目录
一、介绍
二、指引
作者
文本
受众
互相依存
三、概括
经文的复杂性
解释者的独特性
受众的需要
四、结论
一、介绍
通常孩子们不能体会他们老师为他们付出了多少心血。他们的老师使出浑身解术让他们有诸多的新发现。可是，作为孩子的，在他们成长的路上，不但不感激，往往是诉委屈发牢骚。当然，作为成人我们回望我们儿时的老师，我们能体会到有老师带领的学习，要胜过只是靠自己来学习所有的功课。我们会为老师所做的心存感激。我们若再思一下，我们应该更加感激在我们童年时期，给我们这么多学习功课的机会，让我们在每日生活中不断成长。在许多方面，这恰好反映出《圣经》含义的情形。上帝没有丢下我们，只靠自己去发现《圣经》的含义。他为我们提供指导帮助我们。不只如此，一个有关《圣经》最显著的特征之一，就是在我们的一生中，我们可以不断地一遍又一遍地阅读《圣经》，却总能发现其中更多的含义。
这是《他赐给我们圣经：释经的基础》这个系列的第六课，我们给它定的标题是「发现含义」。我们在这一课要聚焦来看一些释经策略，它们能帮助我们认识《圣经》的原本含义。
有无数的因素促成了发现《圣经》含义的过程。不过，按我们要达到的目的而言，我们只关注两个因素。第一，我们要谈一谈帮助显明《圣经》经文含义的一些重要指引。第二，我们要看对那含义做多重概括或总结的价值。让我们首先来看带领我们去发现《圣经》含义的指引。
在之前的课程里我们提到现今多数福音派基督徒，认为他们诠释《圣经》的方式是文法历史的释经法，这个神学名词是较为近期才出现的，但这种释经方式其实可以追溯到整个教会历史中，特别是宗教改革的时候。所谓文法历史的释经法就是按着经文的文法结构那些成文的字句要表达的内容与方式；以及按着经文的古代历史背景特别是从经文作者和当时受众的时代背景，以这两个要素来寻求了解经文的意思。读经的人就是使用文法和历史的因素做为指导来明白《圣经》经文的意思。
我们在这一课要关注帮助显明《圣经》一处经文意义的三个主要指引：经文的作者，文本本身，以及经文要写给的原本受众。
当圣灵默示《圣经》的写作时，他是通过《圣经》作者的才能和个性来做工。所以，对作者的认识可以帮助我们明白他们写的《圣经》。
圣灵也塑造每一卷书，让它们成为一个综合的整体，提供了足够的记载下来的内容，让我们能按照每一段经文自己的文法和历史的上下文脉络来认识这些经文。所以文本本身能指引我们对《圣经》的解释，因为它包含了文学的上下文，解释这文本所有经文时需要参照的来龙去脉。
圣灵还确保他默示的书卷是原本受众能够明白的，与他们的生活相关。所以，我们也能通过探索《圣经》原本读者的身份和生活，以此了解经文的含义。
想象此情形，有一个人在餐馆里发现一张扔在地板上的字条，上面只是草草写了「帮忙」两个字。他把这张字条递给同桌的朋友，看看他们有没有人能明白它的意思。但可以帮助人明白的线索不多。这个人抱怨说，「要是多写几个字就好了。」另外一个人加上一句：「要是我们能知道是谁写的就更好了。」另外一个朋友评论说：「我真希望有法子知道这张字条是写给谁的。」事实就是这张字条可能会有很多含义。它可能是另外一张餐桌上孩子玩游戏的一部分，可能是有人求助问及菜单的问题，还可能是某人落在大麻烦里拼命求救。没有进一步的指引，这人和他的朋友实际上就没有办法能明白这张字条真正的意思。
《圣经》的情形也类似。当我们对它的作者和受众知之甚少，或一无所知，或者当我们读一些经文时，不知道它们的定义和更大的上下文或背景，《圣经》要传递给我们的含义，在我们看来就是不清楚的。然而，好消息就是，我们获得的对作者、文本或受众的任何认识，都有潜力增强我们对《圣经》含义的认识。
如果我们研读《圣经》的时候，不去考虑经文的文法和历史背景，无可避免的就会按着我们所以为的来解释《圣经》。当然这听起来可能是很可笑，但是好比说当耶稣讲到重生，或是从上头生，对有些人而言，那就是再投胎的意思，不是进入你母亲的腹中然后再生出来，而是再一次进入另一个人的腹中。这也是尼哥底母当时有所误解的。因此，我们是需要从经文的文法字句上明白到底在说什么。就上面那个例子，一些历史的背景也会对我们有所帮助。例如，当犹太人讲到重生，他们特别想到的是一个外邦人归信犹太教情形。因此，当耶稣这么说的时候，身为犹太的教师，尼哥底母是难以理解的，为什么他被看为跟那些与上帝的子民无关的人一样？但就如耶稣稍后说的，就是在约翰福音8章，耶稣说那些人是魔鬼的后代，他们必须重生，才能成为上帝的儿女。这样的例子在《圣经》里是不胜枚举的。《圣经》里每个叙述都有它的文法意义和历史文化背景。《圣经》虽然是超越时代，但我们也是需要明白那些经文书写的环境和时代背景，才能够明白那些原则，而将那些永恒的总原则应用在其他状况里。柯瑞格凯纳博士我们相信研读《圣经》时，若是对于经文的文法字句意义和历史背景有更多了解，就更能明白经文意思。当然，即使你受的教育不多，手边也没有研读《圣经》的辅助工具，只有经文本身，你还是可以读《圣经》；而历世历代的基督徒都相信，即使没有像现今的信徒所拥有的辅助工具或是研经的参考书，你仍然可以明白经文在说些什么。不过，若是能把经文段落、字句集合在一起，明白其结构，以及经文写成时的历史背景，那会使我们对于经文含义更为清楚和更佳透彻的理解。西门沃伯特博士我们对能帮助我们揭示《圣经》经文含义的指引的讨论要分成四部分。我们开始的时候要更深入来看这些指引的每一样：作者，文本和受众。结束这部分的时候，我们要探索它们互相依存的关系。
让我们首先来看作者给我们的指引。
当我们思考部分《圣经》书卷的人类作者时，我们必须要预备好回答一系列的相关问题。首先就是要知道作者的身份，到底他是谁？有时《圣经》一些书卷是很清楚地列出了人类作者的名字，例如，旧约《圣经》的阿摩司书，或是以赛亚书，很明显就是先知阿摩司和以赛亚所写的，而新约《圣经》里的彼得或是保罗书信，也清楚列出这些使徒的名字，标明他们就是作者。不过新、旧约《圣经》也有很多书卷我们不知道作者是谁，例如旧约的士师记，或是列王纪；新约的使徒行传和希伯来书，就是如此。对于这些书卷，我们通常就是按着一般性的作者看法。但不管是知道与否，对于经文做一些历史考查，通常可以让我们知道某一卷书作者的人物轮廓，帮助我们能够解答下面的这些问题：在上帝的百姓当中，这个作者扮演什么角色？他特别关切的是什么？他的书里强调什么思想，行为和情感？我们对人类作者在这些方面的任何认识，都可以引导我们接近目标，即发现经文的含义。
让我们关注约翰福音3章16节的作者，思想对作者的认识对我们解释《圣经》的工作应该带来的影响。这段我们耳熟能详的经文是这样的：
上帝这般爱世人，甚至将他的独生子赐给他们，叫一切信他的，不至灭亡，反得永生。（约翰福音3章16节）约翰福音是由使徒约翰所写，他是雅各的弟兄，西庇太的儿子。他是耶稣最信任的同伴那小圈子里的一员，是初期基督教人群中信仰的柱石。除了约翰福音，他还写了新约《圣经》另外四卷书：约翰壹、贰、叁书和启示录。通过他写的书 通过其他《圣经》作者，比如马太、马可和路加记载的关于约翰的事情我们能对约翰所信的，他是怎样向他的受众传递他所信的获得有用的认识。例如，在约翰福音20章第31节，约翰叙述了自己为什么要写这卷福音书。他告诉他的受众：
记这些事，要叫你们信耶稣就是基督，是上帝的儿子，并且叫你们信了他，就可以因他的名得生命。（约翰福音20章31节）这段经文清楚讲明，约翰写福音书整体的目的，就是要他的受众们「信耶稣是基督，是上帝的儿子，并且叫他们信了他，就可以因他的名得生命。」
当我们对作者和他的写作目的有了一定的认识后，我们不难看到约翰福音3章16节也含有这双重目的。
现代《圣经》译本的多数编辑正确的理解到约翰福音3章16节，乃是对结束于3章15节时耶稣的话语所作评论的开始。约翰福音3章16节的前半句，「上帝这般爱世人，甚至将他的独生子赐给他们」这个部份是对应约翰福音20章31节所说的：「要叫你们信耶稣是基督，是上帝的儿子。」而约翰福音3章16节后半句「叫一切信他的，不致灭亡，反得永生」，则是呼应约翰福音20章31节后半句：「叫你们信了他，就可以因他的名得生命。」
这些对应的文句证实许多解经学者几千年来所意识到的，约翰写这段，不只是做一个事实与历史的陈述，上帝赐下他的独生子耶稣这个历史事实，对约翰而言这固然非常重要，但他提起这个事实的真正目的是要他的受众相信基督，以致他们可以有永生。因此，我们若是了解约翰的目的和信念，就能帮助我们更加合宜地解释他写的这卷福音书。
看了依靠作者引导我们认识《圣经》含义的益处之后，让我们来关注《圣经》的文本。
我们对文本这个词的用法，要包括我们研究的经文的所有特征，包括它的词汇、语法、修辞方式、句子结构、形式结构、论证大纲、文学背景的上下文等等。要负责任地解释《圣经》，我们就必须 密切关注受上帝默示的作者们所写的实际字词和短语。
我们探索《圣经》文本时，要记住的重要事情之一，就是它以不同大小的文法单位来传递其意思。当然，这些传递意思的不同单位各有其不同类型。总而言之，文句意思是以语素来传达的，例如一些字的细微特质，好比说是单数，复数以及动词的时态。意思也可以借着单字，片语，短句，长句，散文或是诗词的段落来传递。大的部份，例如完整的叙述，演说或是律法的条文，甚至整卷书，都可以成为意思表达的单位。而很有趣的是，有时较小单位的意思可以从较大的单位里来了解的更清楚，或是较大单位的意思因着对应较小的单位而显出清楚意思；因此任何时候我们若是要明白《圣经》文本的意思，就需要探索它里面的所有这些不同层面。
为了要了解我们到底是在讲什么，我们可以看约翰福音3章16节里一个常被误解的地方。
如之前所读到的，约翰福音3章16节是这样开始：上帝这般爱世人（中文『这般』的原文没有翻译出来），而福音派的基督徒常会以为这个短句的意思是上帝如此伟大的爱世人，或是上帝如此亲切的爱世人，或是上帝是这么的爱世人。这样的误解行之已久，也被多人认同，以致我们不会去质疑约翰在句子中用这般这个字，到底是要被认为『如此伟大的』，『如此亲切的』，或『这么的』意思，还是他别有所指。但是，如果我们读约翰福音3章16节的上下文背景，就马上看出这字不是要传达那个意思。
首先，英文 so『这般』这个字是从希腊文的οὕτως（/hotōs/）翻译过来的，希腊文的副词通常隐含有『如此大』，『如此多』的意思，不过更常的情况是带着『所以』，『照样』，或『以此方式』这样的意思。我们可以对照约翰在16节之前的字句中同样词汇的使用，来明白3章16节的这个字要表达的确实含义。约翰福音3章14和15节这么写着：
摩西在旷野怎样举蛇，人子也必照样被举起来，叫一切信他的都得永生。（约翰福音3章14-15节）在这几句经文里，耶稣提出两个时候的对照：摩西在旷野举起蛇，因此人子就是耶稣他自己也必须被举起来。
在15节里，耶稣乃是引申民数记21章4到9节，在那里，上帝惩罚在旷野的以色列人，让毒蛇去咬他们，以色列人于是呼求上帝的拯救，于是上帝下达命令，摩西做了一条铜蛇，放在杆子上，把蛇高举，所有望着这铜蛇的以色列人就得医治。用这个类比，耶稣清楚声明当他被举起来的时候，不论什么地方，凡是仰望他的人，就能免于上帝的审判。
我们特别要注意耶稣说的『摩西在旷野怎样举蛇，人子也照样要被举起来』。在这个对照里，被翻译成『照样』的这个希腊字，也就是16节开始的那个字οὕτως。耶稣说，就如蛇被举起来，『因此』，或是『照样』，人子也必要被举起来。约翰在16节用这个字的时候，他是引用这个对照。
事实上，约翰重复用οὕτως这个字，来与摩西的举起蛇，做出第二个对照。但是在16节里，这对照是介于摩西所做的，和上帝所做的，他赐下他的独生子。因此，整句可以这样说：『摩西在旷野怎样举蛇，照样上帝爱世人，甚至赐下他的独生子，叫一切信他的不致灭亡，反得永生』。从这个例子我们就看到，对于经文字句里一个小地方的仔细查考，就可以帮助我们更明白文句所要表达的意思。
认识到作者和文本如何指引我们去解释《圣经》之后，我们现在准备好来看第三种指引，就是受众。
每次我们思考《圣经》某段经文的原本受众时，都需要预备来考虑各种不同的问题。首先，我们要知道那些受众的身份，他们到底是谁？有时经文会很清楚的明讲这些受众是谁。例如新约《圣经》的罗马书，就标明收信人是住在罗马的基督徒；加拉太书则是写给加拉太的众教会。不过，与此同时，许多的新、旧约《圣经》书卷都没有直接说明谁是原本受众。在这样的情况下，我们只能靠着间接的线索。然而，按着一般性的历史考查，和经文本身，我们多少能塑造出《圣经》一些书卷的最初受众到底是哪些人。我们需要尽可能的回答以下这些问题：例如，那些受众住在哪里？他们的历史背景如何？他们面对什么样的挑战？他们有什么思想，行为和情感上的需要？我们对原本受众的各种认识，都能引导我们更明白眼前所阅读的经文的含义。
虽然书卷原本受众对于《圣经》的书写没有直接贡献，但《圣经》作者们书写时，心里总是想着那些原本的受众和次要受众。他们是直接为某些人而写，但他们也为那些间接会读到他们作品的人而写。我们一定要记得，当《圣经》初步写出来时，那时能阅读的人只是少数。因此，《圣经》的作者们并没期盼有许多人会拿起他们所写的来阅读。不过，若是我们对主要的和次要的受众群体知道越多，就更能明白经文的原本含义。
让我们再一次回到约翰福音，以此来说明，为何阅读《圣经》时，记住原来受众是很重要的。就约翰福音而言，我们需要借着间接的线索来知道约翰的主要和次要的受众们。就约翰福音来看，约翰经常需要解释巴勒斯坦地区的一些习俗，注意在约翰福音4章9节，他怎么写耶稣和一位撒玛利亚妇人的谈话：
撒玛利亚的妇人对耶稣说：「你既是犹太人，怎么向我一个撒玛利亚妇人要水喝呢？」（原来犹太人和撒玛利亚人没有来往）。（约翰福音4章9节）显然，约翰的一些受众们可能不知道犹太人和撒玛利亚人之间的隔阂，因此我们很难相信约翰主要是写给住在巴勒斯坦地区的人，因此他们应该知道这些习俗的。事实上，约翰的某些受众很可能是外邦人，因为有两次，例如约翰福音1章41节，还有4章25节，他甚至需要解释Χριστός（基督）这个希腊字，就是等同于希伯来字的弥赛亚。另一个例子是约翰福音9章22节，约翰的评论：
犹太人已经商议定了，若有认耶稣是基督的，要把他赶出会堂。（约翰福音9章22节）在这段经文里，赶出会堂，是驱逐出去，赶逐出犹太的社群。
我们不只可以猜测出约翰的受众是包含外邦人，还有巴勒斯坦地区之外的人，也知道他们可能面对一些严酷的挑战。关乎这挑战的线索之一就是约翰用『犹太人』时，是指那些压迫耶稣和他的跟从者的人。这个主题是这么的明显，以致有些解经学者认为这本福音书是反犹太人的。当然耶稣，约翰，和其他耶稣的使徒们都是犹太人，因此这绝不是针对种族而言。约翰心里想的乃是那些不相信耶稣，又迫害教会的人。
约翰屡次提到不信的犹太人如何反对耶稣和他的跟从者，这强烈显示出约翰的受众们也正面临因信仰而被逼迫的情况。约翰福音也常提到为何不信的犹太人会拒绝耶稣，不肯归信基督信仰。鉴于我们的目的，我们要再看两处经文。
一方面，不信的犹太人指控耶稣是亵渎上帝，因为他自称是上帝的儿子。在约翰福音10章36节，听听看耶稣如何责备那些反对他的犹太人：
他（耶稣）自称是上帝的儿子，你们还向他说『你说僭妄的话』吗？ （约翰福音10章36节）由这句经文可知，耶稣自称是上帝的儿子，乃是犹太人拒绝他的理由之一。
另一方面，反对耶稣的犹太人不喜欢他，因为他将救恩的盼望除了带给犹太人，也给予了外邦人。约翰很清楚的让他的受众知道，耶稣不只是犹太人的救主，也是世上所有人的救主。例如，约翰福音4章42节，那些撒玛利亚人听到耶稣在井边所碰到的那个撒玛利亚妇人的见证之后的回应：
我们知道这真是救世主。（约翰福音4章42节）从约翰的观点，耶稣不但是犹太人的救主，更是救世主。
对于约翰原本的受众而言，这两个重要主题，得以解释约翰福音3章16节约翰所强调的，耶稣是上帝的独生子，而且父上帝差遣他来，因为上帝这般爱世人。
《圣经》里的每卷书都是写给它的原本受众的，而二十一世纪的我们并非是那原本受众。另外，一个有趣但对我们也很有帮助的认知，就是新约《圣经》里绝大部份的书卷都是书信，因此我们在读那些书信的时候，或是说在你读整本《圣经》，但特别是书信时，你是在读写给别人的信件。那些书信跟我们有关，乃是因为我们属于教会；但它们最初是为当时的信众而写的。就新约《圣经》而言，那就是第一世纪的基督徒们。因此，如果我们花些功夫，了解当时信徒们的生活状况，他们所关注的事情，还有书信的作者到底是谁，为何写那些信件，我们对于那卷书就有更多认识；而在把书信里的教导应用在现今的生活之前，尤其需要先了解书信原先受众的状况。罗伯特麦克尤恩博士既然我们已经看了作者、文本和受众是怎样成为我们的指引，带领我们去认识《圣经》的含义，就让我们来关注它们之间互相依存的关系。
我们要负责任地解释《圣经》，很要紧的就是要明白，我们提到的每一种指引，都是彼此互相光照的。我们对作者的认识，帮助我们认识他写成的文本和原本的受众。我们对受众的认识，帮助我们了解作者的意图，和他写作文本的细微之处。文本的字词和语法同时给我们提供了关于作者和受众的信息。所以，作为解释《圣经》的人，我们需要从所有这些来源获取尽量多的指引，好使我们对《圣经》的解读不会因为只对其中一两样有不平衡的强调而出现偏差。
作者、文本和受众是认识《圣经》含义互相依存的指引。如果我们不考虑它们互相依存的关系，就会很容易犯下错误。
如果我们过分强调作者，我们就会经常落入一种意图错谬。意图错谬是太过依赖我们认为 我们对作者和他意图的认识，不强调我们从文本和受众学到的内容。
在解释《圣经》的时候，犯下意图谬误的方法是多种多样的。例如，我们会猜测一位作者写作时的想法，对他的意图作出没有根据的认定。或者我们会错误认定，关于一位作者的正确信息与我们解释的经文非常相关，因此就过分强调了这正确的信息。
让我们以约翰福音3章16节为例，看一些有可能犯的意图错谬。我们可以肯定，约翰写下这节经文时，他是要吸引读者去注意上帝在基督的死这件事上表明出来的爱。但我们不能确定促成约翰写下这句话的所有微妙心理影响作用。很简单，《圣经》和可靠的历史文献没有给我们足够线索，去了解约翰的内心思想，使人可以得出这种类型的结论。即使我们能得出这些结论，他内心的思想可能也不会与约翰福音3章16节的含义特别地相关。
那些看重经文本身的权柄和意图的解经学者，有时被指责犯推测意图的错缪，就是推测认为作者写那些话语的意思到底何在。但是，这并非意味着我们就无法理解作者到底要和他的受众沟通些什么，而且在时过境迁之后的岁月里，他所表达的仍然可以让我们后人理解。现今，不管我是写一封电邮给我太太或是世上另一个地方的人，是某个人在报纸上发表其言论，某个作者写一本书，所有的作者都认为他们能够借着借着他们是谁，和他们所写的文字，让人知道他们要传递的信息。不过，在这一切之上，我们知道也相信，《圣经》至高无上的作者是上帝，而不单单是人，是上帝借着这些人类作者而书写；因此我们相信，首先是圣灵帮助那些人类作者来书写《圣经》，这也帮助现今的《圣经》受众们在阅读时，可以明白作者到底是要表达上帝的什么心意。西门沃伯特博士我们会犯的第二种类型的错误，就是过分强调文本。这种错误经常被称作是一种书写错谬。英文「书写」（graphical）这个词来自于希腊文γραφή （/graf/）这个单词，意思就是「写作」。相应地，书写错谬就是过分强调文本本身，去到相对而言排斥考虑上下文背景中作者和受众这些因素的地步。这是一种错谬，或错误，因为同一份文本可以有很不同的意思，取决于是谁写的，是写给谁的。我们如果认为只需分析文本的词汇、语法和结构，无需考虑它的作者或原本受众，就能充分把握一段文字的含义，那么我们就是犯了这种错谬。
按照我们举的约翰福音3章16节的例子，想一想如果我们唯独关注文本，忽视约翰和他原本的受众，这会有什么结果。我们怎么知道上帝的儿子是谁？毕竟这节经文没有明确指出他的身份。如果读者不知道约翰是一位基督徒，他写作的对象是基督徒受众，他们就会作出各种各样不负责任的假设。
一个拜迦南地诸神的异教徒，可能会认为「上帝的儿子」是巴力，迦南神伊勒的儿子。
某些人知道亚当在路加福音3章38节被称为「上帝的儿子」，就可能会错误得出结论，认为亚当就是约翰福音3章16节讲的上帝的儿子，甚至把亚当和耶稣当作同一个人。
其他读者可能会被好像独生或世人这样的说法，或者 永生这个概念搞得很糊涂。当我们忽视作者和受众的时候，我们就会犯很多这类错误。
我们会犯的第三种解经错误，就是过分强调受众。这常被称作是一种影响错谬，因为它太过关注《圣经》如何影响它的受众。当解释《圣经》的人过分猜测原本受众的心态，没有足够关注作者和文本，他经常就会犯这种错谬。思考《圣经》对原本受众的影响，以及从可靠的历史记载了解受众，这肯定是合理的做法。但是影响谬误超过了这一点，过分强调受众个人对经文的反应，这就几乎总会导致主观的、不可靠的《圣经》解读。
例如在约翰福音3章16节，影响谬误可能会过分猜测原本受众的处境，以及他们对约翰关于永生教导的回应。它可能会认为，约翰讲生命的时候，他的意思其实是在地上逃脱他原本受众忍受的逼迫，而不是我们要永远享有的灵命更新和祝福。这种解释会过分强调经文对它受众的冲击，忽视了约翰范围更广阔的教导，以及文本本身的细节。
有几个情况可能使得我们太过于强调原本受众的重要性，首先就是太强调《圣经》某一卷书是特别为哪些人写的，而我们误认为我们知道的比实际的要多。例如，多数的新约《圣经》书信，当然这也包括旧约《圣经》，不过我特别要谈的是新约，多半的新约书信，我们并不清楚它们原先的受众是哪些人，因此我们在假设的时候，可能就会导致错误的解释。例如，新约《圣经》的希伯来书，这是我精心钻研的一卷书。许多人想象着这卷书的所有可能原先受众，而以此做出解释，但事实上，我们根本不知道它的特定受众是哪些人。我们需要知道的是那些书信写于第一世纪，也需要知道当时的文化背景，所使用的语言，他们是如何被写成，诸如此类的事，这是相当重要的。但是，我们也不能超越所知道的，而自以为是的认为最初的受众是谁。例如，就福音书而言，我们知道是为着牧养当时的教会，为那时的基督徒而写，除此以外我们没有其他线索。重要的是，我们不能自以为知道，那就会错解《圣经》了。盖瑞科克尔博士不幸的是，好像意图错谬、书写错谬和影响错谬这样的错误是很容易犯的尤其是在我们对一些指引没有足够的信息时，就更容易犯这样的错误。事实就是，我们并不总是对经文的作者或受众有很多认识。许多《圣经》书卷的作者是匿名的，很多书卷没有明确指出它们的受众是哪些人。有时，我们甚至缺少关于文本的重要信息。我们并不总是可以有来源资料，帮助我们明白它所有的特征，比如《圣经》原文对事情的说法带来的隐含意义。当我们的信息更有限的时候，我们的解释就更加普遍化，这通常是智慧的做法。即使如此，当我们正确看待从作者、文本和受众得到的指引是互相依存时，我们从这些指引任何一样了解到的每一件事，都有可能帮助我们改进我们的解释。
我们在讨论发现含义，到目前为止，我们已经讨论了发现含义的三个重要指引。所以，现在我们准备好来看对《圣经》经文作多重概括的价值。
如果你在教会聚会有相当的年头，就很有可能听过不止一位牧师根据同样的经文讲道。通常这些讲道都相当不同。事实上，根据同样经文作的讲道有可能非常非常地不同，却都没有违反那经文的原本含义。这怎么有可能呢？简言之，没有一位解经的人能够完全彻底或穷尽地解释出《圣经》经文的含义。总会有更多地学习的空间。为此缘故，我们必须总要期待用新的方式总结《圣经》经文，好使我们能够拓展我们对其含义的理解。
发现《圣经》含义的其中一个最有用方法，就是对一处经文作多重概括。按照我们这一课的内容，我们用概括这个词指：
对一处经文的描述。通常一个概括是出于一个特定的出发点，或者强调一个在经文中出现的特定概念。因为每一节经文都有一个复杂的含义，概括就能帮助我们缩小我们的研究范围，让我们能够只聚焦在这段经文所讲的某一部分上。
我们可以举一个例子说明概括这个观念，我们可以想象一群学生在观赏一场复杂的戏剧。表演完毕，老师要求学生总结这出戏剧的含义。一个学生的概括，集中描写整个故事中不同角色的发展。另外一个 学生按时间顺序来概括事件的发展。还有另外一个学生描写戏剧是怎样批判当时的价值观。最后，一个学生描写感动他自己的漂亮舞台布景和生动语言。所有这些回应都是对这出戏剧含义的合理概括。但这些概括没有一个是完全抓住了这出戏剧的全部含义。如果我们要看这出戏剧的全部含义，就需要把这些概括和更多的概括加进来。因此，这就是做多重概括是如此有用的其中一个原因 它帮助我们聚焦含义的个别方面，并且 也让我们对这戏剧完全的含义有越来越多的认识。
《圣经》也是如此。存在着很多合理的方法去概括《圣经》一段经文的含义，这些概括可以帮助我们更好明白它含义的各个方面。合在一起，多重合理的概括带领我们越来越靠近《圣经》完全的含义。
我们要来思想三个主要因素，它们要说明对《圣经》含义作多重概括的好处。第一，我们要看经文的复杂性。第二，我们要提到解释者的独特性。第三，我们要聚焦来看为他们概括经文的受众的需要 。
让我们首先来探索经文的复杂性。
正如我们在前面一课学到的，《圣经》经文的含义复杂性，主要是因为它们的原本含义，或者说文字含义，就像一块经过切割的宝石，是多方面的。它们的方面代表历史事实，教义，道德责任，拯救和末世论这些方面的内容。每一节《圣经》经文都传递对我们思想、言语和行动的道德意义。每一节经文都教导我们某些关于历史和拯救的事情，帮助构建对未来的希望和期望。而经文传递的这些事情的每一样，都能用来作概括总结的基础。
事实上，因为《圣经》含义是多方面的，我们就能用许多不同方式对它进行概括，却仍能忠实于它文字的意义。《圣经》的复杂性意味着我们的概括绝不可能是穷尽一切，我们总是能作出更多既真实又独特的概括。
让我们来看一节经文实际概括另外一节经文的一些地方，以此探索这种观点。请看诗篇110篇第1节：
耶和华对我主说：「你坐在我的右边，等我使你仇敌作你的脚凳。」（诗篇110篇1节）新约《圣经》经常引用诗篇第110篇第1节，但每次都关注它原本含义的一个不同方面，而且没有一处引文包含了其他经文所说这篇诗篇原本含义的全部内容。
比如耶稣在路加福音20章41到44节引用这节经文，表明弥赛亚必然不仅仅只是大卫的子孙。
彼得在使徒行传2章32到36节用这节经文证明，耶稣既是主也是基督，因为他是大卫的后裔，升天坐在天上的宝座上。
新约《圣经》也认识到，诗篇110篇第1节的话是对大卫的主说的；所以许多新约《圣经》经文使用诗篇110篇来指基督在地上作王。以弗所书1章20到22节，哥林多前书15章25节和希伯来书10章13节，都概括了这篇诗篇原本含义的这方面，用来指在基督再来之前他目前的作王统治。希伯来书1章13节甚至使用它来证明耶稣的权柄超越天使的工作。
新约《圣经》对诗篇110篇1节的每一次引用，都是忠于这篇诗篇的原本含义，但是每一处也是对那原本含义不完全的概括，有独特的强调点。这有可能是因为这节经文原本含义很复杂，有多层面的含义。
新约的作者使用旧约的方式，很常见于犹太人的文本诠释传统，有些人称这个为米德拉思诠释法。常引发人们困惑的经文之一是出现于马太福音，而马太福音有不少所谓的应验之说，例如马太福音2章，耶稣和他的家人逃到埃及，然后又离开埃及，马太于是引用何西阿书，说：「我从埃及召出我的儿子来」。一些《圣经》的评论者常会觉得马太这样的引用，怎么符合何西阿在几百年前说这句话的意思？我们如果读马太福音的头四章，会发现马太是要显示耶稣如何将以色列人具象化，就是耶稣是个完美的以色列人，是上帝完全的儿子，正如以色列人被称为是上帝的儿子一样。就如我们读出埃及记那样，我们看到耶稣进入旷野，受试探，他胜过试探，也承担得起上帝儿子的考验。而在马太福音2章，耶稣和他的家人去到埃及，然后又出埃及，他乃是代表全体的以色列人。这就是《圣经》作者们所谓的类型学的想法，耶稣应验了一个模式，就是以色列人出埃及，同样的，耶稣也出埃及，我们于是了解他是代表以色列人。顺着这个模式，当我们读其他经文，特别是马太福音的前四章时，我们看到他是上帝的儿子，是大卫的子孙，是完美理想的以色列人。贵葛派锐博士人们看到新约的作者是如何的引用旧约经文的时候，通常觉得很困扰；因为在神学院我们总是教导，你要小心引用旧约的经文，要切合旧约作者的意思。首先，我们需要了解，新约的作者以三种方式来引用旧约经文。有时他们是直接引用，当他们那么做的时候，他们的解释是与我们的非常相近。其他时候，他们是把那经文当一个典故，也就是引用旧约经文所暗示的；他们不是在解释经文，而只是提出一个想法而已。他们用的第三个方式是用旧约经文来说明，他们不是真的关心经文背景或是相关资讯，只是用经文来说明他们的意念而已。如果我们认为他们每次引用旧约，都是一个直接的解释性引用，那就麻烦了，因为许多旧约经文的引用，只是用来说明或是典故性的。我们若是了解这些情况，并且加以分别，就可以免去许多问题。约翰奥斯沃特博士实际上，《圣经》每一处经文的情况都是这样。每一处经文都带来多重合理的概括。对我们最有价值的概括，是因时因地因人而异。不是对《圣经》的每一个概括都有同样价值，或有同样的合理程度。但是，很多对《圣经》经文原本含义的概括，是忠实于《圣经》，对历时历代的教会都是有用的。
在看了经文的复杂性如何会让我们作出多重概括之后，让我们把注意力转向解释者的独特性这个问题。
在之前的一课中，我们提倡使用一种权威对话的进路来认识《圣经》含义。你可能还记得，权威对话模式承认，只要方法合乎《圣经》标准，人就可以找到《圣经》经文的客观真理。权威对话模式的一个很有价值的方面，就是它凸显了这个事实，所有解释《圣经》的人，都是带着不同的关注、认定、背景和问题来看《圣经》经文。我们每一个人读《圣经》都不同，因为上帝已经给了我们不同的恩赐。我们都有长处和弱点，根据我们独有的认识和经验，用不同的方法处理信息。上帝如此安排他的教会，让我们每一个人都能从其他人的长处那里获益。
人的恩赐和背景，让他们用不同方式对《圣经》经文作概括。例如，一位历史学家概括创世记1章的方式，就可能与一位艺术家的方式不同。历史学家可能描述上帝创造光暗，水与干地，植物和动物的顺序，但是一位艺术家可能会讲夜间星空的美丽美好，还有全世界的鱼和飞鸟。解释者个人的长处，让每一个人都带出经文原本含义中重要、却又不同的方面。
与此同时，这两种概括也有可能受到解释者弱点的局限；每一个人都会省略其他人包括在内的重要真理。打个比方，假设我们要认识上帝的属性，就选择从探索创世记1章开始。如果我们看历史学家的概括，就看到上帝是井井有条作计划的上帝，但是，我们可能会忽视了上帝在创世记1章31节宣告，创造都「甚好」时，表明他喜悦他的创造。但是，如果我们完全关注艺术家的概括，我们可能会看上帝是完美的创意，却忽视了他做事都有其目的和秩序。这些潜在的弱点帮助我们看到，不该只是因为与我们的概括不同，就可以忽略其他的概括。在许多情形里，我们可以从其他人的概括里学习到关于一处经文的许多事情。
在基督的身体里我们各有长处和短处，因此不要只是自己研读《圣经》，而是要与其他人一起来查考。我可以想到好几个不同的例子。我自己是对新约《圣经》有很多的研读，也对旧约有些学习，我看到新、旧约《圣经》的一致性，看到旧约是如何应验于基督在教会的工作，但是我的一些朋友，他们专注于旧约的研讨，他们熟悉希伯来文，也认识古代近东的历史背景。当我读到一段旧约《圣经》的经文在新约《圣经》被引用时，我就想要知道它们原来的背景，我的朋友们就可以在此帮助我。而且我知道自己也有盲点，不只是受的教育不足，也因为我尚未全然恢复基督的形象，因此那些与基督同行较久的人，他们的智慧就是我可以学习的，他们对于《圣经》的认知，看到那些含义如何应用于我或是他们的生活中，那是我自己还无法全然明白的。因此，从自己属灵的未成熟度而言，我真是受惠于这些与主同行更久的弟兄姐妹。丹尼斯约翰逊博士上帝的心意是信徒们要彼此相交，一起探讨，以此方式来学习和解释《圣经》。有个在新约出现了几乎65次的教导就是「彼此」 要彼此劝勉，互相造就等等诸如此类的话语。以弗所书3章18节使徒保罗谈到当我们与其他众圣徒团契时，就能一同明白基督的爱是何等长阔高深，因此，单独一人我们是难以有此认知，我们一定需要和其他信徒往来团契。我自己也常经历到，当一群人在一起研读《圣经》，各人分享所领受的看见，而使大家都蒙受造就。P. J.百思博士看了经文的复杂性，还有解释者的独特性，是怎样让多重概括成为可能之后，现在让我们来思想受众的需要。
我们概括《圣经》的原本含义时，常常是预期不同的受众会有什么需要，以此进行概括。有时我们为了向成年人讲道而概括经文，有时我们是为了预备带领儿童学习《圣经》，有时我们因为要费心思解决一个具体难题，甚至只是为了我们自己灵命长进而读《圣经》。不同的受众通常需要很不一样。这就意味着，要用负责任和恰当的方式应用《圣经》，我们必须要找到能够帮助我们特定受众的概括。举一个例子，请看约翰福音16章33节耶稣说的话：
我将这些事告诉你们，是要叫你们在我里面有平安。在世上你们有苦难；但你们可以放心，我已经胜了世界。（约翰福音16章33节）我们可以用很多合理方式概括这节经文。我们可以作出一个概括，是聚焦平安，或耶稣向我们启示真理这个事实。但让我们假设，我们需要为一群正在面对受苦问题的受众，对这节经文进行概括总结。
首先，我们需要看受苦的原因。一些基督徒受苦，因为他们承受不信的政治当权者的逼迫。其他人受苦，是因为贫穷或自然灾害。另外的人受苦，是做事没有智慧，甚至是犯罪的结果。还有其他受苦的不同原因。因着我们自己经历存在着有这些巨大差异，没有一个单独的概括能负责任地把约翰福音16章33节的教导应用在所有这些不同的受众身上。
例如，为受逼迫的受众概括这节经文，可能会是这个样子：不要灰心，因为耶稣最终要终止对你们的逼迫，建立起一个世界，在当中你们不再会受到逼迫。
但是，对于那些因贫穷或自然灾害受苦的受众来说，这概括可能是这样的：耶稣已经允许你们暂时受苦，并且要最终祝福你们，这祝福的补偿远远超过你们曾经遭受的任何损失。
总体来说，我们都能因为耶稣已经胜过世界而得到鼓舞，我们都能盼望在受苦之中找到平安。但是，因为我们都经历不一样的苦难，我们就需要用不同的方法配合这节经文复杂的教导，为的是服事不同受众的需要。
我们也需要考虑文化差异。每一种文化都有不同的历史，不同的社会结构，不同的互相竞争的宗教观点，不同的优缺点。为了用对人最有帮助的方式应用《圣经》，我们就需要找出适合的《圣经》概括，来服事具体处境中具体人群的需要。
牧养事工的基本权益之一就是能教导《圣经》，传福音给不同型态的会众，有的是受高等教育，有的则是没有受过什么教育，有年轻的，也有年长的，以及各种不同行业的人。当然这也是相当挑战性的事工，因为牧师在传讲上帝的话语时，需要明白那些会众的需要和理解程度。我觉得有两件事是非常有帮助的，首先就是问会众，我这么说你们清楚吗，明白吗？告诉我，你们从最近的一些讲道里学到了什么？也就是说，不要只是一直对会众说话，也要听听他们对于上帝的话语有什么回应。另一件有帮助的事，就是经常去对小孩子传讲福音信息。我不时把讲给成年人听的信息，再用简短的方式讲给小孩子们听，这可以帮助牧师学习简单化，而且在分享重要的信息时，比如福音信息，简单明了是很重要的。菲利普莱肯博士为了让人能够听懂，听的明白，我们需要调整我们的信息；例如有的人善用左脑，有的是惯用右脑；左脑的人善于分析，处理事实，而右脑的人比较容易接受故事，表演或是给予范例。我个人是介于这两种中间，所以我需要双方面的资讯。此外，这也关乎到你所接触的文化，因为世界上有些地方是极端属于右脑型态的，而有些则是非常左脑型的，所以对于这些地方的人，我们的信息就要做加以调整。在耶稣的时代，我们发现他很愿意将《圣经》的真理与生活中的事物，或是经历相联起来，例如，让人看到天空的飞鸟，或是一个行路的撒玛利亚人的故事。耶稣经常这么做，将他的信息加以调整，适应左、右脑型态的人，让他们都能理解他的话语。马太弗瑞德曼博士我们解释《圣经》的时候，总应该记住经文的原本含义和我们当代受众的需要。在很多方面，查考《圣经》就是拉近原本含义和我们现代受众之间的距离，使我们都能从《圣经》经文的完全价值中得到造就。我们没有一个人能完美做到这一点。但是，我们信靠圣灵会带领我们作出对《圣经》的合宜概括，用有价值的方式服事他的教会。
我们在发现含义这一课中，聚焦两个主要观点：我们在《圣经》的作者、文本和受众中，找到获得《圣经》含义的重要指引；以及我们能根据《圣经》作出多重合宜的概括。
我们都会承认有时候《圣经》是很难明白的。但是好消息就是，上帝已经给我们不同的方法去发现他话语的原本含义。他已经赐给我们《圣经》本身做这文本，这些文本包含了我们所需的全部文法和文学的上下文脉络。同时他也提供我们不同的方法，去收集《圣经》作者和原本受众的背景资料。除此以外，每一段《圣经》经文的原本含义是那样的丰富，让我们都能从我们自己的日常人生中得出新的感悟洞见。如果我们研读《圣经》时牢记这些要素，我们势必将会越来越多地发现《圣经》经文的原本含义。
He Gave Us Scripture: Discovering Meaning
INTRODUCTION
Children usually don't appreciate how much their teachers do for them. Their teachers work hard to give them all kinds of new discoveries. But often, young students do little more than grumble and complain every step of the way. Now of course, as adults we look back on our childhood teachers, and we understood how good it was that we didn't have to learn our lessons on our own. We're grateful for all they did for us. But when you think about it, we should be even more grateful for the countless opportunities our childhood lessons have given us to learn more and more every day of our lives. In many ways, that's how it is when it comes to the meaning of Scripture. God didn't leave us to discover the meaning of Scripture on our own. He provided guides to help us. But more than this, one of the most remarkable things about the Bible is that as we go through our lives, we can return to the Bible over and over and always learn more about its meaning.
This is the sixth lesson in our series He Gave Us Scripture: Foundations of Interpretation, and we've entitled it "Discovering Meaning." In this lesson, we'll focus on some hermeneutical strategies that can help us figure out the original meaning of Scripture.
Countless factors contribute to the process of discovering meaning in the Bible. But for our purposes, we'll draw attention to just two. First, we'll talk about some important guides that help reveal the significance of a biblical text. And second, we'll see the value of making multiple summaries of that meaning. Let's begin by looking at the guides that point us toward Scripture's meaning.
GUIDES
In an earlier lesson, we mentioned that most evangelicals today refer to their general hermeneutical strategy as the grammatico-historical method. Now, this terminology is relatively recent, but it represents an approach that can be traced back throughout church history, especially from the time of the Reformation. In effect, the grammatico-historical method seeks to discover the meaning of Scripture in terms of the grammar of Scripture — what's written on its pages — and in terms of its ancient historical context, especially the context of its human authors and audiences. These grammatical and historical factors serve as guides to discovering the meaning of Scripture.
In this lesson, we'll focus on three main guides that help reveal the significance of a text in Scripture: the writer of the text, the document itself, and the original audience for whom the text was written.
When the Holy Spirit inspired the writings of Scripture, he worked through the talents and personalities of the writers. So, knowing something about the writers can help us understand the things they wrote.
The Holy Spirit also crafted each book as an integrated whole, providing enough written content for each passage to be understood within its own grammatical and literary context. So, the document itself can guide our interpretation since it contains the literary context in which all its passages should be interpreted.
And the Spirit made sure that the books he inspired would make sense to their original audiences and be relevant to their lives. So, we can also learn something about the meaning of Scripture by exploring the identities and lives of its original readers.
Imagine a man in a restaurant who finds a note discarded on the floor. The note has just one word scribbled on it: "HELP!" He shows the note to his friends at the table to see if any of them can figure out what it means. But there just isn't much to work with. "I wish there were more words," the man complains. "If we just knew who wrote it," another adds. And another friend comments, "I wish there were some way to know who was supposed to get this note." The fact is that the note could mean a lot of things. It could be part of a game children were playing at another table. It could be a request for help with the menu. It could be a desperate cry from someone in serious trouble. Without further guidance, there's simply no way for the man and his friends to understand what the note really means.
And something similar is true about the Bible. When we know little or nothing about its authors and audiences, or when we read passages without knowing their broader context, the Bible's intended meaning will be unclear to us. But the good news is that any knowledge we gain about the writer, the document or the audience has the potential to improve our understanding of Scripture's meaning.
If we don't take into account the grammatical and historical context of the Scriptures that we're studying, we will inevitably read them in light of just what we already are assuming. For example, and this may sound absurd to some people, but when Jesus speaks of being born again, or born from above, there are people who have read that as reincarnation — being born again, being literally reborn, a kind of, you know, not entering your mother's womb but entering someone else's womb a second time, which was Nicodemus' misunderstanding in the passage. So we need to understand the grammatical sense of it, the literary context. And in that case, some historical background would help as well. For example, the Jewish people when they spoke of being reborn, they would think of it especially in terms of when a Gentile converted to Judaism. But this is something that wouldn't make sense to a teacher of Israel. How could he be treated as if he's on the same level as somebody who wasn't even a part of God's people? But it's like where Jesus says later on, going to the larger context, in John 8, he says that people are children of the devil until they become children of God, so a person needs to be spiritually reborn. And you could multiply with examples throughout the Bible because, again, everything has a cultural context and a grammatical context in Scripture. All of Scripture is for all time, but we need to also recognize the circumstances, the settings that it addressed, so that we can recognize the principles, the universal and eternal principles that we can apply to other settings. [Dr. Craig S. Keener]
We believe that a greater knowledge of the grammatical or historical context will help the modern reader gain more out of reading the Bible. Now of course, you can read the Bible with little education, with no extra tools other than the biblical text and it's been the conviction of Christians down the centuries that you can understand what the text means without all the extra biblical tools and resources that are available to us in our modern age. But nevertheless, an understanding of the way in which paragraphs and sentences are put together and understanding of the context in which the passages were written will bring greater clarity and greater understanding for the reader. [Dr. Simon Vibert]
Our discussion of the guides that help reveal the significance of a biblical text will divide into four parts. We'll begin by looking more closely at each of the guides: the writer, the document, and the audience. And we'll conclude this section by exploring their interdependence. Let's look first at the guidance offered by the writer.
Writer
Whenever we consider the human author of a portion of Scripture, we have to be ready to answer all kinds of questions. First, we want to know the identity of the author. Who was he? At times, the Scriptures actually identify the author of various books by name. For example, the Old Testament books of Amos and Isaiah are directly attributed to the prophets Amos and Isaiah. The New Testament epistles of Peter and Paul explicitly name these apostles as their authors. But at the same time, many books in the Old and New Testaments, like Judges and Kings, as well as Acts and Hebrews, are anonymous. In these cases, we often have to settle for some general observations about authorship. But whatever the case, to one degree or another, general historical research and the Scriptures themselves always enable us to create a profile for every biblical author. We can always gain some insights into questions like these: What role did the author have among the people of God? What were his special interests? What kinds of concepts, behaviors and emotions did he emphasize in his book? And everything we know about a biblical author guides us toward the goal of discovering the meaning of Scripture.
Let's consider the influence our knowledge of the writer should have on our interpretative efforts by focusing on the writer of John 3:16. In this familiar verse we read:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16).
The Gospel of John was written by the apostle John, who was the brother of James and the son of Zebedee. He was one of the inner circle of Jesus' most trusted companions and a pillar of faith in the early Christian community. Besides the Gospel of John, he wrote four other books in the New Testament: 1 John, 2 John, 3 John and Revelation. Through his books, and through the things said about John by other biblical writers, such as Matthew, Mark and Luke, we can gain a useful understanding of John's beliefs and the way he communicated those beliefs to his audience. For instance, in John 20:31, John stated his purpose for writing his gospel. He told his audience:
These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name (John 20:31).
This passage makes it clear that John's overarching purpose was to call his readers to "believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing [they] may have life in his name."
When we have some knowledge of the writer and his purpose, it isn't difficult to see this same twofold goal in John 3:16.
Most editors of modern translations rightly consider John 3:16 as the beginning of John's comments on the words of Jesus that end in John 3:15. The first half of John 3:16 states that, "God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son." This portion of the verse corresponds to the first half of John 20:31: "that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God." And the second half of John 3:16 states, "that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." This portion of the verse corresponds to the second half of John 20:31: "that by believing you may have life in his name."
Noting these parallels verifies something that many interpreters have recognized for millennia. John intended this passage as much more than a mere factual, historical statement. The historical fact that God gave his unique Son Jesus was important to John, but his real purpose in mentioning it here was to call his audience to saving faith in Christ so that they could have eternal life. As we can see, understanding John's purpose and beliefs, helps us interpret his gospel more appropriately.
Having considered the benefits of relying on the writer as a guide to the meaning of Scripture, let's turn our attention to the biblical document.
Document
Our use of the word document will include all the features of the text we're studying, including its vocabulary, grammar, figures of speech, sentence structure, formal structure, the outline of its argument, the surrounding literary context, and so on. To interpret Scripture responsibly, we must pay close attention to the actual words and phrases the inspired author wrote.
One of the most important things to remember when we explore a biblical document is that it conveys its meaning in units of different sizes. Now, these various units of meaning are different in different genres, but in general terms, meaning is conveyed by morphemes, which are small features of words that indicate things like singular and plural and verbal tenses. Meaning is also conveyed through words, then phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs in prose, and stanzas in poetry. Larger sections like whole narratives, speeches or law codes and even entire books serve as units of meaning. And interestingly enough, the meaning of smaller units becomes clearer in the light of larger units. And the meaning of larger units becomes clearer in the light of smaller units. So, anytime we want to see how a biblical document guides us toward its meaning, we have to be ready to explore it on all of these levels.
To illustrate what we mean, let's look at a facet of John 3:16 that's often misunderstood.
As we saw earlier, John 3:16 begins "For God so loved the world…" It's quite common for evangelical Christians to take this phrase to mean something like: "For God so greatly loved the world…", "For God so dearly loved the world…" or "For God loved the world so much…" This understanding of the opening of John 3:16 is so longstanding and widespread that many of us never even question whether or not John meant for the word "so" to be taken as "so greatly," "so dearly" or "so much." But when we look at John 3:16 in its larger context, it soon becomes evident that this isn't the significance of the word "so."
To begin with, the word "so" is a translation of the Greek word houtōs. This Greek adverb occasionally has the connotations of "so greatly" or "so much," but far more often it's used to mean "thus," "in this way," or "in this manner." We can see that this is how it's used in John 3:16 by comparing John's use of "so" in verse 16 with the verses that come just before it. John 3:14-15 says:
Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life (John 3:14-15).
In these verses Jesus set up a comparison between the time when "Moses lifted up the snake in the desert" and the time when "the Son of Man" — Jesus himself — "must be lifted up."
In verse 15, Jesus referred to Numbers 21:4-9 where God punished Israel in the wilderness by sending poisonous serpents against them. The people of Israel cried out for deliverance. And at God's command, Moses made a bronze serpent, put it on a pole, lifted the serpent into the air, and all the Israelites who looked to the bronze serpent were healed. By this analogy, Jesus made it clear that as he is lifted up, all people everywhere who look to him will be saved from God's judgment.
It's important to note here that Jesus said, "Just as Moses lifted up the snake … so the Son of Man must be lifted up." In this comparison, the Greek term translated "so" is the same word that appears at the beginning of verse 16, the word houtōs. Jesus said that just as the serpent was lifted up, "thus," or "in the same way," the Son of Man must be lifted up. And John picked up this comparison when he used this same term in verse 16.
In effect, John repeated the word, houtōs, to make a second comparison with Moses lifting the serpent. But in verse 16, the comparison is between what Moses did and what God did when he gave his one and only Son. Or as we may put it, "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert … in the same way God loved the world [and] gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."
This example illustrates just one small way that carefully considering the document of a biblical text helps us understand its meaning.
With this understanding of how the writer and the document serve as helpful guides to interpretation, we're ready to consider the audience as a third guide.
Audience
It's important to understand the historical setting in which a book of the Bible is written because one of the remarkable things about biblical literature is that God chose to speak to his people in a particular time and to particular individuals, taking into consideration their cares and their concerns, their fears and their hopes about the world around them. God spoke to them in this way in order to reveal himself, and we get to be a part of that message, receiving it for ourselves, however, as it's mediated through their particular historical setting. [Dr. Scott Redd]
Whenever we consider the original audience of a portion of Scripture, we have to be ready to ask all kinds of questions. First, we want to know the identity of the audience. Who were they? At times, the Scriptures tell us explicitly who the audiences were. For example, the New Testament epistle of Romans identifies the audience as Christians living in Rome. Galatians identifies the churches of Galatia as its audience. But at the same time, most books in the Old and New Testaments don't directly identify the audience. And in these cases, we must settle for indirect clues. In all events, to one degree or another, general historical research and the Scriptures themselves always enable us to create a general profile of the original audiences. We must do all we can to answer questions like these: Where did the audience live? What were their historical circumstances? What challenges did they face? What conceptual, behavioral and emotional needs did they have? Everything we know about original audiences guides us toward discovering the meaning of Scripture.
Although the original audience didn't directly contribute to the writing of Scripture, biblical writers usually composed their books with original and secondary audiences in mind. They wrote for some people directly, but they also wrote for others who would be exposed to their books indirectly. This was because when the Scriptures were first written literacy was the privilege of only a few. So, biblical authors didn't expect very many people to actually pick up their books and read them. Still, the more we know about the primary and secondary original audiences, the better we're able to investigate the original meaning of biblical passages.
Let's return once again to John's gospel to illustrate the importance of keeping the original audience of a biblical book in mind. In the case of John's gospel, we have to rely on indirect clues about John's primary and secondary audiences. For one thing, John frequently felt the need to explain customs in Palestine. Listen to what he wrote in John 4:9 regarding Jesus' conversation with a Samaritan woman:
The Samaritan woman said to [Jesus], "You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?" (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) (John 4:9).
It would appear from John's comment that at least some of his audience didn't know about the separation between Jews and Samaritans. So, it's very difficult to believe that John wrote primarily for people living in Palestine where such customs were known to all. In fact, at least some of John's audience was most likely Gentile because twice — in 1:41 and 4:25 — he even felt the need to explain that the Greek word Christos was the equivalent of the Hebrew term "Messiah." As just one more example, listen to John's comment in John 9:22:
The Jews had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Christ would be put out of the synagogue (John 9:22).
In this passage, to "be put out of the synagogue" was to be excommunicated, excluded from the life of the Jewish community.
Not only can we assume that John's audience included Gentiles and people from outside of Palestine, but it seems clear that his audience was also facing a crucial challenge. One clue to this challenge appears in the fact that John used the terminology "the Jews" as a way of referring to those who opposed Jesus and his followers. This theme is so prominent that some interpreters have argued that this gospel is anti-Semitic. Of course, Jesus, John and the rest of Jesus' apostles were Jewish, so this was no mere reference to ethnicity. Rather, John had in mind Jews who didn't believe in Jesus and persecuted the church.
The frequency with which John referred to unbelieving Jews as opponents of Jesus and his followers strongly suggests that John's audience was also facing persecution for their faith. And John's gospel often addresses the reasons that unbelieving Jews rejected Jesus and the converts to Christianity. For our purposes, we'll mention just two.
On the one hand, unbelieving Jews accused Jesus of blasphemy because he claimed to be God's Son. Listen to the way Jesus rebuked his Jewish opponents in John 10:36:
Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, "I am God's Son"? (John 10:36).
As this verse indicates, Jesus' claim to be the Son of God was one of the main reasons the Jews rejected him.
On the other hand, Jesus' Jewish opponents also disliked him because he brought the hope of salvation to Gentiles as well as to Jews. John makes it clear to his audience that Jesus was not just the Savior of the Jews but of every group in the world. For instance, in John 4:42, we read the Samaritans' response after hearing the testimony of the Samaritan woman whom Jesus met at the well:
We know that this man really is the Savior of the world (John 4:42).
From John's point of view, Jesus was not just the Savior of the Jews but "the Savior of the world."
The importance of these two themes for John's original audience helps explain passages such as John 3:16 where John stressed that Jesus is God's "one and only Son" and that the Father sent him because "God so loved the world."
Every book in the Bible was written to an original audience, and we here in the twenty-first century are not the original audience. I think it's interesting and maybe helpful to us to realize that the majority of the individual books in the New Testament are epistles or letters, so when we read those epistles — and I think you could expand that to the whole Bible but certainly the epistles — we're reading other people's mail. They are for us because we belong to the church, but they were first written to an original audience, in the case of the New Testament, an original first century Christian audience. And so if we do the hard work of understanding the original situation and concerns of the original audience and the original biblical writer writing to that audience, we will be able to have a better understanding of the book. And we should seek to get that original understanding before we move on to applying it to our own situation today. [Dr. Robert K. MacEwan]
Now that we've considered the ways the writer, the document, and the audience can serve as guides to the meaning of Scripture, let's turn our attention to their interdependence.
Interdependence
In order for us to interpret the Bible responsibly, it's very important for us to understand that each of the guides we've mentioned informs and is informed by the others. Our knowledge of the author helps us understand his document and original audience. The things we know about the audience help us understand the writer's intentions and the nuances of his document. The document's words and grammar give us information about the writer and the audience. So, as interpreters, we need to gain as much guidance as possible from all these sources, so that our readings of Scripture aren't skewed by an imbalanced emphasis on just one or two of them.
The writer, the document, and the audience are interdependent guides to meaning. If we fail to account for their interdependence, it's very easy to fall into error.
If we overemphasize the author, we often fall into an intentional fallacy. An intentional fallacy relies too heavily on what we think we know about a writer and his intentions, and de-emphasizes the things we learn about the document and audience.
There are many ways to commit intentional fallacies in biblical interpretation. For instance, we might make unwarranted assumptions about an author's intentions by speculating about what he was thinking when he wrote. Or we might overemphasize valid information about a writer by wrongly assuming it was very relevant to the text we're interpreting.
Let's illustrate some possible intentional fallacies by looking at John 3:16. We can be sure that when John wrote this verse, he intended to draw his readers' attention to the love of God shown in the death of Christ. But we can't be sure of all the subtle, psychological influences that motivated John to write these words. Scripture and reliable history simply don't give us enough clues about John's inner thoughts to draw these types of conclusions. And even if we could, his inner thoughts might not be particularly relevant to the meaning of John 3:16.
Those interpreters who hold a high value on the authority and intent of a text are sometimes accused of committing the intentional fallacy, which is the idea that we somehow speculate at what we thought the author really meant in the biblical text… That doesn't mean that we're not able to say that authors are able to communicate what they want their hearers to understand and actually for that to be able to still be comprehensible down the ages. So, whether that be me writing an email to my wife on the other side of the world, or whether it be somebody writing something in a newspaper today, or an author writing a modern book, all authors assume that there is a way in which they bring their message through who they are and through the writing of that text, and they convey some of themself through that text. And, of course, added to that is the fact that we believe that the ultimate author of Scripture is not the human authors alone, but actually the divine Author working alongside the human author, and therefore we do believe that the Holy Spirit helps those human authors to write the Bible in the first place. But it also helps the modern readers to read it so that we can understand what the author meant in the mind of God. [Dr. Simon Vibert]
A second type of mistake we can make is overemphasizing the document. This kind of error is often called a graphic fallacy. The term "graphic" comes from the Greek word graphē, which means "writing." Correspondingly, the graphic fallacy overemphasizes the document itself, to the relative exclusion of contextual considerations like the writer and audience. This is a fallacy, or mistake, because the same document can mean very different things depending on who wrote it and for whom it was written. We might commit this fallacy by thinking that we can sufficiently grasp the meaning of a passage merely by analyzing its vocabulary, grammar, and structure without regard to its author or original audience.
In our example from John 3:16, think about what could happen if we focused exclusively on the document and ignored John and his original audience. How would we know who God's Son was? After all, this verse doesn't explicitly identify him. If readers didn't know that John was a Christian and that he wrote to a Christian audience, they might make all sorts of irresponsible assumptions.
A pagan worshipper of the Canaanite gods might think that the "son of God" was Baal, the son of the Canaanite god El.
Someone familiar with the fact that Adam is called the "son of God" in Luke 3:38 might wrongly conclude that Adam is the Son of God in John 3:16, or even that Adam and Jesus are the same person.
Other readers might be confused by terms like one and only or world, or the concept of eternal life. There are many mistakes we can make when we ignore the writer and the audience.
A third type of interpretive mistake we can make is overemphasizing the audience. This is often called an affective fallacy because it focuses too heavily on how Scripture affects its audience. This fallacy is often committed when an interpreter speculates too much about the mindset of the original audience, and fails to pay enough attention to the writer and the document. It's certainly legitimate to consider Scripture's effects on its original audience, as well as things we learn about the audience from reliable history. But the affective fallacy goes beyond this by overemphasizing the audience's personal reactions to the text, and almost always results in subjective, unreliable readings of Scripture.
For example, in John 3:16, the affective fallacy might speculate too much about the original audience's circumstances and response to John's teaching about eternal life. It might suggest that when John talked about life, what he really meant was earthly escape from the persecution his original audience was enduring and not a spiritual renewal and blessing that we enjoy forever. This interpretation would overemphasize the passage's impact on its audience, ignoring John's broader teaching and the details of the document itself.
It is possible to overemphasize the importance of the original audience to whom a book of the Scripture was written in this way: First of all, by making it too specific, in particular, thinking we know more about them that we do. Because the truth is for most New Testament books — and Old Testament books too, but I'll speak for the New Testament — most New Testament books, we don't know a whole lot about the audience to which they were written. And so, when we try to hypothesize about the audience, we are likely to misinterpret because we dream up an audience that is not fair. You know, Hebrews… is a book I've been a specialist in, and all kinds of people dream up particular audiences to which Hebrews was written… And in fact, it skews their interpretation because we don't know the specific audience. So it is important to realize the books were written in the first century. It's important to understand the culture and the language of that century and how they were written and so forth. But it also important not to develop an idea of an original audience that goes beyond what we know. For the Gospels, for instance, we know they were written, written to Christians to nurture the church, but we don't know much more than that. And it's important not to think that we do. If we do, we will misinterpret Scripture. [Dr. Gary Cockerill]
Sadly, mistakes like the intentional fallacy, the graphic fallacy and the affective fallacy are easy to make — especially when we don't have very much information about some of the guides. And the truth is that we can't always know much about the writer or audience of a text. Many biblical books are anonymous, and many don't explicitly identify their audiences. And sometimes we even lack important information about the document. We don't always have access to resources that help us understand all its features, like the implications of the way things were stated in the original languages of Scripture. When our information is more limited, it's generally wise for our interpretations to be more generalized. Even so, when we properly account for the interdependence of the guidance we receive from the writer, the document and the audience, everything we learn from any of these guides has the potential to improve our interpretations.
So far in our discussion of discovering meaning, we've addressed three important guides to meaning. So, now we're ready to turn our attention to the value of making multiple summaries of the meaning of biblical texts.
SUMMARIES
If you've been in the church long enough, you've probably heard more than one pastor preach from the same biblical text. And often the sermons are very different. As a matter of fact, it's possible to preach different sermons, very different sermons, from the same text without violating its meaning. How can this be? Simply put, no mere human interpretation of the Scriptures can be complete or exhaustive of its meaning. There's always more to learn. And for this reason, we must always look for new ways to summarize biblical passages so that we can further our understanding of what they mean.
One of the most useful ways to discover meaning in Scripture is to make multiple summaries of a passage. In the context of this lesson, we'll use the word summary to mean:
A description of a passage
Normally a summary will come from a particular vantage point or emphasize a particular concept that appears in the passage. Since every passage has a complex meaning, summaries help us by narrowing our study, allowing us to focus on just a portion of what the passage has to say.
We can illustrate the concept of a summary by thinking about a group of students that watches a complex, dramatic play. After the presentation, the students are asked to summarize the meaning of the play. One student summarizes the play by describing how the characters developed throughout the story. Another summarizes the events in chronological order. Still another describes the way the playwright was criticizing cultural values of the day. And finally, one student describes how the beautiful staging and expressive language affected him personally. All of these responses are legitimate summaries of the presentation's meaning. But none of these summaries completely captures the play's full meaning. If we were looking for the full meaning of the play, we would need to include all these summaries and more. But that's one of the reasons that making multiple summaries is so useful — it helps us focus on individual aspects of meaning, and it also allows us to learn more and more of the play's full meaning.
And the same thing is true of Scripture. There can be many legitimate ways to summarize the meaning of a passage in the Bible, and these summaries can help us better understand aspects of its meaning. And taken together, multiple legitimate summaries bring us closer and closer to the passage's full meaning.
We'll consider three main factors that illustrate the benefit of making multiple summaries of Scripture's meaning. First, we'll look at the complexity of the passage. Second, we'll mention the uniqueness of the interpreter. And third, we'll focus on the needs of the audience for whom the text is summarized. Let's start by exploring the complexity of the passage.
Complexity of Passage
As we learned in an earlier lesson, the complexity of Scriptural passages is largely due to the fact that their original meaning, or literal sense, is multifaceted, like a cut gemstone. They have facets representing things like historical facts, doctrines, moral obligations, salvation and eschatology. Every text of Scripture communicates moral implications for our thoughts, words and actions. Every text teaches us something about history and salvation, and helps form our hopes and expectations regarding the future. And each of these things that a passage communicates can be used as the basis for a summary.
In fact, because Scripture's meaning is multifaceted, we can summarize it in many different ways and still be true to its literal sense. Scripture's complexity implies that our summaries will never be exhaustive, and that we can always make more summaries that are both true and distinct.
Let's explore this idea by looking at some of the places where one passage of Scripture actually summarizes another. Consider these words from Psalm 110:1:
The Lord says to my Lord: "Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet." (Psalm 110:1).
The New Testament frequently quotes Psalm 110:1. But each time it focuses on a different aspect of the original meaning. And none of the quotations contains everything that other verses say about the psalm's original meaning.
For instance, Jesus quoted it in Luke 20:41-44 to show that the Messiah must be more than simply David's son.
In Acts 2:32-36 Peter used it to demonstrate that Jesus was both Lord and Christ since he was David's heir that had ascended to a heavenly throne.
The New Testament also recognizes that the words of Psalm 110:1 are spoken to David's Lord; therefore, many New Testament passages use Psalm 110 to refer to Christ's reign on earth. Ephesians 1:20-22, 1 Corinthians 15:25 and Hebrews 10:13 all summarize this aspect of the psalm's original meaning with reference to the present reign of Christ until he returns. Hebrews 1:13 even uses it to demonstrate that Jesus' authority is superior to the ministry of angels.
Each of these New Testament references to Psalm 110:1 is faithful to the original meaning of the psalm. But each is also an incomplete summary of that original meaning, and has a distinct emphasis. This is possible because of the complex, multifaceted original meaning of the verse.
New Testament writers are using the Old Testament in ways that are very common in terms of the use of prior text in Jewish interpretive traditions. And some people call these midrashic techniques. One of the common passages that's confusing is in Matthew's gospel, and Matthew has what some have called a formula of fulfillment — "it has been fulfilled…" And in Matthew 2, where Christ and his family are fleeing to Egypt and then coming back from Egypt, Matthew quotes from Hosea and says, "Out of Egypt I have called my son." And often times, biblical commentators have cited that passage and said, well, how can that in any way correspond to what Hosea originally meant when he penned those words so many hundreds of years before? What we see if we look at the first four chapters of Matthew in particular is that Matthew is showing how Jesus really embodies Israel. That he's the ideal Israelite; he's the ideal son of God. In the same way that Israel was called "to be my son," as we read in Exodus, Jesus goes into the wilderness, he's tempted, and he survives that temptation and survives the test of sonship. But before that in chapter 2, when he and his family flee to Egypt and they come out of Egypt, he represents all of Israel as he sort of comes back. And that's the idea of what biblical authors call typology: he's fulfilling a pattern, that Israel had come out of Egypt and in the same way he comes out of Egypt, and we're to understand by that that he is representing Israel. And that pattern, that typology really is borne out as we look at the other passages that depict Christ in the first four chapters of Matthew in particular, that he's the Son of God, he's the son of David, he's the ideal Israelite. [Dr. Greg Perry]
People are often troubled when they see the way the New Testament writers use the Old Testament literature, because we particularly in seminary often teach, no, you have to use it very, very carefully just in line with how they, the Old Testament writers, used it, and so forth. First of all, we need to understand that the New Testament writers use the Old Testament in three different ways: Sometimes they quote it directly, and when they do, they interpret it very, very closely to the ways we would. Other times, they use it as an allusion where they're simply alluding to something that the Old Testament says. They're not really interpreting it; they're simply picking up a thought. And a third way that they use it is to illustrate. To illustrate a point that they're making, they pull something from the Old Testament as an illustration, and they're not really concerned about its setting or any of that sort of thing, they're just using it illustratively. If we assume that every use of the Old Testament in the New Testament is intended as a direct interpretive quotation, we're going to have trouble, because many of the uses of the Old Testament are allusive or illustrative. I think if we understand that, if we make those kinds of distinctions, in most cases, the problems disappear. [Dr. John Oswalt]
In fact, the same thing is true of every passage of Scripture. Every text leads to multiple legitimate summaries. And the summaries that are most valuable to us vary from place to place, time to time, and person to person. Not every summary of Scripture is equally valuable or legitimate. But there are many summaries of the original meaning of biblical passages that are faithful and useful for the church in every age.
Now that we've seen how the complexity of the passage can lead us to multiple summaries, let's turn our attention to the uniqueness of the interpreter.
Uniqueness of Interpreter
In an earlier lesson, we advocated using an authority-dialog approach to the meaning of Scripture. You may remember that an authority-dialog model acknowledges that objective truth can be found in the text of Scripture as long as the methods comply with biblical standards. One valuable aspect of an authority-dialog model is that it highlights the fact that all interpreters come to biblical writings with different sets of concerns, assumptions, backgrounds and questions. Each of us reads Scripture differently because God has gifted each of us differently. We all have strengths and weaknesses, and we process information in a variety of ways, based on our unique knowledge and experience. God has designed his church so that we each can benefit from the strengths of others.
People's gifts and backgrounds lead them to summarize biblical passages in distinctive ways. For instance, an historian may summarize the meaning of Genesis 1 differently than an artist. The historian might describe the order in which God created light and dark, water and dry land, and plants and animals. But an artist might talk about the beauty and goodness of the stars in the night sky, and the fish and birds throughout the world. The personal strengths of the interpreters lead each to bring out important but different aspects of the passage's original meaning.
At the same time, both types of summaries can also be hindered by the interpreters' weaknesses; each one omits important truths that the other includes. Let's assume, for example, that we want to understand the nature of God, and we choose to begin by exploring Genesis 1. If we read the historian's summary, we see that God is an organized planner, but we may overlook the delight God took in his creation when he declared in Genesis 1:31 that creation was "very good." However, if we focus solely on the artist's summary, we may see God as flawlessly creative but ignore his intentionality and orderliness. These potential weaknesses help us see that no summary should be ignored simply because it's not the same as ours. In many cases, we can learn a lot about a passage from other peoples' summaries.
Since we all have strengths and weaknesses in the body of Christ, it is so important that we not study Scripture simply by ourselves, but we learn from what others have seen in the Scriptures. I think of several examples of this. I've done a lot of study in the New Testament. I've studied the Old Testament, I see the unity of the Old Testament and the New Testament, and the Old Testament coming to fulfillment in Christ in his work in the church, but I benefit greatly from my friends who have focused their thoughts and attention in Old Testament passages and can bring wisdom to bear on their understanding of the Hebrew text, of the backgrounds of the ancient Near East. As I look at a text that may be quoted in the New Testament that comes from the Old and I want to understand its original setting as well, I benefit in that way. I also know that I have my own blind spots, not just because of a lack of education but because I'm not fully conformed to the image of Christ yet. And I learn from the wisdom of those who have walked with Christ longer. They see things in Scripture. They see implications of how it applies to my life and to their lives in ways that I don't fully recognize. So from that standpoint of my spiritual immaturity being less than fully mature, I benefit greatly from brothers and sisters who have walked with Christ further. [Dr. Dennis E. Johnson]
God intended the Bible and Bible interpretation to be understood in a context of fellowship with other believers. One of the instructions we get almost sixty-five times in the New Testament is just the simple word "one another" — encourage one another and build up one another and lead one another, and so forth. In Ephesians 3:18, the apostle Paul says that only when we are in fellowship with other believers we fully really comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and the length and the depth of the love of Christ. So alone we can't do it. We need to do it in fellowship with other believers. And then usually they will… I've experienced that myself sitting and doing Bible study in a mixed group of people, and it always amazing with which insights people enrich one another when they study the Bible together. [Dr. P. J. Buys]
Having looked at the ways the complexity of the passage and the uniqueness of the interpreter make multiple summaries possible, let's consider the needs of the audience.
Needs of Audience
When we summarize the original meaning of Scripture, we often do it in ways that anticipate the needs of different audiences. Sometimes we summarize a passage to preach a sermon to adults. Sometimes we're preparing a Bible study for children. Sometimes we read the Bible because we're wrestling with a particular problem, or even just for our own spiritual growth. Different audiences often have very different needs. And this means that in order to apply the Bible in responsible and relevant ways, we have to find summaries that are helpful to our specific audiences. As an example, consider Jesus' words in John 16:33:
I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world (John 16:33).
There are many legitimate ways to summarize this verse. We could create a summary that focused on peace, or on the fact that Jesus reveals truth to us. But let's assume we need to summarize it for an audience that's dealing with suffering.
First, we would need to look at the reason for the suffering. Some Christians suffer because they endure persecution from unbelieving political authorities. Others suffer from poverty or natural disasters. Others suffer as a result of unwise or even sinful behavior. And there are other causes of suffering, too. Because of these vast differences in our own experiences, no single summary will responsibly apply the teachings of John 16:33 to all these different audiences.
For example, summarizing the passage for an audience suffering persecution might look like this: Be encouraged because Jesus will eventually end your persecution and establish a world in which you will never be persecuted again.
But to those suffering from poverty or a natural disaster, the summary may look like this: Jesus has permitted your suffering for a time, and will eventually bless you in ways that more than make up for the losses you've experienced.
In general, we can all be encouraged by the fact that Jesus has overcome the world, and we can all hope to find peace in the midst of sufferings. But since we all suffer from different troubles, we have to adapt the complex teaching of this passage in different ways in order to minister to the needs of different audiences.
And there are cultural differences that we should take into account, too. Each culture has a different history, different societal structure, different competing religious viewpoints, and different strengths and weaknesses. In order to apply the Bible in the most helpful ways, we need to find summaries of Scripture that minister to the needs of specific people in their own specific circumstances.
One of the privileges of pastoral ministry is to teach the Bible and proclaim the gospel to a wide variety of audiences — people that are well educated, people that are not educated at all, people who are young, people who are old, people in very different kinds of work situations. But that is a very demanding task because it requires a pastor really to have a sense of the people to whom he is giving the Word of God. And two things that I've found very helpful in that area: first of all, just asking people in my congregation, "Was that clear? Did you understand that? Talk to me. What have you been learning from recent sermons?" And not just speaking to people all the time but listening to people in their response to God's Word. The other thing that I've found very helpful is to teach the gospel regularly to young children. In fact, often times in pastoral ministry I have taught the same sermon that I am teaching to an adult congregation in shorter, simpler form to young children, and that's a great way for a pastor to develop a gift of simplicity. And we should always try to be simple and clear when we're communicating something as important as the gospel. [Dr. Philip Ryken]
It's very important to adapt our message so that people can hear it. One of the ways to do this in terms of right- and left-brain people. Say, left-brain is very analytical, likes to deal with the facts. Right-brain is much more given to stories and demonstrations and examples. And I tend to be kind of in the middle of those things, so I kind of need both. And it depends on the culture you go to because there's going to be some place in the world that are exceedingly right-brain, some people that are exceedingly left-brain, and it's good to adapt to those places. In the time of Jesus, it's very interesting that he was willing to seek correlations of scriptural truth to things like other Scriptures, other experiences: look at the birds of the air; this is like the story about a Samaritan that's going down the road. He did it all the time… And I think he adapted very well to various audiences with both right- and left-brain contingencies. [Dr. Matt Friedeman]
When we interpret the Bible, we should always have in mind both the original meaning of the passage and the needs of our contemporary audiences. In many ways, the investigation of Scripture is all about bridging the distance between the original meaning and our contemporary audience, so that we can all benefit from the full value of biblical texts. None of us can do this perfectly. But we can trust that the Holy Spirit will lead us to biblical summaries that minister to his church in valuable ways.
CONCLUSION
In this lesson on discovering meaning: we've focused on two main ideas: the important guides to meaning we find in the writer, document and audience of Scripture; and the multiple summaries we can make from Scripture.
We all have to admit that sometimes the Scriptures are difficult to understand. But the good news is that God has given us a variety of ways to discover the original meaning of his Word. He's given us the documents of Scripture themselves, and these documents contain the grammatical and literary context we need. And he's also provided us with ways of gathering information about the writers and the original audiences of Scripture. And beyond this, the original meaning of every portion of Scripture is so rich that we can gain new insights into it every day of our lives. If we keep these things in mind as we study the Bible, we'll be able to discover more and more about the original meaning of Scripture.