Is My Bible Reading Too Academic?
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | - Stephanie writes in to ask this.
00:00:07.200 | Hello, Pastor John, here's my question.
00:00:09.560 | The older women in my life are concerned
00:00:11.960 | with the way I study the Bible.
00:00:13.600 | They claim I take an academic approach
00:00:15.780 | to reading the Word of God,
00:00:17.360 | but I'm afraid it's the only way I truly know how to.
00:00:20.320 | Nothing makes me more excited than to connect the dots
00:00:22.880 | from the Old Testament to the New Testament.
00:00:25.580 | With many different colored pens,
00:00:27.520 | I highlight and underline verses
00:00:29.320 | and scribble notes about what God is revealing to me
00:00:31.520 | and whatever blank spaces are available in my Bible.
00:00:34.880 | I truly feel this is one of the ways I worship God,
00:00:37.200 | and I do feel the closest with Him
00:00:38.840 | while reading His Word and watching His divine story
00:00:41.440 | unfold page by page.
00:00:44.160 | They say I should be reading my Bible more devotionally,
00:00:46.800 | not academically.
00:00:48.360 | They worry I am making more head knowledge connections
00:00:51.480 | rather than heart-changing connections.
00:00:54.400 | Can an academic study of the Bible be God-glorifying?
00:00:59.040 | - When I hear a question like this,
00:01:03.200 | I want to crawl inside the heads of the older women
00:01:08.200 | who have this concern about Stephanie,
00:01:11.900 | and I want to crawl inside Stephanie's head as well
00:01:18.080 | to see what's really going on there.
00:01:21.420 | It may be that I would wind up being entirely
00:01:25.760 | on Stephanie's wavelength and would need then
00:01:29.840 | to offer counsel to the older women
00:01:32.720 | to have a different attitude, and I will come back to that,
00:01:35.880 | or it may be that I would find things
00:01:38.480 | in Stephanie's heart and mind
00:01:40.340 | that would cause me to caution her
00:01:43.400 | not to write off their concern.
00:01:46.240 | So let me try to imagine the best of both of their concerns.
00:01:52.240 | And state them so that Stephanie can test
00:01:55.660 | where she fits into this.
00:01:57.260 | If I give these older women the benefit of the doubt
00:02:00.900 | for a moment, I would ask Stephanie if her excitement
00:02:05.900 | about connecting the dots from the Old Testament
00:02:09.300 | to the New Testament might sometimes slip over
00:02:13.800 | into being an excitement more with intellectual insights
00:02:19.380 | than with God Himself.
00:02:22.160 | Do the older women detect
00:02:24.880 | that there is perhaps a slight misplacement?
00:02:28.000 | And you need to be careful here because it's not black
00:02:31.200 | and white, it's not either/or, it's subtle.
00:02:33.840 | A slight misplacement of affections
00:02:37.740 | onto the process of discovery
00:02:40.440 | more than on what is discovered,
00:02:44.260 | or even more delicately, is there a slight misplacement
00:02:48.740 | of affections onto what is discovered
00:02:52.000 | more than the one who revealed it?
00:02:54.800 | Nobody escapes this danger, nobody.
00:02:57.860 | Whatever they're doing, whether they're worshiping
00:03:02.080 | corporately or whether they're reading their Bibles,
00:03:04.980 | it is possible to delight in the process
00:03:08.960 | of giving God praise than in God.
00:03:11.860 | Some people enjoy singing praise to God
00:03:14.760 | more than they enjoy God.
00:03:17.040 | And so we all are vulnerable at these moments.
00:03:22.040 | I'm very encouraged when I hear the way Stephanie talks
00:03:26.900 | because when she says, "I truly feel this is one
00:03:31.600 | "of the ways I worship God, and I do feel the closest
00:03:36.600 | "to Him while reading His Word
00:03:39.800 | "and watching His divine story unfold,"
00:03:43.160 | I say, "Amen, amen."
00:03:45.400 | I'm glad she's talking that kind of language.
00:03:49.880 | And the only caution that I might have
00:03:52.920 | as I try to imagine what these older women
00:03:56.040 | are concerned about is that Stephanie could develop
00:04:00.280 | a kind of fascination with the intricacies
00:04:03.760 | of redemptive history and with the typological structures
00:04:07.880 | of the Bible that may be disconnected from real life
00:04:13.080 | for these older women who aren't as fascinated
00:04:15.880 | as she is by those discoveries.
00:04:18.120 | And it's so interesting, Tony, just this morning,
00:04:20.480 | God is so good, just this morning,
00:04:22.880 | I was devotionally plotting my way
00:04:25.800 | through 1 Corinthians 10.
00:04:28.320 | And in 1 Corinthians 10, Paul is chastising the Corinthians
00:04:33.320 | for some bad behaviors and warning them.
00:04:37.160 | And the way he does it is by using
00:04:39.900 | the Old Testament people of Israel in Egypt,
00:04:43.460 | in the Exodus, in the wilderness at Mount Sinai,
00:04:46.580 | to help the Corinthians have right affections
00:04:51.160 | and right attitudes.
00:04:52.220 | And it's this verse six that just struck me.
00:04:57.000 | It says, "Now these things took place as types."
00:05:02.000 | Now that, it's tupoi in Greek, types.
00:05:05.900 | And I think it's translated examples
00:05:07.640 | or something like that, which is just fine.
00:05:09.580 | But I think Stephanie will know what I'm talking about here
00:05:12.260 | because typology is one way that God,
00:05:17.260 | in his marvelous running of history,
00:05:20.180 | has caused the old and the new to be interwoven.
00:05:23.680 | There are types, any types.
00:05:25.880 | And here's what it says.
00:05:28.660 | "Now these things took place as types for us
00:05:33.260 | that we might not desire evil."
00:05:38.340 | And I just stopped and I said, "Paul, you're amazing.
00:05:41.820 | You're saying typology is about emotions."
00:05:45.820 | That's what he says.
00:05:46.940 | "These things took place as types
00:05:51.740 | that you might not desire evil as they did."
00:05:56.740 | So amazing.
00:05:59.300 | Now here's the question for Stephanie.
00:06:02.660 | These women that she's relating to
00:06:05.200 | are not excited about types.
00:06:07.980 | But I'll bet they're excited about desires for good
00:06:11.940 | and hatred of evil and seeing those kinds of changes.
00:06:15.300 | And so I'm just suggesting that Stephanie in her excitement
00:06:20.300 | maybe needs to work at helping others,
00:06:25.420 | like these older women, see the payoff.
00:06:29.060 | The payoff for worship and the payoff for joy
00:06:32.640 | and the payoff for godliness.
00:06:35.900 | Instead of simply celebrating with many colored pens
00:06:40.900 | what she's seen, and these women are not
00:06:43.860 | on the same intellectual wavelength,
00:06:45.740 | they're not getting excited about the same things,
00:06:47.300 | but if you move through that, then they might say,
00:06:51.860 | "Okay, if Stephanie can get to worship,
00:06:54.660 | if Stephanie can get to joy,
00:06:55.980 | if Stephanie can get to godliness,
00:06:57.740 | if it's having those amazing effects,
00:06:59.860 | then we'll tolerate her strange way of studying the Bible."
00:07:04.300 | But let me close by giving Stephanie
00:07:06.780 | the benefit of the doubt here.
00:07:07.660 | This is maybe not what she's bargaining for.
00:07:10.160 | Like, here I am cautioning her,
00:07:13.420 | and maybe I need to be cautioning these older women.
00:07:16.100 | So that's what I'm gonna end with.
00:07:17.800 | Give her the benefit of the doubt for a moment,
00:07:21.180 | and let me caution these older women
00:07:23.580 | who are minimizing, it seems,
00:07:25.780 | the importance of what Stephanie's doing.
00:07:28.660 | The answer to Stephanie's question is yes.
00:07:32.820 | Can an academic study, and I might suggest to her,
00:07:36.420 | use another word beside academic,
00:07:38.260 | like serious or rigorous or detailed.
00:07:41.820 | The very word academic turns some people off.
00:07:44.260 | So I know what you mean.
00:07:46.340 | Can an academic study of the Bible be God-glorifying?
00:07:49.780 | Answer, yes.
00:07:51.860 | You're an example of it, and I hope that I am too.
00:07:56.300 | I want to glorify God by serious, rigorous, detailed
00:08:00.580 | study of the Bible that owns up to all that God put there.
00:08:04.540 | But here's something we both need to remember.
00:08:07.460 | Some people are wired, just by God,
00:08:11.740 | in their genetic makeup,
00:08:13.140 | that if they themselves make that effort at detailed study,
00:08:19.860 | their heads shut down their hearts.
00:08:23.740 | It does.
00:08:24.580 | I mean, as soon as they try their best to think hard,
00:08:28.620 | they start feeling cold.
00:08:30.740 | And for those of us for whom it works exactly the opposite,
00:08:33.500 | we just shake our heads and say,
00:08:34.580 | no, no, it doesn't work that way.
00:08:36.380 | And they say, well, it does work that way.
00:08:38.620 | Now, if you put yourself in their shoes,
00:08:40.660 | if it works that way for them,
00:08:42.780 | they're almost inevitably going to assume
00:08:46.740 | it's gonna happen to you too,
00:08:48.660 | which is why their suspicion is built in
00:08:52.380 | to that kind of study, because it's their experience.
00:08:56.180 | And what we have to do, the best way forward, I think,
00:09:00.900 | and this is what I tried to do for 33 years in preaching,
00:09:03.500 | 'cause I did that kind of study, behind my sermons.
00:09:06.380 | And I knew that there were hundreds of people out there
00:09:08.940 | who, if I dumped all my study on top of them,
00:09:12.020 | they would say, that is so boring.
00:09:14.100 | The best way forward that I know,
00:09:16.940 | and this is my advice to Stephanie,
00:09:19.820 | is that the one who is studying most rigorously
00:09:23.700 | also has to love most rigorously.
00:09:28.700 | In other words, if others think that our study
00:09:31.720 | will damage us, we must prove to them
00:09:35.340 | that it does the opposite.
00:09:36.580 | So Stephanie should out-love them, out-rejoice them,
00:09:41.580 | out-repent them, and out-serve them.
00:09:45.960 | And how will they then be able to say
00:09:51.900 | that study is hurting her if all the evidence
00:09:55.580 | is in the other direction?
00:09:56.880 | - That is good and balanced counsel, Pastor John, thank you.
00:10:01.060 | And thank you, Stephanie, for raising the question.
00:10:03.420 | We need your questions, so please send them in to us.
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00:10:13.960 | You can do all of that from our landing page
00:10:16.420 | at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.
00:10:21.980 | Well, we are all in need of saving.
00:10:24.540 | We know that much, but what are we saved for?
00:10:28.220 | That's a question that's a little more complex,
00:10:30.300 | but no less important, and John Piper will explain
00:10:33.340 | what we are saved for tomorrow.
00:10:36.220 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:10:37.300 | Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast.
00:10:39.900 | (silence)
00:10:42.060 | (silence)
00:10:44.220 | (silence)
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