Reading and Applying the Bible Human Language part4

Reading and Applying the Bible

Week 4

Human Language

“Since the Bible was written by human beings, it must be treated as any other human communication in determining the meaning by the writer.” (McQuilkin pg 93)

“When God created individuals in His likeness, He created them [us] sic J.B. with the ability to communicate. The gift of human language, the ability to communicate, is indeed wonderful. In fact, it is so wonderful that meaning in life depends on it. A relationship of love gives ultimate significance in human life, and such a relationship depends on understanding what the other person is thinking. That is what communication is all about: enabling the other person to understand what one is thinking.” (McQuilkin pg 95)

As it is with military, trucking CB, and H.A.M. radio operators, so it is with communication. A clear command, instruction, or message is transmitted to the receiving unit, driver, or operator to receive, understand, and respond accordingly. God has transmitted a perfect, concise, and infallible message through His specifically chosen and preordained human authors. Today, after thousands of years, we are the receivers of the Transmitter or God. When the message is NOT received or understood, it is not the Transmitter or God, but we faulty receivers that are the problem. God sent or sends His message perfect, clear, and with plenty of power; however, we faulty receivers can foul the message up with the simple change of one word, or misplacing a comma, period or exclamation point.

Since God has sent His message perfectly in specific chosen men, human authors, we being saved and possessing the Holy Spirit, we have everything necessary to understand what He is saying IF we are intent with all sincerity, to desire to hear what He is saying via human authors, using human languages. Seeing how we are a little over 1,900 years since the last inspired Scriptures written by the Apostle John, with Jesus at his side dictating to him what to pen down, and over 3,000 years from Job and later Moses’ inspired writings, their different languages, cultures, and customs, it will take such due diligence as or Berean brothers in Acts to hear and understand the message. Simply put, it takes trust, work, and obedience.

The Bible is written in human language which God designed for us to have and use for communication. We will look at or use some simple elementary taught and common sense steps to apply for understanding meaning in the human languages Scripture is transmitted in, on the pages of the Bible. “I do not call them principles because I have reserved the word principle to identify Biblically based, unalterable standards. The laws of human language nowhere stated in Scripture.” (McQuilkin pg 97) We for the sake of our study together in this class will simply call them steps to develop or hone skills in understanding human communication. Dr. McQuilkin gives three basic steps:

1.) To understand the meaning of the writer, one begins with the ordinary meaning of the language.

2.) We must identify the type of of language being used, the genre, (poetry or prose, historical, literal, or figurative).

3.) Ordinarily, the interpreter is seeking a single meaning in context of what the author has written.

These basic steps should lay a systematic basis of study and skill development to begin with, upon which the Holy Spirit will build on as we mature in Christ and correctly divide the Word of Truth, as commanded in Paul’s last letter to young Timothy in 2^nd Timothy 2:15.

Seek Out the Ordinary Meaning of the Language

The clear and obvious intent of the human author must be established. “Jesus wept.” (John 11:35 KJV) What is the Apostle John saying in this sentence? Exactly what is written, Jesus wept. Our Lord cried tears upon seeing Mary and Martha wailing over their brother Lazarus. When we come to the Bible, we are first reading “God breathed” or inspired words written through human authors. So we approach a set of books and letters written in human languages, during antiquity, by men living in different millennia, cultures, nations, that are strange to us here in Jones county, MS.

This is not unlike toddlers learning to communicate with us parents and grandparents. The child knows what he is saying, what he is thinking, but we haven’t gotten in sync with each other on the language yet and it takes effort and time before the child learns or words to communicate what he is thinking. Consider the foreign missionaries that go to an island in the vast Pacific Ocean, where all they have is verbal language, and no written alphabet. That missionary has to understand the customs, culture, language, before can effectively communicate what he is thinking to the native islanders.

“The New Testament presents, in its way, the same union of the divine and human as the person of Christ. In this sense also “the word became flesh, and dwells among us.” As Christ was like us in body, soul, and spirit, sin only excepted, so the Scriptures, which “bear witness of him,” are thoroughly human (though without doctrinal and ethical error) in contents and form, in the mode of their rise, their compilation, their preservation, and transmission; yet at the same time they are thoroughly divine both in thoughts and words, in origin, vitality, energy, and effect...” (Schaff pg 12,728)