This is the transcript of Restitutio episode 532: What You Need to Know about Your Bible with Sean Finnegan

This transcript was auto-generated and only approximates the contents of this episode.

Hey there, I'm Sean Finnegan. And you are listening to Restitutio podcast that seeks to recover authentic Christianity and live it out today. 

As I endeavored to show last time, the Bible is one-of-a-kind. It's the result of dozens of authors working under God's inspiration to produce scrolls of text over centuries. This process resulted in 66 books, including histories, legal texts, poetry, prophetic oracles, and much more. Today, we'll spend some time just getting oriented. We'll cover which books are in the Bible. The various genres how references work and ways that you can access the Bible 

Here now is episode 532. Read the Bible for yourself. Part 2. What you need to know about your Bible. 

I want to begin with the question what is the Bible? The Bible is not. A book? Well, it looks just like a book. It's got pages. It's found in a cover. Nice fake leather cover. If you've got one like mine. Just got these little ribbons. Mine has two ribbons. I probably paid extra for that. Who knows? It's got our our text inside and different columns. Well, actually the Bible is not a book. It is, in fact, a library. It's a collection of 66 books written by dozens of people, old and young, rich and poor, philosophers and farmers, theologians and historians over many centuries. It's not a normal book, and because the Bible is a collection of other books, 66 other books that presents some unique challenges to us as readers. So I want to show you the 66 books of the Bible and just briefly read through them so that you can at least hear what they are. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, judges. Ruth. First Samuel, second Samuel, first King, second Kings first chronicles, second chronicles. Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther. Job psalms. Proverbs, Ecclesiastes Song of Solomon. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel Amos, Obadiah, Jonah even. Is that just I'm reading through. It's like it's incredible. There's so many books. In here, that was the 1st 32 #33, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Matthew, Mark, Luke. John acts Romans first, Corinthian, second Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, first Thessalonians, second Thessalonians first Timothy, second Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, James, first, second, Peter, first, second and third John Jude. Revelation. Man, there's a lot here. There's a lot here to master. There's a lot here to learn about to discover, and the Bible will reward you. This is something. I've experienced in my 25 years of of reading the Bible seriously. I get rewarded. It just happened to me this morning. I was reading a genealogy of all places, which is not where we want to start with this class, but I was in Genesis Chapter 10 reading a genealogy and I. And I and. I came across a. Name and I was just like I know that name and you know, I made a connection. A new connection. A new like neural connection in my brain that wasn't there before. And it was just like putting 2. Things together that. It's a very gratifying experience as. You are reading it. Year after year to to always be learning something new and developing A deeper understanding. Now the Bible is not really in chronological. Order, but it kind of is. It starts in the beginning, it ends in the end. OK, that's good. But in the middle there are some things that are ordered by section or by the kind of thing they are, rather than strictly by the time at which they happened. So the two main sections of. The Bible are the old. Testament, which is 39 books and the New Testament, which is 27 books. Now if we look at justice, the Old Testament, we have these 39 books here and we can break them into different. There are different ways of breaking up the Old Testament, but what I'm going to do here is just break it into three sections. We have our history, our poetry. And our prophecy. 3 sections of the Old Testament history, poetry and prophecy. If you want to further break up the history, you could break it into the Torah, the judges, the Kings and the books related to the exile. So we call those Exilic books a little bit of a technical term there. Then in the poetry section we have philosophy, songs, general wisdom, subversive wisdom, and romance. So there's a lot. In that wisdom section in the middle and then the prophecy has the major prophets and the minor prophets is usually how we divide that up. But there are problems with those kinds of names as well and. Limitations is is kind of like awkwardly in the the profits section. Like I understand why it's there, but it it's not really a book of prophecy, it's it. It's more of a wisdom literature book or a poetic book. Alright, let's look at the books of the New Testament. The New Testament has 27 books in it. It has three sections like the Old Testament has three sections. History, epistles and prophecy. So the history section has the four. Gospels and then the book of Acts. And then the. Epistles. We could break them into Paul's epistles and then general epistles. We could do that right about here. So these would all be Paul's, from Romans to Philemon, and then Hebrews through Jude are just more general epistles. A lot of times we know who wrote things. The Book of Hebrews is very much contested. Who wrote it? Probably not Paul. Although a lot of people assume that it. Never says that. So these are different sections of the New Testament. So there is a logic to how the Bible is put together and the Jewish Bible has a different ordering and a different logic to how it's put together in the Christian Bible. But it has the same books, at least in the Old Testament. Their Old Testament is the same. As our old. Testament. They wouldn't call it an Old Testament. They would just call it. A Bible and then the New Testament. There are different orderings for the New Testament too, and the ordering of the books is not really significant. I don't think any of us are taking like cues on how to live life on the basis of the order of the books in the Bible. What really matters is that you have all of them right, that you have 66. So let's move on to talk about genres for a moment. We have historical narrative, biography, law, poetry, prophecy, wisdom epistles, and apocalyptic historical narrative. These are books like Genesis, the first half of Exodus numbers. Joshua judges roof. Samuel Kings chronicles Ezra. Nehemiah Esther, Jonah, Jonah is in the prophetic books, but it's actually historical narrative more than it is prophecy. There's actually only one prophetic statement in all the book of Jonah that's just free. No extra charge for this little fact here, and it's in 40 days. Denovo will be destroyed. That's literally the only prophecy he makes. Whole city repents. Incredible, but it's not really a prophetic book. It's more of a historical narrative. And then you have Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and acts all historical narrative as well. This is a. Huge portion of the Bible. I don't. I don't know. Maybe half the Bible, but. Huge, huge section of the Bible is historical narrative and as we get into this. And we'll do a. Whole session on just this one section of the Bible. We'll see. Their rules are different than our rules for writing history. And if you don't know the differences. You can really get turned around and confused or start thinking there are contradictions where there aren't contradictions or holding it to different standards, and they're really fitting for an ancient Bronze Age text which is different than a newspaper in the 21st century. These historical narratives are masterfully. They're just like world class. Storytelling. This is not the shallow end of the pool. Here even though. It's easy to. Understand historical narrative. There's so much artistry going on in how things are told and what. Is not said. What is left to your imagination? These the stories. Are incredibly sparse. And yet you're able to really get. Thorough, like experience or mind picture as you read through. And the in the historical narratives, you sometimes get multiple documents or multiple books addressing the same subject or the same events. And when that happens, that's kind of a special case. It happens in both the Old Testament and in the New Testament. You can see multiple perspectives of the same event, just like multiple camera. Then we have biography. Biography includes books like Ruth, part of Ezra, part of Nehemiah, Esther, Jonah, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are famous biographies of Jesus. Acts is a double biography of Peter and then Paul kind of switches. Between them, halfway through, it's important to recognize that writing a whole book about a person is kind of a special. Case of historical narrative. So you might want to fit this in to historical narrative, but I I just made it a different category. Then you have law laws like the second-half of Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, some parts of the legal books of the Bible, the law books. They're highly technical. If this happens, then this is the penalty. But if this happens, then this is the penalty. And they'll have exception clauses, and they'll have different scenarios laid out this case law. There's a lot of ancient understanding of covenants. It's really important for understanding how law works. Our laws are derived to a large degree from the Bibles laws. I mean they're not blatantly copied, but you know there's a long history of influence from the Bible through the Byzantine era of especially Justinian and then into the medieval European law codes and English common law. Finally, to the United States, so you know there's. There's a lot of dependence. Going back, which is good for us because it makes it more easily understandable for us because we're kind of used to thinking a certain way about what should be allowed and not be allowed, then we have poetry. Job, psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Lamentations, a. Lot of the prophetic. Books have these long poetic sections in them as well. I didn't really know how to write that in here, so I just mentioned that. But poetic books have their own rules, very different than historical narrative, and it's very important for you to understand what the conventions are, or else you're going to end up like Monty Python, totally misunderstanding what's going on. Making fun of it or just being confused. Used by it, we're going to get into that. In this class, there's books of prophecy. Most of the books of prophecy are not predicting our future. By far the majority of what the prophets do is they tell the people. To get right with. God tell their own people in. Their own time to get. Right. With God, there are some. Prophecies of the future, like from the prophets perspective, their future. But these things have already occurred by our time. And then there are a few. What we call. Eschatological prophecies or prophecies about the end and those are yet to be fulfilled, and those are the ones we. Get excited about because we're like, oh, how's that? Going to work. How's it going to play out and that sort of thing so. Those are all in the prophetic. Books. Then you have wisdom. Wisdom books have their own logic, their own way of working. There are two kinds of wisdom. There are straightforward wisdom or general wisdom. Generally, if you work hard, you will be successful in life. Generally, there are exceptions. You could get some freak disease. You could have an accident. There are lots of things that could happen, but generally that's like a straightforward wisdom like the book of Proverbs. But then we have subversive wisdom like Joe. But Ecclesiastes is dealing with, like, OK, well, the world doesn't quite work the way it's supposed to all the time. What do I do then? How do I deal with that? And so that's what job and Ecclesiastes are doing. And then we have other kinds of wisdom literature, which we'll get into later. Then we have the epistles. Epistles are letters. The closest thing to a letter that. Young people would relate to would be. What a message. Because I think e-mail is sort of like passe. In a very. Adult. So like the the younger people there. If I say to you a letter, I wonder what you picture in your mind. Are you picturing a piece of paper with lines and cursive writing on it? You know, put it. In an envelope stamp. It seal it, send it right. That's what I picture. Right when I hear. The word letter, but other people. May or picturing. E-mail or maybe a direct message on Snapchat or something, I don't know. But like it's all the same thing, right? It's just different means of communicating what you want to say. The Epistles are very long, though they're not. Short generally, there are a couple of short ones, but many of them are very long by our standards today. Some of them are written to a church, some of them are written. To a leader. Some of them are written to Christians in general, so we'll be looking at all the different types of epistles and how epistles function in the Bible. And then last of all, we've got the apocalyptic genre and this would include parts of Daniel. And parts of Zechariah and most of revelation. This is kind of like the sci-fi fantasy section of the Bible, where you have visionary imagery and lots of interesting symbolism. Then there are subgenres in the Bible. Within a any particular book of the Bible, you can find other types of literature embedded. So you have parables, riddles, aphorisms, monologues, dialogues. And much more. So I just want to show you a couple of these. I want to show you a parable. I know you're probably thinking of the parables of Jesus, so I'm not going to go there. I'm going to go instead to the parable of Nathan, Second Samuel 12, one says, and the Lord sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said to. Him there were two men in a certain city and that's that's how a parable starts, right? It just jumps right in and you have no idea. It's just a true story. It's just made-up. Guess what it's made-up? Doesn't matter. That's the way parables function. There were two men in a certain city. The one rich, the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing but one little you, lamb. That he. Thought he brought it up and it grew up with him and with his children. He used to eat of his meager fare and drink from his cup and lie in his bosom. And it was like a daughter to him. Now. There came a traveler to the rich man, and he was loath to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the Wayfarer, who had come to him. But he took. The poor man's lamb and prepared that for the guest who had come to him. That's the whole story. Nathan tells the story to the King David. It says in verse five that David's anger was greatly kindled against the man. He said to Nathan as the Lord lives the man who has done this deserves to die. He shall restore the lamb fourfold because he did this thing because he had no pity, Nathan said to David. You are the man. And David repented. David got it. You see, that's the power of the parable, the power of the parable is you don't know what's talking about you. You don't know really what it's talking about, and you're and you're just like, yeah, that guy's a real jerk, you know. And then it's and Nathan Boom drops a hammer. No, you're the man, David. It's you. You're the jerk. If he had just come in. To the king. Who had just murdered somebody to cover up his adultery? By the way, the Bible doesn't shy away from, like, real life, OK? And he had just said to him, David, you send you're really evil. What would be the response? Probably not as powerful of a response. Maybe we just kick him out. Maybe we'd have Nathan killed. But there is a power of the parable of telling that little fictitious story to really communicate. What about a Riddle? Judges 1414, he said to them out of the eater, came something to eat out of the strong came something sweet. But for three days. They could not explain the Riddle. Do you know the answer to the Riddle? Out of the. Eater Cave something to eat out of the strong came something sweet. The answer is. What is sweeter than honey? What is stronger than a lion? And I will not go into explanation on this anymore. Riddles are confusing. They're you. They're like, oh, I don't know what you're talking. That's the whole point of a Riddle. If you read judges chapter 14, this will make perfect sense to you. We're not going to go into it right now, but that's an example of a Riddle. Aphorisms are short. Pithy. One or two liners, wisdom sayings. For example. Proverbs 15, one a soft answer turns away. Wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger and semaphore. ISM is just a short one or two liner that conveys a nugget of wisdom or a nugget of truth. Lots of monologues in the Bible you could think of. Job job doesn't really have dialogue in it. It's kind of like. Dialogue, but it's more like one person monologues than another person. Monologues taking turns and around 3 rounds of three people. Or Jesus monologues a lot like Matthew 5-6 and seven. The Sermon on the Mount is. A monologue and we have dialogues in the Bible. God asked Kane. Where's your brother, Abel? And Cain says to God. My my brother's keeper, I. Don't know where he is. And then God says to him, well, your brother's blood is crying to me out of the ground. And then God punishes, he says. I'm going to curse you. And he says, oh, I can't handle this curse is too much. Right. There's this whole dialogue, this back and forth in there. So we're going to flush these out in much more detail in future sessions. We're going to take our time, go through each section of the. Bible. We'll look at Old Testament history, how to focus on and read that genre. We'll look at the law, how to read that. We'll look at wisdom literature, prophetic. Poetic, the Psalms, and we'll just work our way. And by the time we're done, you'll hopefully be better at reading the Bible than you are now, and that you will be able to. Feel more confident. And say, yeah, I I can. Tackle this because there are some parts of the. Bible that are very difficult. For all of us and other parts that. Are pretty easy even. For like the first time. You read it. So we can avoid a lot of common pitfalls by going through this together. I mentioned last time about inspiration. We read that verse from second Timothy 316. I believe God inspired the text of Scripture. But a lot. Of what we see in our Bible, like if, for example, if you have a paper Bible like this, a lot of what we see on the page is not the text of Scripture. It's added. Stuff all these extra numbers. We have a little heading over this chapter. I've got notes in the center in between the two columns. I've got all kinds of notes on the bottom here too. A lot of times Bibles will have introductions before a book of the Bible. So I want to go through those things with you just briefly and talk about them because they are there when you read the text. Now, if you're reading an electronic text. You will still have some of these features, but not others, depending on what kind of app you're using or what website you're on. So I want to look at additions to the text and I want to make this one simple point, which is really. Jordan God inspired the text of Scripture. Everything that the publishers have added, these are their suggestions. These are these are helps, but they're not. They don't have God's authority on them. So let me explain what I mean. Chapters. Chapters were invented in the year 1205 by a guy named Stephen Langdon. And and the chapters are great. I'm not complaining about the chapters, but God didn't. Pick where they go. Some guy. And sometimes they break up the middle of a sentence or the. Middle of a thought. And you just need to realize these chapters are more like suggestions. They're helpful to like, find something, but they don't contain like, the authority of God behind them. Same thing with verses. Verses were added in the Old Testament in 1524 by Jacob Benham. Even Adonijah, and they were added in the New Testament in 1551 by Robert. Epstein, whose pen name was Stephanus. Verses are great, but sometimes they break up a sentence awkwardly. Then you have paragraph headings. They can be super helpful. But sometimes they inject theological bias into the Bible book introductions. Book introductions are really hit or miss. It depends on who publishes your Bible within biblical scholarship. There are really two different. Streams flowing. There are critical scholars and evangelical scholars, and you know that's a little oversimplifying because there are Catholic and Orthodox too, but just holding that to the side for a moment, there are people that are looking at the Bible from a very critical like, we don't really believe this necessarily happen. We're just starting it academically and then we have people that are studying the Bible as insiders. That are going to take the Bible seriously for what it says and believe it in in that vein, and those are more the. Bible believing scholars are sometimes called evangelical scholars. There are Catholic scholars on both sides of This is why I. Said it's a. Little complicated because you have some Catholics that will lean more liberal and some Catholic Bibles will learn more conservative, some will say, oh, I don't think Paul really wrote that epistle. I don't think Peter wrote that. You know, I think there's three isaiahs. To isaiahs you know and and there are a lot of books that are going to be like that and then there are books that are going to be very conservative when. It comes to book introductions. As with all this rest of this stuff. Of there's going to be a bias. Whoever the publisher it has hired, whatever scholars they are that worked on it, they bring their bias to the text. And so we just have to recognize that that is secondary. There's also cross references in many Bibles a lot of times those are in the center. If you have a dual column Bible or footnotes. Or if you're reading on your phone. Cross references will be like a little superscript or a store or something like that that you can tap on and then it opens up and it lists out other Bible references there. Cross notes are super helpful. They are not inspired by God once again, but they are helpful like say for example you're reading the time where. Jesus fed the 5000 in Mark Chapter 6. There's other places in. The Bible that talk about this. I wonder, does Matthew talk about the feeding of the 5000? Does Luke does John do all four gospels? Yes. Yes, they do, and your cross references will tell you. Oh well, here's where it is in Matthew. And here's where it is in Mark. And here's where it is in Luke. And here's where it is in John, and you can be able to find stuff a lot if somebody in the New Testament quotes the Old Testament, the cross reference will tell you where the quotation comes from. You can go back to the Old Testament. You can read the the quote. And in its original context, if that can be helpful, but as anything, cross references can be biased, linking scriptures together that really in my opinion don't belong together, but generally they're super helpful. Then we have textual notes. And that's the idea that the addition of the Bible that you have, we'll talk about the manuscripts. Like I said, there's five almost 6000 Greek manuscripts and then 10s of thousands of other manuscripts. Sometimes there are differences between the manuscripts and they will not be sure most of the time they they have figured out the. Scholars who work on this are called textual critical scholars they. Have figured out. Which is more likely to be the original for 90 plus percent of the bio. People, but there are some where they're like, I really could be this or could. Be that if. There is a doubt about which reading is more accurate. They will usually put a footnote so that will alert the reader. Oh, it could read this or it could read that these differences are tend to be extremely minor for the record, but they're still interesting. Then we have translation notes. This is where somebody rendering it from Hebrew to English or from Greek into English, and they're like, well, you know, we translated it this way, but it really could mean this too, because No2 languages exactly overlaid each. So you get translation notes, you get study. Notes that just. Give you, like helpful information. A cubit is 18 inches and EFA is 5 gallons. You know these kinds of things that will be helpful. Some Bibles will have italicized words, notably the King James version. The New American standard. Bible and the revised English version are three that use italics to indicate words that the translator has added. These are words that are not in the original Bible, but they've added these words in to make a smooth English sentence. In English literature, we use italics to emphasize words, so the fact that these italicized words are added words that should be deemphasized can sometimes create some confusion. But we you see, italicized where it means it's less important, not more important. If you're reading one of those versions, that does that. Some versions, like the New American Standard Bible, will capitalize like use all caps. It doesn't mean they're shouting or it's more important, it means it's a quotation from the Old Testament. And some versions will use red words for Jesus's words. And you'll be reading along and just even even like electronic versions. We'll do this with the red words, and you'll be like, oh, my. Font just went red. What happened? Well, somebody had the bright idea. Let's make Jesus's words read because he, I don't know. He died on the cross and it was a blood or, I don't know, but somebody somewhere just, like, started this trend. So it it happens in a lot of different versions, you know, it can be helpful because you're like, oh, those are the the actual words that Jesus said, these are obviously very important. Because Jesus said them. All right, let's look at references. I I want to just cover the some of these basics because they can be confusing. These are three different examples of the same reference. This refers to 1st Kings, Chapter 3, verse four. So in the first one, we used our separator, which is what I prefer a little period. It's more common I guess, even though it's not as cool to use a colon and then others. I have at least one dictionary that does this. We'll use like a superscript for. It doesn't matter what separator you use between the chapter and the verse. What matters is that it's always the same order book chapter first. OK, so whatever separator somebody uses is kind of secondary. This is how we do a range of verses. First Kings 3.1 Dash 4 means First Kings chapter 3 verses 123 and. Four. However, First Kings 3-4 means First Kings Chapters 3 and four. This is like 3 or 4 verses. I forget how to count if it's exclusive or whatever, and this is like dozens and dozens of verses, right? Because this the first one is referring to a verse range and this doesn't have that verse. Marker, so it's actually two whole chapters. Of kings in that case. Here's a complicated one. One Kings 3.4 comma, 7 comma, 15 semi colon, 16.1 dash 20, semi colon 18. I can imagine how intimidating this is to like somebody is just coming in and they're like man, I've been reading books my whole life. Like I I I I went to school and like, this is just gobbledygook. But just to show how it works, the first one there refers to 1st. Kings as opposed to. Second kings. There are two books of King. Do you really want to? Know it's because it didn't fit on one scroll in ancient times, couldn't make an A scroll long enough to fit both 1st and 2nd Kings on it, so they they cut it in. Half and they said. Alright, this is the first part of kings. This is. The second part of. Kings. So that's how we mark it, so the. Number before the. Book the book name. Is next kings and then the chapter Chapter 3, and then .4 means verse 4. Comma means we're going to another verse. So 3.4 comma seven or three colon 4, comma 7 means verse 4, verse 7, verse 15. Then the semi colon means we're going to a new chapter. See that? So we use commas for verses and semicolons for chapters. It's not 100%, but it's fairly universal. Here's a couple of other things if we want to cite just part of a verse, let's say we want to cite the first half of a verse, we use A and the second-half of the verse we use B First, Kings 34A is the first half of the verse. First Kings 34B would be the second-half of the verse. I've I really should have looked up this verse. That is a good one anyhow. Then we can use other letters in our references. The F. Have you ever wondered about the F First Kings 3-4 F? What is that F? It means folio. And it it's something that originally had meant the next page, but when within Bible reference stuff it means. Just the next verse. So first Kings 34F means First Kings 3-4 and. So think of F as in following. So verse four and following is verse five. However, FF. Means all the verses to. The end of the chapter. So first Kings 3-4 FF means all the way to verse 28. And you will see these references. From time to time when you read stuff about the Bible and it's helpful to look it up. When quoting, of course, it's common to use. An ellipsis the dot dot. Dot that just means we skipped a section of of verse or even multiple verses and then. One last thing. About references, just to wrap this up is that. It's very common. To use abbreviations to abbreviate a book of the Bible to justice, first syllable people don't want to write it out all the way, so that's very common as well. Alright, let's talk about ways to read the Bible. Just sort of winding down here before we we review. You can read your Bible in a paper Bible. I brought one. I don't really use a paper, paper Bible too much these days, but I brought one just to like show you there's something nice about a paper Bible you can stare at this text. So much, and it doesn't really hurt your eyes like a screen you know? Does it smell to it? You know, something tactile you can write on it. You can highlight it. You know, you can use these ribbons. It says something nice about that. Sets the paper Bible, as I mentioned for this class, I'm using the NRSV new revised standard version. Something too. That's great about the Bible, like the physical, getting a physical Bible is that it's great for avoiding distractions. I think so many of us have phone addictions and screen addictions that. Shorten our attention span and like you, maybe you're reading and you read like 3 or 4 verses and then out of the corner of your eye you see something flash and you're like ohh notification. What is it? Right. And then and then you come back and now it's going to take you a little while to get back into it. Now you start really cruising. And boom, somebody calls you. So airplane mode, turn it down. Go to a paper Bible, set a timer. I'm telling you it it. Could it? Could that that right? There could change your life. I don't know. Maybe it will. Maybe. I usually use a timer. When I read the Bible, I just set a timer and then it will beep when I'm done because otherwise I have no idea how long I've been doing it and I don't. You know, I've usually got other things I need to. Get to here are. Our versions that I would recommend I would recommend any standard version. Usually indicated by the S in the abbreviated name. OK, so this is the new revised standard version, English standard version, New American Standard Bible, Christian Standard Bible. Other standard typically means that it's a literal translation. It's trying to give you as close as as they can to the origin. Now and have it still be good English. There are lots of other kinds. Of Bibles that maybe are for good for other reasons. But I think for this. Class those would be more helpful. Let's talk about websites. I've got a couple here. Biblegateway.com biblehub.com. They're freebie websites you can use to get. Tons of different versions of the Bible, different languages as well. You can use an app on your phone to popular ones. Are EU version app. A lot of people. To use that, I think it's totally free. And it has a lot of versions on it, and then another one. Maybe you don't know about this. It's called Bible. dot IS. It's really good for reading the Bible. And they have original language stuff, which is kind of my thing. So like, you can have it read you the Bible in Hebrew or in Greek, you know, or English. Or French or Telugu or whatever language you want. You know they they're doing these things now. So I don't know if they have Telugu, but they have a lot of different languages. So an app on your. Phone the problem with reading the Bible on the phone once. Again, is the distractions like if you. Just put your phone in airplane. Mode or something or do not disturb do something, because otherwise some stupid app is going to like say hey, did you know? And it's like no, I'm trying to read my Bible. I'm not. I don't. Want to know? Right now. Or an app. On your computer I do this a lot. I have both logos and accordance. They're very good, very good Bible software. They both start at $49.00. Logos goes up to $10,800, depending on how many packages you buy. Accordance goes up to $42,568 for like the top level package. I've got several $1000 invested in accordance personally and do not regret it at all. You know, it's just very, very helpful to have Bible software that is able to load in all these commentaries and other books to help. So. Do whatever you want to do right? Get get a paper one, use a website, use your phone app, use a PC app, whatever you want to do. The point is get to know your Bible. And we're going to get more into translations and tools later. I'm not really going to get into that right now, but for this course, I'm not going to assume you have anything other than just access to a Bible. I'm not going to assume that you have some fancy Bible software or a commentary or whatever. We're just going to. For this course. We're just looking at what the Bible. It actually says directly. And I think that's about what I wanted to say. Let's review. The Bible is not. A book, but a library of 66 books. The Bible breaks into two main divisions. Old Testament, 39 books and New Testament 27 books. The Bible contains different genres that affect how we read, including historical, narrative, biography, law, poetry, prophecy, wisdom epistles, and apocalyptic. And people have other ones. If you wanted to add more in, but the idea here which I want to stress one more time is that you just don't read. Indeed, somebody retelling a story about a dream the same way that you would read a newspaper, right? So genre matters when it. Comes to how you read something. Next, review point. Even within genres we can find sub genres like parables, riddles, aphorisms, monologues and dialogues. Although God inspired the text of Scripture, other additions of publishers are subjective and devoid of divine authority. Reference styles vary, but follow the format of book chapter verse. The Bible is available as a bound book on websites, on phone apps, and on computer apps. You can even get a piece of jewelry where they have used some sort of laser to engrave it with the entire text of the Bible, and it fits right in a pendant you could wear around your neck. I mean, the Bible is the most successful book in all human history. It's really exceptional. Next time we'll look at reading the Bible in context. This is so important. Context context is like real estate, location, location, location, context, context, context. It's so easy to take Scripture out of context and read it from a 21st century Western perspective and just miss what it's saying. We're going to spend some time on that, maybe as much as 80%. Of common errors you can avoid just by. Doing the effort to read it within, it's a historical context, and so we'll turn to that subject next time as we continue in our class, read the Bible for yourself. Well, that brings this one to a close. What did you think? Come on over to restitutio.org and leave your feedback for episode 532. What you need to. Know about your. In our previous episode 531, why should you read the Bible for yourself? Someone named Sean wrote in 12 years ago. I would have said yes, but now no, I hate to say it, but without other people and their knowledge, their experience, their story, and how they've changed in reading the Bible, I would say reading it alone will likely lead you down many incorrect roads. I know it's a double edged sword, but we bring our own definitions and worldviews to the Bible that are deep within before reading. Words like hell, God, Jesus are just a few that will have so much baggage built into them, possibly based on your past. Well before you read the Bible, I can only speak for myself. Hell led me. To have no. Other concern except for people dying and not knowing Christ, it drove me to ignore people and only think of their salvation. Well, this is one of those comments where I feel like I came into. The middle of a conversation. And I think what Sean here is referring back to is whether or not someone should read the Bible for themselves as opposed to just accept what the teachings of their pastor on Sundays or some other trusted expert who has a podcast or YouTube channel. And I can see why he would have hesitation. People do in fact bring their biases to scripture. Their previous teaching, their knowledge and intuitions based on movies, they've seen, stories they've heard from family members and personal experience. But. Still, but that just describes the problem. It doesn't really describe the cure to the problem, and I know that for my part I probably have some doctrines wrong. I probably have some interpretations wrong. There are probably some areas in my life today that 10 years from now, looking back, I would say. Ohh my goodness. I really needed to change that and I hope that's the case. I hope that I can continue to grow and continue to change, and that's what it means to be a Restorationist. That's what it means to be a Berean. That's what it means to have a living faith relationship with God is that you are open to change and you are willing to change. But how do these changes occur? How do I shed falsehood and onboard truth? Well it to a large degree, not exclusively, but to a large degree. Happens as I read the Bible, and I believe that we do need to read the Bible on a regular basis, that this is a mechanism that we have to encounter God's thoughts and to challenge our thoughts. And so yeah, I totally agree that people bring all kinds of bias and presuppositions to the text of scripture. They, you know, on on the subject of hell they think hell is a subterranean compartment of the earth where people, I guess, disembodied souls, are tormented in some sort of special fire that never goes out. That's not in the Bible. The Bible does picture hell as a fire, but that's in the vision of revelation, and we have to be careful how we interpret a vision. Of course, we'll get to that later in this class. Actually, we're going to do a whole unit just on the Book of Revelation. So stay tuned for that. But the scripture overwhelmingly describes the punishment of the wicked. As annihilation as destruction as perishing, just like it says in the most famous verse in the entire Bible, John 316. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life. So the options are living forever or perishing. Perishing is what the lake of fire or Hell, or Gehenna does. It doesn't keep you alive forever. It's still a very fearful judgment, you know, I wouldn't. Turn my nose up at the Biblical judgment thinking, Oh well, it's not tormenting me forever. So it's no big deal. No, it's it's definitely still a big deal to be absolutely destroyed by the Almighty God. I mean, come on. So anyhow, I hear what you're saying about that, Sean, and certainly appreciate that. But how how did anyone ever find their way out of these medieval folk categories? Well, it was from reading Scripture, so I think reading Scripture is essentially the antidote, and I wouldn't want to forbid people from doing that. I'm not saying you're advising that. I'm not entirely sure what you are advising here. But I just wanted to affirm the goodness of reading scripture that you should read it, read it, read it, and look, you are going to misunderstand. Some things, as you read it, that's fine overtime. You will have fewer misunderstandings as you gain an understanding of how the book works, how it fits together and you encounter more verses on a subject than just the few that you know in the beginning. I don't mean to say it's fine to misunderstanding like we should be satisfied with that, but I'm just saying it's. Not the end of the world. You have to press forward or else you're never going to make progress. Now as far as seeding your biblical understanding to a particular teacher or pastor or author, I want to give you a caution against that. I myself am a pastor. And I have a responsibility to teach the people that God has committed to my care, but at the same time, one of the very most important things I teach them is that they are responsible for their own salvation and and their own spirituality. I can advise them I can teach them. I give them what I know and I'm going to be held accountable, no question about it. But still on the day of salvation. No one is going to be able to point at their pastor and say, well, this pastor taught me this. Therefore I get a pass. No, that's not. I don't think that's how it's going to work. And So what the best thing I can do as a pastor is encourage people to read the Bible for themselves. If you read the Bible for yourself, then you have some way to check what the pastor. Says because let's face it, pastors are people, and authors are people, and even college professors are. People and as people were flawed and we can be mistaken. And yet the scripture is there, silently testifying to God's truth generation after generation. It's the gracious means by which he's given us to check our beliefs and to grow in our understanding. So read your Bible. That's my point. Are you reading your Bible? Get to reading your Bible if you're. Not reading your Bible? Get on a. Plan set aside a time of the day. Whatever you got to do, listen to it. Watch Bible project videos, whatever you need to do. Get into the scriptures. Well, that's enough for today. Thanks everyone for tuning in. If you'd like to support.us.youcandothat@restofstudio.org, we'll catch you next time. And remember the truth. Has nothing to fear.