Walk
313. Bible Study
(Taken by permission from “The Daniel Files”,
Chapter 4 “Spiritual Sensitivity” – author Winkie Pratney).[i]
Perception
Perception – “quick to understand” – Seeing Like
a Prophet
Divine Guidance & Revelation, Godly
Insight, Spiritual Giftings
“There is a man in your kingdom in whom is the spirit of the
holy gods; and in the days of your father, light and understanding and wisdom,
like the wisdom of the gods was found in him” (Daniel 5:11).
Daniel and his friends
were not just good kids. They knew God and they knew how God did things. When
the crunch came, the King demanded to know the meaning of his supernatural
dream. He was quite simply going to kill those who had no answers.
Daniel knew how to seek
God. He knew how to hear His voice. The boys’ very lives hinged on their
God-given ability to understand the spiritual world. Is it any different for
you? The ability to “see like a prophet” is the key to survival in your
culture. The man or woman who can see what is really going on and chart for
themselves or others what they see is the man or woman who can change or rule
the world.
Without the supernatural
in your life, you are just another seeker. When you give your heart to Jesus,
the full power and wisdom of who He is becomes linked with your own little
life. It is His promise and assurance that we can known Him and have Him
demonstrate that power and wisdom through our lives to His glory.
God speaks to our
spirit, to our heart. Our minds, emotions and will become the medium by which
we transfer the internal truth of His law into the external world where we
live. When we learn to think like God, we will know how to act like God acts.
We are called to have a renewed mind, a mind being changed in all its channels into
a mind like Jesus. (Romans 12:1-2) There are three main ways in the Bible by
which we learn how to see:
Bible Meditation
“This book of the law shall not depart out of
your mouth; but you shall meditate on it both day and night” (Psalm 39:3).
To MEDITATE or muse in
Scripture is to give deep thought or close attention to what God says. You
learn to lock out all that turns attention from His Word. You give
uninterrupted attention to what He speaks to you. It is to study in
silence.
PONDER is a related
word. (Proverbs 4:26) It involves testing, measuring, weighing. It means to
compare circumstances and consequences, to examine and actively reflect. It is
the exact opposite of occult passivity, where you are told to let go of your
mind and just open it up to anything that drifts in. Christian thinking is
never blind faith. God never said, “Be transformed by the removal of your
minds.” First RECORD what God says
to use in a diary, notebook or organizer database. Then WRITE out what you
learn in a way that makes it clear to you exactly what you believe God said.
Finally APPLY what you learned. Give it away to someone else. Pass it on to
another it may be a help to. Nothing is really yours until you have it in a
form in which you can give it away.
“The man without an
organized system of thought will always be at the mercy of the man who has one”
(Ed Cole).
The Law Of Spiritual Learning
There is a law of spiritual learning. It is the
way God reveals what He wants us to know the way He wants us to know. Physical growth comes by time. Intellectual growth comes by
learning. But spiritual growth comes only from obedience. You do not learn the ways
of God by study alone or mental grasp. You don’t know what He is like by the
opinions or teaching of others. Light from God is a gift to the hungry heart.
There is much you can learn about God, but it is not at all the same as learning from God.
God is a God who
hides Himself. He reveals His secrets only to those who long to know Him. George
Washington Carver said, “When you love something long enough it will show
its secrets to you.” The same God who
showed Carver the mighty industry and economy in the humble peanut has much
more to show those who come in humility and hunger to His table. We were never
meant to know the principles of the Law without KNOWING THE LORD HIMSELF. The Divine
order of learning is this:
(1) Revelation: God speaks. His Word by His Spirit
lights up our heart. (Psalm 110:130)
(2) Practical
Obedience: We do it. We obey His word without question or hesitation. Delayed
obedience is disobedience. When we know it is Him, we just do it.
(3) Illumination: He explains it. Maybe! Not always, but
maybe. We do not always see how all the bits of the puzzle fit together, but
that is never a reason for disobedience. “Trust in the Lord with all your
heart; do not lean on your understanding” (Proverbs 3:5).
When we learn this way,
we grow in faith. We know God is to be trusted on the bare authority of His own
testimony. We do not need to “check it out first” to see if we think it makes
sense or fits. Unlike us, Jesus means exactly what He says. As John Bevere puts
it:
“We live in a culture where we don’t
always mean what we say. Consequently we do not believe what others say to us.
A persons’ word is not taken seriously. ... By the time (a child) becomes an
adult he has accepted this as normal. His conversations now consist of promises
and statements in which he says things he doesn’t mean. .... When Jesus speaks,
He wants us to take Him seriously. We cannot view what He says the way we view
the other authorities or relations in our lives. When He says something, He
means it. He is faithful even when we are faithless. Jesus walks at a level of
truth and integrity that transcends our culture or society” (The Bait Of Satan,
pp. 241-143).
Perspective of a Prophet
This law of spiritual learning is the secret of
prophetic perception. In order to see past the smoke-screen of a culture, you
must learn to learn the opposite way it demands. The only way to change
the world is to be different from it. God’s word must be heard God’s way.
After a lifetime of
revival, Charles Finney said this was the one key lesson he learned. What would
he do differently if he could do it all again? To not spend so much time
explaining before he called people to obeying. But reverse this Divine order, he said,
and you will raise a culture full of criticism, negativism and cynicism.
Read God’s description
of “wisdom from Hell” (Jas. 3:13-18) That culture is here and it is yours. The
way to see past it is to not play by its rules. Daniel “purposed in his
heart that he would not defile himself” (Daniel 1:8). A man or woman with a real word
from God cannot be swayed or moved by the world and what it thinks of
them.
God can gift us with prophetic
perception. Over a century ago, Dean Stanley in his, History Of The
Jewish Church, wrote on the unique vision of the Biblical prophet:
“God spoke by the prophets. Not by the
historians, geographers, ritualists, poets of the Jewish Church, but by the
prophets. …However high the sanction given to King or Priest in the Old
Dispensation, they were always to bow before the authority of the Prophet.
Prophetic teaching is the essence of revelation sifted from its accidental
accomplishments… it may fitly be called the spirit of the whole Bible.”
“Alone of all the high officers of the
Jewish Church, the prophets were called by no outward form or consecration and
were selected from no special tribe or family. …Mercy and justice, judgment and
truth, repentance and goodness – not sacrifice, not fasting, not ablutions – is
the burden of the whole prophetical teaching of the Old Testament. In the New
Testament I need only to refer to the Sermon on the Mount and the fact that His
chief warnings were against ceremonial narrowness, the “religious world” of
that age.”
“It is this assertion of the supremacy
of the moral and spiritual above the literal the ceremonial and dogmatic …which
makes the contrast between the prophets and all other sacred bodies. They were religious teachers without
the usual faults of religious teachers. They were a religious body whose only
professional spirit was to be free from the usual prejudices, restraints and
crimes by which all other religious professors have been disfigured.”
“They were not without grievous
shortcomings; they are not on a level with the full light of Christian
revelation. But taken as a whole, the Prophetic Order remains alone. …O, if the
spirit of our profession or the order of our body were anything like the spirit
of the ancient prophets; or if with us truth, love, justice, fairness to
opponents were a passion, a doctrine, a point of honor to be upheld …with all
the same energy as that with which we uphold our position, our opinions, our
interpretations or our antipathies! …It makes all the difference in the world
whether we put the duty of truth in the first place or the second place. The
spirit of the world first asks, ‘Is it safe?’ Secondly, ‘Is it true?’ The
spirit of the prophets asks first, ‘Is it TRUE?’ The spirit of the world asks
first, ‘Is it prudent?’ The spirit of the prophets asks first, ‘Is it RIGHT?’
Only God can give us the spirit
of prophecy and the heart of a prophet. But we can learn these things from them
in order to be better able to hear the Voice of the Lord:
(1) Stay sensitive to
the prompting of the Holy Spirit. (2 Peter 1:21) The prophets of Scripture did
not only speak to general circumstances, but special emergencies. They usually
addressed themselves spontaneously to people or situations they needed to warn
or encourage. In the highest degree, our Lord drew His parables from the people
and scenes immediately around Him.
(2) Cultivate the
sense of the Presence of God. (1 Corinthians 14:24-25) With it comes the
close connection between human thoughts and Scripture words that strike through
to the heart. When you are moved by God you will move men.
(3) Love people and
love the nation. Often in Scripture we cannot distinguish between the prophet and
the people for whom he speaks. Prophets don’t behave like disappointed
politicians or disillusioned churchmen. Christ wept over his country. Paul
loved the Jewish people like Moses; ready to die in their place if it would
save them. (Romans 9:3; 10:1; 11:1; cf. Exodus 32:32)
(4) Give yourself to
promoting national unity. (2 Chronicles 28:10) The prophets aim in all the
revelation of people’s fault, was to bring the nation back to God, the sense of
common origin and worship overcoming the sense of their separation and
alienation.
(5) Change themes as fast as God gives
them to you. In different times different abuses attracted the prophet’s
attention. They never got stuck with one pet slogan. What was right in one time
might be wrong the next. (Isaiah 1:10 vs. Malachi 1:8) Stick with simple faith
in the few great principles; everything else will constantly change.
(6) Don’t back off on
truth.
Some prophets were persecuted, some were briefly popular. But in all there is
the same Divine spirit of revelation that above the passions prejudices and
petty distractions of life. “Be not afraid of them, Be not afraid of their
faces; Be not afraid of their words. Speak My words to them whether they will
hear or forbear.” (Ezekiel 2:6-7; 3:8-9) What is called for here is neither
weirdness nor independence, not useless opposition to the existing framework of
the world or the church in which we find ourselves. “Not this, which is of
no use to anyone, but that which is needed by every one of us; a fixed
resolution to hold our own against chance or accident, against popular clamor
and popular favor, against the opinions, the conversations of the circle in
which we live.” (Stanley’s History, Vol. 1, pp. 393-419)
(7) Look beyond the limits of your time. The
prophetic heart sees sometimes the past in the present, the future in the past
or the future in the present. The walls of time go down, and the vision of the
prophet leaps over the boundaries of our immediacy. Learn to listen, really
listen to the Holy Spirit by Scripture, and the whole world will speak to you. The
prophet, more than any other in the Bible, is a messenger of hope. He knows
Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever. (Hebrews 13:8)
Living by the Word of God
“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by EVERY
WORD that comes from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4)
Jesus said it, and He
meant it. The next way to train your perception to see things from God’s
perspective is to LEARN TO THINK LIKE GOD THINKS. When you soak your mind and
heart in God’s Word, you begin to think His thoughts after Him. Your Bible is the Greatest Book in the
world. It is a manual of miracles. It is a Book from God about God; written BY
His men about how to be His men and women. It is the story of His love for
people. Its central figure is the Lord Jesus, The Messiah, God in the robe of a
man. It is the record of His origin, birth, life, death, and resurrection.
The Bible message is stranger than
science fiction: The God who spun worlds into space has visited our earth to
show us the way to heaven, and we may join a Love-Kingdom in His very own
forever family. The Bible is no ordinary book. It is strangely different
because it was written by men who listened to the voice of God. The words they
wrote were more than human. They live like fire for each new generation. By the
power of the Holy Spirit, they are as fresh as wind and rain on a mountain.
The Bible is not just a book of history, although its records
have been clearly upheld by modern archeology. It is not a book of poetry, although it has
inspired countless songs and poems through the centuries. It is not an adventure
story,
although few novels have matched the sheer drama of its pages. It is not a book
on ethics or morals, yet civilization’s finest and fairest laws have been
forged from it. It is not a textbook; but it still amazes scientist and scholars
from fields as widely different as sociology, medicine, and nuclear physics.
The Bible is the unique revelation of man’s problems and God’s answers: The
Good News of the love-revolution begun by the Father, given by the Son, and
operated by the Holy Spirit. Yet why do so many people not understand or love
it?
Operation Discovery
It was just a letter you found lying on the
ground. Curiosity got the better of you, so you opened it up and began to read.
No, you didn’t know who wrote it, nor to whom it was written, but you
understood the words and knew what it was talking about. Yet, it didn’t seem to
mean very much to you.
Now why didn’t you
REALLY understand the letter? You knew the language. You understood the words.
You could read the writing. Your problem? You didn’t know the writer, and it
wasn’t written to you. The letter’s message was as good as sealed or coded. The
BIBLE is just like that. If you are not a real Christian, a man or woman who
has given yourself to the Lord Jesus as your Savior and Master, the Bible will
be largely a sealed book. You don’t know the Author; it doesn’t speak much to
you. When you get on REAL speaking terms with God, it starts to add up.
Here’s OPERATION DISCOVERY: KNOWING THE
AUTHOR. If you don’t really know Him yet, why not begin? It is not enough to
know ABOUT Him; you must KNOW HIM. When you are truly God’s child, there a
world of adventure and discovery waiting for you in God’s Word.
The first step in understanding the
Bible is to begin to READ IT. Christians are people of His Book. There is no
way to follow Jesus without also knowing and loving the Book He gave us. It is
no accident that both Jesus and the Bible are called “The Word of God.” (John
11:1; Revelation 19:3; Isaiah 8:20) Both are Divine. Both speak with power and
authority. Both are fully true and trustworthy. The world needs Someone to know
and Something to study. God gave us both a Book and His Son. We must obey both.
We do not love Jesus more than we really love His Word. We do not obey Jesus
more than we obey His Word. We do not KNOW God any more than we want to know
His Word. Now, how much DO you read the Bible?
If you read only about FIVE MINUTES A
DAY, you can finish it easily in less than a year. You can read the whole Bible
through ALOUD in about seventy hours and forty minutes! The Old Testament read
this way would take about fifty-two hours and twenty minutes; the New, would
take eighteen hours, twenty minutes. If you were willing to spend eight hours a
day on some holiday period, you could finish it in just nine days! Reading by
chapters
takes you through the whole Bible in eighteen weeks at the rate of ten a
day. That is four in the morning, two at lunch-time, and four more at night.
The Old Testament read in this manner takes only fourteen weeks, the New
Testament, twenty-six days. If you wanted to read just through the four Gospels
(Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) together with Acts, you could read them in twelve
days; all the rest of the books of the New Testament in another 15 days. Now, of course you may not want
to do all of this; but how much of God’s Book have you REALLY read? Jesus did
not say, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” He said,
“IF YOU CONTINUE IN MY WORD you are My disciple indeed; AND you shall know the
truth, and the truth shall set you free.” (John 8:32)
How To Study The Bible
Ask the Holy Spirit to help you understand what
you read. Take color pencils or special markers (ball-points will slowly go
right through the pages of most Bibles and ruin them) and MARK the verses that
God speaks to you by. There are a few simple things to remember when you read
the Bible. Keep them in mind, and you will not get funny ideas from the Devil
or from people who don’t know either the Scriptures or the power of God:
(1) Read everything in
the light of WHERE YOU FIND IT (context). Don’t pull bits out here and there
and try to make them say something they don’t really say at all in the place
where they properly belong. Compare verses with other verses. (If some people
read “Little Red Riding Hood” or “The Three Bears” the way they read the Bible,
they wouldn’t understand those books either.) Be sure you have read all that
you can find in the Bible on a subject before you teach others about it. God
says those who teach from His Word have a solemn charge before Him to be right.
(James 3:1-2; 1 Peter 4:10-11)
(2) God’s Book means
EXACTLY WHAT IT SAYS. Once you know what He is saying, take it EXACTLY AS IT
IS. The only time you should think a verse is symbolic is when all verses
around it clearly show that God wants it that way. Use big passages to help you
understand the little ones; verses which detail things to help you understand
other sections which are more general; and the ones where the writer is
explaining carefully and factually to help you grasp others where the writer is
just talking about what he feels or is enjoying in God.
(3) If some verses don’t seem to fit,
don’t force them together. You just don’t see the whole picture yet. Have you
ever done a jig-saw puzzle? As you found bits that fit together, the whole
picture became clearer. This is the way to read the Bible. Don’t try to get it
all at once. Just read in faith, believing that God will show you more as you read
more. (Psalm 25:14; John 16:12-14)
Using Bible Helps
(1)
A good CONCORDANCE: is a sort of “Bible index.” It is used like a dictionary
when you are trying to find out where a verse appears in the Bible. You could,
of course, read the whole Bible through carefully until you come across it. The
other way is to use a concordance. If you can remember one word in the verses,
just look up that word in the concordance (it lists all the words in the Bible
is alphabetical order). When you find the list of words with your word in it,
go through it until you come to the verse you want. Of course, you can use a
concordance for many other things. Use it for a Bible study on what God says
about a topic. Some concordances give you original Hebrew or Greek words besides
showing you how to say that word in English. Some have a special section in the
end that gives you those Hebrew and Greek words in a list, and shows you how
many times they are translated as one English word or as another. This special
index is called a LEXICON. You will find lexicons at the back of both STRONGS
and YOUNGS concordances. They help you see the range of meanings an original
word can have.
The fastest and most accurate way to
look up verses and words is to use a computer Bible. This way you can not
only instantly find verses by keywords but by entire phrases or combinations of
words. Most will also give you the original Hebrew or Greek words as well. Get
a good fast Bible study program if you have a computer. You can save yourself
literally hundreds of hours of look-up time. Most can link up to your
word-processor so you can pull Scripture directly into your studies as you
write.
(2) A reliable DICTIONARY. Use a
well-known type like WEBSTER’S or OXFORD’S revised. With this you can look up
words you don’t understand and get ideas out of others that may help you get
more meaning out of Biblical words. You can also buy a BIBLE DICTIONARY. This
is written specially for Bible study, like the BIBLE ATLAS and BIBLE
ENCYCLOPEDIA. These are helpful tools, but are not absolutely necessary for
most of the things God can teach you. Again there are electronic versions of
these both as hard-disk programs and in CD-ROM. (See also Reading -
Mastering Print technology).
Be careful with COMMENTARIES. They are
books where people explain to you what they think the Bible says. They can
help, but may become a crutch to you, giving you a ready-made traditional
answer which may not be the truth of God you need. Some are quite useless in
many areas of study. STAY SIMPLE when you study the Bible. Make sure that most
of your study is the Bible itself.
(3) OTHER TRANSLATIONS Language
constantly changes. Older Bibles use words which have since changed their
meaning. Other versions may help you understand a hard passage. The Bible was
written in Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. When it has to be put in our languages,
men must try to translate it as best as they can. Sometimes they differ a
little on what passages mean. Be careful of Bibles that have “interpretive
notes” along with Bible verse. Some may be comments from fine, godly men; but
again you may start to rely on these to “explain” the “real meaning” of the
Word of God without giving the Holy Spirit a chance to speak to you directly.
Remember the law of spiritual learning.
A TRANSLATION and a PARAPHRASE differ. A
translation tries to give you the ACTUAL WORDS used by the original author in
your own language, closely as possible, even if the translator doesn’t
understand the full meaning of what he has carefully translated. Some
translations other than the New King James Version are the Revised Standard,
The New American Standard, the New International versions, and the Amplified
Bible or the New Testament translation “Good News For Modern Man.”
A PARAPHRASE is not as accurate as a
translation. Here, the translator takes a verse of the original language, and
tries to put in his own words what HE thinks is the meaning of the original
words. Sometimes he uses words that do not appear in the original languages at
all. “Phillip’s”, the “Living Bible” and “The Message” are like this.
Use paraphrases for fresh looks at Bible
verses, or for easy reading; but don’t always rely on them for accuracy.
Whenever you can, use the original languages for study. Electronic versions of
translations are available and can be easily compared on screen.
(Taken by permission from “The Daniel Files”,
Chapter 4 “Spiritual Sensitivity” – author Winkie Pratney).