W. Graham Scroggie wrote of the Word, "Being of divine origin, it speaks with sovereign authority and each of us turns aside from it at the cost of his present and eternal undoing."

A few years ago the police arrested a doctor for performing surgery while under the influence of cocaine. Due to his lack of cohesion during the operation the patient died. If a quack doctor is a shame to the field of medicine, what is a believer to the church and the world, when he doesn’t know how to study or teach the only Book God has given Him?

Way back when I generated sales for a print company, a customer came in one day carrying a poster the size of a house door. I couldn’t help but notice the medical lingo scribbled all over. The poster was to be used to teach medical students to never abbreviate prescriptions, because misread abbreviations from the past have cost the health and even life of innocent patients.

“OJ” (orange juice) had been mistaken for “OD” which is oculu dexter, meaning “right eye.” Medication meant to be diluted in orange juice was put in the right eye. “D/C” intended to mean “discharge” was misinterpreted as “discontinue” when followed by a list of drugs. You can only imagine the potential deadly consequences here. If it’s important to get a prescription for a patient’s physical health, what does that say of the need for a proper prescription for a believer’s spiritual health? Rightly interpreting and communicating God’s Word is hugely significant.

At age twelve my family and I trekked into the Trinity Alps for adventure. After hours of strutting through thick brush we came upon an ancient mine running straight through a mountain with a track and trolley that rolled inside. It was like walking into the wild west of the 1800’s. Suddenly one of us spotted sparkling rocks. We couldn’t believe our eyes. Gold! Seconds later we had amassed a pile of gold-colored rock two feet high. About that time a wrinkled miner came loping out of the cave and laughed his head off. When he told us it was fool’s gold our dreams of riches evaporated.

What fooled us? We didn’t know what to look for. We had no experience in gold mining. In a similar way, many mine God’s Word for riches, but really don’t know what they are looking for. Suddenly they make “discoveries” from the text that are nothing more than invasions of the text. Unless someone knows what he’s digging for, he’ll never know if he found it. So what should we look for in Bible study?

What the Author Meant

Meaning. No matter what your position or standing in life and ministry, make it your undying commitment to strive to get at the meaning of the text. This is the foundation for all teaching and understanding of the Bible, and your spiritual growth depends on it. The meaning of the text is what the author intended at the time he wrote it.

Have you ever been to a Bible study where the text is read and someone says, “Well what do you think that means?” And one person says, “Well to me, it means that…” and then someone else says, “Ooh, that’s cool! But I find that to me this text means…” This pooling of ignorance muddles the precious Word of God, reducing it to a handbook of subjective impressions.

Whenever I teach the importance of finding the author’s original intention, someone usually asks, “But what does the author’s meaning 2,000 plus years ago have to do with the 21st century Christian?” Because unless you understood what it meant then, it is difficult—and often impossible—to understand how it applies today.

Imagine that you embark on a mission to find a chest of gold in a far off island. Before leaving, I give you a map that provides directions to this priceless treasure. But suddenly you discover that the map is written in an ancient language no longer used today. How in the world are you going to find that treasure? Would you say, “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter what it meant back then, I’ll just apply it to myself and my situation and find the gold”? And I’d have to say, “Good luck! It’s going to be one frustrating trip!”

But if you are serious about finding that treasure chest, you’d find an expert in this expired language so he can interpret it for you and explain exactly what it meant back then. He’d tell you what the symbols mean, the meaning of ancient letters, and the interpretation of those strange pictures. Once you understand what the original writer meant 2,000 years ago, you can now apply these directions to your current situation, and set out to find the hidden treasure.

What I Think He Meant

Interpretation. “Meaning” is what the text meant when it was originally written. But then you might be saying, “Seth, I thought that’s interpretation.” Well, it’s very close to it. Meaning is the author’s intent, and interpretation is your understanding of that meaning. Obviously the author meant one thing when he wrote it—not two, three, or ten things, therefore, if you want to find the real meaning, you must have a correct interpretation. When someone throws out the overused excuse, “Oh! That’s your interpretation,” he is unknowingly admitting that he thinks meaning and interpretation are the same thing. But they are not. A passage can have as many interpretations as readers, but there is only one interpretation that is right, because it is the interpretation that matches the meaning.

How it Applies to Me

Application. Once you nail down what you believe to be the correct interpretation of the passage, you are ready for the next step: application. Application is how the passage applies to the 21st century believer today. Meaning answers the question: What did the author mean? Interpretation answers the question: What do I think the author meant? And application answers the question: How does this passage apply to today? Each step is built on the one previous to it. Interpretation is pointless if it is not based on the author’s meaning. And application is shoddy if it isn’t resting on a solid interpretation of the text.

Years ago, when I had just started out in the pastorate, I began to take my Sunday school class through a survey of the Bible. To keep them on track with me, I told them to read the book of Genesis, and then come back next week and I would teach on it. Everything went great until we hit the book of Leviticus. I remember the day I walked in to teach it and half the people confessed that they got to about chapter 9 or 10 and dropped out. They couldn’t endure it. What in the world, they wondered, do all these rules—like living outside the camp if you have a green spot on your skin—have to do with me? I anticipated this might happen but wanted to see how well they would fare on their own. So I opened to Leviticus 11:44-45 and read:

For I am the LORD your God. Consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy. And you shall not make yourselves unclean with any of the swarming things that swarm on the earth. For I am the LORD who brought you up from the land of Egypt to be your God; thus you shall be holy, for I am holy.

“What does God desire for His people?” I asked.

“Holiness,” responded the class.

“Exactly,” I said. “What does holiness mean?”

“To be pure. To be set apart.”

“Correct. So why did God give Israel these myriads of rules? To confuse them? To overburden them? Of course not. He gave them thousands of rules to show them the importance of being different—being set apart—from the normal course of other nations as they presented themselves to God. The external rules did not by themselves make the Israelites more holy. The rules stood as an external sign of what needed to be an inward reality: holiness. Although today you don’t need to live outside of your house for seven days when you get a nasty scab on your ear or restrict your diet from any insects except the kind that walk on all fours and have joints on their legs that enable them to jump, God does require for you to live a holy life, just like His Son lived on this earth.”

Suddenly they got it. I got the famous, “Ooohhhh! I see!” Because I extracted universal principles from the text and showed them how these applied to their lives today as much as they did 3,000 years ago, it all made sense. The difference obviously is how they apply. But think about this: God’s desire for Israel’s holiness would never have been so emphatic to these students, had they not spent hours laboring through the myriads of rules God gave them. If they hadn’t first understood what the text meant in Moses’ day, they never would have seen the full muscle of its application for today.

First we pursued Moses’ meaning at the time he wrote it by studying the text. Then we came to our interpretation of that meaning—Israel is to be set apart as holy by meticulous laws. And finally, that interpretation led to relevant 21st century application: God desires complete holiness in every part of our life.

The Right Tools for the Job

Hermeneutics. In order to extract the right meaning you need the right tools. A good miner has a whole collection of tools from which to pick. In the same way, to study the Bible accurately you’re going to need an assortment of tools to aid you as you excavate the Word of God.

This is what we call “hermeneutics” (pronounced “herm-en-oo-tics”). The first time one guy heard this word he thought it was some kind of disease. But the origin of this word is actually amazing. “Hermeneutics” comes from the Greek word hermeneuo which means “to explain” or “to interpret.” From this word the Greeks derived the name, “Hermes,” a mythological herald who interpreted messages of gods for mortals on earth. So this word has to do with interpreting a message or communicating the meaning of a message.

In brief, “hermeneutics” means the tools used to study and interpret the text. Every time you study God’s Word these tools become your allies in understanding the text. See Appendix 1 for a full list and explanation of these tools. When applied properly, these tools will aid you in uncovering the meaning of the text. The result will be stacks of notes, pages of typed files, and even numerous outlines on the passage. You’ll have a mountain of content.

All this content is great information and is beneficial to you, but it’s utterly useless for the people in your Bible study or the audience on Sunday. This means you need to package the information so that it communicates.

Trying to teach from your study notes is like giving your restaurant customer who ordered steak a live cow. And that is why you need the next step: presentation.

Saying it Well

Presentation. Presentation deals with the delivery of your message. Whether it be a sermon, Sunday school lesson, or house Bible study, for the presentation to be effective it must be more than raw study notes. This is the step where you take all your content and order it in such a way that is both accurate and gripping when you teach it. It’s really all about communication—how you take what you have learned and deliver it to others in a way that is lucid and fascinating.

The presentation includes the introduction to your lesson, fitting in powerful illustrations, fitting hand-gestures, breaking the lesson down into captivating points, eliminating obnoxious “um’s,” and wrapping up the lesson with a riveting conclusion.

I’ve run into pious Bible teachers who said something like, “I don’t worry about using illustrations, fancy introductions, and all these superficial hand gestures that supposedly make me a good preacher. I just tell them what the text means.” This statement is as arrogant as it is foolish. Men, on the day you propose to the love of your life, how would she feel if you presented her the engagement ring in a paper bag? But that’s what we do with God’s Word if we give no attention to the presentation. Yes, the content is indescribably important but the package we put it in reflects what we think about that content. Teaching God’s Word with no effort in making your presentation engaging, dynamic, and incredibly relevant is like serving gourmet food on a piece of bark.

Basic Terms
Key Term	Definition
Meaning	What the author meant at the time he wrote
Interpretation	What I think the author meant at the time he wrote
Application	How the passage applies to me today
Hermeneutics	Tools used for studying and interpreting the text
Presentation	The packaging of your findings into a well-dressed lesson

The teacher who communicates God’s Word in a boring, lifeless, non-applicable style, does more hurt than good. By example, he teaches his people that God’s Word is a dry, life-sucking book. The best teachers, preachers, and Bible study leaders will always be those who communicate God’s Word accurately and in the most interesting and applicable manner possible.

At the same time, no matter what style of presentation you use, the text must be the main thrust of the message. Some teachers use Bible verses as a launching pad into saying whatever they want. Others abuse the point of the passage, teaching their hearers dangerous interpretation methods by their example. Others teach right principles but from the wrong passages, bending the text to say what they want it to say. Still, others almost entirely ignore the text, and use the Bible more as a pulpit decoration than as the source and authority of the message.

The heart of the presentation must flow from the main point of the text, otherwise, your lesson becomes fluffy suggestions with no meat. It’s like serving someone gravy with no potatoes. Seven hundred years ago the term “exposition” was coined to describe the proclamation of God’s Word that communicates the passage accurately, contextually, and with strong application. Although this term has sometimes been abused to depict messages void of biblical meat or sermons drained of life application, exposition still stands as the very best, time-proven, and most accurate approach to proclaiming the Word of God.

Reduce “exposition” to its basic root and you end up with “expose.” Your chief goal is to expose the meaning and application of the text to your hearers. Do not rest until you have prepared a message that will leave every hearer with far deeper knowledge of the text than they ever could have arrived at by themselves and with full understanding of how they are to apply it to their lives.