So why would I ever be so proud as to believe that God can speak through me, but not my

wife, not my friend, not my sister, mother, my daughter?

I know that what I'm about to say can't begin to make up for a lot of the damage that's

been done by taking these verses out of context or away, so far away from the teachings of

Jesus.

But to any woman out there who has felt this desire to share what you've learned or thought

or experienced, but you've been told that God says you're not allowed to do that, that's

a lie.

I'm sorry that your voice has been stifled and that what God wants to say to all of us

through you has been withheld from the body of Christ.

That's a loss.

We need you.

We need your voice and we need what God has uniquely revealed about herself through you.

I'd love to do anything I can to help your voice be heard.

I'm really excited to have a woman speak next week.

Yeah, and I haven't explicitly said this, but I ask this, but I know that the leadership

of this church would want to support you in your desire to share.

To any woman who's been taught that God says you're second class, that God says you can't

lead in the church or at home or anywhere in the world, I'm also sorry.

That too is a lie, and I hope we can keep doing the work to dismantle these systems

of oppression that that lie continues to sustain.

So, it's as Jesus said, and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

If the gospel that you hear and that you follow oppresses anybody, it's not the gospel of

Jesus.

The kingdom of God is about elevating the less than the oppressed, because in doing so,

you're actually elevating everyone.

You're bringing everyone into the kingdom.

If the gospel doesn't apply to some people, you know, those people that are definitely

out, then it's not good news.

I believe Jesus was including everyone when he gave the greatest commandment, to love

God, love others, and love yourself.

We're all in.

So, as we go today, let's follow that command.

Let's go love well, arsenal.

It's who we're made to be.

Thank you.

We'll see you next week.