Audio Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast, and welcome back to talking about our Bible-reading plan this year. We started the new year looking at the spiritual battles we must overcome in our Bible reading. That was APJ 2112, a wonderful episode with all sorts of great advice for how to read the Bible in a year, just one of many episodes on Bible-study principles from the thirteen-year history of the podcast — specifically in the Epistles and how to break down a paragraph from the Bible to its individual statements, its propositions, to determine how those propositions relate to one another logically. For a sampling of other episodes to help you read your Bible better, see the Ask Pastor John book on pages 1–46, the longest section in the book.

As we find ourselves in the second half of January, we are in the process of reading Genesis 37–50 together, fourteen captivating chapters about the life of Joseph — world-famous stories. And as we read those chapters, we’re trying to understand the value of the Bible’s narratives for our own lives. As we do, here’s the question from Nicholas, who lives in Ontario, Canada — who is, I gather, a pastor: “Hello, Pastor John. Thank you for your tireless work on this podcast. I am currently listening on Audible to your book Reading the Bible Supernaturally. It has been such a wonderful refresher on why to read the Bible and how to focus my reading and study for personal devotion and sermon prep.

“My question is regarding narratives. You make the point that your revolution in reading came when you discovered that the Bible’s authors were making arguments and that tracing those arguments well was key to understanding the author and, thus, God’s intention in the word. I see how this applies to the Epistles of the New Testament and in your LAB videos through Paul’s letters and even in Wisdom Literature. But what about narratives? My church is currently preaching through Luke, and while there is indeed structure, how do you ‘arc out’ a narrative? Are there different keys you look for? Are there specific transitions, markers, or triggers you are looking for in the narrative texts?”

Let me see if I can get everybody up to speed with what he’s asking. I put a huge emphasis on following an author’s train of thought in order to find his true intention. And I do believe that the most fundamental goal of reading is to discover the author’s intention — what he wants to communicate.

Now, there may be other good effects of reading besides that discovery. You might just find entertainment, for example. But without pursuing this foundational effect of finding an author’s intention, we are being discourteous, and we’re treating authors the way we don’t like to be treated — like when we try to communicate something, and somebody says, “I don’t really care what you’re trying to communicate. I’m going to take your words to mean this or that.”

And in the process, we’re going to lose a great opportunity for growing. If we don’t care about finding what another person has discovered in reality, and we just want to read our own ideas in, we’re not going to grow. And 2 Peter 3:18 says, “Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” So, I argue that one essential means of pursuing that goal — of finding an author’s intention and growing in knowledge and grace — is to carefully trace an author’s argument.

Tracing Arguments

By argument, I don’t mean quarrel. (Sometimes people use the word argument differently than I do.) I mean a sequence of thought that builds from foundations to conclusions. For example, Romans 1:15–17 goes like this: “I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. [Because]” — there are going to be three of these becauses. Listen now:

I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. [Because] I am not ashamed of the gospel, [because] it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. . . . [Because] in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith.

I read my Bible for two decades before I discovered that’s the way Paul wrote. So, there are four statements here, right? Massively important statements. And my point is that you can’t understand Paul’s intention, what he’s trying to communicate, unless you understand the logical relationships between those four statements. And Paul signals loud and clear those relationships by using the word because three times. He’s building an argument from foundations to conclusions.

Following Narratives

Now, Nicholas’s question is how that detailed, rigorous focus on the logical relationships between particular statements relates to the interpretation of big sections of narrative in the Bible or stories in the Bible. (And he could expand it out and say, “How does it relate to poetry and parable?” And so on.)

Events that are woven together in a certain way — that’s what I mean by narrative. Should we seek the author’s intention in the same way? And my answer is, in principle, yes, but in the details of how the author signals his intention, we’re going to have to watch for other things than simply one proposition following another proposition with a logical connector in between. Stories don’t work like that. But biblical authors write stories for a reason. They are trying to communicate something to us. They want us to find it.

“I put a huge emphasis on following an author’s train of thought in order to find his true intention.”

One of Jesus’s main criticisms — I remember that, when I wrote that book he referred to, I was just blown away by this, that I saw this really for the first time. One of Jesus’s main criticisms of the Pharisees was that he said they didn’t know how to read. It must have absolutely galled them. They were the readers, right? Over and over, he says, “Have you not read? Have you not read?” (Matthew 12:3; 19:4; 22:31). “Have you not read?” And they’re scratching their heads and saying, “That’s all we do — read.” Of course they read. So, what does he mean? He means, “You are reading and not reading. You are seeing and not seeing.”

In other words, there are real intentions that the inspired authors — in this case, the Old Testament authors that the Pharisees read every day — have to communicate, whether through careful sentence-by-sentence exposition or whether through poetry or whether through narrative, and those Pharisees weren’t seeing it at all. That’s what Jesus was upset about.

So yes, we should look for an author’s intention in all writing — all writing that’s worth its salt. And yes, we should look for whatever clues the author gives us. And all good authors do give clues to help us find what he’s trying to communicate. Those clues with regard to narrative might be repetitions, or the order of events, or what the dialogues actually say, or the effects of certain events, or actual inserted interpretive comments by the author, and so on. So let me just give a few illustrations from one of the best stories in the Old Testament.

Authorial Intention in the Joseph Story

I’m thinking of Joseph now (Genesis 37–50). Some regard this as one of the best short stories that’s ever been written, if you want to put it in those categories. It’s an absolutely riveting story, and you wonder, What in the world is going on here? Where is this going — this story? There are fourteen whole chapters about Joseph’s dreams, the hatred of his brothers, their selling him into slavery, his fall further and further into misery as Potiphar’s wife lies about him, and then he goes to prison and he’s forgotten in prison, and then he becomes the second-ranked ruler in Egypt, and the people of God are saved from starvation in the famine, and the line of the Messiah is preserved. Oh, that’s what was going on.

And there are numerous layers of intentions in this writing. I want to get it out of people’s minds that when you read a narrative, get the big picture; get the one big point. Well, yes, by all means, get the one big point; it may govern all the others. But there are a lot of little points that authors make along the way.

Big Picture: Sovereignty

So, let’s start with the big picture of this story. Moses doesn’t leave us — I think Moses wrote this book, Genesis — wondering about the big overarching intention of the story. He fills us in with a couple of very clear, pointed summary statements of what he’s been talking about. For example, Joseph says in Genesis 45:7–8,

God sent me [to Egypt] before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors. So it was not you who sent me here [even though you sold me into slavery], but God. He has made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house and ruler over all the land of Egypt.

In other words, all these apparently human events that we’ve been reading about for fourteen chapters, even the sinful ones, were in the control of the sovereign God, who is sending his emissary through sinful actions down to Egypt to save his people. That’s crazy. That’s wonderful. That’s almost the meaning of the Bible, in parable.

And then, in Genesis 50:20, Joseph says to his brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive.” I think that when you read that, you almost have to go back and reread the story, because now you get it. Now you say, “Oh, that’s where it was all going.” And you can reread the story and say, with that clue in your mind, “This meant that, and this was going here,” and you see God’s hand more immediately.

So, the big point is that the human sinfulness of God’s people, or human sinfulness against God’s people, not only does not thwart his saving plans; it advances his saving plans. They are part of the plans of God to save his people and finally his Messiah and bring him into the world through that line. So that’s the big picture, and he clues us in with hints all along the way and with that big explanatory statement at the end.

Sub-Point: Steadfast Love

But there are other clues of meaning and layers of meaning besides the big interpretive statement at the end. Along the way, Moses mingles worsening circumstances with encouraging words. Joseph is thrown into the pit. He’s sold as a slave. He’s far from home in Egypt. He’s lied about by Potiphar’s wife. He’s forgotten in prison. Down, down, down, down. You can graph this story, and it corresponds to many of your lives. I’ve done this for our people: I graph it and say, “Where are you on this horribly descending graph of miserable circumstances in your life?” And he comes to the end, and then he seems to be forgotten by God. What in the world? It’s supposed to sound that way.

But along the way, he says things like (Moses says), “The Lord was with him and . . . the Lord caused all that he did to succeed in his hands” (Genesis 39:3). Or again, “The Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison” (Genesis 39:21). So we get these hints along the way that even though things are getting worse for Joseph, it’s not because of his sinfulness. He’s not bringing this on himself. It’s not because he’s been abandoned by God, but because of God’s hidden purpose. And as we read, we want to know, “What’s the purpose? What’s the purpose? God, you say you’re for him. You don’t look like you’re for him.”

Sub-Point: Sexual Purity

One more illustration of how the author gets across his intention — and this is one of the perplexing things to me in the whole story. Chapter 38 totally, it seems, interrupts the flow of this story. The story begins in chapter 37 with the dreams and the selling into slavery in Egypt, and bang — Moses inserts chapter 38 as soon as the big story starts, and it is so extraneous. It tells this bizarre story about Judah, Joseph’s older brother, who winds up getting his daughter-in-law pregnant, thinking she’s a prostitute. Now, whatever else is going on here, my question is, “Moses, why here? Put that chapter before chapter 37; let the story flow. What’s the point of interrupting the narrative with this chapter 38?”

Well, here’s my suggestion (and I would love to know whether it’s right or not), because the very next thing after that horrible immorality of Judah in chapter 38 — the very next thing we read about in Joseph’s story is his incredible uprightness in sexual relations with Potiphar’s wife, who tries to seduce him. And Moses records his words: “How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?” (Genesis 39:9).

So, I think the ordering of the narrative with the insertion of Judah’s sexual immorality just before Joseph’s staggeringly effective and beautiful sexual morality is to underline in bright colors the difference between Judah’s unfaithfulness and Joseph’s amazing sexual uprightness, which simply goes to show that there can be main points to narratives and lots of sub-points to narratives that we should be alert to.

What Is the Author Saying?

So, in answer to Nicholas’s question: whether we are reading a tightly argued epistle of Paul or a sweeping narrative across fourteen chapters, we’re always looking for what the author intends to communicate. And we look for the kinds of clues that he gives us, whether in exposition or in narration, to help us find the intention. And I would just say to Nicholas that the more you read, the more I read, with that aim of spotting those tips and pointers that authors give us, the more you’re going to see.