How To See More In Scripture Reading the Bible Differently

The Challenge of Reading Scripture

I'm going to start off this morning with a bit of a humble brag, if that's all right. We love a humble brag, don't we?

Recently I read Jane Eyre. Can you believe it? A Brontë classic. I'm not normally a fan of the classics, I have to be honest, but I thought, I'm going to read Jane Eyre. And do you know what? I enjoyed it. I was surprised that I enjoyed it. I had to look up a few words; I had to get the dictionary out a few times. But I got on all right with it.

And then, after I finished it, I thought, do you know what? Let's jump straight into another Brontë. Let's do it. It's going to be easy this time, isn't it? Because I've just read Jane Eyre, I've read all these fancy words, and you get in the flow, don't you? I read Wuthering Heights a couple of years ago and I remembered enjoying that as well, so I thought, I'm going to read Wuthering Heights now.

Can I be honest, Church? I got a few chapters in and I had to bail. I had to bail. I thought, I can't read another one like this straight after the last. I thought too much of my abilities, I think, and so I had to swap it out for what we might call an easy read.

We love an easy read, don't we? The kind of book you take on holiday, that kind of thing. And the book I'm reading now, I'm enjoying it. It's got a bit of mystery to it, the characters are quite good, but I'm not having to get the dictionary out quite as often as I did with Jane Eyre, if I'm honest. Sometimes we want an easy read, don't we? Sometimes that's just what we need.

But can I be honest? The Bible does not always present itself as an easy read, does it? Sometimes that's because our opinions are challenged, or it presents new ideas we'd never thought about, and it confronts us in that way. That's what makes it difficult. But other times, and can I be honest here this morning, it's because we haven't really got a clue what's going on. We read it and we think, I don't quite understand what's happening here. And you have to wrestle with the text, don't you?

The Work Required to Read Scripture Well

Over the last few weeks we've been looking at reading the Bible as meditation literature. So this morning I want to equip us with a couple of tools to help us do that more effectively — to make the Bible a slightly easier read, or at least to help us understand why it's challenging in places.

As I've been going through and learning these tools this week, they've genuinely impacted my own reading. As I learned them and then went back to Scripture, they helped me see things I wouldn't otherwise have seen. They've helped me this week, and I hope they're going to help you as well.

Now, it's going to be a little while this morning before we're specifically in Scripture. And honestly, church, I don't love that. What I would prefer to do — what we as Assemble Church stand for — is that Scripture is at the top of the sermon, that we open the Scripture together. This morning is going to be a little different from that. It's going to be a little while before we get into the text. And like I said, I don't love that. But what we're doing this morning is understanding some tools that will open up Scripture to us, and I think that's important too. It helps us for the long term in our reading of Scripture.

The whole point of this is for us to read Scripture better: to understand more of who God is, to understand more of what He's done for us. Not just to read and see what Scripture says, but to understand what it means for us.

One of the reasons the Bible can be so hard for us to read and understand is the culture it was written out of and written for — the Old Testament writings and the culture they were living in, and also the culture Jesus was teaching into as we see in the New Testament writings. This is a culture that deeply, deeply values wisdom. Not just the having of wisdom, but the journey that gets us there: the experience it takes and the thought that's required to bring us to a place of wisdom.

So the culture the Old Testament is written in, and the culture Jesus is teaching into, is one that really values the fact that we have to put some work in. We have to put some work in. And that's part of what makes the Bible more of a challenge and less of an easy read — because it requires something of us. It requires us to engage with it, to ponder it, to think on it.

This has been a week of challenges for me, because I've been asking myself: do I give myself a lot of time for thought — whether that's pondering on Scripture, or simply thinking more deeply about things?

The Discipline of Giving Time to Thought

Maybe this is just me. Maybe it's the fact that I've got two small children at home who don't often let me get to the end of a thought. Maybe it's that. But I feel as though my head is constantly swirling with thoughts — and yet, am I actually giving myself time for thought? Time to sit and think, to ponder, to chew things over, to get to the crux of something, to form my own opinions, to really wrestle with a topic?

Maybe not. And again, maybe this is just me. But I feel as though we are consuming so much information these days — information that deserves our thought. Forgive me, it seems I've come up here and it's simply turned into confession time, me mulling over my own life.

I realised this week that I consume so much content at more than one-times speed. Why am I doing that? I watch YouTube at 1.25. I listen to audiobooks at faster than normal speed. Why is that?

I got a video from a friend this week — one of my closest friends. She sent me a video; we do this most weeks, sending each other a little update. It was six and a half minutes long. It's normally not that long, but this week it was six and a half minutes, and I went to watch it at one and a half speed. And I thought: can I not give one of my closest friends six and a half minutes of my day? Do I really need to watch this at one and a half speed?

I was challenged this week to sit and to think, to listen to what she was saying, to think about it, and to actually hear her. And we've been thinking about this over the last few weeks, haven't we — this idea of sitting and thinking.

Hagah, Parallelism, and Symmetrical Patterning

We talked about hagah a few weeks ago — what it is to take a piece of Scripture, to sit and hold it, to think about it and mull it over, to keep it close to us, to read it multiple times.

Sometimes we might find that we are reading something over and over again, feeling as though we are hagah-ing. I don't think that's how we would conjugate that in the Hebrew, but that's how I'm going to do it today. And yet we still don't quite arrive at a full understanding, or at something we feel comfortable with. So the tools we're going to look at this morning, we're going to pair with this idea of hagah. What these tools will do is help us identify what our attention should be drawn to in the Scripture.

Then we use the practice of hagah to sit with the Holy Spirit, to sit with the Scripture, and to understand why our attention is being drawn to these specific things.

We're going to look at two ideas today, and they're quite closely related. The first is called parallelism. I had to Google how to spell that, because I spell the word parallel wrong every single time. Parallelism and symmetrical patterning — symmetrical is also quite a difficult word to spell, with all those double letters.

So we're going to look at parallelism and symmetrical patterning, and, as I said, we're going to bring in the practice of hagah and draw all of this together. The first thing we're going to talk about is parallelism.

Parallelism And The Depth Of Scripture

Parallelism is effectively presenting two ideas or thoughts side by side that are in some way similar or related. But it's not immediately obvious when we first see them how or why they might be related. We have to do some of the mental work to see why they've been presented that way, and why it's interesting.

We see parallelism a lot in biblical poetry. The Psalms are biblical poetry, but we see poetry throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament as well. So this is a tool that will prove useful to us across a whole range of Scripture.

There's a man called J.P. Fokkelman who wrote a book literally called Reading Biblical Poetry, and he likens this kind of parallelism to a pair of eyes. He says the parallel lines of biblical poetry are like a pair of eyes. We look with both eyes so that we have the advantage of seeing depth. Our eyes see in stereo. If you cover one eye, you see things from one angle. If you cover the other eye, you see the same thing but from a slightly different angle. Our brain puts those images together and gives us one picture that has depth to it.

What Fokkelman is saying is that Scripture does the same. When we see two lines that are similar but not quite the same, it gives us a depth of meaning that God wants to bring out.

I'd like to show us an example, to bring some of the theory into something more practical. Psalm 33:6 \u2014 this is the New Living Translation that I've taken from specifically this morning \u2014 says this: \"The Lord merely spoke, and the heavens were created. He breathed the word, and all the stars were born.\"

These two lines are quite similar to one another, but they're not the same. We're seeing that God speaks and then something is created. In the first line, God merely spoke and the heavens were created. But in the second line, the idea of his breath is brought in. That draws our attention a little bit. We can see it's similar, but it's not the same.

Again, in the first line it talks about the heavens being created, and in the second line the stars were born. They're similar, aren't they? There's this idea of the heavens, and then what the heavens are filled with is what's created. So they're similar, but they're not the same.

We can see what is different. But the next part of our exploration of the Scripture is looking at why they are different. This is where the depth comes from. This is where we gain that wisdom through thinking, through mulling over the Scripture, and through seeking the Holy Spirit. This is where we need to hagah \u2014 where we need to sit and ponder and pray and say, \"I've noticed that something is different here, but why?\"

So we're going to do that. We're going to do something practical this morning and put these tools into practice. We'll stop here and look at the parallelism, and then in a few minutes we'll do the same with the symmetrical patterning. We're going to think about why this is different. We're not going to rush into it. We'll spend a little time individually, each of us praying, seeking the Holy Spirit, and hagah-ing on this Scripture. Then, with the people around you, we'll spend a couple of minutes having a chat about what the Lord has spoken to us about this morning.

Too busy pondering the Scripture at the back \u2014 it's all right. We had some good chats. I was having a little chat with Dom, and then he said to take Hattie out, and then I was chatting with these guys down here. I think we could have spent a lot longer talking about that, couldn't we?

Hopefully in your groups you drew out some good things. We were looking at the word \"merely\" \u2014 that jumped out to quite a lot of people \u2014 and the difference between \"created\" and \"born.\" Maybe you explored some of those things as well in the conversations you were having just now.

As I've been reading Scripture elsewhere this week, I noticed some of this parallelism in other places too. There was a passage from Exodus, I think, where I noticed this parallelism.

Symmetrical Patterning and the Seventh Day

Hopefully you'll start to see that as you read the Scripture at home. So the next one we're going to look at is symmetrical patterning. This is the idea that a pattern is set up that starts to feel familiar, and then something changes slightly about it that draws our attention to what's different.

A good example of this is in music. A pattern is set up, and then it changes. Most songs, not all, are written in what is called 4/4 time: four whole beats in a bar. So you count 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4. You'll recognise that in most pop songs. Not all of them, of course. We love a 6/8 in the worship team, which would be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. But most of them are 4/4. Sorry, I'm wandering into a music theory lesson here by accident.

The point is, those patterns start to feel familiar. They lull you into the rhythm and you're happy with that. But an example where a curveball is thrown in is the Bluey theme song. I don't know how many of you are familiar with it. What happens there is that there are three bars of 4/4, and then a bar of 5/4: five whole beats in the bar. Then it goes back to 4/4 for a bit, and then we have another little 5/4 bar thrown in.

It keeps things interesting, a bit of extra musical pizzazz for the kids. But it also breaks us out of the pattern of simply letting the music wash over us. Suddenly we think, "Hang on, there's something a bit different there."

That is a technique we can see in Scripture too, though not through music, although I suppose the Psalms were set to music. A pattern is established, and then we're given something different to think about. This can be closely linked with parallelism as well. If you think about the psalm we just looked at, you saw the rhythm of God speaks, God creates; God speaks, God creates. But there were differences in there that drew our attention.

Something doesn't have to be only one thing. It doesn't have to be only parallelism or only symmetrical patterning. It can be more than one thing at once.

I wanted to look at a different example this morning. This is the third time this passage has come up for me this week, so I feel like maybe the Lord is trying to speak to me about it as well. It's from Genesis chapters one and two, which tell us about the creation of the universe.

See the pattern being laid out. On day one, God creates. On day two, God creates. Day three, God creates. Day four, day five, day six: God creates. And then day seven. "So the creation of the heavens and the earth and everything in them was completed. On the seventh day God had finished his work of creation, so he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because it was the day when he rested from all his work of creation."

On day seven, God rests, and the pattern we have been lulled into is broken. That passage could have ended at day six. God could have stopped at day six and simply got on with everything that happened afterwards. But no, day seven exists. God rested. We don't have a six-day week; we have a seven-day week. We have the Sabbath.

So we see this pattern being broken, and we ask what is different. What's different is that we have create, create, create, create, create, create, rest. But why? Why does the biblical author want to draw our attention to this idea of rest, this idea of Sabbath?

So we're going to sit and ponder this Scripture for a few minutes, similar to what we just did. Take a couple of minutes thinking about why this pattern is broken. Why is this pattern different? Why is our attention being drawn to this idea of the Sabbath? Why is that important?

Equipped to Draw More From Scripture

In a few minutes I'm going to step down and the band are going to come up. The worship song we're closing with actually fits really well with what we've been speaking about this morning.

Hopefully you'll find those tools helpful as we go into reading the Scriptures in our own time. I know some of those pieces of Scripture felt quite disjointed, and as I sat with them I was thinking, "Oh no." But I think we've still drawn something of worth out of these conversations — not only from the Scripture itself, but also in terms of practising these tools and equipping ourselves for the future.

So I'm going to pray as we close, and then we're going to spend some more time in worship this morning.

Lord, I thank you for your word. I thank you that it challenges us. Thank you that it challenges our ideas, our concepts and our opinions. And thank you that it challenges us to wrestle with it, to spend time in it, to meditate on the Scripture, to draw wisdom out through the work that we have to put in — not just to have it handed to us.

Lord, I pray that as we've all learned together this morning — these tools that we can use to read your Scripture, particularly poetic Scripture that can be a bit difficult to understand — I pray that you will help us. As we apply those tools, help us to see more of you: more of your nature, more of your will, more of what you've done for us, more of how you see us. Just more of you, Lord. And I pray that we'll draw more and more out of the Scripture of who you are.

In your name, Jesus. Amen.