How Do I Follow Big Sections of Scripture?

00:00:04.000 | Well, with the recent launch of John Piper's new book, "Reading the Bible Supernaturally,"

00:00:09.200 | we have a lot of Bible reading questions in the APJ inbox, and we love it. Keep sending those in to us,

00:00:15.000 | including this question that comes in to us from a man named Philip.

00:00:19.000 | "Dear Pastor John, I really enjoy the way you go through individual verses and explain them very clearly

00:00:24.500 | by breaking them down and explaining each part.

00:00:28.000 | I understand that meditating on small parts of scripture can be helpful as we suck out all the nourishment from it.

00:00:34.000 | But sometimes my problem is in understanding the entire chapter or larger sections of the Bible.

00:00:39.500 | I read something like John 8, and although I can understand small parts of it, I really get lost and fail to follow

00:00:45.500 | the entire flow of Jesus' arguments or where the chapter is going.

00:00:50.000 | Sometimes reading a psalm can be quite incoherent to me too,

00:00:54.000 | and I don't quite get how one sentence flows into another.

00:00:58.500 | So could you help me? Help me figure out ways to understand larger sections of scripture as a whole,

00:01:04.000 | rather than just small chunks disconnected from other parts."

00:01:08.500 | Let me see if I can help. First with an analogy,

00:01:14.000 | namely an analogy of a jigsaw puzzle,

00:01:18.000 | and then with an exhortation about the hard work of seeing a whole chapter whole,

00:01:25.000 | and then give an example from my own experience.

00:01:28.500 | Think of a larger unit of scripture, like a chapter or a few paragraphs or maybe several chapters.

00:01:36.000 | Think of it as a jigsaw puzzle, a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle.

00:01:43.500 | For me, this is just like the way I go about it.

00:01:47.500 | There are 500 pieces laid in front of you, and as you look at them,

00:01:52.500 | they do not look at all like the painting on the front of the box.

00:01:57.500 | They are just one big jumble.

00:02:01.500 | And that's how the words and phrases and clauses might look to you in a chapter in the Bible

00:02:07.500 | when you try to think of the chapter as a whole.

00:02:10.500 | There are just lots and lots of words and phrases and clauses that might say some nice things,

00:02:15.500 | but my, oh my, they don't make one big picture.

00:02:18.500 | How do you go about seeing the whole picture instead of 500 scattered pieces?

00:02:22.500 | And of course, the Bible doesn't have a picture on the top of the box.

00:02:27.500 | You're working a little harder here.

00:02:29.500 | How do you see a chapter as a whole with a main point,

00:02:35.500 | with all the pieces fitting together to make that main point

00:02:39.500 | instead of just seeing 60 or 70 scattered clauses and phrases?

00:02:43.500 | That's the goal.

00:02:45.500 | You take one piece, right?

00:02:47.500 | I love to do puzzles like this because I love figuring this out.

00:02:51.500 | You take one of the pieces, and you look at the piece very carefully.

00:02:56.500 | You don't just keep scanning your eyes.

00:02:59.500 | Over 500 pieces superficially, oh, let me see something.

00:03:03.500 | Oh, let me see. No, no, no, no.

00:03:05.500 | You get nowhere that way.

00:03:07.500 | You take one piece, and you examine it very carefully.

00:03:11.500 | And you notice that half of this piece is solid red,

00:03:16.500 | and the other half is gold, solid gold.

00:03:20.500 | And you notice that the little protrusion at the top is split in half,

00:03:26.500 | and half of it is gold, and half of it is red.

00:03:30.500 | And from this, you infer with careful thinking that there is another piece somewhere here,

00:03:36.500 | somewhere that will be half red and half gold.

00:03:41.500 | And instead of a protrusion, there's going to be an indention

00:03:46.500 | in the bottom of the piece leading up into half red and half gold.

00:03:52.500 | And now you're looking very specifically for that piece.

00:03:56.500 | And you scan the 500 pieces, this time looking specifically for that.

00:04:01.500 | And you find maybe six or seven or eight pieces that have this half red, half gold.

00:04:09.500 | And you slide them around looking for how they can fit together.

00:04:13.500 | You push them off to the side of the table in a corner,

00:04:16.500 | and you find one or two that fit, and then another, and another.

00:04:19.500 | And pretty soon you realize that you've got five, six, seven, eight pieces all fitting together.

00:04:27.500 | And you notice, oh my, this is a robe draped over the arm of a throne.

00:04:36.500 | So that's going to go here probably.

00:04:38.500 | You set that mid-size unit aside now, and you do the same thing all over again

00:04:45.500 | with another piece with its peculiar characteristics, fitting the pieces together as you go.

00:04:51.500 | So that's how you build little pieces into mid-size units.

00:04:57.500 | We might call those two or three verses or a paragraph.

00:05:01.500 | And we've got maybe five paragraphs that are going to fit together.

00:05:03.500 | But now you've got several, maybe three, four, five, six, seven, eight mid-size units.

00:05:11.500 | And you should be able to discern of those three, four, five verses in each unit,

00:05:17.500 | what's the main point there because of how they fit together.

00:05:20.500 | Now here's my exhortation.

00:05:23.500 | One of the reasons we don't move from the part to the whole in reading the Bible

00:05:29.500 | is because it is very hard work.

00:05:34.500 | It is hard work to fit all the mid-size pieces together so as to see the whole.

00:05:43.500 | For most of us, I certainly include myself here, we simply cannot do this in our head.

00:05:50.500 | And there's where people run into trouble.

00:05:52.500 | They're reading devotions, and they're trying to do this in their head.

00:05:57.500 | Well, I can't even begin to do this in my head.

00:06:01.500 | We have to do it on paper.

00:06:04.500 | We have to write it down.

00:06:06.500 | Now I don't think there are computer programs good enough to do this yet on screen

00:06:11.500 | because of all the jumbled jotting and line drawing and circling I have to do.

00:06:17.500 | We have to jot down the main point, the red and gold mid-size unit means robe over the arm of a throne,

00:06:27.500 | that kind of a thing, and then we jot down the next main point of the next mid-size unit and so on

00:06:34.500 | until we've got it on a piece of paper, six, seven, eight sentences,

00:06:39.500 | which now each one sums up the mid-size unit in the chapter, in the larger unit we're trying to understand.

00:06:46.500 | And then we try to go about seeing how those mid-size units relate to each other.

00:06:53.500 | And my exhortation is simply don't give up on that.

00:06:57.500 | Use a pencil and a paper.

00:06:59.500 | Draw lines between them.

00:07:02.500 | You have no idea how they might all fit together.

00:07:05.500 | You'll be amazed at what you're able to see by trying to fit those mid-size units

00:07:11.500 | and their main point together to make the larger piece.

00:07:15.500 | Now here's my closing example of how I've done it recently.

00:07:19.500 | I've been baffled over the years by the main point of Psalm 8.

00:07:25.500 | It seems like the main point is, "Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth,"

00:07:29.500 | because it begins with that and it ends with that.

00:07:31.500 | And that's a wonderful structural thing to see.

00:07:33.500 | But in the middle, you've got these babies who cry out,

00:07:38.500 | "And God gets victory over his foes through the mouth of infants."

00:07:42.500 | And so I jotted that down recently.

00:07:46.500 | I even made a look at the book about this just a few weeks ago.

00:07:49.500 | I jotted that down.

00:07:50.500 | I said, "Okay, so the meaning of the first part of the Psalm, just the first couple of verses,

00:07:54.500 | seems to be God gets victory over his foes by babies saying things."

00:08:01.500 | And I have no idea how that works. None.

00:08:04.500 | That's just what it says.

00:08:05.500 | So I jotted that down.

00:08:07.500 | And then the next unit, which seems just totally different,

00:08:11.500 | "I behold your heavens and the things, your handiwork,

00:08:15.500 | and what is man that you're mindful of him,

00:08:17.500 | and through this man who's just a little lower than the heavenly beings,

00:08:21.500 | you govern the whole world with fish and birds."

00:08:25.500 | And I said, and I tried, now what's the main point?

00:08:28.500 | I've put a few pieces together here.

00:08:30.500 | I want to jot down on my piece of paper the main point of this mid-sized unit.

00:08:35.500 | And I jotted down, "God exercises dominion over his earth

00:08:42.500 | through insignificant man who compared to the stars seems like nothing."

00:08:49.500 | And as soon as I wrote it, I saw, oh, I get it.

00:08:54.500 | The babies are insignificant, and God works his victories through babies,

00:09:00.500 | and man is insignificant, and God exercises dominion through man,

00:09:06.500 | and then he ends it.

00:09:07.500 | How great is his glory and his majesty.

00:09:11.500 | Surely then, the point is, one of the peculiar aspects of the majesty

00:09:17.500 | and glory of God is that he gets his victories,

00:09:20.500 | and he exercises his dominion through the use of weak and insignificant things.

00:09:25.500 | Amen, amen. Praise God.

00:09:26.500 | And it's exactly the use that Jesus makes of it, or that Matthew makes of it,

00:09:32.500 | as Jesus enters the city on Palm Sunday where the babies are crying out,

00:09:38.500 | "Hosanna," and he's on a donkey of all things.

00:09:42.500 | So the point is, look at the pieces very carefully.

00:09:46.500 | Fit them together in mid-sized units.

00:09:49.500 | Jot down the main points of the mid-sized units

00:09:52.500 | until you have them all on a half sheet of paper,

00:09:55.500 | and then think and think and pray and pray and think and pray and think and pray

00:09:59.500 | and organize and draw lines and try to fit them all together

00:10:03.500 | until they fall into place, and you see how these five, six, seven, eight, nine points

00:10:10.500 | of the mid-sized units are in a flow that make one big overarching point.

00:10:16.500 | And you will be surprised if you take up pencil and paper and do this what you will see.

00:10:24.500 | Wow, that's a lot of help, and puzzles are a great metaphor for reading large sections of Scripture.

00:10:30.500 | Thank you, Pastor John.

00:10:31.500 | That is doing Bible reading in the macro picture, putting together big chunks.

00:10:35.500 | And in a couple of weeks we have a question about how to read a particular passage,

00:10:40.500 | really doing Bible reading in the micro sphere.

00:10:43.500 | Stay tuned for that.

00:10:44.500 | We're going to cover that more in future weeks.

00:10:47.500 | Well, we have run up again against the weekend,

00:10:50.500 | and that means it's time for me to remind you to subscribe to our podcast

00:10:53.500 | and to find our audio feeds and search our episode archive,

00:10:55.500 | and even reach out to us by email with a difficult question you might be facing

00:10:59.500 | or a Bible study question on the brain.

00:11:01.500 | Please send those in to us.

00:11:02.500 | You can do all this through our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

00:11:07.500 | Well, speaking of hard questions, what do we do with the lingering sense of regret

00:11:12.500 | that we feel for wronging people with our sins in the past,

00:11:17.500 | wrongs that cannot be forgiven by the ones we have wronged?

00:11:22.500 | What do you do when it's too late for reconciliation?

00:11:25.500 | This is a sobering and humbling question,

00:11:28.500 | and it comes to us from a listener who wants to know.

00:11:31.500 | We will begin next week with it.

00:11:34.500 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.

00:11:35.500 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.

00:11:37.500 | We'll see you on Monday.

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