4: Bible Study Checklist

(00:02) Stephanie: Alright, Season 4, episode 4. We are back talking about Bible study and it’s epic. Hello, Father.

(00:10) Marcus: Hello, Daughter. It’s nice to be able to discuss this with my seminary trained daughter. It’s fun.

(00:17) Stephanie: You know it’s fun. And hey, the Walking in the Spirit event just happened this weekend. I trust it was epic. We are pre-recording this because that happened on Saturday and this episode releases on Monday. If you were there, let us know in the comments. Was it as epic as I trust it was? What did you learn? What were your takeaways?

I also have to give another disclaimer to the fact that because we’re pre-recording this at the same time, there is still some construction-y noise stuff happening outside. So I apologize if any of that bleeds through. We’re hoping for the best here.

But yes, the Walking the Spirit event just happened and now we’re going to be off to the Hope Together Conference in Dallas at the end of September. And then we’re gathering in person for the Deeper Walk Experience in Chicago in October.

Let us know in the comments there too. Are we gonna see you there, any of those places? Getting to see people in person is just one of my favorite things ever and I’m so excited for those events.

Father, anything you wanna say about those events before we get into the Bible?

(01:33) Marcus: Well, yeah, it’s a fun little run here, because I get to speak on neuroscience, spiritual warfare, and inner healing at the ICCI conference. That is gonna be fun. And then we’re doing the Deeper Walk Experience again, this time with some good friends, Peter and Alla Kucher, who are pastoring at the Christian Worship Center in Downers Grove, I believe, is the city. It’s a great opportunity if you live near Chicago. This is a great time to come and hang out with the Deeper Walk Tribe. And I think you’ll really enjoy it.

(02:17) Stephanie: Yeah, I love it. Well, we’ve been walking through the 3-2-1 Bible Study method and going through the three steps of effective Bible study. We have our framework of observation, interpretation, and application. We went through our two key strategies of recognizing the author’s intended message by the selection and arrangement of the text, because we’re looking at a literary approach to our Bible study in this series.

We have brushed on it, but in this episode we are specifically starting to get into the “one” of 3-2-1, which is the checklist, which is an acrostic. Thank you, Father. And the acrostic is STORIES. So would you give us a refresher? Walk us quickly through STORIES. Why STORIES? What is the acrostic for? And then you can list out the letters.

(03:10) Marcus: Sure. So there’s actually seven letters in the word stories. So instead of 3-2-7, we went with 321. So we have a 3-2-1 checklist, and where this came from was when I was in seminary, we had a visiting professor from Yale who had given us a 14-point checklist on things to look for in literary analysis. And I was like, “I’m never going to remember this.” So I said, “I think some of these can be combined,” and I got it down to seven and then made it fit the word stories. And that’s where STORIES came from.

I first used this on a final exam for that class in seminary where I knew we were going to have to look at a text for the first time, not knowing what text it would be at least, and walk it through the process and be prepared to defend why we believe that was the author’s intended message. The text that we got was 2 Kings 5, which is the story of Naaman and the leper and I’ll be honest, it was amazing. As I’m going through, I’ve never enjoyed a final exam more.

I’m going through here and it was just so obvious that the pagan starts off with leprosy and ends up cleansed and in the middle of his journey he says, “I now know there’s only one God in all the world and it’s the God of Israel and you know I’m only going to worship this God from now on.” So you see the pagans turning to the God of Israel and finding healing.

Meanwhile you have the servant of Elijah starting off healed, him saying, “I want the money that the pagan has,” and ending up with leprosy and going the exact opposite path. So it’s like this big X pattern in there as the one guy’s going on one journey and the other is going on a completely different journey. It is a metaphor for what was happening in Israel and why they went into exile. And that is, they wanted to be like the nations instead of realizing what a miraculous and wonderful thing it was that they had God. So that was where this started. It was where STORIES came from, and that was my first time using it, and ever since I’ve been just amazed at the fruit that can be born.

(05:34) Stephanie: Your approach to using acrostics and memory devices like this definitely helped me throughout my education as well. I did some final exam acrostics and yes, STORIES. I love it. Even though you’re like, “How can I make this work?” It does! I remember it. It’s so helpful. So will you walk us through what each letter is? And you can give a sentence or two of description, but then we’ll unpack them each more.

(06:06) Marcus: So the seven elements, right, first one is Speeches. And the idea of a speech could also be a conversation, but it’s the idea that authors often don’t tell you directly what they’re trying to say, but they will put it in the mouths of the characters. And so you pay attention particularly to speeches that are made. And if all of a sudden you’re telling a story and it’s interrupted with a speech, that’s a device that an author will use. They’ll interrupt the flow of the story to give you the speech. And so you need to pay attention when that happens, because there’s usually a reason for it.

(06:42) Stephanie: Also it can also be dialogue.

(06:44)Marcus: Dialogue or conversation. Yes, right. And then T is for Terms, and specifically theological terms. So if you see an appeal to the covenant, for example, that’s a theological term. If you see in Genesis they talk about seed or land, then those are the two key covenant terms in the book of Genesis. So you’re like, “It’s got seed and land in this story, and in this story, and in this story. Wow, it’s all over the place!”

You begin noticing that these key theological terms are used. Even something as simple as, “wisdom is the discerning between good and evil,” you begin to notice how often good and evil pop up in the storyline and the interpretation of, this is good, this is evil. And simple things like that begin popping out as key terms that are helpful to notice because they help guide us where we’re trying to go. So that’s the T.

O is Order. And we talk about that as the same as arrangement from the last one, but it’s reinforcing it, because order is so important. I’ll use this time to say the most obvious order thing I ever came across was in the book of Daniel, where the author makes a shift, which is actually the last S of our acrostic, but he makes a shift from Hebrew to Aramaic and then back to Hebrew.

You’ve got to ask why. Like have you ever written a language letter and then just changed language for three pages and then come back? And I’m like, “Why would you do that?” And the clear answer is that he’s writing the Aramaic section for an international audience for whom Aramaic is a more familiar language than Hebrew. And in that Aramaic section, there is a clear order that you can see.

Because most of us are familiar with the Daniel stories, I think I could walk through this.It starts with the idea that there are four empires. So you’ve got the head of gold, the chest of silver, the abs of bronze, right? And then the legs of iron. So you’ve got these four empires in that one vision. And then the final part of the Aramaic section has four animals representing the same four world empires.So those are parallel to each other.

And then you get a story, the second story in the Aramaic section is of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego being rescued from the fiery furnace. And the second to last story is Daniel being rescued from the lion’s den. Now there’s a clear parallel there, right? You’ve got people standing up with God and being rescued by God. And then the middle two stories, both have the king of the most powerful empire in the world, the Babylonian empire, being humbled.

And in their humility acknowledging that the God of Israel is the God of all gods and the God of all nations and is the one who needs to be worshiped. And so when you see that order laid out like that, it’s called a chiasm. It goes CBABC. When you see that, it becomes very clear that it’s saying that God is the God of all nations.

And that Israel didn’t go into exile because your gods were more powerful, right? And that God is able to take care of his own just because he didn’t protect Israel from the exile doesn’t mean he can’t take care of his own. And that if you’re wise, you will humble yourself before the God of Israel and you will make him your God too. And so there’s a very clear intended message that pops out when you understand the order of the text.

(10:31) Stephanie: That’s a really good example.

(10:35) Marcus: I will also say one more thing which you’ve heard me say a lot because you’re my daughter and that is that one thing we know about especially Old Testament writings is that the authors did not use Roman numeral outlining. There was no I, ABC to abc because that was Roman numerals. That wasn’t invented back then and so we have to kind of get that out of our heads that everything falls into this preset notion of how Americans tend to outline things.

And understand that there are a lot of different organizational systems used by ancient writers. One of the more common ones is this chiastic structure where you have parallels, parallels, and then the key point is actually right in the middle. Order, that was O. Speeches, Theological terms, and Order, right? Okay.

(11:19) Stephanie: Yes, yes, and now we’re on to Repetition.

(11:30) Marcus: Repetition. We’ve mentioned Pastor Woody, my friend Woody, before, but he likes to say that repetition is God’s highlighter. When he wants to draw your attention to something, the fastest way to do that is repeat it. But we do want to pay attention to this idea that repetition is a specific strategy. Sometimes it’s repeating exact terms, but it can also be something…let me give you another example:

In the flood story, it says, there were seven days and then this happened. And then there were seven days and then this happened. And it says, there were 40 days and this happened. And 150 days and this happened. And then you get to the middle. So this is both order and repetition. But the repetition there is how the author is reminding us the number of days. And it goes, seven, seven, 40, 150.

But then it reverses: 150, 40, 7, and 7, and all of a sudden you see that he’s doing this on purpose. Noticing the repetition in this case actually leads you to recognize the arrangement or the order of the text. So what is smack dab in the middle of this, the hinge on which this whole thing turns, is that phrase, “God remembered Noah.” Now we know God hadn’t forgotten, like,”Didn’t I just destroy the whole world? What was I doing?” He hadn’t forgotten Noah.

Whenever the Bible says God remembers, we could say God acted. In other words, when God remembers something, it means this was the point at which he acted upon the thing that he had promised to do. He remembered his promise and he did it. But they don’t say all of it, they just say he remembered.

(13:17) Stephanie: You see that a lot in Hebrew actually. When somebody listens or hears, it’s like they obeyed, right?

(13:24) Marcus: Yes, right. So that’s the O. So we’ve gotten to S-T-O-R. So that was the R. Repetition starts with R. Almost forgot. OK.

(13:32) Stephanie: Yes, that was repetition. Yes, so that can be words, that can be concepts, that can be locations, but you’re paying attention to recurrence. You’re paying attention to, especially within a section, within the segment that you’re studying, is this getting repeated?

(13:53) Marcus: Right. You’re looking for all kinds of repetition and we can look at it more later.

The last three are I, E, S: I is Introductions and conclusions, and that’s sometimes the author just gives you a little intro to the story. It says this story is about that. Let me tell you about the time this happened, and/or the conclusion of the story.

(13:59) Stephanie: And we’ll get into that more. So now is the “I”..

(14:22) Marcus: For example, in Chronicles, which we talked about last time, there’s a story where the kingdom of Judah goes to war against the kingdom of Israel. And the last line the author writes is an editorial comment, which basically says, they won that battle because God was with them. And so he tells you kind of, they sought the Lord and God delivered them. Here it is. So sometimes in the intro or the conclusion, the author will simply tell you what their intended message is, so you need to pay attention to those things, and particularly the clues that get inserted there. So that’s the “I”, yes.

(15:01) Stephanie: And speaking of edits, speaking of editors, the E is Edits. What do we mean?

(15:07) Marcus: Yes, the next one is Edits. And what I mean by edits are editorial comments in particular. An editorial comment would be, in movies, what we might call breaking the fourth plane. Is that what it is? The fourth wall? OK, so it’s like I’m talking, I’m talking to them, I turn to the camera and I talk right at you. So an editorial comment is kind of like that. I’m telling a story then I’m breaking away and I’m saying it right to you, “Oh, yeah, that used to be called Luz.” And, “When he said this, this is what it meant.”

So you want to pay attention when the author kind of breaks away from what they’re normally doing to speak directly to the reader. There’s a reason for that and so you need to pay attention. This is an editorial comment. One of the examples was when he says, “And they won the battle because the Lord was with them.” That’s an editorial comment. That’s not something you would know from the flow of the experience. That’s his commentary on it.

And so an editorial comment is a little bit like the commentary that’s actually embedded into the text.

(16:12) Stephanie: And then the final S you already mentioned, but is Shifts.

(16:14) Marcus: Shifts. And so the first kind of shift I’m looking for is like a genre shift. And that is, if I’m reading a story and all of a sudden there’s a poem, I’m like,”Well, that’s a shift. Why is there a poem here? What does this poem contribute to what the author’s trying to do?” Or if I’m reading along and suddenly there’s a genealogy, I’m like, “Well, that’s a shift. Why is there a genealogy here?”

And so I start paying attention to shifts like that, if there’s a shift in scene, like, this is happening in Babylon, and this is happening in Israel. There’s a shift in scene, the location. There can be other kinds of shifts that…

(16:54) Stephanie: There can be shifts in point of view, there can be shifts in timeline, there can be shifts in, yeah, just even in language like you said before.

(17:03) Marcus: Right, yeah, shift from Aramaic to Hebrew and Hebrew to Aramaic. So you’re just noticing when the author makes a sudden change and shifts from doing the approach that he had been using to using a different approach. You want to notice that. And when you bring all those things together, what happens is by the time you… You don’t always have to go in this order, right? This is just a way to remember the different things. So you don’t have to always do your analysis in the order of the word STORIES.

(17:36) Stephanie: For instance, introductions tend to happen first, so you can…

(17:59) Marcus: Exactly. Right. But it’s really helpful to have categories for the kinds of observations that you’re trying to make. And it is kind of fascinating to see how the better you get at making observations within these categories, the clearer what the author is trying to do becomes. And that’s ultimately what we’re after – the author’s intended message.

(18:09) Stephanie: So, now that we’ve got that overview, let’s go even deeper into the S. So we have speeches, dialogues, when people are talking, the author wants you to pay attention to what they’re talking about.

(18:26) Marcus: Sure. So let’s take an example. You mentioned Acts 4 before this, before we were on air, right? Let me just comment. Luke and Acts are the longest portion of the New Testament. The Apostle Paul wrote more individual books, but the largest volume of words in the New Testament is Luke,Acts. And so, and what’s going on there is that when the book of Acts ends, I’ve found this fascinating, that Paul is in prison when it ends. We’re used to stories ending with resolution, you know, they all lived happily ever after. Or, tragedy happened and it all ended badly. But there’s no resolution at the end of the book of Acts. Paul is still sitting in the Roman jail awaiting trial.

And so this is actually a clue to us of what is motivating the writing of Luke and Acts. And that is that Luke is gathering eyewitness testimony, not just to defend the gospel, but to defend Paul. And part of his defense of Paul is defending the gospel. He’s showing that Paul is only doing what God told him to do, and here’s all the evidence that God has been the one who told Paul to do this.

He showed up and he appeared to him. And then here’s the evidence that Christianity is a God-started movement and not just a weird thing going on. Christianity has its roots in the Old Testament and in the Jewish traditions, it’s got its roots in the movement and the activity of the Holy Spirit. There are supernatural evidences.

So Luke and Acts are just filled with things which, when you have this mindset, you begin to recognize it. You realize, “Okay. There is something going on here that helps me understand it.” So with that big context in mind, this simple little speech by Peter in Acts 4, in that context it says,

Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, the Jewish religious leaders’ “Rulers and elders of the people, if we, that is the apostles who’ve just been arrested, are being called to account today for an act of kindness shown to a man who was lame (now that would fly well in a Roman court, right? All we did was an act of kindness) and we are now being asked how he was healed, then know this, you and all the people of Israel, it is by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth whom you crucified, but whom God raised from the dead, that this man stands before you completely healed.” 

And it goes on. But you notice there that one of the things that, like for Paul’s trial, is they’re trying to show why are the Jews bringing this case against Paul? And he’s saying, “Well, they’re the same religious leaders who crucified Jesus to begin with. They’ve kind of been the ones that have been on the wrong side of this from the beginning, and here’s another example. What we were doing is something that was moved by the Holy Spirit and was kind, and that we’re just following what the Holy Spirit is leading us to do.”

So you can keep on going through the speech and see more and more things like this. That’s one example. But you take Stephen’s speech in Acts and you can do the same thing. And all of a sudden you realize why he is giving that speech and why he is laying it out. He’s not giving these people a history lesson because they don’t know the history of Israel. He’s giving them a history lesson and the entire recitation of this is an indictment of them for their opposition to what God is doing. The basic climax of Stephen’s speech is “You always oppose God.”

And again, in the Roman court system, it’s like, “Well, the people bringing this suit against Paul have been opposing God for a very long time”. And that’s kind of the idea there. So once you get these contexts and you get the speeches can sometimes pop out and you begin to understand why this speech is here and what exactly this speech is contributing to the overall flow of the book. So that’s what we say we’ve got to pay attention to the speeches because that’s often where the core messages are hidden.

(22:55) Stephanie: Mm-hmm. That’s good. I don’t want to jump in on more to say, I want to get us to Terms, but I’ll just say, one thing that I will find helpful sometimes if I’m doing a really thorough study is to paraphrase or write what is the point that I see in this speech or in this section?

And then as I’m going back through, if I’m doing a survey of a section, I can see the highlights and I’ll look for patterns. Did anything pop out overall? Because maybe I didn’t know what the big structure was that I’m looking at yet. But now that I’ve read the whole thing and I’m going back, I’m like, “Oh hey, this thing was covered way back here. Let me go see how it’s interacting.” Anyway, that’s one little strategy that I will use.

So Terms.

(23:46) Marcus: That’s good. Do we have time for “T”? I feel like we’ve been doing this for a while. Are we okay?

(23:52) Stephanie: We have, well it depends on how much you wanna say about “T”. We were gonna talk about Judges 17, which we have, I think, talked about on the podcast before, which is the story of the Ephraimite, Micah.

(23:56) Marcus: Okay.It is a bizarre story, right? It catches a lot of people off guard, like, what in the world is going on here. So I think it’s one of the reasons why I like going to it, because…

(24:22) Stephanie: Maybe we should give people homework. Maybe we should say, go read that story. We’ll give you some terms to look up and then we’ll talk about it next time.

(24:25) Marcus: Right. No, it’s true. So let me say this about Terms.The Torah, the first five books of the Bible, is the spring from which the vast majority of theological terms flow. And so the assumption throughout the Bible is that the people reading the Bible already know the Torah, that they are literate in what the Torah says.

So, Judges 17 is a classic case where you cannot possibly understand this story if you do not know what the commands were that Moses gave to the people of Israel, but once you do, you’re going, “I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe this is happening. They’re violating another law. They’re violating another law.” And so the text won’t tell you that. There’s no editorial comment saying, “And they violated the law by doing this.” They’re assuming that you know the Torah.

And so I would say too, for people who are like, “Where do I start my Bible study? How do I get really embedded in this?” I’m always like, “Read Genesis through Deuteronomy, and if you get stuck in Leviticus, I’m sorry, but highlight what he wants you to notice there.”

(25:45) Stephanie: You don’t have to absorb the whole content of every little iota of the law in that read through. Just say, “God, what do you want me to know right now?” Highlight it and you move on.

(25:59) Marcus: Right. And there’s a reason why the study of the Bible is a lifetime practice. All right. So that was Terms. The fountain of most of the terms of the Bible come from the Torah. And let me just finish this off because I know we can give an example, but basically it’s like the mom puts a curse on him because he stole silver from her.

(26:08) Stephanie: That’s good. Wait.

(26:27) Marcus: He then gives her the silver and she says, “Thank Yahweh that my silver has been returned” And as an act of gratitude to Yahweh, she bakes an idol with the silver. And so it doesn’t condemn that in the text, but it assumes you know the Torah and that is that the second commandment, “Do not use images, graven images, in the worship of me.” And so that’s a violation. You’re going, how in the world could they not know to do that?

Then it goes on and he makes a shrine in his own home for this idol of Yahweh. And you’re like, “Wait,there are only supposed to be shrines in Jerusalem or the place that God has chosen or where the tabernacle is. Why are they having a shrine in their home?” And then he installs one of his own children as the priest. And you’re like, “Wait, you have to be a descendant of Levi from the house of Aaron to be a priest. What is going on here”?

And then a Levite shows up in the story and the Levite’s job is teaching people the law. So you’re like going, “Finally somebody who knows who can set this thing straight,” but instead the Levite accepts money to become the priest at this shrine in their home with the idol in it. And you’re like, “And at that time everyone did what was right in his own eyes” suddenly makes sense.

It’s like there was no Torah running the community. There was nobody who knew the law of Moses. They were not doing what God had prescribed. They were all doing what was right in their own eyes. And God’s solution to that was a king. It was a leader who would bring the Torah back to the center of society. So there’s a little bit of an overview of Judges 17.

(28:13) Stephanie: Yeah, and some of the terms that popped out of that were: Yahweh, idol, shrine, priest, Levite. There are things that you’re like, “Hey, these words are popping out at me.”

(28:22) Marcus: Those terms remind you of, “Okay, I’ve read that in the Torah. I know where this is. I already have a theology in mind because of the term that was used, because I am familiar with Torah.” I will say of all the things listed in here, this is the one that you have to be the best Bible student already to really pick up, and that is the significance of the terms in the text. And the only way to know the significance of the terms of the text is to already be a Bible student.

(28:54) Stephanie: But also, if you come across a word you don’t know, write it down, look it up, because it might be significant, right? So that’s, yeah, yep, awesome.

Well, I just want to say a heartfelt and quick thank you to every donor who is on the trail with us and keeps us on the air with you. It is a privilege to be here with you. Thank you to each listener, to every person who is sharing with their friends and sending in encouragement and all the things.

I’m just saying, we see you, those of you who you send in testimonies, you come to us at conferences, you’re engaging with us on social media. Wherever we’re engaging with you, it is such a privilege to be on the trail with you and thank you, thank you, thank you.

Father, do you have any quick little final thoughts on this episode?

(29:45) Marcus: Yeah, you know, honestly, the first thing that comes to my mind is just that sometimes I miss the time where this was my life, you know, where I was a Bible teacher and this is what I spent my life doing. There’s still almost like a joy in reflecting on those days. And I think the good news is that that’s the beauty of the Bible. At every stage of the journey, there is a joy.

I can think back to high school and to college and to seminary and the time as a professor and then time since then, and at every stage, it has its own unique joy. And I think my encouragement to people is, get on the journey and enjoy each stage.