Friday, March 14, 2008
IDEA: Interpretation is asking questions beyond the questions we first asked.
PURPOSE: To help listeners think of how they would ask questions of the biblical text.
Two guys were sitting at a bar . . .
How does that story work?
What do you have to do to understand it?
I. In order to study the Bible, we not only have to observe what is there, but we try to make sense of what is there.
We not only ask, "What is it saying," but we also ask, "What does it mean?" That is interpretation.
We can make the process more difficult than it is.
We do it all the time.
Example: a note when you come home in the evening may demand a great deal of interpretation.
What do you learn from that note about the observation step? What is left for interpretation?
II. It is easier to demonstrate what we mean by interpretation than to explain it. Let's look back at Romans 12:1-2 again.
"I beseech you therefore . . ." You would have observed the word therefore. Now you must ask what it is "there for." What are the possibilities?
It could refer to what is immediately before it—the depth of the riches of God's wisdom and knowledge (Romans 11:35).
He says "by the mercies of God." It could refer to the section in Romans chapters 9-11 in which he has talked about God's mercy to the Gentiles, that they are included in God's plan.
He could refer to all of the mercies he has been discussing throughout the entire book.
What he is not referring to is the mercy that you have good health or that you've got enough money to support yourself. You have to decide among those that deal with what Paul has already written in that letter. You can't even go over to some mercy that he may have discussed in the book of Galatians. The therefore is linked to the mercies of God.
As you're thinking about that, how would you decide?
What are the implications of the statement of what we've just done?
One implication is that what we are called to do for God is based on what He has already done for us.
Another implication: How we respond to God grows out of our understanding of how merciful and kind and gracious He has been to us, in contrast to how severe and holy and mighty He is.
He says, "I beseech you . . ." We had earlier raised the question, "Why beseech?" "In the light of God's mercies . . ." Do we have a clue why Paul didn't say, "I demand" instead of "I beseech"? What is the implication of that?
"That you present your bodies a living sacrifice." What is the picture behind this?
It refers to the kind of offering you would have had in the Old Testament. The concept is one in which what you have given to God in the animal now belongs wholly to God.
"Bodies." If you're going to do the will of God, you'll do it with your body. It also speaks of your body as valuable to God.
"Living." What are the possibilities? What does that mean?
When you say something is holy, you mean that it belongs to God. The implication is that we belong to God because He has created us, and because He has redeemed us; but now we belong to God because we have given ourselves to Him by our own free surrender. The dictionary meaning of holy is that we are dedicated and set apart to the service of God.
What does it mean to be "acceptable to God" in the light of all of Romans?
"Which is your reasonable service."
It is reasonable as the logical response to all of the mercies of God preceding it.
The use of the word service may come from this, denoting worship which is the sense of the Greek text. Some translations say worship; others say service.
Part of the unraveling is that we think of worship as singing hymns (cultic worship), but worship and service are the same thing: as I live (give my body to God) before God, that is my worship of God. When we speak of a worship service, we speak of serving God with our worship.