Living by the Book/Living by the Book Workbook Set (21 page)

T
he tenth and final strategy for developing first-rate skill as a student of Scripture is:

Telescopic reading means viewing the parts in light of the whole.

Back when Japan was dominating the world in consumer products, Sony president Akio Morita came to Texas to talk about why the Japanese were reluctant to manufacture their goods in the United States. His explanation: they couldn’t find American parts that met their quality control standards.

Take the Sony camcorder. Sony had a production standard that tolerated only one out of a hundred camcorders to fail. That seemed easy to meet— until you realize that the device was made up of two thousand component parts. With that many parts, each one had to work flawlessly—perhaps one failure in a hundred thousand, or even a million—in order for the whole unit to meet the standard. You see, the whole was far greater than the sum of the parts.

So it is with the Bible. It is not simply a collection of parts. It is an integrated
message in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That’s bad math, but good method. And yet what happens in a lot of Bible study and Bible teaching is that we keep breaking it down and breaking it down, until we have nothing but baskets of fragments. What we need today are people who can put the parts back together again into a meaningful and powerful whole.

So every time you read and analyze Scripture, every time you take it apart, realize that you’ve only done part of the task. Your next task is to put it back together again.

How can you do that?

In
chapter 15
we looked at the power in the little words
but, and,
and
therefore
. These and other words are “connectives” in that they link the text together. They are the coupling pins in a train of associated words that work together to communicate meaning. Telescopic reading demands that you pay attention to these links, so that you tie the author’s message together in your mind.

We saw how important context can be when we studied Acts 1:8. We’ll come back to it in detail when we get to Step Two, Interpretation. But the principle to remember is that whenever you study a verse or a paragraph, always consult the neighbors of that verse or paragraph to find out what the broader context is. Telescopic reading is based on this principle. It never settles for close-ups alone; it always demands the wide-angle lens of perspective. It always asks, What is the big picture?

This is the ultimate extension of checking the context. It’s like flying a plane over a particular terrain in order to evaluate distances and relationships.

For instance, if you were to slug your way through the gospel of Mark verse by verse, you’d probably enjoy the narrative, but you’d miss the author’s message. Obviously the story is about Jesus. But so are three other books in the New Testament. What makes this one distinctive?

It’s not until you back off and evaluate the book as a whole that you
discover that Mark breaks it into two major sections. From 1:1 through 8:26, you have the Person of Christ; from 8:31 through 16:20 you have the purpose of Christ. The hinge of the book is 8:27–30, where He asks the crucial question, “Who do people say that I am?” All kinds of insights flow out of this structure. But it is something you can detect only by examining a satellite photograph of the book.

I happen to think that history is one of the most fascinating subjects there is. History lends relevance to otherwise insignificant details. For instance, we’re all familiar with the Christmas story in Luke 2, which begins: “And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed” (2:1 KJV).

But how many of us appreciate the fact that Caesar Augustus was the first emperor of Rome? How did that come about? Perhaps you’ve seen or read Shakespeare’s tragedy
Julius Caesar
and know that Caesar was murdered in 44 BC. He had become a dictator. But previously Rome had been a republic, much like our own United States. A power struggle ensued in the aftermath of Caesar’s death, and a man named Octavius emerged as the victor. A mere thirty years before Christ, Octavius was named emperor and assumed the title Caesar Augustus.

Another interesting fact is that Rome annexed Judea—the birthplace of Christ—in 6 BC.

So when Luke opens chapter 2 with reference to Caesar Augustus, he’s reminding the reader of the extraordinary political changes underway at that time. Does that have any bearing on his account? Does it give us any insight into the circumstances surrounding Jesus’ life and death? Does it shed light on the Acts narrative, which continues the story? Does it give us any clues as to who Luke was writing for, and what might have mattered to the fellow he calls Theophilus in Luke 1:3 and Acts 1:1?

Whenever you come to a book of the Bible, ask, Where does this book fit historically? When was it written? When did the events in it take place? What was happening in the larger history of the world at that time?

Also ask, Where does this book fit in the flow of the Bible? Does it come
before, during, or after Christ? How much of the Bible was complete when this material was written? In other words, how much did the writer and the people in the book know about God?

You’ll probably have to use secondary sources to discover the historical context of the biblical books. I’ll talk about some of those in
chapter 34
. For now, keep in mind that God is the God of history. He works in and through real people in the real world to accomplish His purposes. You can discover a lot about those purposes if you read His Word telescopically.

I
began our discussion of Observation by focusing on one verse, Acts 1:8. Now I want to step up to a paragraph. Actually, the paragraph is the basic unit of study—not the verse, not the chapter. Certainly a paragraph may be as short as one verse or as long as an entire chapter. In any case, the paragraph represents a complete thought. It is a group of related sentences and statements that deal with one main topic or idea. That makes it ideal for observational study.

By the way, let me point out that originally the Scriptures were not divided into chapters, paragraphs, and verses. They were just scrolls and similar documents with long, unbroken passages. Twelve hundred years after Christ, scholars began carving them up into the divisions we have today. They did so to enhance Bible study, but their efforts were by no means inspired by the Holy Spirit. In fact, many of the breaks are artificially imposed on the text. So sometimes we have to ignore them in order to read the books properly.

The paragraph we’re going to study is Nehemiah 1:4–11. I suggest you turn to it in your own Bible, but here’s the paragraph: