How to Read the bible for All its worth - Gordon D. Fee, Douglas Stuart

How to Read the bible for All its worth
Gordon D. Fee, Douglas Stuart
2007, IMprint Edition
(cont'd)

The Law(s): Covenant Stipulations for Israel

And this is the role of the Law in Israel’s history. It was God’s gift to his people to establish the ways they were to live in community with one another and to provide for their relationship with and worship of Yahweh, their God. At the same time the Law set boundaries with regard to their relationships with the cultures around them. A formidable task indeed!

But some will ask, “Didn’t Jesus say that we are still under the Law, since no jot or title, not the least stroke of a pen, would ever drop out of the Law?” The answer is, no, he did not say that. What he said (see Luke 16:16-17) was that the Law cannot be changed. Jesus came to establish a new covenant (see Luke 22:20; cf Heb 8-10), and in so doing “fulfilled” the purpose of the old, thus bringing its time to an end. The fulfillment itself Jesus called a “new command” – the law of love (John 13:34-35)

There are many modern analogies to this sort of change of stipulations from covenant to covenant. In the case of labor contracts, for example, a new contract may specify changes in working conditions, different staffing structures, different pay scales, etc. Yet it may also retain certain feature of the old contract – seniority, work is hardly on the level of the covenant between God and Israel, but it is a type of covenant and therefore helps illustrate in a familiar way the fact that a new covenant can be quite different from an old covenant, yet not necessarily totally different. This is just the case with the biblical covenants


Wisdom: Then and Now

…. Wisdom is the ability to make godly choices in life. There is a very real sense in which the entire progress of our lives may be viewed as a result of choices. IN fact, almost everything we do is to some degree a matter of choice. When to get up in the morning, what to do first, where to work, whom to speak to, how to speak to them, what to accomplish, when to start and stop things, what to eat, what to wear, whom to associate with, where to go, with whom to go – all these actions are the result of decisions…others may be the result of God’s choices and not our own (Gen 45:8), while yet others may be only partly voluntary on our part (Prov 16:33). Nevertheless, choices chart the course of life.

The ancient knew this, and thus wisdom literature abounded in ancient cultures. Non-Israelite wisdom also had as its goal the making of the best choices, the purpose being to achieve the best life. What the inspired biblical wisdom added to this was the crucial idea that the only good choices are godly choices (emphasis mine). Thus from the faithful Israelite perspective, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov 9:10, Ps 111:10).

After all, how can you make godly choices if you do not believe and obey God? The very first step, then, in biblical wisdom is knowing God – not abstractly or theoretically, but in the concrete sense of committing your life to him. Then your general direction will be correct, and as you learn specific guidelines and perspectives for making godly choices, a more precise sense of direction for wise living can follow.


The Revelation: Images of Judgment and Hope

As with most of the other genres, the place to begin one’s exegesis of the Revelation is with a provisional reconstruction of the situation in which it was written. To do this well, you need to do here what we have suggested elsewhere – try to read it all the way through in one sitting. Read for the big picture. Do not try to figure out everything. Let your reading itself be a happening, as it were. That is, let the visions roll past you like waves on the shore, one after another, until you have a feel for the book and its message.