Christian Publishing House Blog
Apologetic Defense of the faith, the Bible, and Christianity
The city of Smyrna was located approximately thirty-five miles north of Ephesus. It was a prosperous city with a population of over one hundred thousand in John’s day (c. A.D. 95). That location had been inhabited for over three thousand years and no one knows for sure who founded Smyrna or exactly when it was established.
In Josiah’s day, the book of the law was found in the temple, and Josiah’s humble response to its demands changed his generation. Jesus later confronted religious teachers of His day who, for all their attention to the law, had often buried it beneath their religious traditions.
We have grammatical-historical-interpretation and grammatical-critical-historical interpretation. The former preserved objectivity in interpretation, the latter subjectivity. The former preserved the integrity and trustworthiness of the Bible writers and the text; the latter made both the Bible writer and the text untrustworthy. In other words, New Hermeneutics, with its pseudo-scholarship has done nothing more than weaken and demoralize people’s assurance in the Bible being the inspired and fully inerrant Word of God.
Most people who read the Bible do so without a clearly defined goal. It is better to study the Bible with a more defined purpose in mind, for its subject matter and its intended meaning.
Let me remind the reader, no doctrine is lost over one verse. Moreover, the policy to follow is, let the textual evidence lead where it leads, the translation go where it goes, the translator do what needs to be done, and the exegete discover what the author meant by the words that he used. God does not need our help in manipulating verses to get our desired outcome.
We, non-Bible authors, can only get at the meaning of any given text by grammatical-historical interpretation, which is an objective approach. We are not under inspiration while we are interpreting Scripture; otherwise, we would never err. We have to understand ...
Continue Reading →
What did the Bible authors mean by the words that they used? How can Christians determine this instead of imposing their modern-day opinions into the text? What implications does a text have for Christians today? How can Christians rightly apply the Bible in their lives?
The Bible is a revelation from our heavenly Father, about our heavenly Father, i.e., his will and purposes. (1 Thess. 2:13) If we take the things we learn and apply them in our lives, we will live a life far more beneficial than those who do not. As we grow in knowledge, we will draw... Continue Reading →
Recognize the Christocentric focus of the Bible The New Testament writers primarily viewed the Old Testament as Christological documents. They understood the Hebrew Scriptures as ultimately pointing to the person of Christ and the redemptive-historical fulfillment that he would bring: And He took the twelve aside and said to them, “Behold, we are going up... Continue Reading →
Does the book of Acts simply record the history of the early church? Or does it also provide a blueprint for the church today? Do we read Acts as an interesting true story of how Christianity began, a story that gives us our roots and our identity or is it still normative for today? A... Continue Reading →