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Thursday, March 17, 2005
So...hopefully you made your observations from yesterday's blog and now you can begin to make interpretations of your observation.
Just to make sure we're clear on the subtle difference, let's use a basic example. Let's say that you were in your backyard in just before you went to bed last night. This morning, when you woke up, you found a baseball sitting in the middle of your backyard. The OBSERVATION is "there's a baseball in my backyard."
The INTERPRETATION could go in a bunch of different directions, but the most obvious one is "how did that baseball get there?"
So, you might have to scroll down to review the observations we made yesterday, but a few questions of interpretation you might make based on the "Palm Sunday" (which is this upcoming Sunday, in case you weren't aware, and the reason I've chosen this passage) account found in Luke 19: 28--40.
WHERE is Jerusalem (verse 28)?
WHERE is Bethphage and Bethany and the Mount of Olives? (verse 29)
WHO were the two disciples? (verse 30)
WHAT does it mean to spread their garments in the road? (verse 36)
WHAT psalm is quoted in verse 38 and WHY would this be meaningful?
WHO were the Pharisees? (verse 39)
WHY would they ask Jesus to rebuke His disciples? (verse 39)
WHY would Jesus say that the stones would cry out if He did that? (verse 40)
Now, some of these questions would require more information than you might have just rattling around in your brain. You'll need some help.
Most good Bibles will have a series of maps in the back of them. Try to find one that is titled something like "Jerusalem in the time of Jesus" and then locate the cities. You might even find the Mount of Olives on there,too.
The two disciples are going to be discovered in other gospel accounts of this same event, so we'll leave that alone for now as tomorrow we'll be looking at correlations.
Spreading the garments in the road would be a custom of that day, so you might need a Bible dictionary...and since most people don't have one of those around, let me give you a few web-sites, that last time I checked, had free search engines and things to help you interpret some things:
Bible Online
SonicLight.Com
Bible.Org (click on study tools or pastoral helps--it even has a "net Bible" too)
At Sonic Light, you can click on Study notes, then click on Psalms, scroll down to Psalm 118, and you should be able to find out why this Psalm was very important.
In your Bible dictionary, you could look up "Pharisees" and get LOTS of information.
And if you wanted a quick answer to the questions of Luke 19: 39 & 40, you could easily use SonicLight, go to Luke, scroll to chapter 19 and find out a few things.
Now, you're really studying the Bible on your own...and you could teach a small group Bible study just on what you've learned here! Half the battle is asking the right questions and doing the research...and the confidence you gain is sort of repeats the process.
You know, you begin to study seriously, you learn a lot and you even enjoy the process, you gain confidence, you do it again, you get better at it, you get more confidence, you get better studies as a result, you gain more confidence, etc.
And...all you've done so far is observe and interpret...tomorrow we'll correlate this information with other passages and you'll see how very cool it is to see God's Word work together.
So, what's going well for you and what isn't? Feel free to comment with successes, failures, etc.
Brent 4:37 AM
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