The following is the explanation of what I hope will become an excellent discussion board for anyone who is seeking to dig deeper into the Word of God. Ken and I are planning on posting our discussions and fleshing out our questions and what we are learning as we study through the text. These discussions will be posted here. I hope these thoughts will cause you to give some thought to how you approach the Bible and will inspire you to deepen your relationship with God.
In order to understand the questions and discussions contained here, you must know a few things that brought us to this point in our study. Kenneth Starr (longtime friend) and I have recently embarked on a “new” way to study the Word Of God. A couple years ago, I was handed a set of talks given at the Focus On The Family Institute in Colorado by Ray Vander Laan. Ray is a long time pupil of the Word and spent a significant portion of his life in Israel learning everything he could about the Jewish lifestyle, culture, and language (Hebrew, Greek, etc?). When he returned to the United States, he brought back with him a fire and a passion to teach and share his insights and the lessons God taught him while he was over in the Middle East.
In the talks I was given, Ray lays the foundation of how Ken and I approach the Text. First, you must understand the difference in the thought process between “Westerners” (the USA) and “Easterners” (The middle East, much of Asia and Africa). In general, Western thought is very logic based. They want facts, they possess a need to UNDERSTAND the things around them. If a Westerner fails to understand something, there is a good chance they will refuse to believe it, and will question it until it makes sense. Easterners, on the other hand, base their understanding on their experiences. Something doesn’t have to make logical sense for them to believe it, it just has to fit their experience. For example, an Easterner might believe that a car has an engine even though he’s never looked under the hood based on his experience of driving the car, where a Westerner would need to physically see the engine to truly believe it’s there. As silly as that sounds, the implications of this idea are far reaching. A Jew doesn’t have to understand God to believe in Him, where many Westerners today reject God based on the fact that He doesn’t make “sense” to them. Moses encountered God in a burning bush that didn’t burn up (Exodus 3). I don’t think he came down from the mountain trying to figure out how the bush was on fire but not burning up, he came down knowing that he had an encounter with Almighty God and although not everything made logical sense, He trusted God and proceeded to do what was asked of him.
Second, Ray points out that Westerners are very abstract thinkers, while Easterners are very concrete thinkers. For example, ask a Westerner who or what they think God is, and they will likely answer with words like “God is love”, “Joy”, “Almighty”, “Holy”, etc. It will be very hard to see anything if you close your eyes and try to picture those answers, but ask an Easterner the same question, and they will answer with “God is my Rock”, “my shield”, “my fortress”, “my shepherd”, “my living water”, etc. Those things are concrete. You can see them, they’re “pictures”.
Third, Ray points out the absolute necessity of our Jewish roots as Christians. We, as Americans (Gentiles), are essentially adopted Jews and cannot exist without our roots. Without our Jewish heritage we wouldn’t have Jesus, as the Bible says (using the picture of an Olive tree) He was a “shoot” from the “stump” of Jesse (Isaiah 11:1), and that we (Gentiles) are branches from wild “fruitless” olive trees that have been grafted in “among the others and now share in the nourishing sap from the olive root…” (Romans 11:11-24) Verse 18 of that same chapter says this: “You do not support the root, but the root supports you.” Our root that gives us the “nourishing sap” is not Jesus, but the “stump of Jesse”, or our Jewish heritage. Don’t hear me wrong, Jesus is the source of our salvation and our savior from sin, but Jesus was, as we are, a branch from the stump, not the stump itself. Sadly, Westerners and Western translations have done everything they can to strip the text of it’s Jewish “roots” and make it, for lack of a better word, “Western”.
With these three points in mind, Kenneth and I have begun to reexamine the text and experience for ourselves the power of God’s word when it is put in the context of which, and to whom it was written. In addition to just reading the text, we study with an exhaustive concordance, which is nothing more than an alphabetical listing of every word in the bible and where it is used. When we come to a new name, we look it up in the concordance and see if and where else that person is mentioned. We then read that passage and the surrounding context to try to get a picture of who that person was and how they fit in (what tribe were they from, who are they related to, etc). Same procedure for places, strange objects that we might not be familiar with (ex. a Goad), tribes, laws, and anything else that might be mentioned elsewhere in the Bible. Yes, it takes a lot longer to get through a passage of scripture, but as you begin to put the whole picture together and see the Bible as one continuous interwoven message instead of a collection of short stories, God truly begins to open your eyes to things you’ve never before seen.
Finally, but most importantly, I leave you with an exert from an email Ken sent me recently:
“…I think it is imperative that we stress the reading of the text, but more importantly stress that the text itself will not get you there. A person must first be concerned with pleasing God and coming to know Him. No formula, including the text or not will get you to God. Only His grace and following him as you strive to be in his “will” (that continual relationship with Him) can cause you to grow and do the things you should…”
