Balancing Personal Bible Study and Commentary Insights

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It is possible to fall off the horse of independent thinking in two directions. In One Direction, we fall off on the side of I don't need anybody else, just me and the Holy Spirit and my Bible, and I can see what I need to see. Or we can fall off on the other side of the Horse by failing to think for ourselves at all and becoming almost entirely dependent on what others have thought. [00:01:27]

If we make the first mistake, we're probably arrogant, and we are denying the biblical reality that God has given to his church teachers. It's an amazing thing. God has given to his church teachers. He didn't just give us a Bible; he gave us Bible teachers. That has huge implications because no one person, apart from the help of other teachers, Ephesians 4, is going to see all that God has to teach us in the Bible. [00:02:08]

Secondhands are like ambassadors of a king who are never sure what he says. They're never able to say, thus Seth The Sovereign King. Instead, they're always saying, well, my commentary says that the king says. That's a secondhand her. So we want to avoid falling off the horse of independent thinking on either side. [00:03:09]

In real life, most of us have a limited amount of time that we can devote to study, and I've generally said, look, if you have 8 hours to get a lesson or a sermon ready, and you're going to spend 4 hours studying and four hours writing, then use most of those four study hours, almost all of it, thinking about, praying over, looking at the text, not reading commentaries. [00:04:50]

The Bible teaches us that doing our own thinking with our own mind is essential for Christian Living. 2 Timothy 2:7, think over what I say, Timothy, for the Lord will give you understanding in everything. Think over, you think, think, use your mind, Timothy. Or 1 Corinthians 14:20, Brothers, do not be children in your thinking, be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature. [00:05:56]

The fact that God has given us a Bible, a book, doesn't remove the need for thinking; it creates the need for thinking. Six times Jesus said to the most well-read Bible readers of his day, Pharisees and scribes, he said, have you not read? Must have absolutely G these guys, yeah, what do you mean have we not read? That's all we do is read. [00:07:16]

They had read, but they hadn't read. They hadn't thought rightly about what they read. The requirement to read a Bible is the requirement to think rightly about what you read. They got it wrong. They Ed their minds in a way that distorted the texts. So the fact that we have a book, an inspired Bible, creates the need for carefully, insightfully reading, good thinking, not bad thinking. [00:07:42]

Thinking is hard mental work, and constitutionally, we're all just supposed to be lazy to avoid hard work, which means we naturally default to letting somebody else think for us, and then we get the answer when they're done thinking, and that sounds efficient. He did the thinking; I'll just take his answer and save myself a lot of time. [00:08:27]

The best teacher I ever had told us don't read commentaries for their conclusions, read them for their arguments. Now that transformed the way I read everything. In other words, if you're going to seek help in getting an answer from a commentary, make sure you are letting the commentary help you think about how to find the answer, not replace your thinking with their thinking and their answer. [00:08:55]

Questions are simply a way of stating problems. Questions are the interrogative form of problems, which get us to think. Thinking our way through biblical texts means asking question after question after question, and the better the questions, the deeper the insight. And of course, this implies we need to use our God-given Minds in Reliance on the Holy Spirit at every moment to think our way into good Bible answers. [00:10:28]

The most Illuminating questions are not what and where and when questions; they are who and how and especially why questions. Then we apply our minds, we apply our minds to think and think and look at the book and look at the book and doodle with our piece of paper with possible ideas scratched in every corner, Watching God bring glorious things to light. [00:11:19]

If we run out of time and get stuck, then we reach for our good friend, the commentary, and we look at his arguments. It's remarkable, uh, the more commentaries I read, the more diverging conclusions I tend to have to navigate. It complicates more than it clarifies. That's been my experience. [00:11:52]

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