Welcome to “Learning and Living the God-centered life”

Carmel Baptist Church

www.learningandlivingtheword.com
August 29, 2010
3 key principles for Biblical Hermeneutics
1. Historical-Grammatical Approach
2. Scripture interprets Scripture
3. New Testament is controlling hermeneutic for Old
Testament
Historical-Grammatical Approach to Scripture
In their feasts as well as in their religious sacrifices people
in the ancient world customarily drank what was either hot
or cold—never lukewarm. This rebuke would have been
especially meaningful to this church, for water was piped
to the city from Hierapolis, a few miles north. By the time
the water reached Laodicea, it was lukewarm!

The Bible knowledge commentary : An exposition of the

scriptures (Re 3:15–16). Wheaton, IL: Victor Books.
2. Scripture interprets Scripture
For Example:
Deuteronomy 25:4
“You shall not muzzle the ox while he is threshing.

And you might read this and say but I do not have oxen, so
what does Deut 25:4 have to do with me?

Also how I am supposed to interpret this verse?

Last week we said that the best commentary on the Bible is the
Bible itself.
2. Scripture interprets Scripture
As Paul wrote to the Corinthians in 1 Cor 9:9‑11 nearly 2000
years after Moses wrote this command for Israel,

For it is written in the law of Moses, you shall not muzzle the
ox while he is threshing. God is not concerned about oxen, is
He? Or is He speaking altogether for our sake? Yes, for our
sake it was written, because the plowman ought to plow in
hope, and the thresher to thresh in hope of sharing the crop.

Paul properly interpreted and applied this OT Scripture to teach

the Corinthians that they should “pay their preachers”. If God
intended for us to understand this teaching from the verse, Do
not muzzle the ox… doesn't that make you and I wonder what
all the other Old Testament laws and commands mean to us
today?!
3. The New Testament is the controlling hermeneutic
for the Old Testament
Luke 24:27 Then beginning with Moses and with all the
prophets, He explained to them the things concerning
Himself in all the Scriptures.
Doctrine means what the whole
Bible says about any particular
topic or subject.
3 questions for us to consider regarding the doctrine of God

 What is at stake in pursuing a knowledge of God?

 Does it matter if we know God rightly?

 Does it matter if we grow in the knowledge of God?

We can never fully understand God
The Bible does not contain everything that is known about God but
all that we need to know to have an intimate relationship with Him.

Since God is infinite and we are finite when reading the truths in the
Bible it becomes like pouring a 10,000 gallon truth into a thimble
like mind.

The Bible tells us that God is incomprehensible and we learn in

Psalm 145:3 that His greatness is unsearchable.

Other Scripture references:

 1 Corinthians 2:10-12
 Psalm 147:5
 Psalm 139
 Romans 11:33-36
Psalm 145:3
Great is the LORD, and highly to be praised,
And His greatness is unsearchable.
1 Corinthians 2:10-12
For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit
searches all things, even the depths of God.

For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of
the man which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows
except the Spirit of God.

Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who
is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by
God,
Psalm 147:5
Great is our Lord and abundant in strength;
His understanding is infinite.

Romans 11:33
Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge
of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and
unfathomable His ways!

Psalm 139:4-6
Even before there is a word on my tongue, Behold, O LORD,
You know it all.
You have enclosed me behind and before, And laid Your hand
upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; It is too high, I
cannot attain to it.
And yet we can truly know God

 Though we have finite minds and cannot know God

exhaustively we can know true things about God as revealed to
us through the Bible.

 The Scriptures tell us that God is righteous, God is love and

that God is Spirit. This doesn't mean that we know everything
about the righteousness or love of God or any of the other
attributes that we will study.

 Some Scriptures I will refer us to here will be: Isaiah 11:9,

Jeremiah 9:23-24, John 17:3, Hebrews 8:11, 1 John 5:20,
Galatians 4:9, Philippians 3:10, and 1 John 2:13. (The key word
to notice in these verses is the word know.)
Scriptural Support

Jeremiah 9:23-24 - Thus says the LORD, “Let not a wise man
boast of his wisdom, and let not the mighty man boast of his
might, let not a rich man boast of his riches;

but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and
knows Me, that I am the LORD who exercises lovingkindness,
justice and righteousness on earth; for I delight in these
things,” declares the LORD.
John 17:3 - This is eternal life, that they may know You,
the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.

1 John 5:20 - And we know that the Son of God has

come, and has given us understanding so that we may
know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in
His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.
Galatians 4:9 - But now that you have come to know
God, or rather to be known by God, how is it that you turn
back again to the weak and worthless elemental things, to
which you desire to be enslaved all over again?

1 John 2:13 - I am writing to you, fathers, because you

know Him who has been from the beginning. I am writing
to you, young men, because you have overcome the evil
one. I have written to you, children, because you know the
Father.
Philippians 3:7-10

But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have

counted as loss for the sake of Christ.

More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the

surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I
have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish
so that I may gain Christ,

and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my

own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in
Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of
faith,

that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the
fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death;
The Bible speaks of the importance of our “KNOWING
GOD”

Isaiah 11 - which starts out as a reference to Christ

The context is the overarching banner of what a
transformed world will look like?

Isaiah 11:9 They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy

mountain, For the earth will be full of the knowledge of
the LORD As the waters cover the sea.
So if you were to ask God what is the end goal of what you
are going to do on this earth?

What does it look like when you win God?

The answer is that My people will know Me!

And the knowledge of God will be as pervasive as the
waters of the sea
As one prominent theologian once wrote:

“The opportunity that we have as Christians to know and

have a personal and intimate relationship with God the
Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit is the greatest
of all the blessings in our Christian life.”
The problem in our culture when it comes to knowing God

There is such a rush to immanence when we speak of God

in our culture today. His mercy, kindness, graciousness,
patience and His love
Ask the typical person on the street about God and you
will probably hear that God is love

We live and swim in a culture of self esteem and self

importance but the Scriptures don't point us to self esteem
but instead for us to esteem God in all things.

Before we study and look at the specific attributes of God

we will need to discuss what method we are going to use
in order for us to know the God of the Bible.
Point #1 - Methodology in the Doctrine of God

It is important for us to talk about the method in which we are

going to study the God of the Bible

Is there a way to approach from Scripture, as full as we can, an

accurate understanding of God?

And many theologians over the years have thought it helpful to

classify God into several different categories.

The least helpful but terms you may run across are:

Absolute and Relative

Trying to get at the fact that God has attributes that are in
Himself absolute and then attributes where God is relational.
Milliard Erickson’s book talks about the following categories
Greatness and Goodness

Natural and Moral

 Natural has to do with the attributes of God's capabilities like
power, wisdom, and knowledge. These characterize what God can
do.

 Moral has to do with the center moral nature of God's being like
goodness, love, justice, righteousness and holiness.

But a better category to help us understand

Transcendent and Immanent

We have already talked about this somewhat but let’s look more
closely at the word transcendent.
So what does transcendence mean?
This means God's distance and God's otherness, His being
apart from us, who God is in His majesty and greatness.

TRANSCENDENCE. A term describing the fact that God is

separated from man and above man. God is transcendent in that
He is holy and man is sinful; He is transcendent because He is
infinite and man is finite. God is “wholly other” than man.

So what is immanence?
This means God's nearness, intimate, close, compassionate,
kind, caring and protecting.

It is only when we are the people of God start to see God as

transcendent that it begins to magnify properly His mercy,
compassion and kindness
A.W. Tozer in his book the The Knowledge
of the Holy states "the view of God today
(1960’s) in the modern church is so far
below the dignity of God that we should
call it idolatry”
First and foremost we need to see the greatness of God
before we come to study and embrace the grace of God

It is important that we learn about the majesty of God

before we try to comprehend the mercy of God

Turn to Isaiah 57:15

For thus says the high and exalted One Who lives forever,
whose name is Holy,“I dwell on a high and holy place,
And also with the contrite and lowly of spirit In order to
revive the spirit of the lowly And to revive the heart of the
contrite.
The first 3 lines give to us an indication of His
transcendence and then the last 3 lines talk about His
immanence which means near, close at hand, caring and
comforting.

That this God who is great and holy should come to dwell
with us is truly "Amazing Grace"

But for many today we have turned this into a presumption

(of course God would come to me because I am valuable)
because we have gotten away from how great this God is in
Himself.
Another example of this can be found in Isaiah 66:1-2
Isaiah 66:1 ¶ Thus says the LORD,
“Heaven is My throne and the earth is My footstool.
Where then is a house you could build for Me?
And where is a place that I may rest?

Isaiah 66:2 “For My hand made all these things,

Thus all these things came into being,” declares the LORD.
“But to this one I will look,
To him who is humble and contrite of spirit, and who
trembles at My word.

What are the answers to the rhetorical questions in Isaiah 66:1?

So what is the point?
Don't think Israel that I dwell in a Tabernacle or a Temple to
the degree that it contains Me.
For My hand made all of these things.

 The first part is to emphasize transcendence, how big,

awesome, great and majestic that God is.
 Then in verse 2 it says but to this one I will look and we
ought to ask why?

We live in an age of entitlement thinking.

So what is the one thing that we as people have absolute rights

and entitlement for in relationship to our condition before God?
 Condemnation
 Judgment
 Hell
So in our culture when we hear and we hear this as the
primary and most often quoted attribute of God, that God
loves you we immediately think, well of course He does. I
am self actualized and I have self esteem and dog gone it
people like me. Of course God loves me because I am the
center of the universe.

After all God made me because He was lonely and I am

actually helping Him out. It is a good thing that I am here to
help out God who is lonely and needs my help.

Then immediately we translate this into Christian service.

Isn't it a great thing for God that I am a teacher, counselor,
missionary, pastor because where would God be without my
contribution.
Our theology can make God the beggar when it is really us.
We make ourselves the giver when it is God who is always the
Giver

This my friends is called idolatry.

A.W. Tozer quote - the belief about God among professing
evangelicals in the church today is so low that it equates to
idolatry. Which means we have a cultural view not Biblical.

We think we are entitled - self esteem and self actualized and I

am very important

And so when we hear that God loves us we ought to just sit,

think and marvel at that statement.
Because this is grace and it should amaze us but quite frankly it
doesn't. Because we are under the presumption of grace.
So when we come to Isaiah 66:2 and we read
"And to this one I will look"
we should ask ourselves, why would God look to us?

We can say something to this verse but it comes close to

being fully unanswerable.

So we can see that in these Bible verses we have a category

that God is other than us, God is distant from us, remote
and we have another category that lets us know that God is
involved in every moment of human life.
Probably the best way to classify that is most helpful
Incommunicable and Communicable

Incommunicable means that these particular attributes of God

are not communicated to us which doesn't mean they are
revealed or said to us, but instead we do not share in any part
of this attribute. This is distinctively divine.
For example: Self existence and we do not share in any
measure this attribute. Because our existence is dependent and
contingent and derivative.

Communicable means attributes of God which He

communicates or shares in substance or in kind in some
portion with His creatures. There is in us a finite
representation of these particular attributes.
Communicable Attributes

For example:
God is love...this is a communicable attribute because
we are called to love

God is wise...we are called to be wise in our decisions

God is merciful...we are called to be merciful

Point #2 - Methodological Balance when we come to the
Doctrine of God

This means it is easy for us to emphasize one attribute of

God that another attribute is lessened to the degree that it
gets little or no attention.

Someone could emphasize the holiness, justice,

righteousness and the judgment of God that kindness,
mercy, forgiveness is hardly accounted for.
But really the problem in our particular culture today is
that we have taken an over emphasis to the immanence of
God which is God loves you to the limitation or exclusion
of the other attributes.
And what love is, becomes that defined by the culture and
not the Bible. Love is accepting, tolerant and never
judgmental.

In church history there has been tendencies to emphasize

one particular attribute to the exclusion of others. And in the
early church the skewing was toward the transcendence of
God which means His greatness, holiness, separation.
And the early church adopted a view that God is immutable
in the strictest sense of the word that He never changes.
Because if we say that He changes then it is either a change
for the better or worse. But they never considered change
that was part of God's moral nature.
And also the fact that God is timeless in the strictest sense of
the word. And the reason is because if God is temporal then
that is the medium for change and they were set on the fact
that God cannot change.

For example: A room that was blue and you paint it yellow.
Well at one time it was one color but now at another time it is
another color. So you can't have change unless you have
time.

In the early church transcendence was so prevalent that

immanence got very little attention in the preaching and
teaching.

Once you have said God is absolutely unchangeable,

timelessly immutable, but then say He relates to us we ask
what does this mean.