God is Relational
Character of God • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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· 4 viewsContext leading up to Exodus 34
Notes
Transcript
Welcome
Welcome
Good evening and welcome everyone. Emma and I just wanted to say thank you to all of you who take learning and growing seriously. To take time out of your busy weeks to come to this study says something about who you are.
Housekeeping
Housekeeping
As always in the event of an emergency the closest fire exit is just outside of this door and to your right, the emergency evacuation point is in the carpark where we will all muster. Toilets are just down the main hallway on your left with the yellow painted walls you can not miss them. After this if you all can stay for about 5 minutes to reset this room ready for the learning that will take place tomorrow.
Announcement
Announcement
Emma can you come up and tell us what we can expect.
Prayer
Prayer
The first step to anything we do is that we partner with Holy Spirit.
Come Lord Holy Spirit
Introduction
Introduction
Today we are going to be getting into our Scripture Passage and focusing on how do we study the bible, the best way to do that…is to just do that together.
Like any good training, the best is on the job training when someone is showing you how. This will be no different.
So you will learn two things:
You will learn about the specific content that we are going to cover
You will learn how we got there
Passage
Passage
Ex34.6-7 “6 And Yahweh passed over before him, and he proclaimed, “Yahweh, Yahweh, God, who is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding with loyal love and faithfulness, 7 keeping loyal love to the thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and he does not leave utterly unpunished, punishing the guilt of fathers on sons and on sons of sons on third and fourth generations.”
In his book, Read the Bible for a Change, Ray Lubeck describes this process for Bible Study:
S- Seeing
U- Understanding
S- Sharing
R - Responding
Let’s unpack these
Seeing
Seeing is all about asking the question what does the passage say in it’s context. Context in this case means in reference to it’s placing and genre, this is not some random proverb, it is a passage in a much larger narrative and that has to be looked at.
Seeing is identifying, the who, the what, the where, the when and the why as all of these things tend to shine light on to the meaning of the passage.
Understanding
Understanding is about putting all of this together, the context, the characters, the setting, the genre, the culture and the history to figure out what the author means by what he has written.
Lets just flag something here, more often than not, the passage means something significantly different than what can usually be caught on a fly by, surface reading. This is why it is called a study and to be certain it is work, but it is an enjoyable and worthwhile task.
Sharing
Sharing starts when we find out what the original author was trying to say we are then able to identify the shared truth. The truth that underpins the whole passage, in this case the character of God. It was true then and is true now, the truth is shared.
Responding
Once we can know and accept the shared truth of what the biblical author has shared in the passage we then must respond.
Scripture is not just to be known, it is to be responded to.
Just like tuning forks hit together, when the truth of scripture hits our souls we ought to resonate with the same resonance. This is just another way of saying walk in the Spirit. Walk in the ways of God is to see His ways in Scripture and walk like you have seen.
How are we going with that?
Lets See together
Lets See together
First question we should ask is what Genre of writing is this?
You can not interpret all parts of scripture the same, just like you can not interpret Dr. Suess and a Maths textbook the same way. It will not work, if you try to figure out the geometric proof of green eggs and ham…you will go insane guaranteed.
If you try to figure out what mountain the grinch’s cave was located in like it was written in a history book you would be declared a crazy person and rightfully so.
If you ask in what year and on what continent did horton hear a who and spend your life looking for morally upright elephants in trees you have missed the point altogether.
However, if you see that repetition will make you remember green eggs and ham, or if you see that even the biggest meanies can grow hearts and turn around or if you get that values will cost you something, you have now interpreted according to genre.
Most every issue I see in biblical understanding can boil down to 3 things:
Genre confusion
Static appropriation
Lack of historical understanding
although discussing these in detail can be the topic of another Bible Study, they are with the exception of Genre beyond the scope of today.
Does that all make sense? We are getting into a bit about literature and I know that isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but does it at least make sense?
So what Genre is Exodus? Narrative.
Exodus is a story.
So like any good story we can not jump in, in the middle without a recap.
So what has happened in the story so far?
Lets talk about that!
Go through an overview of Genesis and Exodus asking questions along the way.
The important thing to see here is what is God doing? How does God choose to react and instigate things…relationally.
Adam and Garden
Tower of Babel and Calling of Abraham
Abraham and Promise
Abraham and Covenant
I want you to think how long 430 years is:
the 1600s were 430 years ago.
The original King James Bible was written in 1611
William Shakespeare was all the rave in the early 1600s
America as a country did not exist for another 176 years, the first settlers started to arrive
Galileo was put on trial for saying the sun was the middle of the universe
Science was in it’s infancy and calculus didn’t even exist yet
This is how long the Israelites were slaves in Egypt.