5: Bible Study Clues – Order, Repetition, & Intros

(00:43) Stephanie: Alright, Season 4, Episode 5. Hello, Father, and Happy Hobbit Day!

(00:49) Marcus: Well hello, Daughter. And yes, I probably should have brought my Tolkien pipe, you know, as we discuss Lord of the Rings theology. OK, well.

(00:56) Stephanie: Yeah. You did my 13th birthday. You dressed up as Tolkien for my Lord of the Rings party. That was —

(01:06) Marcus: We did. We had a Lord of the Rings themed 13th birthday. That was fun.

(01:11) Stephanie: My love of Lord of the Rings is all your fault, really, I mean, since you were telling me stories of hobbits before I knew what Lord of the Rings was. So yes, today is in fact Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday.

Happy birthday! And that is something that you can celebrate the world around versus, you know, it’s also, for those of you who are, we are sharing the same hemisphere, happy first day of fall as well.

(01:23) Marcus: Okay.

(01:38) Stephanie: I’m very, very excited. This week is full of excitement. We are on the way to the Hope Together Conference this week and are going to be hanging out with our School of Ministry people and just, yeah, wonderful, wonderful connections there.

And then we also have a fun announcement. In case you have not heard yet, it’s pretty new: The Spirit and Scripture Self-Pace Course is now live for pre-orders. I’m so excited. This course is just — I’m in the throes of it right now, and so a lot of times the thing you’re studying is your favorite thing, but it’s like my favorite thing.

Like this is, we’re talking Holy Spirit, we’re talking Scripture, and Dad is working through it in 10 lessons that you can take at your own pace, and it’s really fun. So Dad, do you have anything that you would like to say about The Spirit and Scripture course?

(02:39) Marcus: Yeah, it’s part of the series that has freedom and identity and spirit as we work our way through the F.I.S.H. model. And we’re going to have two more courses coming out before this is complete. We’ll have a five-course set when it’s all done. But I would tend to agree this is my favorite one to teach.

And I think that it involves so many lifestyle issues and things that are just important and so many lessons about the Bible to really help you get a handle on some things. And so it’s always nice seeing what we’re doing in the podcast too, because we are diving into how to handle Scripture well and how to interpret the Bible.

(03:19) Stephanie: Yeah, no, it really is. The first half of the course is really laying groundwork for how to walk in the Spirit versus the flesh and what are the roles of the Holy Spirit and different things like that, like focusing on the Holy Spirit. And then the second part of the course is getting a handle on the Bible and how it all fits together.

And all of this together is like lifestyle and rhythms and how are we cultivating our walk with God. So I’m excited. Links in the description for how to pre-order that, and we can move on into the topic of the day.

Last week we were talking about the acrostic stories as the checklist in our 321 Bible study method, and we started unpacking. We went through speeches and terms, and so this week we are gonna pick that back up and go with — oh, so Father, would you just cast a really brief vision again to catch people up for like what are stories, why are we?

(04:17) Marcus: Yeah, so stories basically is a checklist that I have used for 30 some years on what are the kinds of observations that I need to make as a Bible interpreter that are going to help me get to the author’s intended message. And so this is just a list of categories to kind of keep in mind as you’re reading the scripture to notice when these things are happening because they are the clues that lead us where we want to go, and order is a big one.

We actually — in our 32 — the 2 was selection and arrangement. So arrangement and order are basically the same thing, but we’re making sure that we identify that and look at it. And again, I said this before, but one of my pet peeves is when we force things into Roman numeral outlines, when clearly the authors weren’t using Roman numeral outlines because that process hadn’t been invented yet. And so paying attention to what is the actual order that the author is using is really important.

And the other thing about order is that all of the other elements of stories can help you recognize when something is happening that is creating order. For example, shifts that the author uses, editorial comments where he breaks the fourth wall and talks directly to you. Those kinds of things can help us recognize, even repetitions can help us recognize, okay, he’s using repetition to establish this order.

So I think we talked about how in Genesis repetition was used to establish order for the flood story. And in the Gospel of Mark, for example, the life of John is used to establish something. So when John baptizes Jesus, his ministry launches.

When John is imprisoned, Jesus moves to Galilee and you know, all the stuff that happens in Galilee takes place. When John is beheaded, right, that ends it. There’s another shift in the ministry of Jesus, and he starts moving now more intentionally and directly towards his own destiny with the cross.

So noticing shifts like that, noticing things can kind of clue you into, okay, the author is changing something here. Maybe I should pay attention to this because he could be using this to establish the order, and all of these are going to give us a clue to where he’s trying to take us.

(06:35) Stephanie: Mm-hmm and just for clarity I think I heard you say that we talked about the flood story, and I was thinking we talked about the creation story but also I’ve been working with you on a variety of Bible things. So maybe we did, maybe I’m off.

(06:49) Marcus: Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. It’s like we have a lot of conversations about a lot of different things. I can’t always remember which ones were on the podcast. But it won’t hurt to review. Let me just say the flood story really quickly, right? And that is one of the ways you can see what’s called a chiastic structure in the flood story is by noticing the repetition of numbers.

And that is there are seven days and then something happens. There are seven days and then something happens. There’s 40 days of rain and then something happens. There’s 150 days, and then we get to the apex of the story where God remembers them. And when it says God remembers, that never means he forgot. That always means this is where he took action. This is where he acted on what he promised. So he remembered a promise, and he began to act on it.

And now we see reversal. So we see another 150 days. And just like we saw 40, we see another 40 days. And just like a seven and a seven. And so you see this perfect chiastic or triangular structure to the flood story that is built around recognizing the repetition of these numbers. And so that’s an example of how these things can work together and help us.

(07:58) Stephanie: Yes, yes, and I think you are right. I think we did talk about that now that it’s coming back to me. Let’s dig into order just a little bit more for another example before we move on to repetition. I know we’ve covered order a lot, but it’s important, as you say. Unless, do you want to do a segue, the segue from order to repetition and talk about — ?

(08:23) Marcus: Yeah, let’s go ahead and talk about repetition. I do think we’ve covered a lot on order.

(08:28) Stephanie: Yeah, I like how you structure the repetition of toledot.

(08:36) Marcus: Toledot in Genesis? Yeah, yeah. So this is one of those where it helps to know Hebrew, right? Because in Genesis, we see this phrase, depending on the translation, ‘Now these are the generations of’ or ‘Now this is the account of’ or something like this. And there are 11 times it occurs in the book of Genesis.

And the Hebrew word for generations of or account of is toledot and that is based off the Hebrew word for birth, huledet. And so when we look at this, we’re like, okay, these are the generations of the heavens and the earth, and it tells us Adam’s story. And this is the generations of Esau and it gives us the genealogy from him.

Well, the author is clearly using that phrase and that term and that expression, the repetition of ‘Now this is the account of’ or ‘This is the generation of’ to give order and structure to the book of Genesis. So, paying attention to that repetition can help you to recognize, okay, the author is repeating something here in order to give it order.

I’ll give you another example from Matthew, right? Several times in Matthew, we read, ‘When Jesus had finished saying this,’ and it always comes right after one of his sermons or discourses. And there are five sermons in the book of Matthew that kind of parallel the five books of the Torah.

And the five sermons of the book of Matthew all end with, ‘And when Jesus had finished saying these things,’ and you see this transitional phrase repeated over and over again, and it kind of highlights the fact that we’re moving, we’re making a shift now to the next thing, and it’s going to be related to what you just read in this big speech. So things like that, repetition and order often go together.

(10:21) Stephanie: Mm-hmm, and so let’s talk more about repetition specifically. This can be words, it can be concepts, it can be locations. What kinds of things can be — are we looking for recurrence? Are we looking for? Or it can be phrases. Yeah.

(10:36) Marcus: Yeah, so for example, when we talk about theological terms, and those are often anchored in the Torah or in the covenants. And so for example, I would look at the idea of wisdom being anchored in clusters of words, you know, good versus evil, curse versus bless or bless versus curse to keep them connected. It’s got life versus death.

And so what happens is you begin to notice that those words are used in those key terms. So when you see key terms that are repeated, all the more reason to pay attention to it, like this is not only a repetition, it’s a repetition of a theologically significant term. So for example, in some of Paul’s epistles, he’ll say, ‘These things are true of us in Christ Jesus.’

And you’re like, well, look how often he says ‘in Christ Jesus’ in the book of Ephesians. I should underline these and pay attention to that repetition because he’s clearly trying to get a point across about what it means to be in Christ Jesus, and that raises questions for us because you know I know I’m not physically in Christ so what is this talking about?

And this idea of union with Christ grows out of it. The idea of the covenant grows out of it, and there’s a lot of things that begin with just noticing the repetition, and as we said before when we introduced this, repetition has been referred to as God’s highlighter, you know, for drawing our attention to things that he wants to emphasize.

(12:00) Stephanie: Yeah. Could you give some strategies for recognizing repetition? For example, I’ll start off with just contextually, it’s really helpful to read — If you are ever able to take the time and read a larger chunk at once — read a whole book even at once, or read several chapters.

A lot of times I’ll find recurring, you know, a sentence, like a whole sentence, like this was the same sentence that happened like two chapters ago, you know, or something, but I wouldn’t have caught that if I was just reading it a chapter at a time. So if you’re like really doing a study of something, it can be helpful to find repetition happening in a book or a section of a book, reading bigger chunks at a time, because you’ll note that.

(12:47) Marcus: That is a great point because the number one thing that keeps us from recognizing order and recognizing those things is that so many of us just read a little bit at a time, and you kind of have to read larger chunks and you have to think in terms of entire books as having a single message and that I want to know what the point of this book is because if I can understand the point of the letter, if I can understand the point of the book and how it all connects together, then that’s going to help me.

Now to jumpstart people in this, right, because that’s a lot of work. That’s one of the reasons that we’ve written, I’ve written a book called The Deeper Walk Guide to the Bible. It’s one of the reasons we’ve got books like this to try to jumpstart people in the process of what is the big theme of this book? What are the big picture items going on here to try to help people understand that.

And so just like we talked before, sometimes that can be as big as Joshua through 2 Kings like that whole section has a theme to it and if you’re only reading a chapter at a time it’s going to be very difficult to get there, and it’s one of the reasons why we go to school. It’s one of the reasons why we study these things because it takes a lot of time to unearth those things, and we want to benefit from what the work that others have done before us.

(14:06) Stephanie: Mm-hmm. Well, and I will just say there, you know — I always have the tendency toward wanting to like, I’m doing a deep dive as I’m going through the whole thing. But you can just read it. You know, you could even listen to it, find an audio Bible or just, you know, every time you approach the Bible doesn’t have to be ‘I am going to milk this study for all it’s worth.’

There are times for that, and they’re awesome, but also just washing your mind in it, and like sometimes things will just pop out and you’re like, whoa I hadn’t noticed that before. And so a lot of times if I’m doing a casual book survey versus an I’m going to you know find out that whole outline of the book, if I’m just doing a casual book survey I just ask God to highlight things to me as I’m reading through it, and I’ll just kind of write ‘recurrence’ next to something if it happens to pop out at me or whatever, but I’m not like hunting for every single thing the first pass. I’m just seeing what —

(15:02) Marcus: Well, and it might be a good time just to reiterate that there are multiple approaches to Bible study. One of them is devotional, and a devotional approach is, ‘God, I’m just going to read. Would you just make something jump out at me and let’s interact over that?’ That’s a perfectly legitimate thing.

So then there’s historical, whereas I really want to get the history of what’s going on there and understand the cultures and understand the backgrounds, and that’s a legitimate approach to the text. There’s theological, where I’m trying to put together what are the streams that run throughout Scripture that are related and how do they connect together and where are they taking me?

And then what we’re talking about specifically is literary, because the point of the literary is that there was an author who had a message to get across, and we want to discover the clues that are taking us to that message and that’s where we’re focused.

(15:58) Stephanie: Yeah, yeah. All right, any further thoughts on repetition specifically before we move to?

(16:05) Marcus: Yeah, so again, repetition can be a lot of things. Like, for example, I remember reading through Genesis one time, and it jumped out at me that Abraham came to Bethel and then he went to Shechem, right? And then he went to Beersheba and then he was in Egypt. And then when he came back, he went to Beersheba and then he went to, it was reversed order. And so by noticing little things like that, all of a sudden I began to see, I think the author is using the repetition of these place names to give some structure to the account.

And one of the things that that does for me is it puts the emphasis on, Egypt, and that what we’re getting is like a preview of the whole Exodus story that’s going to happen sometime, where God’s people are going to find themselves in Egypt, bad things are going to happen there, but God’s going to bring them out with plunder and wealth, and he’s going to bring them back to the land, and there’s this whole, you know, kind of metaphorical message that comes out of it that I’d never saw before until I noticed the repetition.

And it was the repetition of those things that pointed to the order. It was the order that helped to understand the highlight of what the author was trying to highlight. So that’s an example. And so repetition can be things that we’re not even looking for. It can be the repetition of phrases, repetition of names, repetition of places, repetition of, you know, even speeches, like it’s organized by, hey, look, there are five major speeches here.

In Genesis through Deuteronomy, for example, there are three massive poems. You’re like, why? I thought this was a law, right? Why are there three big poems in here? And so even that raises our question, like, why, why did he do that? What is going on here? Why that shift from narrative to genealogy to poetry? And what’s the purpose of this poem?

So things like that help us to recognize that there’s a repetition to it, that he’s done this more than once.

(18:05) Stephanie: Yeah. So I’m sure repetition will continue coming back in. As you can hear, we’re talking about order and shifting and repetition, throughout all of it. They’re all supporting each other and interconnected. And sometimes you just happen to notice one of those things first and then you discover that this was repeated.

So yeah, but so in our acrostic stories, the I is introductions and conclusions because sometimes the authors just tell you their message. They’re like, and here you go.

(18:42) Marcus: Yeah, and so sometimes introductions and conclusions can be for the whole book. So like with the Gospel of John, he starts off and says, this is who Jesus is, and I’m writing all these things so that you’ll believe. And at the end of the book, he tells you, I’ve written all this so that you’ll believe.

That’s not subtle, but not every book does that. Not every book does the author say, I wrote all of this so that you would — it’s not quite that clear. But when it is clear, we want to notice that and go, okay, that means that I should read everything in here through that lens that he’s writing this to increase my faith and help me to believe. So —

(19:21) Stephanie: I just want to jump on that real quick. That is a huge clue that I circle constantly. I’m like, I don’t know what it means yet, but I’m going to come back and look at it. When the text says, ‘So that’ or ‘Because’ or something along that effect, or ‘Forward, blah, blah,’ there’s an explanation happening there on some level, so that’s something you want to pay attention to.

(19:47) Marcus: Once you get into the original languages in Greek and Hebrew, different kinds of repetitions jump out at you. And they can even be the repetition of prepositions or the repetition of participles and things that you wouldn’t see in the English text, but that’s getting kind of deep. But it is part of it. When we’re talking about intros and conclusions, the other thing I’d say is that that can be for whole books, but it can also be for passages.

(19:59) Stephanie: Mm-hmm.

(20:15) Marcus: And that is, that’s one of the things that’s helpful to understand the order, because the order can help define this is where a passage begins and ends, and how does the author introduce this, and how does he end it. I’ll give you an example from Mark, because that’s my most recent study, and there are pivot points, and the first pivot point is that John is imprisoned, and it’s just one sentence, and it says ‘John was put in prison.’

The next thing, after that, Jesus moved to Capernaum, and he starts his ministry there. And then there’s another pivot point right afterwards where it says, Jesus is soaring in popularity, people are amazed with him, and then all of a sudden the Pharisees don’t like the fact that he’s claiming to be able to forgive sins and claiming to be God.

And they’re like, ‘We gotta stop this guy, not just stop him, we gotta kill him.’ So it says the Pharisees started plotting with the Herodians, who were their sworn enemies. And so here are enemies plotting together, ‘We got to kill this guy We got to get rid of him,’ and from that point on there’s a pivot you’ll begin to notice. Opposition starts increasing, and the next story after that is a conclusion to one section and an intro to the next section.

We begin to see that his family now thinks he’s out of his mind. There are people from Jerusalem, teachers of the law, who say, ‘No he’s possessed by the prince of demons,’ and then Jesus starts teaching in parables. Why? Specifically because it’s not safe to just say exactly what he means. He’s got to say things in a way where those on the outside who want to persecute him can’t be absolutely sure that he’s talking about them, and so you begin to see a shift in the strategies of the author, and the clue to it though are these pivotal intro conclusions that switch to the next part of the story.

And so that’s what I mean by intros and conclusions. Sometimes they are cluing us into shifts, and sometimes they are speaking to us directly. In this case, the obvious thing was persecution began. And once you have that rubric in your head, you begin to notice it in the stories. And then that answers the question, ‘Why did the author put this story next to that one?’ And he put this story next to that one because thematically they are showing the increase in persecution and misunderstanding of Jesus. I could go on, but yes.

(22:47) Stephanie: Yeah, yeah. I feel similarly about Bible study as John did about the — Jesus did many signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in the book. Yes, we’ve already — but I’m trying to remember when we brought up that John 20:30 verse before, 31 then says, ‘But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and that by believing you may have life in his name.’ You can’t get clearer than that.

(23:21) Marcus: Yeah, well, and I look at that too. It’s like, what was his goal? Life. So what do I hear when I hear that? Wisdom, right? I want you to choose the wise path and trust and obey Jesus because that’s the path of life. And it’s the old wisdom message coming through again.

(23:38) Stephanie: Yeah, I also pulled from Revelation 1:9: ‘I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.’

(23:54) Marcus: Well, honestly, so one of the first sermons I ever preached was on the entire book of Revelation. And I got teased about it by my brother-in-law who’s a pastor who said, “I just finished a 22-week series on Revelation, and you covered it in one sermon.” But my goal, I think I was 24 at the time, my goal was I wanted people to see the big picture of the book of Revelation and understand that the core point of Revelation isn’t prophecy and teaching us about the end times.

And the verse you just quoted is the clue from the author of what this book is about, and it’s written as encouragement to people who are going through suffering. And so then you ask yourself the question, in what way was this an encouragement to people going through suffering in John’s day? Right, not just to people 2,000 years later, but in John’s day, how would this have been encouraging to them?

And you look at it, and things pop out at you because you realize there are seven I AM statements in the book of Revelation, just like there are seven I AM statements in the Gospel of John. Same author, so it makes sense that that would happen, but these are all I AM statements about overcoming. And the core message in the letters is to be overcomers, right? I’m in this with you, we’re going through the suffering, let’s be overcomers who live in victory in the midst of this.

And then he pulls back the curtain on the spiritual warfare, and he shows Jesus is the overcomer and that it’s gonna be worth going through all of this because of the victory that awaits us in the end. And all of a sudden, a lot of things in Revelation start making more sense when you realize that the author has actually told you what he’s all about in writing this book.

(25:37) Stephanie: Yeah, good word for the season. Yeah, okay. I’ve been pulling us long in our episodes recently. I should have us wrap up. So, I’m really, I don’t know. Dad, would you pray over us?

(25:59) Marcus: Yeah, well, you know, people listen to podcasts at different times. Some people listen to them when they first come out. And so, yeah, it’s a hot day, right? But other people listen to them at other times. And one of the things that just happened this last week, you know, was that Charlie Kirk was shot.

And so that has just sent shockwaves through, you know, through the Christian church, especially, and then through culture in a bigger way. And so this idea of we need a rock as much as we have ever needed a rock. And that rock is God’s word, but it’s also God’s word put into practice. And part of putting it into practice is trusting and obeying God in the midst of all of this. It’s turning to God for his narrative, not the correct narrative for the whole culture to embrace, but how he wants you to think about things.

This is part of what we cover in the Spirit Course is how do we bring these kinds of things to God? What does he want us to think about it? What’s the takeaway for us in this season can be more important than having the definitive narrative for the whole culture. And so I look at things like this, and I realize that one of the reasons that we do what we do at Deeper Walk is to give people tools and resources for the hard things in life. And this is one of the hard ones.

And I know a lot of people shed tears, a lot of people got really angry, a lot of people have been afraid, a lot of people have had a lot of emotions about this.

Father God, some things are too big for us, right? And we have to look to you and ask you for your intervention. And this is one of those things where it affected a lot of people at a very personal level. And there’s a lot of emotions with it, a lot of thoughts and ideas and beliefs with it.

I ask you first of all to protect us from the enemy getting in and planting seeds in this wounded place in our hearts that would lead us to make vows that we shouldn’t be making. I pray God that you will help us to find the path of healing in our own lives for the things that we’ve gone through that we will be able to be relationally, emotionally mature in the way that we interact with people about all of these things.

And God, we pray for our culture, we pray for our world. It’s easy to look around and see distress. I mean, just today, looking at the news all over the place, there are so many areas of distress. But God, we know there’s always something distressful going on in this world.

And I think of Corrie Ten Boom’s words: “When I look at the world, I am distressed. When I look within, I am depressed. But when I look to you, I am at rest.“ And God, that’s our prayer, that we would find rest in you and that you would pour out your peace and your protection on your people at this time and that you will give us courage and clarity, and I pray these things in Christ’s name. Amen.

(29:02) Stephanie: Amen.

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.