3: “Why Did the Bible Include THIS?” Be a Bible Detective.

(00:02) Stephanie: Season 4, Episode 3. Hello, Father.

(00:07) Marcus: Hello, Daughter. Here we are again.

(00:09) Stephanie: Here we are again, and I am laughing for so many reasons, but also I just wanted to give a shout out.

We’re actually not on the trail, we’re in our normal places, but it feels like we’re on the trail because we have — I have surround sound like construction-y things happening around me right now that we’ve been testing, and I don’t think you guys can hear it, but I apologize. If anything, there’s like demolition happening outside the office, and I keep hearing stuff, so hopefully that will not interrupt us.

(00:39) Marcus: Yep, and I’ve got school buses dropping off kids right about this hour here at the house. So, we’ll see how the background noise does, but here we are. Let’s dive in.

(00:49.902) Stephanie: We are, yes, and before we dive into the Bible, which I’m so excited for, I have three quick time-sensitive announcements for us. So first, if you are on Instagram, you cannot only follow Deeper Walk International, but also as of this month, we now have On The Trail_podcast, and you can follow a whole Instagram account just for the podcast.

So you are welcome to join us in that corner of our community, and we’re excited for the potential there. Second, the next School of Ministry cohort begins on October 8th, and the deadline to apply is this week, September 10th. So this is your moment. Do it. All right.

Third, also this week, the Walking in the Spirit event is happening Saturday afternoon on September 13th. And I’m so excited for this event. So we have Dawn Whitestone, we have Marcus Warner, and a new friend of the ministry, Asheritah Ciuciu. I am a personal fangirl of hers, and I’m so excited that she’s coming.

And Dad, do you wanna just give a quick blurb for what kinds of things we’re talking about?

(02:09) Marcus: Yeah, we’re going to be, I’m going to do an introduction on, what’s the difference between walking in the flesh, walking in the spirit. What are the three core practices that we all need to kind of get good at if we’re going to be walking in the spirit on a regular basis.

And then Dawn’s going to be talking about the difference between discernment and distinguishing voices and how do you discern voices, but also how do you get guidance for questions that you have? So praying strategically about things in our lives.

And then Asheritah is going to join, and she’s got a wonderful book called, Delighting in Jesus, if I’ve got that correct. And I got most of the way through it here. I’m still reading it, and I’ve loved every bit of it. So she’s an excellent writer and has quite a story.

(02:55) Stephanie: She does, yeah. so she’s gonna be talking about Delighting in Jesus and obedience and friendship and all of that. And then also, I will pop in at the end of that afternoon and we’re going to have a conversation, a Q & A time with Asheritah and Dad. And so come live, bring your questions and it’ll be fun.

And also, did I mention, it is name your own price, okay. We don’t want money to stand in the way of this event. So come, bring a friend, bring your church. It’s happening this week on Saturday, and we’re excited to see you there. Alright, yes, also links in the description for all of these things. Alright.

(03:35) Marcus: True podcaster! Links in the description. Hit the like button. Subscribe. Yeah, okay, good job.

(03:38) Stephanie: Oh yeah, now that you mention it. Okay. So now that we have been talking — so we talked about the three steps to effective Bible study. We talked about, we introduced stories, the acrostic, we’ll get into more of that in another episode, but we’ve been walking through the 3-2-1 Bible study method.

Yeah, oh man, there’s so much to unpack here. Today, we’re gonna be talking about selection and arrangement, which is the two. But Papa, would you cast just a brief vision for why 3-2-1 Bible study method? Why did you create the 3-2-1 Bible study method?

(04:30) Marcus: Yeah, where the 3-2-1 came from? Is that what we’re asking? Yeah, so the three is a standard Bible study thing that everybody who learns how to study Bible learns those three steps pretty much. And then the two are the two things that I found that were the most unique that I learned while I was doing doctoral work in the Old Testament. These were like the two principles that were really driven home by one of my professors named John Sailhamer.

And John Sailhamer is an expert in the literary interpretation of scripture. And these are two core principles that every author uses to try to communicate their message. And so it’s very important to understand these two.

And so I wanted to highlight them particularly because they’re the foundations of all literary interpretation. And then the one is a checklist. And so, but that’s where the two came from is this idea of selection and arrangement.

I can explain it quickly. The idea is like whenever you’re going to write something, you’ve got a blank piece of paper in front of you. Let’s just say that you were asked to tell your family history. Okay, so we want to tell the family history of the Warner family. Well, I’ve got way more information there than I can possibly write in a paper, right? So the first thing I’ve got to decide is what am I going to select and what am I going to omit?

And I’m always going to omit more than I can possibly select. So something is going to drive my decision making on why this and not something else. And it could just be, well, I remembered this, and I forgot that. But it could also be, I found this more interesting than that. But I may also have a theme I’m trying to get to, or it might be chronological. There’s some reason for me selecting this and not something else.

And then the arrangement has, why do I put the things that I’ve selected in the order that I’ve put them? Why put this one here? And so as we unpack those, as we’re going to be Bible detectives, right, then we’re looking for clues. We learn to look for and ask ourselves the question, well, why did the author choose to include this and did not choose to include something else?

Classic, for example, would be in the Book of Exodus, we are never told the name of the pharaoh, right? It’s just pharaoh this, pharaoh that. We’re never told, Amenhotep IV or whoever it was, right? And so you’ve got to ask why.

And part of the answer is, well, that clearly wasn’t important to the message that the author was trying to communicate. And so it’s not that it is unimportant for other purposes, but for the purpose of understanding the message of the text, it’s not important, or he would have included it. And that’s kind of the idea here.

(07:22) Stephanie: Yes, because overall we are taking aim on the text. We want the author’s intended message as what we’re really studying for.

(07:30) Marcus: Can I jump in while I’m thinking about it too? Because what a lot of us evangelicals have been taught to do is to use the text as a window. And what I mean is that we’re not actually exegeting the text, we’re exegeting the event behind the text. And that’s not what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to get away from that. There’s a place for that. It’s called apologetics, and it’s called doing Bible history.

But if you’re actually trying to understand the author’s intended message, we don’t want to look through the text to the event behind it. We want to stay in the text and see what did the author actually do in this text to drive us to the meaning and the message that he wanted us to understand.

(08:16) Stephanie: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s awesome. As we’re talking about selection, I pulled a happy Bible verse out of John, John 21:25 says, ‘There are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I expect that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written.’ And I just think that’s like one of the best ever, like show and tell features of selection. Like, hey, I have curated —

(08:51) Marcus: The Gospel of John is telling you, I omitted far more than I included. I’ve selected these because I want you to come to faith in Jesus. So he tells you — John’s helpful — he tells us what his intended message is. So, yeah, that’s a great example.

(09:00) Stephanie: Mm-hmm. Well, would you start helping us dig more into selection? So at some point, I wanted to talk about the news as a helpful framework for understanding. So if you have another thought before that, feel free, or we could jump into that.

(09:24) Marcus: Yeah, well, no, when I would teach Biblical hermeneutics, you know, on how to study the Bible to college students and occasionally seminary students. This was a long time ago, when I was teaching, and one of the assignments I generally gave was that they watch the news and they watch it from the selection and arrangement perspective.

And it starts with the question of why this news story and not some other? It’s like, why out of all the things that happen in the world today, how did these stories make the news? And so you’re asking why this? Why was this selected and something else omitted?

And then within the content of the story, you ask yourself the same question. So once they selected this story and not some other, why did they include the things that they did about it and what have they left out? And most of the time, what you’re gonna find is that everybody has to leave something out.

And so what happens is our biases show up in what we select and what we omit. And so, for example, one of the classic ones back in the day was there was a news story about a guy who had saved his friend’s arm from a shark. He had dived into the water and literally retrieved an arm that had been bitten off of his friend’s body from the shark. The surgeons were able to reattach it, and his friend was okay.

But what got left out of every single story was that he had shot the shark with a shotgun. And you’re like, why? Why was that left out? And it’s pretty easy once you think about it. It’s that they didn’t want to do a story that glorified guns. And so they just left it out.

And you see, that’s like a simple one, but there are a lot of things where people will intentionally leave things out because it doesn’t help lead you to the message they want you to get. And the Bible does the same thing. That’s actually a good thing in some cases, right? It can be used for evil and propaganda and stuff like that, but it can also be in the Bible. We want a certain amount of God’s propaganda.

That is, how does God want us to look at this? What does he want us to see? And how is the author trying to get us to look at something? And we can tell a lot about that by what he’s chosen to include and what he’s chosen to admit.

(11:47) Stephanie: Mm-hmm. It’s paired in a lot of ways with the worldview conversation, right. We have worldviews. Everybody has a worldview. Everybody has a bias.

You can’t not have a bias. Bias isn’t a dirty word. It can just be used badly, you know, like any tool can be used badly. And so when you’re looking, you’re like, what is the bias here?

I’m gonna tune into this news channel because I want this bias. I’m gonna tune into this news channel because I want this bias or that podcast or this thing. You know what thinking people are coming from usually. And if you don’t, there are ways to figure that out.

And it doesn’t even have to — I think a lot of times we think about, oh, it’s this political or that political, but it can even be, is this local? Is this national? Is this international? Right, like what are we prioritizing here? What are we featuring as we are selecting stories? Are we trying to keep people alert and warning things? Is there kind of a fear motivation or is this like a joy building or community building thing?

(12:49) Marcus: Right. Well, it’s like I remember visiting your grandpa, my dad, in the retirement home where he was the last few years. And I noticed some newspapers. Every headline, five headlines on the front page all had the word death in them. You have to first of all, select those stories out of everything you could report, and then you had to put that in there.

Why? Because clearly they’re trying to scare people, right? And so it’s — bias can be a bad thing, but bias is in and of itself not bad. And we can’t help but bring our biases to things. So part of what we try to do is admit them and recognize where I’m starting and be willing to change and willing to move forward if the evidence leads me in a different direction. And so that’s all part of it.

(13:44) Stephanie: You don’t want to be ignorantly biased. You don’t want to be like, stubbornly, willfully biased. I won’t change my opinion. I won’t listen to any other thing. You don’t want that.

Yeah. All right, so let’s bring it into some Biblical examples. As people are like, okay, so what does this look like in the Bible? Where can I see a clear example of selection?

(14:10) Marcus: So we’ll take a couple of obvious ones here. First of all, when you’ve got two books telling you the same story. So for example, the story of Sennacherib’s armies surrounding Jerusalem is in three different books, right? So it can help to start with stories like those and look at how are they the same, how are they different? What was included in this one and not in that one? Why would the author include this here but not include it there?

One of the biggest examples is Kings and Chronicles, no, 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings. Then, you’ve got 1 and 2 Chronicles telling us the same stories. And because of that, a lot of people just sort of skip Chronicles because they’re like, well, I already read 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings.

But again, the way they’re thinking is, I’m not interested in the text. I’m interested in the world behind the text. And I feel like I’ve already got enough of a handle on that world. But you would miss so much. So let me just make it simple here.

1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings are part of a narrative that starts in Joshua, that goes Joshua through 2 Kings. And what’s happening in this narrative throughout is that the stories that have been selected are showing, first of all, that there was chaos in the days of the judges, that people were doing what was right in their own eyes. And it says because there was no king.

But what the king did was, the king reestablished the Torah as the center of society. And so there’s a big story about bringing the ark to Jerusalem and a big story about Solomon building the temple and a big story about all of these things. And there’s a big celebration about how God brought the Torah there.

And then David in 1 and 2 Samuel, the key story in David’s life, the hinge story on which the whole narrative turns is his sin with Bathsheba. And you know we find out that Bathsheba was somebody he knew. It was somebody, and he had connections with her husband, with her father, and with her grandfather. And he knew exactly who this was, and he knew who he was betraying when he did what he did with Bathsheba. And that story takes several chapters.

And is literally the hinge on which David’s whole life changes. In Chronicles, it’s omitted. That story doesn’t even occur in Chronicles. So that’s your first question: why? If it’s the most important thing and the hinge on which his whole life turns, why is it completely left out? Well, it’s because the author’s intended message is totally different in the two books.

And in Chronicles what’s going on is — whereas Samuel and Kings — that’s all part of what’s often called the Deuteronomistic history, which is getting a little technical — but it’s all part of this idea of when the Torah is at the center of society, things are as they should be.

And we can even see that in David’s life. When he was following the Torah, God was blessing him, things were going great. When he disobeyed the Torah, right, that’s when the curses came into his family line.

And so, yeah, it was a pre-figured exile. Because the other thing that Joshua through Kings is doing is it’s giving us an apologetic for why the exile happened. And so that colors its selection of the stories that get included. Does this help us understand why Israel went into exile and what was going on there?

(17:53) Marcus: Chronicles, on the other hand, basically has a premise. And the premise is stated most clearly I think in 2 Chronicles 15. What these words say is the Lord is with you when you are with him. If you seek him, he will be found by you. But if you forsake him, he will forsake you. And this idea of seeking the Lord is now the template that lays out the thesis.

And then what Chronicles does is it takes a look at every king of Judah and asks that one question. Did they seek the Lord or did they forsake him? And did they seek the Lord their whole life or did they seek him early and forsake him late? You know, what happened?

But every story all of a sudden makes sense once you understand that these stories were chosen — like out of all the things in a king’s life, they chose two stories. And they chose one where there was a huge problem, and they sought the Lord and the Lord delivered them. And then there was another big problem, and they didn’t seek the Lord and they forsook the Lord and bad things happened.

And it’s just case study after case study after case study on did this king seek the Lord? Did the people seek the Lord or did they forsake him? Whereas Kings is taking us on a completely different journey, and that determines which stories get selected, which ones get omitted.

And so learning to — before I knew that that was a thing, I didn’t even look for it and had no explanation or no understanding for why it was left out of one and included in the other.

(19:28) Stephanie: Mm-hmm. And so making those observations is the first step to, okay, why? Which would be the interpretive process. But first you have to even know to make that observation.

Hey, I’m going to look for what got selected here, which then leads us to how was it arranged? So arrangement is how the elements are organized and sequenced. And this can be from very small scale grammar and writing and individual texts all the way through book arrangements. So.

(20:00) Marcus: Yeah, you can get something within just a few verses where there is a clear little arrangement that the author uses within those few verses. And then there are these macro arrangements that authors use within them.

For example, the Gospel of John’s got a pretty clear one here. Gospel of John basically has an introduction and then it’s got two books. So book one is usually called the Book of Signs. And the second half of John is called the Book of Glory or the Book of Suffering or something. You know, it’s got a tie like that.

And so what happens is in the intro, we are told upfront, Jesus is actually the Word of God who created heaven and earth, who spoke to the prophets. He is God, and he took on flesh, and he came in among us. Let’s see what he does right now that we know who he really is. Let’s watch how he reveals his glory to people.

And so what we have is a hidden glory theme throughout the Gospel of John. And the very first set of things that happens in John is what I call a revealing week. Because it’s where the glory of Jesus that has been hidden in his flesh is being revealed in a series of events that all take place in a seven-day period.

And so on day one, the Pharisees and Sadducees come out there questioning John, ‘Are you the Messiah?’ And he says, ‘No, I’m not. I’m the voice of one calling in the wilderness.’ And then it says, the next day they’re discussing things again. This time, it’s the Lamb of God idea being introduced. Oh, behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

And then you’ve got a third day where it says it got to be the 10th hour of the day. Well, the 10th hour means that day was over in two hours. So if people were gonna get together, go to somebody’s house and hang out at the 10th hour of the day, it means that day was over, we’re getting ready for a day three.

And so on, and then by the time you get to — then it says, now on the third day, in chapter two verse one, and what it means when it says that is you string them all together, and it now means we’re coming to the seventh day since that original event took place. On the seventh day, he’s in Cana of Galilee and what does he do there?

He does a miracle that reveals his glory. And that’s what the text says. It says, with this, the first of his miraculous signs, Jesus revealed his glory. And the whole story of Cana becomes a parable of how the water of the old covenant is being transformed into the wine of the new covenant because Messiah has come, and he’s revealing his glory in this miracle.

So, understanding selection and arrangement, knowing that this is what I’m looking for and then I’m asking the question why with that, helps me get to the author’s intended message and those are just a few examples.

(23:00) Stephanie Yeah, no. I like how many little micro sermons we’re getting in one little episode. It’s making me happy. So would you look at it on a macro level too of like context on a more macro level?

(23:18) Marcus Well, you can do this with the way the whole Bible is arranged and ordered, right? And that is, you can actually see some intentionality even into how the books of the Bible are put next to each other.

So the original Hebrew text has three parts. It’s got the Torah, it’s got the prophets, and it’s got the writings. When the Greeks came to translate that into Greek, they were like, this isn’t the way we think. We think chronologically, we think, you know, very systematically.

And so we’re going to take Ruth out of the writings, and we’re going to stick it next to Judges because the first line of Ruth is, ‘Now in the days of judges …’ so surely it belongs here. And so all of sudden Ruth is moved from its natural setting in the Hebrew flow to a totally different place.

You see the same thing, a lot of books get rearranged. But when you study the Hebrew arrangement, you’ll see that there was actually a thematic flow to how everything fit together. And so, for example, after the Torah, the first chapter after the Torah is Joshua 1. And what is the primary command in Joshua 1? Meditate on the Torah. Meditate on the Torah day and night, and you will be successful. And that’s the word that’s used for success. Meditate on the Torah day and night.

Then when we come to the writings, the first book of the writings in Hebrews is Psalms. And what does Psalm 1 tell us? If you want to be successful, meditate on the Torah day and night. So all of a sudden you can kind of see even in the broader structure of how the Bible is assembled that there is a selection and arrangement process going on here that is pointing us to a message, and there’s just almost no end to how many of these interconnections you can find.

(25:06) Stephanie: There is, and we’re cramming semesters’ worth of seminary in a series here. We’re having fun. But yeah, no, like being aware of the context in which you are reading, whether that’s, you know, you’re reading a passage inside a broader segment or a passage inside of a broader book or even, you know, just like understanding context is really good as, you know, our pastor would often say context is king. So this is important.

Well, all right, friends. This week, don’t forget, if you are wanting to join the School of Ministry cohort that starts in October, the deadline is September 10th. So just do it. And then, wait, can I say that?

(26:02) Marcus: I don’t think Nike will sue you. I think you’re okay.

(26:05) Stephanie: And then also on Saturday, we invite you to join us for the Walking in the Spirit event with Dawn Whitestone and Father and Asheritah and myself. And then yes, follow us on Instagram. We would love to see you there.

Thank you for being on the trail with us every week. We just really appreciate you. All right, Father, any final thoughts about selection and arrangement?

(26:33) Marcus: Well, honestly discovering this kinda brought a new spark to a Bible study for me. I remember back in the day, I was like, well it’s cool seeing what these people have come up with, but can I do this for myself? And I was a little surprised how quickly I started seeing things just by having this set of lenses on when I went to the text. So I’d encourage you, keep these things forefront when you’re reading your Bible. Ask yourself the question regularly, why this story?

Why put it here? How’s it getting connected? Why these details? Why not some others? And I think what’ll happen is you’ll start noticing things you just didn’t notice before. And that is the foundation of good Bible interpretation.

Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to like, comment, subscribe, share with a friend. And do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer. Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.