Many people sit in church year after year, every Sunday hearing a brief message, yet they feel dissatisfied. They have an ongoing desire to learn and understand the Bible, but a half-hour topical sermon every Sunday doesn’t really enable them to “learn the book.” They may learn about certain topics, depending on the church they attend, but that good desire for a deep understanding of the Scripture is left unmet. Some people address this desire by deciding to go to school to learn more. They may go to a ministry school, where they learn how to minister to people—things like street outreach, prophecy, praying for healing, and so forth. Or they may choose to attend a seminary or a theological school, where they will learn about systematic theology. A third option for biblical instruction is a Bible school, where people learn a different theological approach to the Bible called biblical theology. This textbook presents biblical theology, or a biblical studies understanding of the Bible.

The following chart provides a simple explanation of the differences between systematic theology and biblical theology:

Students of systematic theology learn about at least these seven areas of study. Soteriology is the study or the doctrine of salvation; Pneumatology is the study of the Holy Spirit. Atonement Theory refers to the various theories and understandings of the atonement that theologians study and debate. Angelology and Demonology are the study of angels and demons. Eschatology is the study of the endtimes. Ecclesiology is the study of the understanding of the Church. And finally, Canonicity is the study of the formation of the Bible. The way these subjects are taught varies greatly, depending on the seminary, but all of these subjects will be covered at a school teaching systematic theology.

We will use atonement theory as an example of how systematic theology works. One of the most well-known books on systematic theology is Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology. It is about 1,290 pages long and has over 400,000 copies in print. Grudem is very open to the Holy Spirit, so he covers all the above subjects from that perspective. By comparison, Thomas F. Torrence, a well-known theologian, has written a 500-page book titled Atonement on just one of the systematic theology topics—atonement theory. This is just one view of the atonement, among many. What this shows us is that theologians can take Grudem’s Systematic Theology and literally multiply it into fifteen or more 500-page books from a variety of viewpoints. The end result is many very large books and a lot of passionate disagreements in the study of systematic theology. In this way, systematic theology is a seemingly endless study.

Students of systematic theology learn a lot of terminology. Like in the medical field, theologians have a specific jargon regarding the Bible that the average Christian will not understand. This can be helpful, because of the precision involved, but it can also lead to more and more rabbit trails with no real conclusion about what a particular passage actually means. Systematic theology creates a net that has a strong ability to capture certain ideas, but it also has holes. One of the biggest holes is a lack of knowledge about specific Bible verses and stories and the overall historical context of the Bible. To address some of these holes, many seminaries have added Old Testament survey and New Testament survey courses, which provide an overview of the Old and New Testaments. The purpose of these classes is to help students understand, generally, the history, main characters, lands, and geography of the Bible. This is usually a small part of the study of systematic theology.

Because of this emphasis on theological ideas, systematic theologians tend to approach Scripture with the purpose of debate. They see the Bible according to these theological categories of study, and they use the Bible to prove their position in each of these categories. This is a biblical understanding most people can’t relate to, and it often leaves those who are hungry for more knowledge of the Bible still unsatisfied. When Christians hungry for more Bible knowledge attend seminary, they will learn the above topics, and they will learn where the verses are to prove their particular view of each topic. They will also learn how to debate with others on these topics using theological jargon. When they return to normal church life, however, they will still feel the same frustration that drove them to school in the first place. They still don’t feel like they really know the Bible. Or perhaps they go to seminary hoping to become a pastor but eventually realize that most of what they learned in seminary is not helpful to the average person in the pew, who wants practical teaching on how to live the Christian life well and thrive in business and family. The missing piece in systematic theology is that it does not prepare pastors to give their people helpful instruction from the Bible.

By contrast, the second approach to theology, biblical theology, is a combination of Old and New Testament surveys, as well as hermeneutics, which is simply the application of methods for interpreting the Bible. In systematic theology, people approach the Bible with a filter, using one of the topics listed above. For example, when people study the Bible using the filter of soteriology, they start by outlining the various views and the scriptures used to support those views. This is why it is called a filter, because they are not simply reading the Bible. They are starting with presuppositions that determine how they read the Bible. By contrast, biblical theology starts with nothing but the Bible. Students of biblical theology simply read the Bible step-by-step, endeavoring to understand the text from the writer’s perspective and the original reader’s perspective. By doing so, they often come to very different conclusions than those who use the systematic approach.

Two more terms important to understanding how we study the Bible are exegesis and eisegesis. Exegesis means approaching the Bible by pulling from what it says. We are trying to learn what it says and what it means, and we are trying to draw something out of the Bible that is actually there. By contrast, eisegesis is when we approach the Bible and insert what we think is there, what we think it means.

For example, exegesis of Matthew 24 involves reading the preceding chapters. In these chapters we find Jesus declaring unfolding judgment against Jerusalem. With this backdrop, it is easy to understand what the disciples meant when they asked Him, in Matthew 24, when these things will happen. It is clear they were referencing the judgments Jesus talked about in the preceding chapters. This is what it means to draw meaning out of Scripture based on the actual content and context of the Scripture, not on our preconceived ideas.

By contrast, many modern views of Revelation are a good example of eisegesis. For example, when people read about the eagle in Revelation that is flying and declaring woe (see Rev. 8:13), they assume the eagle must refer to the United States of America, because the eagle is the national symbol. This is eisegesis, because it clearly is not what John meant. The United States did not exist in John’s day, so he could not have been referring to it.

The root issue here is how we interpret Scripture. The problem with claims like, “The Holy Spirit told me that’s what John meant,” is that First Peter 1:20–21 says Scripture is not of private interpretation. Thinking we can figure out Scripture all on our own leads to dangerous places. It can eventually lead us to interpret Scripture without properly testing what we think against what the rest of the Bible says. This is a fast track toward full-blown eisegesis. This happens frequently, especially related to cultural understandings. If a church is in a country or culture where it is acceptable to oppress women, typically that church will do everything it can to read oppression of women into the Bible. The American church culture prior to and during the Civil War is another example of the power of eisegesis. At that time, many churches in America were preaching in support of slavery. They could draw out of certain passages and say, “See, it’s scriptural.” We can make almost any scripture say what we want it to say if we start with certain preconceptions instead of reading the Bible with an understanding that draws out what the Lord is trying to express in Scripture. This realization can cause people to wonder, “How do I know whether I’m drawing it out, whether my preferences are drawing it out, or whether that is actually what I am supposed to get out of it?” That is where the word hermeneutics comes in.

Hermeneutics comes from a Greek root word meaning “to interpret.” So, hermeneutics is not related just to theology but to any study of literature or history that requires interpretation, such as the writings of Plato or Aristotle. It is the art or science of interpretation. When we read something from Aristotle, we need a hermeneutic to be able to interpret what he meant. The hermeneutic many scholars consider to be the most reliable is called a historical contextual hermeneutic. In historical contextual hermeneutics, the first question asked is, “What would this have meant to the author?” The second question is, “What would this have meant to the original reader?”

These questions employ the concept of reader relevance. When people read the Book of Revelation in the first century AD, they were not thinking about America when they read about an eagle. That interpretation has no reader relevance, so it cannot be what the text means. It is critically important, when we read, to put ourselves in the place of the author and the original reader. That is the historical contextual hermeneutic. This is quite a challenge for many of us, because we come from very different cultures than the cultures of the biblical writers. We also have a significant time gap. The time gap affects language and understanding, because the usage of words evolves over time. Words actually change meaning because of the influence of culture. A common example of this is the word gay, which only fifty years ago meant “happy.” Now it has been recast by culture to mean “homosexual.” That is how quickly the meaning of words can change—and how drastically. This means we are not only dealing with our own language changing but also with the changes within the original languages of the Bible—Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. This can create quite a challenge when it comes to interpretation.

For example, in Second Peter 3:7, the phrase heaven and earth is commonly understood to mean literal heaven and literal earth. The average Christian reads this verse and believes it to mean the literal heaven and earth are reserved for a judgment of fire. However, if we look at the passage according to a historical contextual hermeneutic, we will discover that the original phrase translated “heaven and earth” is actually an idiom referring to the temple. Inside the temple was the Holy of Holies, where the ark of the covenant was housed and where cherubim were sewn into the walls. That room represented heaven to the Jewish people. The secondary area of the temple had a dirt floor, the candlesticks, and the table of showbread; it represented earth. In the outer court, the large bronze container represented the sea. Thus, the temple was divided into the heavens, the earth, and the sea.

However, over 2,000 years later, because of the time gap and the culture gap, it is easy to misunderstand what Peter and Jesus meant when they spoke about the heaven and earth. Because of our literal interpretation, we think they were saying the heavens and the earth would literally pass away. Instead, Peter and Jesus were talking in the vernacular of their culture, and their original hearers understood they were describing the temple. In fact, Peter was writing about the destruction of the temple by fire just a few years before the temple was actually burned with fire. In other words, his prophecy has already been fulfilled. But if we do not know that, we think heaven and earth will be burned with fire in some sort of nuclear explosion. And just like that, we have strayed very far from the original meaning of the text and created room for all kinds of false teachings.

A healthy biblical theology starts with two presuppositions. The first is a historical contextual hermeneutic. The second is that God is revealed progressively throughout the Bible. This second item is often forgotten, especially in systematic theology. The Bible was literally written over the course of 1,500 years by over forty authors. Now we have it compiled in one volume, and the systematic approach tends to pluck verses out here and there rather than understanding that we need to start at the beginning and read chronologically. In this way, we can read Scripture according to the revelation of God the people had when it was written. For example, Noah didn’t know anything about the Law or the Ten Commandments. He didn’t know about worshipping God in a tabernacle or about the nation of Israel. He predated all of that, and we need to understand that if we want to understand Noah’s story properly.

Job is another example of this. Most scholars believe Job is the earliest book in the Bible, yet it is found well into our current version. As a result, people read it assuming Job had a greater revelation of God than he actually did. Part of the problem is that our Bibles have been organized by categories—history books, poetry, prophetic books, and so forth—which means everything is out of order. Our Scripture has no chronology, which creates a lot of confusion. Job really should be inserted after Genesis 1–3, but instead it follows the Book of Esther, which tells the story of the Israelites in exile. Clearly, our chronology is a mess.

The books of Ezra and Nehemiah are also completely misplaced, which makes understanding the historical flow of the story of the Bible very challenging and confusing. Ezra and Nehemiah should actually be near the very end of the Old Testament, but instead they follow Second Chronicles, which tells the story of Solomon and the kings of Judah until the nation goes into captivity.

Here is the basic chronology of the Old Testament: the Garden of Eden; Noah and the flood; Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the twelve sons of Jacob (Israel), including Joseph; Israel’s sojourn in Egypt for 430 years; Israel’s escape from slavery in Egypt under Moses; the giving of the Law to Israel; the forty years in the wilderness; Joshua’s leadership of Israel into the Promised Land; the rule of the judges in Israel; King Saul; King David; King Solomon. Christians who are familiar with the Bible know these Old Testament stories, but after Solomon, the storyline is muddled and confusing, and most Christians don’t know it very well.

In the time following King Solomon, the nation divided into two nations, and many different kings—some good but most evil—took the throne of either Israel or Judah. This was the period of Ahab and Jezebel and Elijah and Elisha. Eventually, Babylon and Assyria came and took possession of the two nations. Most of the surviving Israelites went into captivity, including Daniel. Daniel prayed what Jeremiah had prophesied. Jeremiah prophesied ahead of the captivity, telling the people they would be in captivity for seventy years. When Daniel read the book of Jeremiah, he prayed, “Lord, what’s going to happen?” (See Daniel 9:2.) The prophetic dreams and visions in his book were an answer to that question. Finally, the people returned to the land; Nehemiah rebuilt the city wall, and Ezra rebuilt the temple system. That is why Ezra and Nehemiah should appear at the end of the Old Testament, not prior to the poetry books.

This organization of the Bible by topics has created a lot of confusion for the average Christian who is trying to read the Bible. In many ways, the result of topical categories in the Bible has the same effect as systematic theology. Instead of being presented progressively, the material is lumped together. Thus, the poetry books (Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Songs, and Lamentations) are placed and read together even though they may be completely unrelated and were written in different time periods. Even within Psalms there are psalms by Moses and by David, who came from very different time periods. This type of organization simply does not make sense. When we read like this, we miss the fact that God was revealed progressively throughout the Bible.

We see this progressive revelation clearly in the names of God in the Bible, which were one of the primary ways in which He revealed Himself and His nature to the Israelites. In fact, one of the meanings of God’s personal name, Jehovah (YHWH) is “self-revealing.” In other words, He revealed Himself through adding an attribute to His name. So Jehovah Jirah means “God will provide.” Because we do not read the Bible chronologically, we can easily miss how significant these revelations of God’s names were. Each time God revealed a new name, He revealed a new aspect of who He was as their God. Before God called Himself Jehovah Jirah, no one knew He would provide for them.

Through these examples we can see the importance of reading the Bible with the historical contextual hermeneutic and with an understanding of the progressive nature of Scripture. When we study the Bible this way, we will not read into stories in ways the characters never would have understood. We will not insert ideas or meanings that were not there. Instead, we will be able to stand back and observe, knowing that we understand what God was doing, but Abraham and Noah did not understand what God was doing. Because of our perspective, we are able to see certain things they could not. We know how history after them would unfold, but they did not know that. So, we can see more than they could, but we cannot inject what we know into their thinking.

Now that we have examined the differences between systematic theology and biblical theology, and the two keys to reading the Bible with biblical theology, we will look at ways we can study the Bible—or study forms.

The natural question arising from the previous material in this chapter is, “How am I supposed to approach this book?” Because a good chronological Bible does not yet exist,¹ how do we read the Bible with a historical contextual hermeneutic and an understanding of the progressive revelation of God through Scripture? To answer this question, we must look at how people have studied the Bible, or common study forms. This chart gives a simple list of the most common forms of Bible study.

The term devotions has arisen from the recent belief among Christians that we must read at least one chapter of the Bible each day to be good Christians. Many people are raised with this idea and wrestle with a lot of guilt if they do not read their Bibles daily, but this idea actually has some significant problems, which we will look at here. The idea of daily devotions is, itself, flawed when we consider that most of the New Testament is made up of epistles (also known as letters). In life, we would not read a friend’s email in small portions over a series of days. That would make it unnecessarily difficult to follow the flow of the message and to understand it all in context. Yet this is what many attempt to do with the letters of the New Testament.

The Book of First Timothy is a great example of this, especially because the places where chapter breaks are inserted in the text are sometimes horribly misleading or confusing. The letter of First Timothy is broken up into six chapters, but the chapter breaks should be in different places. In First Timothy 1:15, it says, “Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance….” Then, in First Timothy 3:1, it says, “Here is a trustworthy saying….” Then, in First Timothy 4:9, it says, “This is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance.” In these three verses, Paul highlighted the three topics he was writing to Timothy about in his letter.

If we were to write First Timothy as a blog, the beginning (1 Tim. 1:1–14) would be the introduction. It lays the foundation for the topic. Then we would insert a subheading, maybe in bold print, that reads: Trustworthy Saying #1. After the text of that point (1 Tim. 1:15–2:15), we’d insert Trustworthy Saying #2 (1 Tim. 3:1–4:8) and Trustworthy Saying #3 (1 Tim. 4:9–6:11). The remaining text would be the conclusion, the final charge to Timothy (1 Tim. 6:12–21). This is a sensible way to divide First Timothy; it actually flows with the author’s intent and topical understanding. Instead, the chapter breaks do not follow the actual content of the letter.

This, of course, is not a problem if we read the entire letter in one sitting, but if we read only one chapter per day, this can create quite a problem in our ability to understand the content. When we stop reading at the end of a chapter, we actually stop in the middle of Paul’s point, and when we pick up reading the next day, we have most likely forgotten what we read the day before. We view the chapters as separate and, therefore, do not really understand what Paul was saying. We must read letters as a whole to understand their flow.

We need to read straight through, following what the author was saying as an over-arching theme and allowing the natural breaks to come to the surface. Otherwise we will end up with a devotional approach that is very disjointed. We will read our one chapter, but we will not understand the context or what was being said in the larger picture. As a result, we do not receive the value we need from it.

Second, topical Bible study is what many Christians experience on Sunday mornings around the world. If Pastor Bob picks “Dying to Self” as the topic for his Sunday message, he will choose several key passages to teach from. Most likely he will start with First Corinthians 15:31, which says in the King James, “…I die daily.” Pastor Bob, according to his systematic theological training background, will briefly highlight this verse in isolation, without reading it in context, and then he will preach for thirty minutes on why we all need to die to ourselves—to our desires, passions, dreams, and visions. He will pull in other isolated verses that may seem to support his point, like Luke 14:27, where Jesus told His disciples, “Whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple” (NKJV). Because of the way Pastor Bob strings these verses together, it seems natural for them to be connected. It seems logical that Jesus and Paul were talking about the same thing. But this approach to Scripture contains massive problems.

First, topical Bible study does not give us a historical contextual understanding. The passages used are read apart from the context they were originally written in, not to mention the historical realities of that day. If Pastor Bob would read the verses before and after First Corinthians 15:31, his entire sermon would fall apart. Verse 30 says, “And as for us, why do we endanger ourselves every hour?” This clearly shows that the dying mentioned refers to literal physical death. This becomes even clearer if we read First Corinthians 15:31 in any translation other than the King James, which has not accurately translated the meaning of this verse. The NIV reads:

Clearly Paul was talking about physical persecution and the literal threat of death the early Christians faced on a daily basis. That is not everyone’s reality, but it was his reality when he wrote this letter to the Corinthians. Paul could say he had faced wild beasts at Ephesus, because that was part of his story, but it’s not part of most people’s stories. In other words, it is not a universally true statement. This means it is not permissible to apply it universally. So often we quote Scripture as our personal experience when it is not our personal experience. This is not an acceptable or accurate use of Scripture. In this we can see the danger of plucking a verse or phrase out of its context and using it to prove a point that isn’t actually being proven in that Bible passage.

This same principle applies to the passage surrounding Jesus’ command to bear our cross (see Luke 14:27). Looking at several verses prior to it, this is what we find:

To understand this passage properly, we need to remember the second key to biblical theology—reading progressively. When Jesus said these words, He hadn’t been crucified yet. Our understanding of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ cannot be injected into the understanding of those who were listening to Jesus in Luke 14. It would be wrong to do that. They did not understand what we understand about Jesus’ death on the cross. Therefore, we have to think about what Jesus’ words would have meant to those listening to Him at that time, people who had no idea Jesus would eventually die on a cross. Another important fact to remember is that Jesus was not talking to Christians, to the Church, or to people who had been walking with Him for fifty years. He was talking to large crowds of non-believers. This is why He said, “If you want to be my disciple….” He was saying, “If you are going to make a choice to become a follower, you have to know the cost involves picking up your cross, and then you follow Me.” He was not saying this to believers but to non-believers. This means, we cannot apply it with broad strokes to the Church the way so many have.

If we keep reading in this passage, we will get a fuller picture of what this cross, or cost, was that Jesus was talking about:

Here Jesus gave two different pictures to explain what He meant: a king going to war and a contractor building a tower. He said, “Don’t get halfway down this road and have half a building built and then be laughed at and mocked by everyone around. Don’t be the king who goes to war without enough people, or you’ll be slaughtered.” Simply put, His point was: If you are going to be a disciple, don’t be a half-disciple. He was telling potential followers not to start following Him and then turn back to be mocked by friends and family. When we understand this, we see that when Jesus talked of hating mother, father, wife, children, brothers, and sisters, and even one’s own life, He was not saying Christians should hate everyone around them. What He was saying was that those who wanted to follow Him should not be half-followers.

This begins to make even more sense when we realize, in the larger context of history, at that time the cross was a terrible punishment reserved only for rebels and the worst kind of outlaws. The Romans would crucify insurrectionists, using this specific form of death as a sign to warn others that if they rose up and rebelled they would be crucified. This linking of crucifixion with making a public example of someone remains in our language today, in statements like, “That politician made a mistake, and the media crucified him.” In other words, they were making an example of that person. People don’t say, “The media gave him a lethal injection,” because they are not just talking about death; they’re talking about a public humiliation. Crucifixion has always meant making a public show of someone to show that those who do the same will be destroyed in the same way. Thus, in Jesus’ statement we can see that He used crucifixion as a metaphor indicating the public humiliation the Jews of His day would experience if they chose to follow Him. They had to count the cost in a very holistic way, because they risked rejections from family and friends and persecution from religious and political leaders. The decision to follow Him literally meant turning their backs on everything they’d previously looked to as a source of identity and reputation. If we want to actually have a hermeneutically correct interpretation of this passage, we can’t say Jesus was talking to Christians about how to defeat temptation in their lives. Yet many pastors do just that. They twist scriptures out of context to create topical sermons.

Of course, it is important to clarify here that topical sermons are not necessarily bad. The problem happens when people pull scripture verses out of context to create a topical message without considering what those verses actually mean in their context. When people do that, they do violence to multiple texts that have nothing to do with their sermon topic (as we saw with the example on dying to self). As a result, they teach unbiblical sermons in a way that makes them seem absolutely biblical to the unstudied and causes a lot of confusion about what the Bible really says. That is what we do not want. However, one can create an excellent and biblically accurate sermon on a particular topic by using the historical contextual hermeneutic to examine all the verses on a particular topic, such as the wrath of God. (We will look at how to do this in more depth in Chapter 3.) Topical messages can be wonderful if we are careful to respect the context of each verse we use. And if we use a verse apart from its original context, it is important to clarify that to our audience, to say something like, “I know this verse in context refers to this, but the Holy Spirit has been speaking to me about this through it, so I want to share that with you without ignoring the original context and meaning.” This kind of clarification is crucial, and it allows room for fresh words from the Spirit while still honoring (and not contradicting) the original meaning of the text.

Because much of modern Western Christianity has been based on topical sermons once a week and daily devotions on our own, many people have ended up with skewed understandings of Scripture. The question is, what can we do? How can we read Scripture and approach our walk in a way that is truly accurate and life-giving? One word that describes the answer to this dilemma is expository. Expository Bible study and expository preaching simply expose what the Bible is actually saying in context. This is exactly what we did with the verses above; we exposed what the text truly means in context. Expository study looks at the passage in context, in its historical place, considering who was being addressed and the context of the author. In this way, expository study can lift a passage out to help us understand that topic in its proper place.

At times it can sound a lot like topical study, but the difference is that expository study respects the context, the flow, the place in history, the progression, the original audience within the passage, and the relevance to the modern reader. In expository study, we take the passage and study its context by asking: Why is it being written; who is it being written to; and what are the purpose, value, and intentions of the passage? Only when we ask these questions are we really able to arrive at an accurate conclusion.