First, a quick thank you to all of the readers of my blog who have expressed their gratitude for the mind-bending explanations of scripture that I’ve begun to provide. Believe me, I understand your bewilderment at reading such things for the first time. Obviously, the posts you’ll read here aren’t the kind of thing you see every day. This is because, as the sub-title to my blog suggests, I do not recite things as “truth” from the lessons that I’ve gotten from other people. So, how do I do it? And how can I be so certain of the accuracy of my posts?
I discovered three important instructions that are found in scripture. First, we must have faith that we will/can understand what the Bible says if we believe in the power of the Holy Spirit and have confidence that Yahshua will be our source of understanding, as it is HE who is our conduit between ourselves and the father, not some other person on earth.
1 Tim. 2:3–“For this is good and acceptable in the sight of Yahshua our Saviour; 4 Who will have all men to be saved, and to COME UNTO THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE TRUTH. 5 For there is one Elohim, and ONE MEDIATOR between Yahweh and men, the man Yahshua Anointed.” If you believe in this bedrock foundation of how we will grow in understanding, then you’re already a step closer than 99.99% of all humanity. Virtually everybody else lets someone else “do the heavy lifting”, then they accept what that other person told them as true. If you do this, you never make the truth of scripture your own. It remains the beliefs of someone else that you eventually “adopted” as your own. But you run a terrible risk in learning the Bible this way. Ask yourself, what if that person is wrong? How did Paul feel about the religious leaders in his day?
Rom. 1:21–“Because that, when they knew Yahweh, they glorified him not as Elohim, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”
Paul was already disgusted with the religious leaders by the years 55-58 A.D., a mere 2 1/2 decades after Yahshua’s death and resurrection. In fact, Paul’s disgust runs deeper than the KJV Bible conveys. The actual word Paul wrote in v. 22 which is rendered “fools”, comes from the Greek word ἐμωράνθησαν, “emOranthEsan”, which literally means “they-are-made-stupid”. And, if you look carefully at the structure of this word, you’ll see that it contains the Greek root word “moran”, from which we have our modern word “MORON”. Now, seriously, don’t you just love Paul a little bit more, knowing that he wasn’t one to mince words?
The second thing you have to do to fully understand the Bible, you have to really work at it. Again, Paul explains this in 2 Timothy.
2 Tim. 2:7–“Consider what I say; and Yahweh give thee understanding in all things.” V. 12–”…if we deny him [Yahshua], he also will deny us”. V. 15–“Study to shew thyself approved unto Yahweh, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.“ It takes thought, time, persistence and elbow grease to really develop a mature and accurate understanding of scripture.
I know of many people who are proud of the fact that “they’ve read the Bible”, as if they now know what it says. Whether they truly believe that or not is of no consequence. Isaiah talked very specifically about how one fact builds upon another, then another, and another without end.
Isa. 28: 10–“For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little: 11 For with stammering lips and another tongue will he speak to this people. 12 To whom he said, This is the rest wherewith ye may cause the weary to rest; and this is the refreshing: yet they would not hear. 13 But the word of Yahweh was unto them precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little; that they might go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken.”
If you understand the instruction of step two, how can that be achieved? What thoughts should guide our way? Again, Paul reveals the answer.
Phil. 2:5–“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Yahshua Anointed: 6 Who, being in the form of Elohim, thought it not robbery to be equal with Yahweh.”
The first time I ever read this verse, I wondered “How in the world can I, as puny and unworthy as a person can be, get Yahshua’s mind ‘in me’?” That’s when it hit me–Yahshua was the author of the entire Old Testament, referred to as “The Word” in the New Testament, so if I’m going to try to allow his mind, his thoughts to be inside my head so that I understand HIS thoughts, I would have to change my study behavior to include two new things. This brought me to the third important instruction of understanding the Bible, and it can be broken down into two phases.
First, I would have to begin reading each book of the Bible in its original language. Second, I would have to begin reading the Bible in its original manuscript order. But, I speak English…how could I ever conquer such a monumental task? The answer was right in front of my eyes.
I discovered a web page which contains an Interlinear Bible, (click here). This wonderful tool allows the reader to use either the Hebrew to English Interlinear, or the Greek to English Interlinear. This lets you see, in great detail, the closest possible transliteration into English from the author’s original text. It can be shown whether a word is masculine or feminine; whether a noun is singular or plural, whether the expression “Lord” or “God” is actually El, Elohim, Ya, Yahweh or Yahshua. Some words don’t actually even exist in the original text (such as Red Sea and Lucifer) and other words are so poorly translated, they completely lost the author’s meaning.
Re-reading familiar texts was suddenly like a bomb going off in my head. Things I thought I understood before, I now realized that I had drawn the incorrect conclusion because I never really knew what the author said until I read it in his own language. Even though it sounds choppy and clumsy, trying to directly read Hebrew into English, it still is a valuable tool to become closer to the “mind of Yahshua”.
What did I mean about “reading the Bible in its original manuscript order”? Isn’t today’s Bible already arranged in the proper order? Not by a long shot.
If we’re going to continue to build our understanding line upon line, precept upon precept, etc., we have to do in in THAT way. There must be a beginning, a middle and an end. Originally, all holy texts were written on scrolls and were kept by Levitical priests in either the Tabernacle or the Temple for safekeeping. They were also kept very carefully in the proper order, and categorized according to the primary “heading” of three sections of scripture.
That’s when an amazing revelation hit me. The Bible was originally written as a textbook, which begins with “Primary School” subjects, then “Middle School”, then “Junior High”, “High School”, “College”, “Masters” then finally “Doctorate” level of mature theological teachings. And, just as it is impossible to explain how the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle equals the squares of the opposite two sides (sorry, I couldn’t resist–“hat tip” to the Scarecrow), if you’ve only begun to learn Subtraction, so too it’s impossible for a person to understand the advanced sections of scripture if they haven’t mastered the fundamental, easier sections.
The crazy thing is, any novice of the Bible can simply open the book and BEGIN reading the parts that are “higher education” categories, and think they understand it. I know I did. But it took decades of progressively growing and building upon what I had proven to be true before I finally understood those sections of scripture that I had previously thought I knew.
Both the Old and New Testaments are scrambled into the wrong order in our modern Bibles, but since this post is only about laying the foundation of understanding, here is the correct order of the Old Testament books, in their proper order:
I. THE LAW (TORAH)
1) Genesis
2) Exodus
3) Leviticus
4) Numbers
5) Deuteronomy
II. THE PROPHETS
6) Joshua and Judges
[reckoned as two separate books by the Jews after the 2nd century]
7) The Book of Kingdoms (Samuel and Kings)
[reckoned as two separate books by the Jews after the 2nd century]
8) Isaiah
9) Jeremiah
10) Ezekiel
11) The Twelve (Hosea to Malachi)
[always reckoned as one book by the Jews]
III. THE HOLY WRITINGS (or THE PSALMS because it was the first book in the collection in this “Royal Division”)
12) The Psalms
13) The Proverbs
14) Job
15) Song of Songs
16) Ruth
17) Lamentations
18) Ecclesiastes
19) Esther
20) Daniel
21) Ezra-Nehemiah [reckoned as one book by the Jews]
22) The Book of Chronicles [reckoned as one book by the Jews]
To anyone interested in attempting to get “the mind of Yahshua” into your brain, a good place to start is to read what he wrote in the order he wrote it. I’m not going to split hairs that an angel of Yahweh inspired humans to actually put the words down on scrolls. It is well understood who the author in heaven was.
As you can see, the process of correctly understanding the Bible can be identified, but the mountain to climb seems just way too high. I’ll wrap this up with a final thought from my late Dad, who–whenever I’d face a task that seemed to big to achieve, he’d say: “How do you eat an elephant?” Answer: “One bite at a time.”
Theology Without The Pedigree 