How to Study the Bible - Week 1 Session 1

I'm going to pass this around. This is kind of a check-in sheet to confirm that you are all here. Please make sure to put a check mark or your initials next to your name. If you are not on this list, it’s because you either have not registered on the website or you registered before five o'clock today or after five o'clock today.

At the very end of this, there are some blank lines. Please legibly write your first and last name and your email address so that we can connect with you and ensure that you are on the list for next week. I will start this out, and yes, please print. I can't read my mother's handwriting at all.

How are you guys doing? Glorious! Pastor Mark is answering with the Pastor Chuck response. Well, some of you obviously didn't read the sign, but that's okay. By the end of this class, we will learn how to fulfill what the Scriptures say.

Welcome to our "How to Study the Bible" class! I have to say, I am totally blown away by how many people are here tonight and how many registered online. We have had over 90 people register for this class. I expected only about 20 to 30. In fact, originally when we planned for this class and ordered books, we only ordered 30 because I thought we would only have around 30 people. So, I had little faith in this whole situation.

We are waiting for more books to come, but the publisher is behind on shipping, as I’m sure you all have experienced with shipping problems recently. We will hopefully have all of the books by next week. I only have about 30 books here today, so if you are here with your spouse, please just take one book. We will run out of books tonight, but that’s okay; we will have them in the future for this class.

Let me begin by going to the Lord in prayer.

Then we'll get started, so let's pray.

Father God, I thank You for the group of people that are here tonight. Lord, it speaks to me that there are quite a few people in our church who have a desire to go deeper with You in the Scriptures. That says a lot for this body of believers, and it blesses me as a pastor to see so many people here who want to grow in their understanding of You, who You are, and what You have said through Your Word.

I pray that over the next nine weeks, You would teach us from the Scriptures. Teach us by Your Spirit and open up our minds as it relates to some technical things that we will look at, which might be challenging at the start. But I also pray that You would open up our hearts so that we would be receptive to Your Word, which, as the Scriptures say, is living and powerful.

Lord, Your Word is alive, and it has an awesome way of reading us as we read it. Not only does it reveal to us certain aspects of who You are, but it also reveals everything that we really know about who You are. It reveals much about who we are in relationship to You. I pray, God, that You would use what we learn in this class, and also what we hopefully put into practice in our lives as a result of this class, to transform us.

Just as Paul wrote, You desire to transform us by the renewing of our minds, and that transformation in our minds would result in a transformation in our behavior. We would display and show in our daily lives, in our interactions with our family members, co-workers, neighbors, and friends, what is Your good and perfect will.

So I pray, God, that the result of this time, which is a sacrifice—not just coming to the class here on a Tuesday night, but the time that will be spent doing some of the homework we have over the next nine weeks—is a sacrifice that I believe will yield good fruit.

So, God, do work in us, we pray. We ask this in Jesus' name. And all those that agreed said, "Amen."

Amen. You can come on in. There was a sign on the screen that said, "Please fill in the front rows," so there is an entirely open front row here for those who are coming in. Well, you're not really late, but all right.

As I said, I'm really blessed that you're here for this class. I think that this is a very important class. What we're going to be going through here over the next nine weeks is something I developed about five or six years ago. I've been teaching at Calvary Chapel Bible College in Marietta for about 17 years. About five or six years ago, the director of the Bible College, as we were getting ready for another semester, asked me, "Well, what do you want to teach this semester?" They had gotten to a point where they kind of just gave me whatever I would want to teach. I said, "Well, what do you need taught?" He replied, "Well, we really need someone to teach a Bible study methods class or we need someone to teach a preaching and teaching class." I asked, "Is there any way that I can put those two together and make them into one class that we would call pastoral preaching?" They said that would be great.

So, we put together a class called pastoral preaching. This is about 60% of that class. The class is about 16 weeks long, and it goes much more into how to teach the Bible in the last half of it. We will talk a little bit about that, but not as much as I would at the Bible College. What we are going to do in this class is hopefully learn some strategies, tools, and processes for digging into the Scriptures and studying them.

I took a class like this here at this church when I was about 15 years old, up in one of the classrooms where the children's ministry rooms are. The pastor who taught the class did a good job, but he started by saying, "I'm going to teach you how to approach Scriptures and study the Bible, but I have to confess to you at the start that this is not how I do it." That was incredibly unhelpful for me at that time because I thought, "Well, why not just show us how you approach the Scriptures?" He expressed what I think a lot of pastors actually wrestle with. After they have been doing this for a while, it becomes kind of second nature and intuitive, and they are not entirely sure how they would teach that to somebody else.

He was teaching from a book, and it was all really helpful and good, but what I'm going to do in this class, or what I have done in this class when I teach at the Bible College, is teach you how I come to the Scriptures. The tools and strategies that I'm going to teach over the next nine weeks are things that I use on a regular basis every single week. Now, I don't use every single tool every single week, but the way that I approach the Bible—whether I'm reading it devotionally, preparing a class at the Bible College, or preparing a teaching here at the church—is consistent. This is how I approach the Scriptures, and I want you to hopefully come away with this understanding.

Some very clear tools can be used on a regular daily basis, whether you are just reading a very small section, one paragraph of the Bible, or you're endeavoring to do a Bible study with somebody else through an entire book or a topical study. I hope that you will come away with some things that will be really helpful for that.

Now, I do have to say at the outset that some of the things we are going to talk about in this class are going to be technically challenging. You may look at it and think, "Why on Earth are you showing me this? I'm never going to use this." The primary thing I will do is introduce you to various tools that are out there and ways that people approach the Scriptures. This will help you begin to see how to put some of these together practically, and hopefully, you'll pick up some things along the way as we go through this.

I don't expect that as a result of this class, you will become an expert in all the different things I am going to show you. Some of the topics would take an entire semester to cover. For example, one of the things we will discuss in three weeks is called arcing, which is a method of going through the Scriptures. I know a seminary where this is a first-semester class that lasts 15 weeks, focusing solely on this topic. We will talk about it for about an hour and a half, so you are not going to walk away thinking, "Oh wow, I totally get it." In fact, you may walk away scratching your head and wondering how on Earth you will ever use that.

The whole point of this is to help you see how the Scriptures break down so that you can glean and understand what they say. I recognize that, just as many of you probably experienced in junior high or high school, when you were introduced to the world of Shakespeare, it is highly unlikely that you understood anything he was saying the first time you read it. People would say, "It's in English," and you would think, "Well, not the English that I speak."

To understand Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or any sort of literature, you really have to learn how that author speaks. You need to find the ways into it, and it takes time to familiarize yourself with the lingo and understand how things connect. Similarly, if you pick up the book of Second Kings and start reading through it, it is likely that you will find yourself saying, "I have no idea who these people are or where they are." It takes time to become acquainted with the way the authors of Scripture convey their messages.

Information is essential for you to become proficient in understanding the Bible. I have had the privilege in my life to study a number of different foreign languages, from French to German to Greek to Hebrew. I am probably most proficient in German, but even after taking German and going to Germany, it would take me three or four days of just hearing the language before I could discern where the language breaks up to pick out the words. It takes time to become fluent in these things.

Even though you are not studying a foreign language, when you come to the Bible, you must become fluent with the different terms and the various ways that the writers of Scripture approach these topics. This class is designed to help you begin that process.

Why is this class important? The Scriptures are the way we begin to know who God is and come into a relationship with Him. Since this is the means by which we come to know God, it is crucial that we understand how to read and interpret these texts for ourselves. Additionally, there is a commission that God has given to every single one of us as Christians: to share what we have learned about God with others.

You may never teach a Bible study or stand up in front of people to preach a sermon, but it is highly likely that you will share insights from the Scriptures with your spouse, family members, children, or friends. God desires that we do this, and this class aims to help you extract understanding from the Scriptures for yourself so that you can communicate that understanding clearly to others.

We cannot grow in our faith without taking in the Word of God. The Word of God is food for us, as we will see in some passages later tonight and throughout this class. Peter tells us that as newborn babes, we should desire the pure milk of the Word so that we may grow thereby. When you first become a follower of Christ, you are referred to in Scripture as a babe in Christ, a newborn babe, because Jesus talks about being born again. You grow by taking in the sincere milk of the Word, by consuming it. As you begin to grow, you graduate, if you will, from milk to more substantial food, moving from milk to meat.

It is going to be helpful if your consumption of the Word of God is not limited to what is presented to you on a Sunday morning, or through a Bible teaching podcast, or during a Bible study. You need to reach a place where you can feed on the Word of God on your own. That is my hope for this class: to help you get to that point where you can begin to engage with the Scriptures independently.

As we go through the material tonight, we will take a break in the middle of our class. During this time, you may have questions that arise as we discuss the topics. I encourage you to write those questions down. After our first break, I will open the floor for questions, and I will ask you to come to the microphone up here. We are recording this session, as I have received numerous emails from people asking if this class will be available online. Our hope is to make it accessible in the future.

When we reach the question portion, please come up to the microphone so that we can capture your questions for the recording. At the beginning of the second half of tonight's class, we will have a question-and-answer session. Additionally, if you have more questions at the end of the class, I will be happy to address those as well. It would be very helpful if you could compile your questions so we can discuss them all together.

This class is important because the way we grow in our faith as followers of Christ, and the way we deepen our relationship with God, is through His Word. We need His Word to become a part of our lives; it must enter our hearts and minds because it transforms us. God sanctifies us—a significant theological concept that we will explore further as we progress through this class. He sanctifies and cleanses us by the washing of the water of His Word, as stated in Ephesians chapter 5. He also transforms our minds through the Word, as mentioned in Romans chapter 12.

The Word of God is essential for our lives, and we also need to be able to share what we have learned with others. God has given all of us a commission to do just that. Back in the 1970s, there was an author named Francis Schaeffer, a Christian apologist and one of my favorite writers in this field.

Entire exhaustive works are on my shelf at home, and one of his most well-known books is called "He Is There and He Is Not Silent." It discusses God and presents a great exploration of the idea that God is present and has revealed Himself to us. I love that title alone: He is there and He is not silent. God has revealed Himself to us; He wants us to know who He is, and He has done so in a number of different ways.

The first thing we discuss when we talk about the revelation of God is something I've mentioned here on Sunday mornings: General Revelation. In Psalm 19, David says, "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the Earth shows forth His handiwork." Day unto day, these things that God has made pour forth speech. There is no tongue or language where the speech of creation is not heard. Even if the Bible is not translated into a particular language—unfortunately, it is not translated into many languages—there is still the general revelation of God, where He reveals Himself to us through creation. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the Earth shows forth His handiwork.

The Apostle Paul picks up on this idea in the New Testament in Romans chapter 1. He states that the invisible things of God are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, so that man is without excuse. God's General Revelation of Himself in creation reveals to us that God is. This is at the very basis of General Revelation: God is revealing His existence.

If you read the works of those who are atheists, both in years past and today, many of them—especially today—will say that the most challenging argument for God has to do with what is called fine-tuning. This concept relates to the fact that when we look at the cosmos, when we study astronomy, biology, chemistry, or physics, we find intricacies in things that appear to be designed. They point back to a designer. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the Earth shows forth His handiwork. The invisible things of God are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, so that man is without excuse.

God has revealed Himself to us in creation. Paul says in Romans chapter 1 that God has not only revealed Himself to us in creation, but He has also revealed Himself to us through our consciousness. The fact that we are able to perceive the intricacies of design or the fine-tuning of the universe reveals something about God and the way that He has made us. We are conscious beings.

I was listening to a conversation today between two artificial intelligence researchers. One of them was discussing how we are very near to the point of what AI researchers refer to as the singularity. This is the point where computers appear to be conscious, and we cross a threshold where it becomes almost impossible to discern whether we are having a conversation with a computer or a human being. The AI researcher mentioned that it seems some of the things being created in AI exhibit consciousness, which leads to a broader discussion about what consciousness actually is.

At the very base level, consciousness is the awareness that we are. It is the knowledge that there is knowledge beyond just who we are and what we are. You and I possess this consciousness. Although some may argue this point, we are not sure whether our animals, such as dogs, have consciousness. However, we perceive in ourselves and others that we have this awareness of existence. We are aware of things beyond ourselves, of the future, and of the past. This awareness encompasses many different aspects of consciousness.

There is a lot of discussion among philosophers and scientists about what consciousness is and where it exists. Various research areas are challenging our understanding of consciousness. One of the most interesting discussions I heard a couple of weeks ago involved a neuroscientist who experienced a significant near-death experience. Near-death experiences are fascinating to me, and now medical science has thousands of documented cases. Some of these cases involve individuals who have shown zero brain activity; the EEG indicates no brain activity for an extended period, and the EKG shows that the heart rhythm is gone. In these instances, the person is clinically dead in every sense.

Respectfully, they have a conscious experience that suggests consciousness may not reside solely in our brains. Many of us think of consciousness as a little guy inside our brains who controls everything, representing our awareness of the world. However, recent research, which is independent of the Bible or Christianity, indicates that consciousness seems to exist separately from the body. This idea is quite intriguing and aligns with biblical teachings, as the Bible discusses the soul of humanity, which is distinct from the body.

As we explore this topic further, we find that the consciousness, or the soulishness of who we are, reveals something about God, who exists outside of His creation. We have creation as general revelation, consciousness as general revelation, and then we also have conscience. In Romans chapter one, Paul speaks about the moral code, or moral law, written upon our hearts, which tells us something about God. This conscience accuses or excuses us, and it is present in every single created human being across all cultures throughout history.

There are instances where one might encounter someone who appears to be psychopathic and lacks a conscience. What is happening in such cases? Paul, in one of his New Testament letters, explains that this person's conscience has been seared as with a hot iron. It is as if it has become callous due to repeated transgressions against their conscience or having transgressed so many times that their conscience no longer functions as God intended.

The scriptures reveal that God has given us an inclination to recognize His existence based on the moral code written within our hearts. This moral code is not merely about distinguishing right from wrong; it also encompasses a recognition of truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness, justice and injustice. We are hardwired to understand these concepts, and our conscience reflects something about God. All of this falls under the umbrella of general revelation.

As we philosophically examine general revelation, we can identify at least three significant aspects. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the Earth showcases His handiwork. The invisible attributes of God are evident through creation.

The things of God are clearly seen and understood by the things that are made. Creation tells us something about God. Consciousness tells us something about God. Conscience tells us something about God. All these things point to God in some way, and at the very least, they teach us three things.

The first thing they teach us is that God exists. I consume all kinds of weird content on YouTube and podcasts, and I came across a video the other day. It was very strange; a guy was digging in the ground and finding all of these created things. When you find a bottle eight feet underground, you know that it didn't just come about by random chance or mutation through billions of years. It assembled all these things together into a glass bottle with writing on it. You intuitively understand that it came from something, that it had a Creator.

If you stumble upon a wristwatch in the middle of a forest, you know that it didn't happen on its own. It was assembled and brought together by some creator, some engineer who put it together. The mere fact that it exists tells us that there is the existence of the one who made it. So, creation, consciousness, and conscience all point back to the fact that God exists.

When we find design and see all the things that point to intention and purpose in creation, it reinforces the idea that there is a Creator. We see that God exists, but we also see that God is intelligent. He must possess an awesome mind and wonderful intelligence to be able to put things together in the way that He did.

Now, this doesn't even get into the discussion of how God created; that's a whole different study in theology. There are a lot of different opinions among Christians. In fact, in this room, with this many people, there are probably some who would call themselves young Earth creationists, while others might believe in what's called theistic evolution. There may be people who subscribe to the day-age theory or other ideas about how things came together and how God created.

At the base of all these discussions, we can agree that we believe God created. Christians often divide, debate, and sometimes get angry at each other over the particulars of how these things came to be. However, the very first thing we learn about God in the Scriptures is, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth."

He reveals Himself as Creator, and so it reveals His existence. It reveals His intelligence, as He is able to put all these things together, and it reveals His power, as He has the resources and the ability to compile these things and put them together. Creation, consciousness, and conscience point back to the fact that God is intelligent and powerful.

When you start to move beyond just looking at creation and all of the things that you can find in the hard sciences that seem to point back to a Creator, and you begin to think about things with your consciousness and the conscience that God has given you, there are other things you can deduce about God by examining the world or thinking deeply about who we are, where we exist, and our inclination towards morality. This inclination tells us something about God being moral. Our inclination towards justice tells us something about God being just. Our inclination towards beauty, or our revulsion of that which is ugly, tells us something about God, who creates and is into aesthetics.

When we see that there is within every one of us this drive to know and be known, to connect with one another, it is important to us as a church here at Connection Church. This tells us something about God; He seems to be into community. This deep desire that we have for love suggests that if you are going to look for God, He must cohere with all those things that we deduce about Him: that He is Creator, that He is moral, that He is just, and that He is into aesthetics. The God we should be looking for should align with all the things we discover through the intuition and the ability He has given us to deduce things from creation, consciousness, and conscience.

We should be able to find God as we would imagine Him to be. When you start to look at the religions of the world—this isn't a world religions class, but I have taught that before—you really get into the discussion of which God, among the different gods presented to us in the world through various religions, is the one that is most coherent with what we understand about the world. It would be my conclusion, and thus I am a Christian pastor, that the God of the Bible, as revealed to us in the Bible, is the one who fits that pattern the best.

In general, revelation reveals to us His existence, His intelligence, and His power. However, there are many things that we cannot know about God through general revelation.

Revelation chiefly presents two main things. If you've been around Cross-Connection Church for any length of time, you've probably heard me talk about these concepts before. The two main things that we can't know about God through General Revelation are what God is like in His nature and what God likes in His will. His nature and His will are basically hidden from us in creation and through conscience.

Through General Revelation, we often come to wrong conclusions about God by looking at the data that we have around us. We are not able to know what He is like, what His nature is, and what He likes or His will. To understand what His nature is and what He likes, we need a different kind of revelation than General Revelation. We need something deeper than just General Revelation. As I said, if we only use our rationality and consciousness, which God has given to us, by looking at all the things in ourselves or outside of ourselves in the creation that He has provided, we will come to wrong conclusions.

What are some of the wrong conclusions that we come to? We look at war, we look at natural disasters, and we observe all the different natural evils or moral evils in the world. Many people, when they examine these things, conclude that God or gods are angry, mean, or unloving. We come to these wrong conclusions because we don't know what God is like and we don't know what He likes unless we move from General Revelation to Special Revelation.

Now, Special Revelation is a challenge for a lot of people you will interact with who don't go to church. As soon as you move from looking at the world around us, you recognize that we live in a culture that is almost entirely given to naturalism and materialism. The only things that exist are those that we can observe through scientific endeavors, and therefore, there is nothing that exists that is supernatural.

You probably have a lot of co-workers, friends, neighbors, or family members who don't believe in anything metaphysical above the physical or supernatural above the natural. They are naturalists; they are materialists. They don't believe in that sort of stuff. When you get into this whole discussion of, "Well, I believe that God exists outside of creation; He is supernatural and beyond the physical," people are likely to respond, "Okay, yeah, I don't know that I believe that. I have a hard time with that."

Because they're only looking in the box that is the cosmos, they can't find God in the box. He is not in the box; He has left His fingerprints, I believe, in the box through creation, consciousness, and conscience. However, He is not confined to it. When you move into the area of God existing outside the box, if He is going to reveal what He is like and what He likes, then you need to move into the area of special revelation. He is able to reveal something to us about Himself and His preferences.

Most 21st-century Westerners have a hard time with this idea. They say it is just not possible. They argue that if this being exists, He would have to be infinite, and we are finite; therefore, we could never fully grasp Him. This is true in one sense; we could never fully comprehend the infinite God with our finiteness. However, it doesn't mean that we can't understand something about Him, nor does it mean that He can't reveal something to us about Himself.

As I thought long and hard over the years about how to articulate the idea of special revelation to people I know who don't know God or don't go to church, it came to me one day while I was listening to a podcast. I listen to way too many of these things. I recalled something interesting that happened in 1974. There was a company in New Mexico that created an amazing invention, and they were really excited about it. There was a write-up about it in Popular Electronics magazine. It was considered the first mini-computer, the Altair 8800.

Some of you here today may remember when this came out. This was before I was born, but when it was released, this gray box with lights, switches, and dials on the front was believed by the engineers in New Mexico to be something revolutionary. They thought they had created a new era in computing for common people, moving computers from being large mainframes that were operated by punch cards in rooms as big as this one or larger to something that could sit on a tabletop. They believed they had unleashed a revolution. The problem was that these engineers had made this box, but they had no way to communicate with it; they had no language.

The creators who made the Box could not communicate to it what their will was or what they wanted. The Box spoke a certain language, and you can't just speak that language unless you are able to develop a language that will tell the Box, in its language, what it needs to do, who you are, and what you want.

There were two guys on the other side of the country in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard, who picked up an article. One of them was a guy by the name of Paul Allen, and the other was Bill Gates. They read this article and thought, "Well, we can create a basic computer language to write or to speak to the Box to tell us, or to tell the Box, what we want." They aimed to reveal their likes, their will, and their nature to this creation that spoke a different language.

So, these two guys started a company. You know that company by the name of Microsoft. They developed the first basic computer language to speak to the Box. They went out and demonstrated that they could now communicate with this Box, which only spoke in digital binary code. They could translate their desires and share with the Box what they wanted it to do.

Now, fast forward 50 years. What do we have? You can now talk to the Box and say, "Hey Siri, get me a ride," and next thing you know, you have Lyft. It's kind of surprising that no phones went off when I said that! You can now communicate with the Box in your own language, and it understands what you want. We are getting to the point where it is indistinguishable whether or not this Box has consciousness.

It's pretty crazy that some engineers could come up with a device and then figure out how to speak to it in a language such that the device would know what they wanted and recognize who they are. God is a master engineer, and He created this Box that we live in, the cosmos. He has the ability to communicate with us in a language that we can understand so that we can know who He is, what He is like, and what He likes. We can know His nature and His will. That is special revelation. What Paul Allen and Bill Gates did was special revelation; they were able to reveal, in a language that the Box could understand, our likes and dislikes.

Wanting is an amazing thing. We have a perfect example in our own world: engineers can come up with ways to solve problems. Our God is the master engineer. He has created the box, and He has created you and me within it. We are still considered the most amazing computer that you could imagine. This little two-pound ball of flesh inside your brain has the ability to work faster and computationally, performing an incredible amount of tasks constantly. It’s just amazing.

God is able to speak to us and reveal to us who He is, what He is like, and what He desires. He reveals Himself to us in a language that we can understand. The people we refer to in the Bible who received this word are called prophets. The author of the book of Hebrews writes that God, in diverse ways and at various times, spoke to our fathers by the prophets.

What did He reveal? He revealed what He is like. For example, in Exodus 34:6, He said to Moses, "I am the Lord, the Lord God, merciful." He reveals His nature. He also reveals His will—what He wants and what He desires. He said to Moses in Exodus 3, "I want you to go down to Pharaoh and tell him, 'Let My people go.'" Through the Scriptures, He reveals His likes, His light, His nature, and His will to us.

However, there is a problem with this. Anyone who speaks more than one language will recognize this issue. I moved to Germany in 2004 to teach at a Bible college. I took just enough German to get around and find out where the nearest IKEA was. When I got to Germany, I was teaching the book of Romans, which is a challenging book if you've ever read through it. I had to teach this book with translation.

I would speak a sentence or two, and then I would stop while my wonderful translator, Helena, would convey what I was saying in German. There were Germans in the class, as well as students from the Netherlands, Austria, and some from France. They either spoke English or German, or they didn’t understand at all. When I would share things from the book of Romans in English, there were times when Helena would look at me and say, "Could you rephrase that? That doesn't translate very well." We recognize that there are certain things that don’t translate well. God spoke through the Old Testament prophets.

He reveals to His people, "I have loved you with an everlasting love." However, how many of you would recognize that love is kind of a difficult concept to understand or comprehend? There are things that are lost in translation, and we're going to see that as we go through this class. There are certain things that are very hard for us to grasp, even from the Scriptures, because the Scriptures as we have them are translations from that which was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek. Therefore, there are things that don't always come across quite that well.

I think the English translations that we have are really pretty good, but there are still some things that we have a hard time with. You'll find this as you read through the book that is the textbook for this class. So, there are things that are lost in translation. General Revelation has its deficiencies, and Special Revelation has its deficiencies as well. I believe this leads to the third form of Revelation that is necessary and important, which is personal revelation.

Personal revelation is where God comes down to us to reveal His nature and His will to us. If we are truly to know God and have a relationship with Him, which is what the Scriptures reveal God desires to have with you and with me, then we need to move beyond General Revelation and beyond Special Revelation to personal revelation.

Do we have testimony anywhere throughout literature of God coming down to us? We do, in the man Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God with us. What does Jesus do? He reveals God because He is God incarnate. This is where we move from the whole area of General Revelation. The heavens declare the glory of God; the Earth shows forth His handiwork. Day unto day, they utter speech; God's invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that we are without excuse.

Then we have God, who in various times and in various ways spoke in times past to us by the prophets. He has, in these last days, the author of the book of Hebrews says in Hebrews chapter one, spoken to us by His Son. Jesus is the image of the invisible God; He comes to reveal God to us so that we can know God personally and begin to have a relationship with Him. This is what the Christian Scriptures reveal.

Now, the Bible is the revelation of God. It is the apocalypsis, the unfolding or the revealing to us of the nature of God. Christ is revealed to us in the Gospels through the New Testament. He points back to the Old Testament as well as revealing who God is and what God is.

God has created every single one of us to be in connection with Him. Life in connection with God allows us to discover who He is and to have a relationship with Him. The Scriptures reveal that this relationship is not only intended to be an earthly relationship, a temporary connection, but also an eternal and heavenly relationship. He gives us eternal life through Jesus Christ and what He has accomplished on our behalf. All of these things point back to God.

The Bible reveals God through general revelation. We see something of Him; we find that He exists, that He is intelligent, and that He is powerful. However, we do not know what He is like and what He likes. Special revelation allows God to reveal what He is like and what He desires. Personal revelation is when God comes down to us to reveal Himself fully so that we can have a relationship with Him. Ultimately, all of this is contained in the Scriptures, where we are able to get to know Christ. That is what we hope to begin to do as we go through this class.

It is important to recognize that this book we have is not just a book; it is a book of books. There are 66 books written by 40 different authors over 1,500 years on three different continents in three different languages, all with a consistent storyline that points back to the God who is there. This allows us to know Him personally through the man Jesus Christ.

This leads us into the discussion of bibliology, the study of the Scriptures and the Bible. How do we know that what we have here is the Word of God? We will talk about that more as we progress through this class. At the very beginning, we need to recognize that God has revealed Himself to us so that we can know Him and have a relationship with Him.

This is why it becomes so important to have a class like this. If you begin to open the Bible sporadically, pointing at verses and reading them one at a time, it will be challenging for you to really get to know who God is. It is my conviction that we need to go systematically through the Scriptures, chapter and verse, and book by book, so that we can comprehend who God is and how He has revealed Himself to us. This understanding will enable us to know Him and share Him with others. In this class, that is what we hope to accomplish over the next nine sessions.

Weeks sound good. Okay, we're going to take a five-minute break. Let's say a ten-minute break. When we come back after ten minutes, we'll go into the next section.

What we're going to talk about tonight, if you have any questions and you've written them down, we will start in just about ten minutes with those questions. Then we'll go into our next section. So, ten-minute break, and we'll come back.