Logos Bible Software 30 Day Training

Faithlife Corporation 2016

Learn to Study the Bible with Logos: Part 1

Introduction to Part 1

Welcome

Welcome to this course on how to study the Bible. Hi, I'm Adam and one of my responsibilities at Faithlife is to help train you to study the Bible. Most Christians believe that they should be studying the Bible more. There are many reasons for not studying the Bible, but one major reason is not knowing where to start. That’s why this course exists. If you’ll devote just 30 days to this course, we’ll equip you proven techniques for doing Bible study on your own.

Using Matthew 4 as the text we will study, this course will follow the well-known inductive Bible study method of “Observation, Interpretation, and Application.” I’ll outline ten steps in Bible study that you can follow with any passage of the Bible.

Logos Bible Software is powerful Bible study software. While you don’t have to own Logos to learn the steps I will teach you, I will be using Logos in all of the steps. You’ll see the benefit Logos adds to your Bible study. If you already own Logos Bible Software, or subscribe to it via Logos Cloud, this course is also designed to help you master the Bible study tools you now have access to.

There are countless things Logos can do help you study the Bible, but you’ll be well on your way to using Logos if you can master just two skills: using the Go Box and right-clicking to access the context menu. Most of the videos in the class are based on these two simple skills.

Method of this Course: Observation, Interpretation, Application

As I mentioned, we’ll follow the “Observation, Interpretation, Application” Bible study method. We start with observing the facts about the passage we’re studying by asking, “What does the text say?” Next we interpret the passage by asking, “What does the text mean?” Finally, we apply the text by asking, “What does the text mean for my life and the lives of others?”

Observation

In this first section of the course, we’ll spend a good deal of time observing the text. There is no substitute for spending time with the passage we’re studying and Logos provides us with tools to help us see what’s there. Essentially, we are looking at the details of the text and asking who, what, when, where, why, and how. We’re looking for things that we should study further. In our effort to explore the text deeply, we’ll identify important themes, compare English translations, look at the context, and explore the setting and characters.

How to Watch this Course

We recommend you watch one video a day so that you have time to fully learn the new skills. The videos are short, usually under 5 minutes, and most will include an assignment that will take up to 30 minutes to complete. Feel free to only watch the videos, but if you can invest a little more time, doing the assignments will help you solidify your new skills.

If you need further help, additional training videos are located at Logos.com/Logos-Pro and you can always contact the Logos Pro team at [email protected].

Because different base packages include different tools and resources, you may not have some of the functionality or resources demonstrated in a number of the videos. But, watching all of the videos will help you. Not only will you gain more insight into Matthew 4, you’ll learn key steps in Bible study.

Summary

The Bible is a powerful text. And Logos Bible Software is a powerful tool. If you invest in learning how to use it, it will transform how you study the Bible. You’ll be more efficient and will walk away from your study with deeper insight. If you want to communicate truth to others or simply grow in your knowledge of God’s Word, Logos Bible Software can help you in big ways. I’m glad to have you join us.

Observation DAY 1

Become Familiar with the Passage and Its Context

Step 1: Read the Passage in Its Context Several Times

Part of the observation stage is reading the context of the passage we are studying to find out where our passage fits within the overall book of the Bible. In fact, reading the passage several times in its context is a great idea for good Bible study and is the first step in the Bible study method of this course. Reading it as much as possible familiarizes us with what we are studying and helps us ask better investigative questions of the text. You can do any of the steps in this video with a print copy of the Bible and a notebook, so if you choose the paper route, skip ahead to the assignments. Logos can make this process more convenient.

In this short video we’ll explore how Logos can help us with our daily Scripture reading and prayer. We’ll also find out how to take important notes in the Bible as we read. For the next three videos we won’t be using the two simple skills I talked about in the introduction video. We need to set up a few things in Logos before we start in-depth study.

Custom Reading Plans

Let’s start by creating a custom reading plan. Simply open the Documents Menu and choose Reading Plan. Here we can choose to follow a predefined reading plan, like “30 Days with Jesus,” or choose to setup a custom plan that fits our schedule and goals. We’ll create a reading plan on Matthew. Let’s click “Generate a Reading Plan,” give our reading plan a title, limit the range to the book of Matthew by typing “mat” in the New Reference Range box. We can now choose how we want Logos to divide the daily passages, by chapter or pericope. A pericope is a unit held together by one thought. Next, let’s choose our preferred version. We also want to consider how often we want to read and the time period in which we want to read it. Let’s choose to read something every day. Since this is a 30 day course and there are 28 chapters in Matthew, let’s choose 4 weeks. That will give us 28 days to complete the reading. If we want to read this portion of Scripture with others, we can easily share it with any Faithlife group we are part of. When we are done, let’s click “Start.”

Now, when we relaunch the Logos Desktop app to the home page, we’re reminded of today’s readings. Selecting the reminder will open our preferred Bible to today’s reading and provide us with helpful start and stop indicators to track our progress. And Logos reading plans are automatically synced between our desktop software, mobile apps, and app.logos.com account so we can take our daily Bible readings wherever we go. Plus, we can build a reading plan on any of our books, so if we want a custom reading plan through The Pilgrim’s Progress, Logos will keep us on track. Instead of choosing a Bible translation in the reading plan creator, we’ll choose the book we want to read.

Notes As we read through the text, we’ll want to keep track of our observations. Keep in mind that we are asking who, what, when, where, why, and how. When we find an answer to one of these questions, we’ll want to highlight the text or make a note. To do this, we will go to the documents menu and select notes, then give our note file a name. We’ll call our notes “Devotional Reading Notes” to distinguish them from other notes we make in the software. Now, let’s highlight the portion of text we want to comment on, right-click, select reference, and choose to add a note…then we’ll enter our comments.

Prayer Lists

Lastly, here’s how to create a prayer list. While prayer isn’t a technical step of Bible study, it is an important and foundational part of Bible study. If we believe that it is God who illuminates the text and changes our hearts when we read the text, we need to ask for His help. To create a prayer list, we’ll go to the documents menu and select Prayer List. Let’s give our prayer list a name. Now we can add a prayer by clicking on “Add prayer” at the top of the panel. Now, let’s give our prayer’s title and add any notes or tags. We can also choose how often we want to pray for this specific request. Let’s choose every weekday by clicking the checkbox by “Pray for this item,” changing “day” to “week,” and selecting the weekdays. Now, when we return to the homepage our prayer requests will show up next to our daily reading reminders. When our prayer is answered, we can return to our prayer list and add that answer.

Assignments

Here are your assignments:

• Start a reading plan for your devotional reading and begin using Logos for your daily Bible reading • Start a note file for your study of Matthew 4:1–11, begin reading the passage regularly, and start adding notes to your passage answering the investigative questions we spoke of earlier • Add at least five new prayer requests to your new prayer list and begin using the prayer list in your daily prayer time

Thanks for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed learning about reading plans, notes, and prayer lists.

In the next video, we talk about how to organize the books in your library, and arrange them on the screen for study.

DAY 2

Organize Your Library and Create Your Own Layout

Step 1 (cont.): Read the Passage in Its Context Several Times

In this video, I’ll show you how to search your Logos library, prioritize resources, and customize how Logos displays your resources. If you don’t have access to Logos, you can skip the first part of this video and move on to the insight we uncover half way through.

One of the benefits of owning a base package in Logos or subscribing via Logos Cloud is the library that comes with the software. Though you can do Bible study with just the Bible and a pad of paper, quality resources take advantage of insight God has given through the universal Church through the ages and around the globe. You’ll need to know how to access these resources to take full advantage of what you have in Logos.

Library Search

Let’s start by searching our library. Let’s click on the Library button to open a pane with all of our resources. The more specific we can be in our search the better our results will be. For example, if we’re looking for everything written by John Calvin in our library and type “Calvin” in the search box, we’ll get both the books written by Calvin and books that contain quotations from him. But, if we type “author:Calvin” we get only his works. We can use many of the words in this top row to make our searches more specific and we can right-click on this row and see more categories. For instance, if we wanted to find every Bible dictionary we own, we can input, “type:encyclopedia” since encyclopedia is what Logos has labeled Bible dictionaries as. We could also find all our commentaries by typing “type:commentary.” Let’s input “type:bible” to find all of our Bibles. We could add “AND language:English” to find just our English Bibles. Let’s open the Lexham English Bible by clicking on its title.

Two of the most helpful and up-to-date resources in our library are the Faithlife Study Bible and the Lexham Bible Dictionary. Let’s search for “title:Faithlife Study Bible.” If you know the abbreviation, you can use that instead. In this case, it’s “fsb.”

Prioritize Resources and Shortcuts

Let’s do two things with this resource. Let’s prioritize it by clicking “Prioritize” in the upper right and dragging this resource over to the list. This will ensure that the Faithlife Study Bible is one of the first places Logos directs you to when you’re looking for information. If you haven’t already, also prioritize your preferred Bible at the top of the list. Let’s also drag the Faithlife Study Bible to the shortcuts bar for future access.

Let’s also prioritize the Lexham Bible Dictionary and add it to our shortcut bar. Let’s open both resources next to our Bible. We can link the LEB to the Faithlife Study Bible by going to the Resource Panel menu and choosing “Linkset A” for both. Now, as we read through our text, the Faithlife Study Bible follows along. We can link other resources to our Bible if they are divided by verses, like commentaries. Notice what the Faithlife Study Bible says about our passage.

“The temptations Jesus encountered follow the same pattern as the Israelites’ disobedience in the desert. The Israelites demanded bread, doubted the Lord’s presence, and despaired of His help. Jesus reverses all of these acts of faithlessness.” This helps us understand the passage.

Clippings

If we want to collect helpful quotes like this one, we can start a Clipping file. Let’s highlight the sentences above, right-click on them and choose, “Add a clipping.” We’ll give this Clipping file the name “Quotations for Matthew 4.” We can access our clippings later by going to the Documents menu.

Next, double click on “tempter” in the Bible. Logos opens the Lexham Bible Dictionary to an article on Satan because you prioritized the Lexham Bible Dictionary. In this article we read that the temptation occurs “shortly after God declares Him to be His Son—Satan challenges this declaration. Through reliance on Scripture, Jesus overcomes Satan’s temptations and thereby proves Himself obedient to God’s will. Thus, He symbolically undoes the disobedience both of Eve in the garden and the Israelites in the wilderness.” Let’s add this quotation to our clippings document.

Layouts

You’ve essentially created a study Bible. Let’s save it is as a layout by clicking on “Layouts” in the upper right and naming it “Study Bible.” We can now come back to this Study Bible over and over again.

If you don’t own a base package from Logos, you can get the Logos core engine and add the Lexham English Bible, the Lexham Bible Dictionary, and the Faithlife Study Bible all for free at logos.com. These three resources are on the cutting edge of biblical scholarship. And, because they were developed as digital resources first, the benefit from constantly being updated.

Assignments

Here are your assignments:

• Read through Matthew 4:1–11 three times • Use the library type search to find your favorite Bibles, commentaries, Bible dictionaries, and lexicons and prioritize them in groups (first your top 5 Bibles, then your top 5 commentaries, etc.) • Add a shortcut for your favorite Bible • Create a layout with your favorite Bible beside your favorite commentary and link them together Thanks for watching. In the next video, we’ll cover what to look for when you take notes and highlights in your Bible.

DAY 3

Read the Passage Slowly and Mark It Up

Step 1 (cont.): Read the Passage in Its Context Several Times

Observation requires close attention to detail. One of the main skills in Bible study is simple, but not always easy: we need to read slowly. Slowing down is a major benefit of learning the original languages of the Bible. They make us slow down, but you don’t need to learn them to read the Bible slowly as you study.

So, as we read the passage we are studying, we must do so slowly. As we read, we’ll find it very helpful to mark up the text. We can do so easily by printing out of our passage or even using a paper copy of the Bible and a good set of colored pencils, but Logos makes marking up the text easy and accessible. One of the issues with paper printouts of Bible passages is accessibility. Sure, we can keep the copies in a notebook on a shelf, but we may never refer to them again. With Logos, we can highlight the text in any version of the Bible and we’ll have our work in front of us whenever we return to that passage in Logos, even when we aren’t near our bookshelves. If you are planning to use paper and colored pencils, you can skip to a later part of the video where I talk about what to look for.

Highlighting

To create a highlight, we’ll go to the Tools menu and choose “Highlighting.” We can choose any of the default options listed. Each option gives us different styles we can use to markup the text. Each set of styles is gathered into a palette. Let’s look at the default palettes to see how we can highlight the text. In “Emphasis Markup” we see that we can underline text, place it in all caps, and add boxes around it. The “Highlighter Pens” show us that we can highlight with very natural looking highlighting styles. The “Inductive” palette uses the highlighting scheme from Kay Arthur’s inductive Bible study method. Notice how she highlights important, recurring words in the biblical text.

When we create a highlight in any one of the default palettes, Logos adds that highlight to a note file that corresponds with that highlighting style’s name. This isn’t a huge problem, but if we highlight everything with the same palette, that note file will become quite large. Instead, let’s create a new palette and give it the name “Matthew 4 Highlights.” When we hover over our new pallet, a small drop-down arrow appears on the right. After we click it, we’ll hover over the “Save in” option and choose the note file you made for last video’s assignment. I entitled mine, “Matthew 4 Notes.” This will ensure that every portion of text we highlight will appear in our Matthew 4 note file. Now, let’s add a few styles by clicking on the drop-down arrow again and choosing “Add a new style.” We’ll give the new style a name and edit how we want the highlight to appear in our text. We can change the font, add a background (like a true highlight), choose texts effects, and many other options. For now, let’s use the red natural highlighter. Let’s save the style. Now when we hover over our new style, Logos presents us with a new drop-down arrow. When we click on it, we can choose a shortcut key if we would like. This is really helpful if we are using the same highlighting style over and over again. For now, we won’t choose a shortcut key. Now when we want to highlight something when we are reading the Bible, like Satan’s name, we’ll select the portion of text we want to call attention to and select the highlighting style we created. Now the text is highlighted and a note has been added to our Matthew 4 note file.

What to Look For

Let’s create highlighting styles for each of our investigative questions. Click on the dropdown arrow of the palette and choose “Add a New Style.” Give it the name “Who.” Expand “Insert Text” and in the Label text box under Text before type “Who.” Check the box beside “Capsule” and click Save at the top. Now do the same for each of our remaining investigative questions, “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “how.” Now read through Matthew 4:1-11 and begin adding these labels to the text.

Along with the answers to the investigative questions, what else should we be looking for? Scott Duvall and Daniel Hays provide a really helpful list in Grasping God’s Word. They recommend that we look for repeated words, contrasts, comparisons, lists, figures of speech, cause and effect statements, questions and answers, purpose statements, dialogue, conditional clauses, actions of God, actions of people, emotional terms, and shifts in the narrative. We should also pay special attention to the type of verbs, conjunctions, and pronouns the text uses. If you want more information on any of these elements in the text, I really recommend Duvall and Hays’ work.

As we read through, we can create a new highlight style in our palette for each thing we notice. For instance, we’ll notice that the phrase “it is written” is repeated multiple times in Matthew 4. We can create a special highlighting style for this repeated phrase.

Once we have finished looking through the text and marking it up, our Bible may look a little cluttered. That’s a good thing! But, there will be times when we simply want to read the biblical text—perhaps for our daily Bible reading or when we are reading the Bible with others. To turn off the highlights we just made, let’s go to the Visual Filter menu. Remember, our highlights are also in our notes file, so we can toggle all of our notes off and on or just the note file we made for Matthew 4. Now what we see is just the biblical text. We can just as easily turn our highlights back on.

Bible Text Only

We can go a step further make our Bible even cleaner for reading and studying. Let’s click on the Visual Filter menu and expand the menu item entitled “Resource.” We’ll also expand “Bible text only.” When we toggle “Bible text only” on and have no other boxes checked under it, we’ll only have the biblical text—no verse numbers, chapter numbers or footnotes. This is really helpful for us when we want to read the Bible as literature. Chapter and verse divisions were added many years after the original text was written.

Assignments

Now it’s your turn: • Read through Matthew 4:1–11 slowly at least three times and answer the investigative questions • Additionally, create new highlighting styles for the important elements of the text, like repeated words or phrases, and markup the text • Start a highlighting palette for your devotional reading (you can call it “Devotional Reading Notes”), connect it to your new note file, and start making highlights as you read through Matthew during your daily reading

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to practice these foundational steps of study. In the next video, we’ll talk about how to identify the important themes in our passage.

DAY 4

Identify and Research the Main Themes

Step 2: Identify Important Themes in the Passage and Connect Them to the Broad Themes of the Bible

Hi, and welcome back. The second step in the observation stage is to identify the important themes in the passage we are studying and connect those themes to the broad themes of the Bible. There are multiple ways of choosing what to study, but people either start with a topic or a passage. In this video series we are assuming that we already have a passage in mind to study, Matthew 4, but that is not always the case.

Let’s imagine that we are helping a close friend who is battling temptation in his or her life. We know that the Bible says a lot about temptation and that Jesus was tempted by the devil and did not fall into sin. But what if we don’t know where to find that information about temptation? We could look in the concordance of your print Bible, but the information there isn’t prioritized and it’s limited. We could do a search on the internet, but you aren’t guaranteed quality results. Our best bet is to check a Bible dictionary or encyclopedia for the topic. Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias include short articles that cover biblical topics, people, events, and objects. They also often include Scriptural references that are connected to the topic we are studying. So, as we study a passage of the Bible, we should identify the major themes in it and then look for those themes in a Bible dictionary.

Logos makes this process easier.

Go Box—Entering a Topic

The Go Box is one of the fastest ways to access information on a topic or passage. Our software opens to the Home page by default and the Go Box is in the upper left of the Home page.

Let’s type “temptation” into the Go Box and press Enter. Immediately Logos opens the Bible to the account of Jesus’ temptation in Matthew 4 along with informative articles from Bible dictionaries. Additionally, it opens several reports on the topic of temptation. With the Go Box in Logos, our results are both exhaustive and trustworthy. And it would have taken much more time to accumulate this information if we were searching through physical books.

Depending on what library you have access to, the Bible dictionaries that appear may be different. It will also depend on what dictionaries you prioritize in your library.

Let’s look at the Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology. It says, “In general, testing and temptation are facts within God’s world and constitute some of the tools through which He is bringing to fulfillment His redemptive purpose.” The New Bible Dictionary, a highly respected Bible dictionary, states “The biblical idea of temptation is not primarily of seduction, as in modern usage, but of making trial of a person, or putting him to the test; which may be done for the benevolent purpose of proving or improving his quality, as well as with the malicious aim of showing up his weaknesses or trapping him into wrong action.”

This information sheds light on the nature of temptation and may help us as we speak to our friend. Let’s add these quotations to the clippings document we started early. Also included in our results is a list of related verses. This section of the topic guide points us to other relevant passages where our topic of study is discussed in Scripture.

To get back to the Home screen with the Go Box, we’ll simply click the Home screen button.

Assignments

Here are your assignments:

• Continue reading through the Bible dictionary articles and add at least five more clippings to your clipping file on temptation • Read through the related verses and add observations to your note file on Matthew 4 • Use the Go Box to find information on another important theme or person you have observed in Matthew 4:1–11

Thanks for joining us! See you tomorrow when we look further into the biblical theme of temptation.

DAY 5

Broaden Your Knowledge about Biblical Themes

Step 2 (cont.): Identify Important Themes in the Passage and Connect Them to the Broad

Themes of the Bible

One of the many reasons for reading slowly through the passage we are studying is to identify the major themes in the passage. As you’ve read through it several times already, I hope you’ve been able to identify the major themes in Matthew 4 and made notes about those themes. But how do we find extensive information related to the main topic we are studying? If you are not using Logos, you can find such information by diligently looking through various commentaries and Bible dictionaries. This is important work for good Bible study. A broad knowledge of biblical themes really helps us understand the narrow focus in our passage. Fortunately, Logos makes finding related topics easy.

In the last video, we used the Go Box to access information on the subject of temptation. When we search for a word in the Go Box, Logos runs 3 reports. The Topic Guide gives you information that helps you understand a topic. The Sermon Guide provides you with resources that will help you apply and communicate a topic or passage. And, if you are studying a specific word, the Bible Word Study analyzes the word you are studying by providing background information and definitions. Each guide is segmented into different sections full of information and can be accessed independently of the Go Box by using the Guides menu. We’ll come back to the Bible Word Study Guide in another video. For now, let’s focus on the key elements of the Topic Guide and the Sermon Starter Guide.

Topic Guide

The Topic section in the Topic Guide provides us with a quick definition from one of the Bible Dictionaries in our library, links to other Bible dictionaries, and additional searches. We can also access sermons, illustrations, and media that apply to our study.

Sermon Starter Guide

Let’s look at the Sermon Starter Guide. While this guide was designed with the pastor in mind, it holds useful information for everyone. In the preaching resources section you’ll find quotations about temptation and helpful commentaries with practical application. The passages section expands the related verses section with “Pericopes.” Here we’ll an extensive list of sections of the Bible, not just verses, that relate to our main theme.

Thematic Outlines

One of the most helpful sections is the Thematic Outlines section. Scholars at Logos have outlined important themes and topics and provided Scripture references for each point. Expand “Temptation and Jesus Christ.” Here we find a detailed list with Scripture references of the temptations Jesus faced. When we think about Jesus and temptation, we typically think of the three temptations He experienced in the wilderness. This thematic outline shows us that He was also tempted to avoid the cross and please His listeners. We also learn that we can identify with Jesus and have confidence when we face temptation. All of these entries are followed by references from Scripture. Let’s add a note about this by right clicking on verse 1, selecting the reference, and adding a note to our Matthew 4 note file.

With the Topic Guide and the Sermon Starter Guide we have access to a wealth of knowledge about our selected topic of interest. Specifically helpful are the Thematic Outlines.

Assignments

Here are your assignments:

• Explore the Factbook links under the theme section of the Sermon Starter Guide and add the insights you find to your note file on Matthew 4 • Explore at least three additional thematic outlines and record your findings in your note file

See you tomorrow when we take the next step in our Bible study method.

DAY 6

Explore the Differences between Translations

Step 3: Compare English Translations

Today we are going to look at the interaction and textual differences between Bible translations.

A third step in Bible study is to compare English translations of the passage. Translations can be considered a basic form of commentary. Whether we realize it or not, the translators of Scripture have to make interpretive decisions. It is impossible to translate from one language to another without interpreting at a basic level. There are no word-for-word translations. If you know more than one language, you know that it is impossible to translate a long string of text word-for-word. That fact shouldn’t shake our confidence in the translations of the Bible we have. The level of commentary that translators make is small and that’s what makes comparing translations really helpful. We can find differences between translations and therefore find differences in interpretation and other nuances of language. In the past, we would have to accumulate several different translations and go through the tedious work of looking back and forth between them. Logos makes the task of translation comparison much simpler.

Go Box—Entering a Passage

Remember how we can type a topic or passage into the Go Box to start our search? When we type “Mat 4” into the Go Box, a list of suggested topics appears. Let’s choose “The Temptation of Jesus.” When we press Enter, the amount of information Logos returns is even more impressive than when we entered a topic into the Go Box. The different panels on our screen will help us accomplish one of the key steps in the observation stage of studying the Bible— comparing different Bible translations.

Parallel Resources

To compare Bible translations, we can select the Bible’s tab and then press either our Left or Right Arrow keys. We can skip directly to another Bible by clicking the Parallel Resources icon and selecting the version we are interested in. We can do this with most any resource in your library, like commentaries and dictionaries. When we type a Scripture reference in the Go Box, Logos also opens multiple translations in tabs behind the ESV, so we could compare translations by clicking on the different Bible tabs.

Text Comparison Tool

To really see the differences between the texts, let’s use the Text Comparison Tool in the bottom right of our screen. We can access it independently of the Go Box by clicking the Tools menu. Let’s open it in a floating window by clicking on the resource panel menu and selecting “Float this panel.” At the top of the screen we can choose what translations we want to compare by typing the abbreviation of our favorite translations separated by a comma. We can also choose how we want to display the differences. When we click on the blue “A,” the differences between the main version on the left and the other versions are highlighted in blue. When we click on the marked through “A,” Logos adds the main translation differences to the other translations with slash through the text. To change the main version of comparison, we can change which translation appears first in the lists of translations at the top. When we look through differences highlighted in the King James text we find that Jesus says, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” in verse 7. When we look at the ESV, we find the word “test.” This difference alerts us to what may be an important point to study.

Information Panel

We can find out more information about this word by hovering your mouse over the Bible version open in our main screen and looking at the information panel. The information panel is full of information that changes as we hover over different words.

Let’s hover over “tempt” and we’ll see the Greek word is peirazo. We will find that the Greek word for “test” is ekpeirazo. This shows us that both words come from the same root, peira, which shows us why the KJV translators chose the same word, “tempt”—they were emphasizing the similarity of the two words. It also shows that the word “tempt” has a broad range of meanings in English and Greek—which shows us why the ESV translators chose different words.

Let’s add a note about this by right-clicking any word in verse 7, selecting the reference, and selecting “Add a note.” Rename the note file and add your note.

Assignments

Now it’s your turn to find more differences in the translation:

• Find at least two more significant differences between translations and add them to your note file • Change the translations you are comparing and see what other differences you can find

You’re doing great. In the next session, we’ll begin to discover why context is so important to understanding our passage.

DAY 7

Explore the Literary Context

Step 4: Explore the Passage’s Literary and Intertextual Context

Step 4 in our Bible study method starts our exploration into the context of the passage we are studying. There are four contexts we need to be sensitive to when we study the Bible: the literary context, the intertextual context, the historical context, and the cultural context. Our fourth step is to explore the first two: the literary context and the intertextual context of the passage. We’ll talk about the literary context in this video and the intertextual context in the following videos.

The literary context involves two main areas of exploration: genre and the surrounding context. In order to interpret a passage in the Bible correctly, we must determine what kind of genre our passage is. Law, like Leviticus, is interpreted differently than poetry, like Psalms. Narrative, like Judges, is approached differently than epistolary writings, like Romans.

Two very accessible books that explain the different categories of genre in the Bible are Basic Bible Interpretation by Roy Zuck and How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth by Gordon Fee. Both are available from Logos and come highly recommended. Zuck’s descriptions of genre are brief and understandable. Fee’s are more extensive, including entire chapters devoted to each genre. For instance, Fee states, “Because of the unique nature of the gospels, … one must do two things here: think horizontally, and think vertically.” As Fee later states, reading the gospels horizontally, or comparing them to each other, is important, but cannot be our main approach to them. Each gospel writer had a theological purpose for his gospel and simply comparing the gospels to one another misses the individuality and point the gospel writer is making. Fee continues, “To think vertically means that when reading or studying a narrative or teaching in the gospels, one should try to be aware of both historical contexts—that of Jesus and that of the evangelist.” Finding the gospel writer’s intention for where and how they included the words and sayings of Jesus in their respective gospels is really important. Fee concludes with a really helpful illustration that you can check out if you own this resource.

If we want to find out what category of genre the passage we are studying falls into, most commentaries will point us in the right direction and give us recommendations on how to approach the passage as part of that genre.

Factbook—Bible Book Guides

The Factbook’s Bible book guides are the best place to get information on Bible books. We won’t be able to use the Go Box or the context menu to get to them, but if we can remember they exist in the Factbook, we’ll be able to access them easily. In the Tools menu, select “Factbook.” Then type Matthew into the search box. The resulting report takes information from the introductory portions of our commentaries and organizes it into distinct sections. We will look at the other sections in this report in a future video, so let’s concentrate on the form section. Notice under “Style,” the Word Biblical Commentary, one of the best commentaries on Matthew, has a section on “The Genre and Purpose of Matthew.” Donald Hagner states that the genre of Matthew is Gospel and defines this genre by stating that “Fundamentally, a Gospel proclaims the good news concerning the saving activity of God.” He then provides six other options: midrash, lectionary, catechesis, church correctives, missionary propaganda, and polemic against the rabbis. He concludes, “This variety of options concerning the genre of Matthew indicates something of its multifaceted character. Several of these explanations may well be equally true. The evangelist could have had several purposes. This much at least is clear: Matthew is a ‘community book,’ written to a considerable extent in order to meet the immediate needs of the evangelist’s church or churches during the interim period between the historical events narrated and the return of Christ. In particular, … the evangelist intends to help his Jewish-Christian readers understand their new faith as in continuity with the faith of their ancestors, as the fulfillment of the Scriptures, and as the beginning of the realization of the hope of Israel. The author wrote, above all, for the Church to interpret the Christ-event but also to instruct and edify the Christians of his own and future generations.” Let’s add this to our clippings document.

The second area of literary context is the surrounding context. Context determines meaning, both at the word level and at the sentence and paragraph level. Therefore, spending time studying how our passage fits in the overall story or argument of the book is essential. The first way to do this is reading the entire book in which your passage appears several times. Another way to get the overall argument or flow of the book is to read a summary in an Old Testament or New Testament Introduction. The most well-known introductions are An Introduction to the Old Testament by Tremper Longman and Ray Dillard and An Introduction to the New Testament by D. A. Carson and Douglas Moo. As you can see, Carson and Moo have an ample section giving you the flow of the book of Matthew. They also have an edited version of the text entitled Introducing the New Testament.

Passage Guide

Let’s conclude the video by quickly surveying the Passage and Exegetical Guides. They should already be open from when you typed Matthew 4 into the Go Box. If not, you can also access them by using the Guides menu at the top.

The Passage Guide is a report full of information about the background, context, structure, and key elements of a passage. The Commentaries section links directly to every commentary that discusses our passage. The Cross References, like the Parallel Passages section, directs us to other passages in the Bible that scholars believe are connected in some way. The Literary Typing section tells us what genre of Scripture our passage falls into and the Cultural Concepts section alerts us to relevant differences between our culture and the culture of the original audience. Biblical Places, People, Things, and Events connect us to important details that help us observe the text. The media sections alert us to stunning artwork, detailed timelines, beautiful quotation slides, valuable video content, and extraordinary artwork and photography.

Exegetical Guide Now, let’s look at the Exegetical Guide. The Exegetical Guide is the more scholarly of the two. It includes sections on textual variants that highlight the differences between biblical manuscripts, grammars that point to key elements in the original languages, visualizations that organize the text for us, and a Word by Word section that gives detailed information about each word in the original language, complete with definitions, pronunciation, parsing, and links to Bible Word Studies.

As you can see, Logos has done hours of research for you and arranged the results for you to study.

Assignments

Here are your assignments:

• Find a book in your library that talks about genres, read the section on the genre of Gospel, and add your findings to the clippings document (hint: search your library for “hermeneutics” or “interpretation”) • Continue to explore the Factbook’s Bible book guide on Matthew (especially the form section) and add three insights you find to the clippings document • Spend some time familiarizing yourself with the sections in the Passage and Exegetical Guides

If any of this seems technical or intimidating, don’t be discouraged. The next few videos will shed more light on how context can help uncover the meaning in a passage. If you need help, please contact the Pro team at [email protected].

DAY 8

Explore the Intertextual Context: Parallel Passages

Step 4 (cont.): Explore the Passage’s Literary and Intertextual Context

Welcome back! In the last video, we investigated the literary context of Matthew 4:1–11. This video will begin our look at the intertextual context. While studying the literary context we looked at the genre of the passage and the immediate context surrounding the passage we are studying. The intertextual context includes passages in the rest of Scripture that are somehow related. The strongest connections are passages that quote our passage, passages quoted within our passage, and parallel passages (for example, Luke’s parallel account of the temptation). Most Bibles include cross-references. Cross-references are a great place to start, but the results from Logos are much more inclusive.

Passage Section of the Passage Guide

First, we’ll compare the differences between the different gospels’ accounts of the temptation. Our goal is not to try to combine them together in order to come up with a more complete version of the account. Our goal is to compare them to see what each gospel writer emphasizes in his account.

Let’s go back to the Passage Guide, which should already be open from when you typed the passage into the Go Box. If it isn’t, highlight Matthew 4:1–11 and right-click in the highlighted section. Select Matthew 4:1–11: Reference and then select Passage Guide on the left. The Parallel Passages section of the Passage Guide is extremely helpful for any text, but it’s particularly helpful if we want to compare an account that appears in one Gospel to the parallel text in another.

Harmony Resources

We notice the titles of different harmony resources. A harmony is a work in which a scholar goes through parallel passages of Scripture and lines them up. For this video, we’ll use Sharman’s Records of the Life of Jesus because we can choose which translations of the Bible to use and its layout helps us see the differences a little more easily.

As we survey the differences, we immediately notice two things: the brevity of Mark’s account and the difference in order of the temptations between Matthew and Luke. We can speculate about why the order of the temptation is different in the two books, but some scholars believe that Luke wanted the culmination of the temptation event to be in Jerusalem thus emphasizing Luke’s major theme revolving around Jerusalem. Matthew may have wanted to emphasize the devil’s questioning of Jesus’ sonship in the first two temptations and place them closer to God’s declaration of Jesus’ sonship in Matthew 3. While it’s difficult to know exactly why Matthew used the order he did, his emphasis on Jesus’ relationship with the Father adds to our understanding of Matthew’s purpose. Matthew’s primary goal in his account of Jesus’ temptation is not to provide us with an example of how to fight temptation, though that is probably one of Matthew’s purposes. His primary goal is to show us how Jesus, as God’s Son, succeeded in obedience where Israel, as God’s son, failed.

Let’s add a note to our note file on Matthew 4 by highlighting the verses that speak about the temptations, right clicking on the highlighted text, choosing the reference range, and clicking “Add a note to Matthew 4 Notes.” If we’ve had another note file open between now and the time we last used our Matthew 4 Notes file, we’ll have to go to the documents menu and open it for the “Add a note” feature to work in the context menu.

Parallel Gospel Reader

The Parallel Gospel Reader, available in Logos Now and Cloud, gives us even more control of how we view our results. It allows us to quickly switch between our harmony resources and allows us to choose which Gospels to compare. For instance, I can choose to compare only Matthew and Luke.

Old Testament Quotations and Allusions

Now, let’s go back to the Parallel Passages section in the Passage Guide. In the Old Testament Quotations and Allusions in the New Testament section, Logos alerts us to the connection between the temptation narrative and Deuteronomy 8:3, “And He humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.” Jesus responds to Satan by quoting this passage. Many Christians have equated Jesus’ emphasis on man’s necessity for God’s “every word” in this passage with the importance of the spiritual nourishment that comes from reading Scripture. If we study the passage Jesus is quoting, we find that the “Word of God” that man is supposed to live by is God’s promise of provision. In other words, we are to trust God the Father for physical nourishment.

Jesus’ experience in the wilderness was like that of the Israelites. It was a place of solitude and scarcity. He may have felt abandoned by God and tempted to provide for His own needs just like the Israelites were tempted to provide for their own needs. But Jesus, unlike the Israelites, resisted temptation and fully relied on His Father. Again, the passage is much less about us, and much more about Jesus. The point we should take away from Jesus’ quotation is not, “I should read my Bible more,” but “Look at how Jesus trusted His Father on my behalf. I believe His obedience and faith in life and death are enough to make me right with God.” In the gospel, our call is toward faith in Jesus Who trusted God perfectly, in His performance for us, not toward our own performance. Let’s make a note with this idea by right clicking on verse 4, choosing the reference, and selecting “Add a note to Matthew 4 Notes.”

In some of the conclusions we’ve drawn in this video we’ve moved from observation to interpretation a bit. While we should avoid making that jump as much as possible while we are in the observation stage, I decided to add these conclusions because we won’t get back to these specific instances later on in the course. If you want more harmony resources, Logos developed a collection of resources called the Parallel Passages Collection. You can check it out at logos.com.

Assignments

Here are your assignments:

• Use either a harmony resource or the Parallel Gospel Reader to find additional differences between the accounts of the temptation and record at least three in your note file • Use either the cross references in your Bible or the Parallel Passages section in the Passage Guide to find out what other passages are quoted in Matthew 4 and read them in their context to see if you’ve misunderstood why Jesus and Satan were quoting what they did • Look at the other passages that are connected to Matthew 4 and record your observations in the note file

You’re doing great! In the next video, we’ll do the exciting work of showing how themes in this passage connect with other texts in the Bible.

DAY 9

Explore the Intertextual Context: Intertestamental Connections

Step 4 (cont.): Explore the Passage’s Literary and Intertextual Context

Matthew 4:1–11 connects to several important passages. One of them is Psalm 91, the psalm the devil quotes. Let’s spend some time with this psalm so we can better understand why the tempter’s use of it wasn’t convincing to Jesus.

Psalms Explorer

This video will show you how to use the Psalms Explorer to find detailed information about Psalm 91. There is nothing out there like the Psalms Explorer, but if you aren’t using Logos you can use a good commentary to get some background data on the psalm. Regardless, I suggest watching through this whole video to see the insight we find.

As we read through the passage, we’ll notice Jesus isn’t the only one to quote Scripture. Let’s hover our mouse over the superscripted letter in verse 6. It tells us the devil is quoting from Psalm 91:11–12. Why did the devil use this text? Why didn’t Jesus find the devil’s use of this psalm convincing enough to throw Himself off of the pinnacle and see His Father’s deliverance? The Psalms Explorer is perfect for uncovering information about the psalms.

From the Tools menu, let’s choose “Psalms Explorer” on the right-hand side. We can see all of our interactive resources by clicking on “All interactive resources.”

When the Psalms Explorer opens, we see a beautiful display of the Psalms categorized by genre and visualized by length—the larger the circle, the longer the Psalm. We can also arrange the Psalms by structure and by author. Additionally we can arrange them by book—the book of Psalms is arranged into five subsections called books. Psalms 1–41 form book 1, Psalms 42–72 form book 2, etc.

To find Psalm 91, let’s arrange the Psalms in order. We find that Psalm 91 has a light blue circle beside it. This circle indicates the genre of the Psalm. When we arrange the Psalms by genre again, we notice that the Psalms of Trust are the smallest genre. To better understand this Psalm, we should read the other Psalms of Trust. We can further filter out Psalms by using the menu on the left to find Psalms that deal with a particular theme or are attributed to a particular person.

Click the circle labeled “91” to get information about this Psalm. It falls into Book 4 of the Psalms and its author is anonymous, though the Septuagint, or the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, attributes it to David. Notice also that it uses strophes as its structure. If we click “About,” we learn that a strophe is a unit of “lines grouped into thematic units, somewhat akin to paragraphs.” Logos provides us with titles for each strophe and shows where parallelism occurs and what type of parallelism exists. As we read through the Psalm with the headings Logos provides, we notice this Psalm applies to the person “who dwells in the shelter of the Most High.” That definitely applied to Jesus during His life on earth, but what does not apply is the devil’s application of the Psalm. He was encouraging Jesus to brashly force God’s protective hand. As we see in the verses that Satan quotes, the Psalm was written to encourage God’s people to rely on His protection, not demand or test it. The strophe titles summarize verses 10–12 as “God guards from harm,” verses 13–15 as “God will answer and rescue,” and verse 16 as “God saves.” As verse two states, God is a refuge from the difficulties and dangers that can befall His people as a result of living in a sin- cursed world. The implication of this truth is not to fear. The implication is not to test God’s protection and care. Let’s add what we learned to our note file by right clicking on verse 6, choosing the reference, and clicking “Add a note to Matthew 4 Notes.”

I hope you are recognizing the value of looking at the intertextual context of passages we study. They help us understand the meaning of the passage because we are able to study how the biblical writers understood and applied other portions of Scripture.

Assignments

Here are your assignments:

• Read the other Psalms of Trust and add any insights into Psalm 91 and Matthew 4 to your note file • Use the Psalms Explorer to study the categories, structure, and parallelism of three of these Psalms of Trust and add any insights you observe to the note file

That wraps up our discussion on textual context. Next, we’ll get to see how considering a passage in its own history and location can add nuance to our understanding.

DAY 10

Explore the Historical Context of the Event: Geography and Time

Step 5: Explore the Passage’s Historical and Cultural Context

We’ve looked at the literary and intertextual context of Matthew 4. During the next three days we’ll look at some of the historical context. After that, we’ll move into the cultural context.

The historical context of a passage is its chronological and geographical setting. Where did it take place? When did it take place?

In his Mobile Ed course, Learn to Study the Bible, Darrell Bock explains that there are two types of historical context: “There’s the historical context—the setting of the book and the setting of the event that’s being depicted, and those aren’t the same things. A book is written after the event to talk about something that happened earlier, so when you’re dealing with historical context, you’re actually dealing with two things simultaneously: the historical context of the event that’s being described—or perhaps you’re in poetry or something like that, the setting into which the praise or the hymn falls—and the time of the book that’s being written, and where this piece falls in the literary sequence of the book.”

For example, the historical events that Matthew writes about are separated in time from the historical situation of Matthew and his audience when he wrote. The difference is even greater between the events of Genesis and historical situation of its writer, Moses.

Today and tomorrow, we’ll look at the historical context of the actual event. The day after, we’ll go on to the historical context of the book.

We’ll start with the geography.

Atlas

The Passage Guide should already be open from when we typed the reference in the Go Box. If it isn’t, we can use the Guides menu to open up a new Passage Guide. Let’s find the Atlas section. When we click on the map’s thumbnail, Logos opens the Atlas tool. We can also access the Atlas through the Tools menu.

With the Atlas tool we can view a broad map of the biblical world at different times in history, and detailed maps of specific events, like the account we are studying. We can find maps with the search box in the upper left-hand side of the Atlas. We can even search based on Scripture reference and people. If we want to measure the distance between two different locations, we can hold the Control button (Command button on a Mac), click the mouse, and drag it between locations. For example, we can find how far Jerusalem is from Nazareth.

In the upper left-hand side of the map, we can open an information pane that shows us the map’s legend. The orange line represents the route Jesus took from Nazareth to be baptized by John. The green line represents the probable place in which He was tempted. There are even links to a Factbook report on the Pinnacle and Herod’s Temple. We can export this map to our presentation software by opening the panel menu and even click on a link that shows us a modern map of the area.

Biblical Event Navigator

The map’s legend also includes links to related events. When we click on “Satan tempts Jesus in the desert,” Logos opens a Factbook report on this event. We’ll expand the Events section and click “Open Biblical Event Navigator.” This interactive shows Biblical events arranged in chronological order. Interactive resources are tools that visualize the data in our software that we can interact with. We can access the Biblical Event Navigator and all our interactive resources by going to the Tools menu.

The first thing we notice is that the event we are studying occurs at the “Beginning of Jesus’ public ministry.” When we click on “Jesus’ ministry begins,” we see additional events in the timeline. We see that Jesus’ temptation occurs right after He was baptized. John proclaims Him to be the Messiah and God the Father declares Him to be His beloved Son.

Many scholars argue that this order of events is significant because these events in Jesus’ early ministry mirror the events in Israel’s early history. Jesus’ return from Egypt mirrored God’s deliverance of Israel from Egypt. Jesus’ baptism is associated with Israel’s passage through the sea in the Exodus and His temptation in the wilderness is connected to Israel’s wilderness wanderings. The fact that the three passages of Scripture that Jesus quotes are from Deuteronomy adds to the connection. The events after the temptation are also significant. After being tested in the wilderness, Jesus crosses back over the Jordan just as Joshua and the Israelites did before conquering the promised land. Matthew makes a point of mentioning the Jordan in verses 15 and 16 by quoting Isaiah Isaiah 9:1–2. Jesus then calls the twelve disciples—a further connection to the twelve tribes of Israel.

In his excellent commentary in the New International Commentary on the New Testament series, R. T. France states, “Now another ‘Son of God’ is in the wilderness, this time for forty days rather than forty years, as a preparation for entering his divine calling …. Israel’s occupation of the promised land was at best a flawed fulfillment of the hopes with which they came to the Jordan, but now this new ‘Son of God’ will not fail and the new Exodus will succeed …. It is probably also significant that the passage of Deuteronomy from which Jesus’ responses are drawn begins with the Shema; … it is precisely that total commitment to God that this wilderness experience is designed to test.”

In Jesus’ temptation, we find God’s beloved Son passing the test that Israel, whom God called His son in Deuteronomy 14:1 and Matthew 2:15, did not pass. Jesus then crosses the Jordan bringing light into a land of darkness. Let’s add these thoughts to our notes.

We’ve again moved from what the passage says, observation, to what the passage means, interpretation. We don’t want to make this a habit in our own Bible study, but because we may not get back to these concepts, we’ll do a little interpreting early in this course. The New International Commentary on the Old and New Testaments that we referenced earlier is one of the best modern commentaries ever produced. If you are looking for a comprehensive, contemporary, and accessible commentary on the whole Bible, you should definitely consider this resource.

Assignments

You are doing great and you are a third of the way through the course. Here are your assignments:

• Use the Atlas tool and the Biblical Event Navigator to research the places and events directly preceding and following the temptation narrative and record your insights in the note file • Use the Biblical Event Navigator to look at the events early in Israel’s history, compare them to the events in Jesus’ life, and record any further similarities in your note file

Tomorrow we’ll observe a couple of specific elements related to the historical context of Jesus’ temptation. See you then!

DAY 11

Explore the Historical Context of the Event: Physical Setting

Step 5 (cont.): Explore the Passage’s Historical and Cultural Context

Today we continue to observe the passage by researching the historical context of the events described in Matthew 4.

A key part of doing Bible study is researching things you don’t know. This is especially true regarding the historical context. We are separated from the events and writing of the Bible by thousands of years and from the land of the Bible by thousands of miles. This is especially true of those of us living in the Western World. We shouldn’t assume that we know what a writer means when he refers to a place or event. For instance, when the tempter takes Jesus to the holy city and to the temple, we shouldn’t assume we have a firm grasp of where those places are. Which temple was this? Solomon’s Temple? Zerubbabel’s Temple? Ezekiel’s Temple? Herod’s Temple?

Bible dictionaries are great places to find answers for these types of questions. A good study Bible or commentary should also help. So, if you aren’t using Logos, those resources would be great places to start. Logos makes finding historical information and accessing quality resources simple.

Biblical Places

Let’s right-click on the word “temple” in verse 5. We notice the words “Herod’s Temple” near the bottom of the right hand column of the context menu. In one simple click, we’ve answered our question. If we didn’t know what city “holy city” was referring to, we could right-click on that term and immediately find our answer. When we click on the entry for Herod’s Temple, we’re presented with a number of options. The options on the left-hand side of the context menu are always dependent on what you have selected on the right-hand side.

We can choose to go back to the Atlas to find where the temple was located.

We can search for Herod’s temple in the Bible we’re using or in our entire library. When we choose to search the Bible, we get only the results for Herod’s Temple. If we searched for “temple” in a normal concordance we would get results for all the temples in the Bible; physical and non-physical, temples devoted to God and temples devoted to idols. Logos returned a result from Matthew 12:4 where the word “temple” isn’t even used.

We also get convenient links to the Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias in our library. One click will take us to related articles like this one in the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary that discusses the place of temples in the ancient Near East. When we click on the link in this dictionary to “Temple, Jerusalem,” Logos takes us to an extensive article that details the temples of the Bible: Solomon’s Temple, Zerubbabel’s Temple, which was renovated by Herod and is often called the Second Temple, and a future temple described in Revelation. At the time of its publication, the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary was said to be “the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and authoritative reference work in the field.” It is a standard Bible dictionary and well worth adding to your library if you haven’t already. Let’s add this information to our note file.

Faithlife Study Bible Infographics

Now, let’s click on the Factbook link in the context menu. There’s a ton of good information here, but let’s scroll down to the Library results where we’ll organize our results “By Resource.” When we expand the Faithlife Study Bible Infographics, we find graphics that help us understand the size of the temple compared to Solomon’s Temple and an American football field. We can also see the temple’s place on the Temple Mount, and the different elements of the temple. When we right-click on these images and choose Visual Copy, we can easily use these graphics in a presentation or we can share them with others.

Before and After Interactive

Now, let’s expand the Before and After section in the library results of the Factbook. We see a picture of the Temple Mount. When we click on the word “Jerusalem” above it we are taken to the Before and After Interactive. (This interactive, along with all the other interactives, are also available in the Tools menu.) We’ll navigate to the one called Jerusalem. Here we see an artist’s reconstruction of the Temple Mount. We can use the slider to see what the Temple Mount looks like now and what it looked like at the time of Jesus. This helps us see how massive the Temple Complex really was. It dominated the Jerusalem landscape.

Let’s look at one more element of the text related to the temple, the pinnacle.

Everything Search

When digging into Scripture, sometimes we want narrow results on a very specific topic. Other times we want as many results as possible. The Everything search is perfect for these latter situations.

From the passage in Matthew, let’s highlight the phrase “pinnacle of the temple” and right-click on the highlight. We notice that there is a biblical thing entry for “pinnacle,” so we could easily do what we did for “temple” earlier, but let’s use the Everything search instead. We’ll make sure “pinnacle of the temple” is selected, and choose “Search: everything.”

Logos returns a lot of information. Let’s start at the bottom of the report where most of the search results are listed. Our library shows every time the phrase “pinnacle of the temple” occurs in our resources in Logos. We’ll sort through our results by Ranked. Near the top of the list is a link to the Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary article on the “Pinnacle.” We find that it was possibly “the southeastern corner of the royal colonnade that overlooked the Kidron Valley.” It could have also been a “balcony above one of the temple gates.” Tradition says that James, Jesus’ brother, was martyred by being thrown off the pinnacle, clubbed, and stoned. The article includes a picture of the corner of the temple complex believed to be the pinnacle. Included in our library results are video resources like Mobile Ed content. In this video on the significance of the temple’s location, Andrew Pitts says, “The significance of the temple is debated among commentators. It could be connected with rabbinic teaching that associated the Messiah with signs in the temple. Bock’s suggestion, however, seems more likely, due to the fact that the rabbinic tradition here is late. Bock says, ‘The temple is a locale that pictures God’s closeness. It is where he is to be found as a refuge of protection. Surely if God will rescue anyone, he will do so at the temple where he is said to dwell.’” We’ll add these thoughts to our note file.

Assignments

Here are your assignments:

• Research why Matthew used the term “holy city” instead of Jerusalem by looking at the intertextual context of the term and record any insights you find • Go to the Tools menu, click on “All interactive resources,” open the “Interactive Infographics from the Faithlife Study Bible,” and explore the different elements of Solomon’s Temple • Perform an Everything search on an important word or phrase in Matthew 4:1–11 and record any insights that help you understand the historical context of the passage better

Today we interacted with some of Logos’ most rewarding features. Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the historical background of the book of Matthew itself.

DAY 12

Explore the Historical Context of the Writer

Step 5 (cont.): Explore the Passage’s Historical and Cultural Context

In the last two days we spent a good deal of time researching the historical context of the events Matthew described in his gospel. Today, we’ll look at the second part of the historical context, that of the writer and his audience.

We want to uncover who wrote the text we are studying. We also want to find out why, when, where, and to whom it was written. Finding out this information will help us understand the intent of the passage.

As we’ve noted in the past, Bible dictionaries, commentaries, and introductions to the Bible are great places for finding information on the historical context of the passage. Logos’ Factbook compiles the information you need into a central place for easy access.

Factbook—Bible Book Guides

We’ve accessed the Factbook’s Bible book guides in a previous video to look at the genre of the passage. They contain much more information that will help us understand the historical context of the writer and the audience to whom he was writing. We can easily access the Factbook from the Tools menu or from the context menu. Let’s change the report to the book of Matthew by typing “Matthew” in the search box and selecting “Gospel of Matthew: Writing.” Here we can explore the origin (who wrote it, when he wrote it, and why he wrote it), background (including the recipients), place in the canon, and meaning of the book of Matthew. Before getting into interpreting the text, it is absolutely essential for us to know this background information. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of data here, but if we can read one short article from each section, we’ll have a good grasp of the necessary information we need to understand the Gospel of Matthew as a whole. We can simply click one of the links, read the article, and add the important information we find to our clippings document. The most beneficial element of these book guides is the accumulation of multiple perspectives concerning each issue. In the past, we would have to open multiple commentaries and Bible dictionaries to compare the different views. Logos makes diving into these resources really convenient. We may not spend less time studying the passage, but the time we do spend will be on reading the material instead of flipping pages just to access it.

Biblical Theology

Let’s pause our survey of the Bible Book Guides, and think about biblical theology. Biblical theology seeks to understand the theology, emphases, and themes of the different books and writers of Scripture and then see the connection of that book or writer to the overall narrative and theme of Scripture. Understanding the emphases and themes of Matthew will make us sensitive to those themes when they appear in the passage we are studying. We find different takes on the theme, emphases, message, theology, and significance of Matthew in the Meaning section of the Factbook, but one of the most helpful and comprehensive resources I’ve found is the New Dictionary of Biblical Theology. It includes an extensive section that defines and clarifies the essential part biblical theology plays in exegesis, a comprehensive article on the biblical theology of each section and book of Scripture, and a detailed list of important themes in the Bible and how they are developed through the story of the Bible.

For instance, in the article on Matthew, Donald Hagner states, “It is a given for Matthew that Jesus, the Messiah, comes in fulfilment of the promises of Scripture. Matthew contains more than sixty explicit quotations from the OT, not to mention a great many allusions. This is more than twice as many as in any of the other Gospels.” This brings a lot of clarity to why Matthew quotes the Old Testament so much.

The New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, along with a solid introduction to the New and Old Testaments, are staples in my Bible study. I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Assignments

Here is your assignment:

• Read through as many of the articles in the Factbook’s Bible book guide on Matthew links to as you can (read at least one from each section) and record your findings in your note file

We’ve covered literary, intertextual, and historical contexts. Tomorrow, we’ll spend some time looking at how studying the cultural context of a passage can add real depth to our understanding of Scripture.

DAY 13

Explore the Cultural Context

Step 5 (cont.): Explore the Passage’s Historical and Cultural Context

The last context we’ll spend time on is the cultural context, also called the social context. When we study the historical context, we observe the details of the event described and circumstances surrounding the writing of that passage. We study the cultural context of a passage to understand the customs, traditions, economics, politics, and social setting. By studying the cultural context we are trying to find out what life was like for the ancient people who wrote the Bible and were written about in the Bible.

When interpreting the Bible, we must resist the tendency to read the passage without considering the society in which it is written. Too often, our understanding of our own culture overshadows the culture of those who lived and wrote the Bible.

A great example is Jesus’ baptism. We often allow our understanding of what baptism looks like in the modern church to influence our understanding of what John was doing in the wilderness and why Jesus was baptized.

There are two ways to access the cultural context of the passage, primary sources and secondary sources. Primary sources are texts written around the same time as the text we are studying. For instance, Josephus wrote about the society and history of the ancient world, particularly of the Jewish people, during the first century after Christ.

The best secondary sources on the background of the Bible are contemporary works that take everything we know today about the ancient world, with the help of primary sources and archeology, and describe the culture of the biblical world. Most commentaries describe the social context of the passages they cover, but I can’t recommend highly enough Walton, Matthews, and Chavalas’ IVP Background Commentary: Old Testament and Craig Keener’s IVP Background Commentary: New Testament. These commentaries specialize in alerting you to important cultural issues that need further study in the passage. The Zondervan Illustrated Bible Background Commentary is also highly respected and reputable. Commentaries in the Socio- Rhetorical Commentary series devote an extended amount of attention to the social context of specific books of the Bible. So, if you are studying a particular book this series covers, make sure you consult it.

In the past, the primary sources were reserved almost exclusively for scholars. We had to rely on secondary sources for background information. With advances in technology, primary sources are increasingly more accessible, but nowhere are they more accessible than in the Cultural Concepts section of the Factbook in Logos. When we use Logos, we can read about ancient cultures from the people who lived and wrote during the time of the Bible.

Cultural Concepts Let’s look at how the Cultural Concepts section will help us understand why Jesus was fasting in the wilderness and how the concept of fasting in the ancient world may be different from our modern experience and understanding.

We’ll right-click on “fasting” from the text. Choose the cultural concept of fasting from the right and click on Factbook. The Factbook directs us to media, passages, dictionaries, and many other items related to fasting. The Lexham Bible Dictionary explains that Jesus fasted “perhaps to express reliance on God in times of temptation.” It also directs you to Jesus’ teaching on fasting. When you look at “Fasting in the Early Church,” you see that the early church often fasted. The author of this article then cites several places in early Christian writings that tell you about the church’s practice of fasting—a twice-weekly fast and the belief that fasting could conquer temptations and prepare people for worship and baptism.

You can find even more information from the Cultural Concepts section. You’ll see a section entitled “Pseudepigrapha.” “Pseudepigrapha” literally means “false writings.” It's a group of texts falsely claiming to have been written by various Old Testament characters, but they are still useful for understanding significant ideas in the ancient world. Here, Adam suggested to Eve that they fast for forty days in repentance, Simeon fasted to learn deliverance from envy, and Joseph promised God’s presence to those fasting.

You will also find the references from the Apostolic Fathers that the Lexham Bible Dictionary mentioned and you can read their context.

Searching for Cultural Concepts

One of the most impressive elements of Cultural Concepts is the ability to search Bibles or even the entire library for a concept. This broadens your search abilities from words to concepts. Searching for one word leaves out synonyms or concepts that can’t be expressed by just one English word. Searching based on concepts greatly helps with this limitation. Let’s right-click on fasting again and choose the Cultural Concept. We’ll then choose “Search: all resources.” You have a good number of hits; it would be a great idea to limit them. Type “pray* WITHIN” before our search syntax. This will search for words related to prayer within passages tagged with the cultural concept of fasting. When you open your results from the ESV you’ll see a strong connection in the Bible between prayer and fasting. This helps us understand what Jesus was doing in the wilderness. Let’s add these insights to our notes by right clicking on verse two, choosing the reference, and selecting “Add a note to Matthew 4 Notes.”

Assignments

Here are your assignments:

• Continue to explore the Cultural Concepts section of the Factbook on fasting, find three more insights, and record them in your note file • Find another cultural concept within Matthew 4:1–11, explore its Factbook, execute a proximity search, and record your insights in your note file This is the last video dealing with the context of Matthew 4. Tomorrow we’ll move on to a close observation of the actions and words of the main characters in our passage.

DAY 14

Observe What Main Characters Do

Step 6: Pay Special Attention to the Words and Actions of the Characters

In literature, plays, and movies, authors often convey their own feelings, ideas, and the main themes of their work in the words and actions of the main characters in the story. The writers of the Bible are no exception. That’s why we must pay special attention to the words and actions of the characters in the passage of the Bible we are studying. This forms our sixth step in Bible study.

This step is particularly important when we are studying a narrative, or a story. In other genres of the Bible, like the psalms and epistles, the purpose isn’t to tell a story. The writer directly tells us what he is feeling or thinking. In these cases we would simply need to focus on the historical context of the passage: who wrote it and what their situation was like? But, since such a large portion of the Bible involves narrative, studying the actions and words of the main characters in the story is imperative.

Since we’re still in the observation stage, we’ll resist the temptation to interpret the actions and words of the main characters. We’ll simply look for what characters are involved and observe what they say and do.

The highlights we made previously help us in this task. When we read Matthew 4:1, we notice there are three main characters: Jesus, the Spirit, and the devil. It’s helpful to see how these characters interact. Here we see an interaction between Jesus and the Spirit: the Spirit led Him into the wilderness. Then, we see the interaction between Jesus and the devil: the devil tempted Him. Was this the only recorded time Jesus and Satan interact?

During this video we’ll use Logos to find every time two characters interact in the Bible. If you aren’t using Logos, you could use a concordance to find every time a person’s name occurs in the Bible and then look at the entries for the other person and compare the references. This would be a time-consuming task and you don’t know if your results will help you understand the passage.

A better strategy is to use a Bible dictionary. Some include sections about the interactions between central characters in Scripture. For instance, this article on Satan from the Lexham Bible Dictionary, states “Jesus’ teaching reflects the existence of the devil as an active enemy…. part of the devil’s work is to cause a person to neglect the message of the kingdom of God… and wicked people are called followers or children of the devil.” The article includes other Scripture references where Jesus and Satan interact.

Person Inline Search

Let’s use Logos to find every place a Bible character appears, even when that person’s name isn’t specifically mentioned. We’ve noticed in Matthew 4 that Satan is called different names. He’s called “the tempter,” the “devil,” and “Satan.” Why did Matthew use these different names throughout the story? I’ll leave answering that question up to you when you get to the work of interpretation, but I do suggest using the Lexham Theological Wordbook to help come up with an answer. The Lexham Theological Wordbook includes articles on many theologically significant words in the Bible. The entry on Satan has a concept summary, a theological overview, and information on the words used in the Bible for the topic it is covering. The Lexham Theological Wordbook says, “The NT primarily relies on two words to describe Satan: Σατανᾶς (Satanas) and διάβολος (diabolos). The form Σατανᾶς represents the personal name for Satan, while διάβολος (diabolos, ‘slanderer’) usually refers to Satan, but frequently is translated as ‘the devil.’ Both Hebrew and Greek also employ nouns related to inimical activities such as lying and deceiving that are important for the biblical concept of Satan.”

Matthew’s use of multiple names does bring up a good point. If we are searching the Bible for a person, how do we make sure all references to them appear in our results if they are called by different names? Often times the more important a person is to a biblical story, the more names the Bible uses. For example, the Bible uses multiple names for Abraham, Moses, and David. Jesus has even more names. Pronouns make it even more difficult because they need context to find out to whom they refer. With Logos, we can find every reference to a biblical character with ease, regardless of the name or pronoun used in a specific text.

Let’s right-click on “tempter” and select “Satan: Person.” From the left-hand side of the context menu we can run a Factbook report, look for maps associated with Satan, and open Bible dictionaries straight to articles on this character. Let’s choose “Search: this resource (inline).” Choosing this option converts our Bible into a concordance with all of the rich functionality you’ve seen in action throughout this course. We can continue to right-click on our search results to find more information. Let’s add another person to our search by typing “NEAR Jesus,” choosing Jesus from the autocompleter, and pressing enter. This limits our results further. We can continue to narrow our search through additional search syntax. We can find additional search syntax when we click on the search icon and look at all of the suggestions in the different searches. We can also find a lot of help by looking at the help manual included in our library. We can simply click on the question mark in the upper right and choose “Logos Bible Software Help.” There’s a whole article on searching.

Within our results for Satan NEAR Jesus, we notice a couple of things. First, our results include a lot of pronouns. The only way to know to whom a pronoun refers is by reading the context, and the scholars at Logos have done that for us. Also notice, that Logos has included different names of the two persons we searched for.

In Matthew 6:13, very soon after the temptation, Jesus prays to His Father that He would deliver Jesus and His followers from the evil one. This may be new information to us, because many of us have memorized this phrase in the Lord’s example prayer as “deliver us from evil.” Many modern interpreters believe a better translation is “deliver us from the evil one.”

In 2 Corinthians 6:15, Paul highlights the immense distinction between Jesus and Satan. It’s interesting that he uses the name Belial since it’s not a common name for Satan in the Bible. Hebrews 2:14 and 1 John 3:8 link our salvation with Jesus’ destruction of Satan as the reason for the incarnation. Revelation 12:10-11 sums up the ultimate conclusion of Jesus and Satan’s relationship: Christ will throw him down.

Later in the course, we’ll see that the temptation is Satan’s attempt to conquer Christ by offering Him things that rightfully should belong to Jesus. We recognize from our search, that later in the history of redemption, Jesus conquers Satan righteously with God’s blessing and in God’s way. Let’s add this to our notes file along with some of the references we’ve seen by right-clicking on verse 10, selecting the reference, and choosing to add a note to our Matthew 4 notes.

Assignments

Now it’s your turn to observe the actions of the characters in the passage:

• Look into each of the words used for Satan in Matthew 4 and record the insights you find in your note file • Search for every time the Holy Spirit appears near Jesus in the Bible, observe the relationship between these two members of the Godhead, and record how their interaction in other passages helps us understand their interaction in Matthew 4

Today, we focused on the interactions of the characters in the passage. Tomorrow we’ll focus on the words of one of the characters in the passage we are studying.

DAY 15

Observe What Main Characters Say

Step 6 (cont.): Pay Special Attention to the Words and Actions of the Characters

Robert Chisholm mentions multiple ways of identifying how characters contribute to the overall understanding of the narrative we are studying. He says, the author communicates information about the characters “in a variety of ways, including the author’s direct description of a character, the response of other characters, as well as a character’s names and epithets, self- characterization, recorded thoughts, speech, and actions.” Chisholm’s From Exegesis to Exposition is a classic, especially for interpreting the Old Testament. It’s a little technical and written on a seminary level, but if you are able to get this resource, it will definitely help you, especially if Chisholm deals with the passage you are a studying as an example.

Yesterday we looked at the actions of the characters in a passage. Today we’ll look specifically at what Jesus says and how Satan is addressed. Steven Matthewson, in The Art of Preaching Old Testament Narrative, emphasizes the importance of speech in a story. He says, “One of the functions of speech by the characters is to provide insight into their traits….Even more significantly, conversation points to meaning. According to Alter, ‘Dialogue is made to carry a large part of the freight of meaning.’… Thus, interpreters should look to speeches for clues to the author’s intent.” Matthewson’s work, like Chisholm’s work, would be a great book to read if you are interested in understanding the narrative portions of Scripture to their fullest.

Since almost every dialogue piece in Matthew 4:1–11 is a quotation from the Old Testament, we’ve already emphasized the importance of looking at the Old Testament context of those quotations. We should spend some time observing the quotations and noting anything that stands out. We’re looking for peculiarities. In their situation, would you have said it differently? Would you have added something to what they said? Would you have omitted something? Answering these questions will give you some indication to what the author is communicating in the passage.

Sometimes it’s helpful to look at what a character says in other passages to detect trends. We must remember that the passage we are studying is part of the larger story of the Bible.

Speaker Search

Depending on what level Logos you have, you may have noticed the small icons beside what characters in Scripture say. For instance, in verse 4 of Matthew 4, we see an image of a megaphone and of a person listening to sound. If we don’t see them, we can go to the Visual Filters icon and make sure Addressee and Speaker labels are selected.

This may seem like an odd thing to highlight, but the insights from these tools are immense. Let’s right-click anywhere in Jesus’ quotation of Deuteronomy in verse 4. We notice at the bottom of the Context menu the same images we saw in the text. We’ll select Jesus and then select “Search: this resource (inline).” We’ll choose Bible from the Inline Search type. Logos just found every instance in the Bible where Jesus speaks. Let’s narrow our search by adding “bread WITHIN” before the search syntax. Typing “within” in all caps works as a search operator that tells Logos to search for the word “bread” within Jesus’ words. In other words, this search shows every time Jesus speaks about bread in the Bible. We can do this for any character in Scripture and for any topic. So if we want to find every time Jesus speaks about money or heaven or hell or angels, we can use this search. If we need a reminder of this, we can simply open a new search panel, select Bible search and look at the suggestions.

As we read through the results, we notice that bread is often mentioned in the context of care and provision. In Matthew 6, Jesus asks for “our daily bread” as He models how to pray for His disciples. In the next chapter, He compares God the Father with a caring father who gives bread to his son. In Matthew 16, Jesus is discouraged by how His disciples have forgotten about His love for them and His ability to provide bread for them. These passages we found bolster our understanding of Jesus’ confidence in His heavenly Father’s ability to provide. Let’s add a note to verse 4 and link this verse with other verses using attachment points. We’ll give our note a title and fill in the content box. Now, when we hover over the note, a drop down arrow appears. When we click on it, let’s choose “Edit attachment points.” Now we can input the references we’ve found that link to other places in which Jesus speaks about bread. When we are done, we’ll click “Done.” We’ve essentially created a cross-reference footnote for this verse. When we go to the verses we included, the note indicator is there telling us that we’ve connected this passage to another one.

Addressee Search

Let’s do one more search. We’ll right-click on the same spot and select Satan: Addressee. We’ll then select “Search: this resource (inline).” Our results now show us every time Satan is addressed in Scripture and that Satan had been rebuked before his encounter with Jesus in the wilderness. Zechariah has very similar language to Jesus’ in chapter 3 verse 2. Jude 9 also speaks of a time when Satan was rebuked. Let’s connect these three verses by adding a note to verse 10 and using attachment points. There is considerable debate among scholarship on many of these passages. Do the writers refer to a general adversary, or do they speak of the actual person of Satan? We don’t have time in this video to dive into each of these passages, but I am confident that you are able to find information about the debate in Logos.

Assignments

Here are your assignments:

• Find two other significant words or phrases in Jesus or Satan’s speech, conduct a speaker or addressee search to find other places where they talk about the concept, and record your insights in your note file • Continue your research into the character of Satan by looking at Bible dictionary articles on Satan and record your insights in your notes file or clippings file Today, was the last day of the observation stage in our Bible study method. After watching today’s video, you are now halfway through the course. Great job! In tomorrow’s video, we’ll move into interpretation!

Interpretation DAY 16

Learn to Study the Bible with Logos: Part 2

Introduction to Part 2

Part 2 Overview

Congratulations! You’ve finished the first section of this course.

We now have a better understanding of how to accomplish the first step in Bible study, observation. We’ve taken the time to listen to the text by reading it multiple times, identifying important themes, comparing translations, exploring the literary, historical, and cultural contexts, and recognizing the setting and characters. While we can do all of these steps without Logos, I hope you see the value of this powerful software for the efficiency and in the insight it provides.

Bible students are often tempted to jump from brief observation to application; from what the text says to what the text means to us. We need to fight this urge and think about what the text actually means. Why did God include the passage we are studying in Scripture? What did the human writers of Scripture have in mind when they wrote it? What did the passage mean to the original audience? Interpretation answers these crucial questions.

In the next set of videos, we’ll delve further into Matthew 4 and the steps involved in interpretation. I’ll show you how to look up and study important words and phrases in the passage and then compare them to other passages in Scripture. We’ll also interpret the text by outlining it and then check our interpretation with respected voices in biblical scholarship. This last step is important. God has blessed us with fellow Christians, both ancient and modern, that can help us understand the text if we are struggling. These guides can also let us know about different interpretive options and can caution us if our interpretation of the text isn’t what it should be. This is exciting work.

Remember, if you need further help, additional training videos are located at Logos.com/Logos- Pro and you can always contact the Logos Pro team at [email protected].

Let’s get started!

Find the Most Frequently Used Words

Step 7: Look for and Study Important Words and Phrases and Connect Them to the Rest of Scripture

Interpretation, you’ll remember, answers the question, “What does this passage mean?” If we want to know what Matthew 4 means, we need to spend a good deal of time on the actual words Matthew used. All of us, to one degree or another, intentionally choose the words we do when we communicate. Some of us, especially writers and public speakers, spend extra time choosing the words we do in order to ensure the meaning we intend to convey actually is conveyed. We have a number of words and a number of ways to arrange those words to choose from.

The biblical writers were purposeful in the words they chose and how they arranged them. They often used words to indicate structure, show emphasis, and connect their writings to the other books of the Bible, especially in the Old Testament.

How do we find these important links? We’ve already seen the benefit of the theology sections of our commentaries and of books dedicated to biblical theology. Resources like these discuss the important themes and words of particular writers and books of the Bible. These resources are a great place to start.

But what if we want to find important themes on our own? Nothing is as effective as familiarity. If we want to discover the important themes of Matthew, we need to spend ample time with the book. That’s one of the reasons we built a reading plan for Matthew at the beginning of this course. When we read the book in one sitting on multiple occasions, important themes will become evident. We will see important words and themes will begin to pop out at us.

At this point, I want to add a word of caution. While words convey meaning and studying them is essential, there is a lot of danger involved. We are always tempted to see in the text what we want to see there, not necessarily what is there. Many interpreters have used words to say things about passages that aren’t there. We must realize that words are part of a larger context. We can’t isolate them and impute them with whatever meaning we want. That’s why familiarity with the larger text can’t be replaced. I’ll recommend two works that will help you avoid common mistakes in biblical interpretation. Exegetical Fallacies by D.A. Carson and Biblical Words and Their Meaning by Moisés Silva are essential reads for every serious student of the Bible. Put them on your “read next” list.

One shortcoming of reading for familiarity is that most of us can’t read the Bible in its original languages. Repeated words are easily lost in translation. Logos’ Interesting Words section and Concordance tool can help.

Interesting Words Section

The Interesting Words section in the Passage Guide is a graphical representation of the words in a section of Scripture arranged by frequency. The larger the word, the more times it is used in the passage. We can toggle between English and the original language of the passage.

This is helpful for the passage we are looking at, but let’s expand our results to the broader section of Matthew that the passage we’re studying falls into. We can do this by looking at the way commentaries outline the book. The Evangelical Commentary on the Bible is a great, single- volume commentary that puts our passage in the section on Jesus’ “Preparation for Ministry (3:1–4:16).” Let’s change our reference range to Matthew 3:1–4:16. Now, we can see the words Matthew repeated for emphasis in this section. Concordance Tool

The Concordance tool, available in a Logos Now or Cloud subscription, gives us even more flexibility. While we can’t get to the Concordance tool from the context menu, it is not difficult to access. Let’s go to the Tools menu and choose Concordance.

We’ll choose to create a concordance of our preferred version of the Bible. It may take some time for Logos to index it because it is combing through every word in the Bible and then organizing them by word frequency. Once it is done, we have a list of every word in the Bible. We can organize the results alphabetically or by frequency by using the “Heading” and “Count” options in the upper right. Now, we could keep our results in English, but we want to find the words most used in the Greek, so let’s choose “Root” from the second drop down menu. This organizes our concordance by the words that have common roots in Greek. Because we are interested in finding repeated words in Matthew, we could limit our concordance by clicking on “All Passages,” typing “mat” in the reference range, and pressing enter, but let’s limit our concordance to the section of Matthew we used earlier.

When we analyze our results, we find that Matthew uses the word for “wilderness” three times. Jesus goes out to the wilderness to be baptized, John prepares the way for Him in the wilderness, and the Spirit leads Him further into the wilderness for the temptation. This further strengthens the connection between Jesus and the Israelites’ wilderness wanderings we’ve seen before.

In fact, this is one of the sub-themes in Frank Thielman’s Theology of the New Testament. According to Thielman, one of the three central themes of Matthew is “Jesus’ Fulfillment of Jewish Biblical Tradition” and one of the sub-themes is “Jesus as the Personification of Israel.” He says, “Israel did not pass the test but instead grumbled about their lack of food (Ex. 16:1–36), and themselves put God to the test by insisting that their lack of water in the desert called into question whether the Lord was among them (Deut. 6:16; cf. Ex. 17:1–7). They also committed idolatry.” The temptations Jesus experienced were not random. Matthew was communicating something. Thielman continues, “For Matthew, Jesus recapitulated the history of Israel, but at the points in Israel’s story where the nation failed to obey God, Jesus succeeded.” When we ask, “What does Matthew 4:1–11 mean?” this theme is a major part of it. Matthew included this account in his gospel to show us that Jesus is the fulfillment of everything Israel should have been. If you want a contemporary treatment of the theology of the New Testament, Thielman’s work is among the best.

Let’s add this insight to our clippings file by right-clicking and clicking “Add a clipping to ‘Quotations for Matthew 4.’”

Another interesting recurring word is “angels.” We see that angels ministered to Jesus after the devil leaves him. Interestingly, just earlier, the devil tempted Jesus to do something that would force the angels to minister to him. This helps us understand something about the meaning of temptation—that the things Jesus was tempted to do were not necessarily sinful in and of themselves. As He says in Matthew 26:53, He could call twelve legions of angels if needed to. What is sin is not relying on God for His provision and timing for those things. We’ll add this insight to a note file connected to Matthew 4:6. Let’s also create a shortcut to the Concordance tool by going to the Tools menu and clicking and dragging it to the shortcut bar. If we can’t remember what the icon means, we can right-click on the shortcut we just created and check “Show label.” Let’s do the same thing for the other tools we’ve used in this course: the Factbook, Psalms Explorer, Atlas, and Biblical Events Navigator.

Assignments

For our assignments, let’s focus on gaining more familiarity with the words and themes of Matthew:

• Read Matthew in one sitting at least once, highlight repeated words and themes, and record any of your insights • If you have access to it, limit the Concordance tool to the book of Matthew and find at least 5 different words that could indicate an important theme in the book and add your results to your note file

In the coming days, we’ll continue to spend significant time exploring the meaning of the temptation narrative by looking at the words of the passage. See you tomorrow!

DAY 17

Find Occurrences of Important Phrases

Step 7 (cont.): Look for and Study Important Words and Phrases and Connect Them to the Rest of Scripture

There are two main ways to approach interpretation. One gives priority to the intended meaning of the author, the other gives priority to the reader. Duvall and Hays summarize the approaches well, “This question has prompted a lively and sometimes heated debate, not only in secular literary circles, but also among students and scholars of the Bible. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the traditional approach to interpreting any literature, biblical or secular, was to assume that the author determines the meaning and the reader’s job is to find that meaning. Within the world of secular literary criticism, however, this approach came under attack throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, and many literary critics today argue that it is the reader, and not the author, who determines what a text means.”

Many Christians, whether they realize it or not, use the second of these approaches. When studying the Bible, the primary question they ask is, “What does this passage mean to me?” instead of “What did the author intend for this passage to mean?” This course is based on the assumption that the best way to understand the Bible is to first understand what the text meant to the author before asking questions about how the passage makes us feel or what the meaning is for contemporary life. That’s exactly why we are spending so much time trying to understand the words of the passage—we want to know what Matthew intended for us to understand from the text.

We aren’t advocating that we can find exactly what the author intended by following a simple series of steps. We come to the text with presuppositions in life and preconceived ideas about the text itself. As we study the text with our presuppositions and preconceived ideas, careful observation and interpretation help us correct the initial interpretation we had, allowing us to see the author’s intended meaning. One of the most helpful concepts in understanding how this works is from Grant Osborne’s Hermeneutical Spiral. He explains, “I am spiraling nearer and nearer to the text’s intended meaning as I refine my hypotheses and allow the text to continue to challenge and correct those alternative interpretations, then to guide my delineation of its significance for my situation today.” Osborne’s work, while a bit on the technical side, is one of the most helpful books to read on biblical interpretation and a resource you’ll consult over and over again after you’ve read it.

Inline Search

Our careful observation of the text helped us notice that the phrase “it is written” occurs 4 times; Jesus says it three times and Satan says it once. When we find such repetition in the passage we are studying, it’s a great idea to find out if it appears in the rest of the book. That will help us understand why Matthew used these words in Matthew 4. Concordances are great tools for this kind of work because they list words alphabetically and tell you where those words occur in the Bible. Logos can act as a concordance, but it is far superior. Let me show you how. With a paper copy of a concordance, it would be impossible to find every place this phrase occurs in the Bible. Concordances find words, not phrases. We could try to find this information by looking up the word “written,” but it would take forever to figure out who said it and when it occurs after “it is.”

Let’s highlight the phrase, right-click it, ensure the selection is highlighted, and choose “Search: this resource (in line).” We notice that there are quotation marks around the phrase. This ensures that our search is looking for the exact phrase, not just occurrences of each word. We just turned our Bible into a concordance that finds phrases, not just words. What’s more, we can continue to interact with our Inline search like we have been with the biblical text with the Context menu. The Information tool still returns great information and we can run Bible Word Studies from the Context menu.

Because we used the Inline search and we have the words of Jesus appearing in red, we can very easily scroll through the gospels and see how important this phrase was in Jesus’ teaching, specifically in Matthew. If the words of Christ don’t appear in red, we can open our Program Settings from the Tools menu and turn them on. Notice that Jesus not only used Scripture as He resisted temptation but to authenticate His ministry as the Messiah. In Matthew 11:10, Jesus connects John the Baptist to Malachi 3:1, then in Matthew 26:24 and 31, Jesus connects the prophecies to Himself.

We’ve tapped into something of major importance to Matthew. As Donald Hagner states in the Word Biblical Commentary on Matthew, “This heavy dependence on the OT reflects Matthew’s interest in the gospel of the kingdom as the fulfillment of the OT expectation. Of particular interest in this regard are the so-called fulfillment quotations, one of the most distinctive features of Matthew…. The importance of the quotations is theological. They are Matthew’s own way of undergirding the manner in which the events of his narrative, indeed its totality, are to be understood as the fulfillment of what God had promised in the Scriptures.”

When it occurs in Mathew 4, the phrase “it is written” does not have the same overt ramifications as it does in the rest of the book because Jesus isn’t necessarily making a messianic statement, but it is connected. We’ve already spoken about how Jesus, in the temptation narrative, fulfills elements of Israel’s history in His experience in the wilderness. The fact that the phrase “it is written” appears in the narrative only strengthens that connection.

Let’s make a note about this by right clicking verse 4, choosing the reference, and adding a note to “Matthew 4 Notes.” Let’s also add attachment points to verses 6, 7, and 10.

The Inline search works for any resource we have access to in Logos, so we can search any word or phrase in any book. For instance, if we wanted to find every instance of “mercy” in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, we can simply click the Inline Search Button, type “mercy” and press Enter.

Assignments

Here are your assignments: • Execute an inline search on a word or phrase that you believe is important in Matthew 4, study your results, and record your insights • Execute another inline search with that same word or phrase in your favorite commentary on Matthew to find where that commentary speaks about the concept you are looking at and add any insights you find to your clippings document

You are making great progress. Tomorrow we’ll expand your interpretation skills by spending some time with the original languages.

DAY 18

Research Words in the Original Languages: Morphological Searches

Step 7 (cont.): Look for and Study Important Words and Phrases and Connect Them to the Rest of Scripture

We mentioned a potential danger of studying the words of the Bible in Day 16 and I’ll mention dangers in future days. This shouldn’t discourage us from doing deep Bible study. Being aware of the dangers will help us better understand any passage we study. By being cautious, we’ll more likely avoid the pitfalls of making the Bible say things it doesn’t actually say. This is especially important when we are communicating God’s Word to people. If we believe that the Bible is God’s speech, saying something that doesn’t align with it when we are explaining it means we are misspeaking for God.

When people recognize the weight of getting the Bible right, one reaction is paralysis. Some people may say, “If there’s a possibility of me getting this wrong, I won’t do it at all.” This is not the response God wants from us. Let’s see if Logos can help us by finding what the Bible says about how we should study the Bible.

Command Box

Let’s open our Bible to Matthew 4 by typing Matthew 4 into the Command Box. The Command Box is different than the Go Box. When we type a passage or topic in the Go Box, Logos opens a layout of with guides and resources. The Command Box is used as a place to tell Logos what to do. It takes some time to learn what commands Logos recognizes, but once you do, you can access parts of the software without navigating through menus. When we type a Scripture reference into the box, Logos opens our preferred Bible to that passage. We can also type the title of resources and different searches in the Command Box.

Sermon Themes

We’ll right click on any one of the quotations from Jesus, I’ll use verse 7. In the context menu, we notice a Sermon Theme section. When I click on the dropdown arrow, Logos alerts us to all the Sermon Themes Logos scholars have tagged in this passage. Let’s click on “Scripture.” In the Thematic Outlines, let’s expand “Scripture, Understanding.” Under “Through diligent study,” we see Paul’s encouragement to Timothy to “rightly handl[e] the word of truth.” In Acts 17, the Bereans are commended for their diligent study of the Bible.

We find John 5:39 in the cross-reference of Acts 17:11. Jesus says, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.” Jesus did not condemn his audience for studying the Bible, He condemned them for misunderstanding the Bible.

Now, let’s approach studying the original languages. Many have said, “A little bit of Greek or Hebrew is a dangerous thing.” If we haven’t spent years in language studies we must approach the study of the original languages with a healthy dose of humility. As we study them, we need to recognize the level we’re at. One of the healthiest things we can do when we find insight by studying Greek and Hebrew is to go to biblical scholars, especially through commentaries, to check our findings. We’ll talk about that specific step in a few days.

There are some great tools out there for accessing the original languages of the Bible, but Logos makes the process simple.

Morphology Search

Look at Satan’s third temptation where Satan offers “the kingdoms of the world.” Why is this tempting to Jesus? Is there anywhere else in Scripture where this phrase is used that would help us better understand its use in this passage?

Let’s look for this phrase in Greek using the context menu. We’ll right-click the word “Kingdom” and choose “Lemma,” the dictionary form of the word. Then, let’s click on search “Morph: Basilea.” The Morph search allows you to search for an original language word in its particular morphology. Morphology speaks of a word’s form and how that form changes when it functions in different ways in a sentence. For instance, the past tense of “run” is “ran.” We could make our search more specific by adding the @ symbol to the end of the search and then choosing what you are looking for. We’ll keep it simple in this video and not select any further options for the search on “kingdom.”

Proximity Search

Logos returned over 160 results, so let’s rerun our search and this time narrow the results. We’ll copy our search syntax and go back to our text. Let’s right-click on “world” and run the same search we did earlier. This time, let’s also type NEAR in all caps in the resulting search and then paste our previous search. Now let’s press Enter. What we have done is a proximity search. We’ve located every time the Greek word for world is found within 8-10 words of the Greek word for kingdom. You can use other words in caps, like AND, OR, and WITHIN, in your Logos searches.

Notice what we find. An angel in Revelation 11:15 declares the kingdoms of the world had become Christ’s. The kingdoms of the world have always been promised to Jesus and both He and Satan knew it. Satan was offering Jesus something at the wrong time and in the wrong way. God had already promised the kingdoms of the world to Him. Let’s move into application for a second. Temptation for us is similar. We are tempted with good things that God gives, like food, relationships, and material possessions, but we are often tempted to acquire them at the wrong time and in the wrong way. Let’s add this to our note file by right-clicking in verse 8, choosing the reference, and clicking “Add a note to Matthew 4 Notes.”

Searching in the original languages makes our results more accurate. While we could have run the search in English and found the verse in Revelation, there are times where the results from searching based on English will be much different than what we would see if we searched for the word using Greek. For instance, when we search using the Greek lemma for “serve” we get around 20 results, including multiple instances where it is translated as “worship.” When we search using the English word, we get almost 70 results. We could easily draw our own conclusions from these results, but it would be a great idea to check them against those who have studied these issues more. We’ll right-click “serve,” select the lemma, and choose an everything search. Because we are looking for occurrences in our commentaries to check our results and not in our Bible, let’s delete everything in the search box except the actual Greek letters. Now, let’s limit our search to our commentaries by clicking on “Everything” at the top, inputting “type:commentary” in the search box, and selecting the option that has the number of commentaries we have access to in our library. We’ve now found where this Greek word occurs in all of our commentaries. Paul Ellingworth says that this Greek word is always used in a cultic or religious sense. Our results confirm this. The New International Greek Testament Commentary series is an excellent series of commentaries if you have taken a year or so of Greek. It’s technical, but it’s among the best.

Assignments

Here are your assignments:

• Find two more words in Matthew 4 that occur in proximity to one another, execute a morph proximity search, and add any insight you find to your note file • Check two or three commentaries to see if they agree with your conclusion and add what they say to your clippings file

Today we’ve seen the value of searching based on the original languages. Tomorrow we’ll explore the benefits that doing word studies have for our interpretation. See you then.

DAY 19

Research Words in the Original Languages: Word Studies

Step 7 (cont.): Look for and Study Important Words and Phrases and Connect Them to the Rest of Scripture

Word studies are a treasure trove. And a mine field. Somehow we have to weave through the dangers to get the treasures. Think for a moment: if we were about to enter such a field, would we want to know first about the gold or the bombs?

I’d want to know about the treasures first: do they make it worthwhile for me to even bother learning about the dangers? And then I’d want a detailed accounting of the dangers—so I can live to enjoy the good stuff.

So here’s a quick account of the treasures in the word study field: you get to dig into rich and precious biblical concepts such as justification, repentance, reconciliation, redemption, salvation, even “going up.”

Notice, however, that I said “concepts,” not “words.” And that brings us to the dangers. One of the most common mines in the word-study field is mixing up those two things: we can’t just search for the word “joy” to find every time the Bible employs the concept of joy. Psalm 150, for example, is a psalm bursting with joy, but the word is never used. Likewise, the Greek word usually translated “evangelize” or “preach the gospel” (εὐαγγελίζομαι, euangelizomai) shows up in places where the concept of preaching the gospel is simply not present—such as 1 Thess. 3:6, where Paul speaks of Timothy “[bringing] the good news” about the Thessalonians’ faith and love. Words and concepts are not always tied tightly together.

Studying the use of a particular biblical word, however, is one of the major means by which we can get insight into major biblical concepts.

A Strong’s Concordance can show us where every instance of a particular Greek word occurs in the New Testament (or Hebrew words in the Old Testament), but digital Bible study tools are obviously a good deal quicker and more powerful.

One of the most valuable features of Logos, in fact, is the quick access it gives to the Bible’s original languages. Let’s look at the value of searching a word based on the original languages. Right click on “word” in Matt 4:4. From the context menu, let’s select the English word and run a search in the ESV. We have over twelve-hundred results: more than a thousand times when the Bible uses the word “word.” We can narrow these results by selecting the range “New Testament.” Still there are 300 results, too many to process unless we’ve got hours. But we can winnow or filter our search to help us find insight into Matthew 4:4, and we can do that with word study.

With Logos, you’re only a click away from the Greek or Hebrew underlying the English Bible text, and there are multiple ways to dig down to that level. The Inline Reverse Interlinear

Let’s start with the inline reverse interlinear. A reverse interlinear rearranges the words in the Greek and Hebrew Bible to match those in our English translations. We’ll click the inline interlinear button at the top of the panel. From here, we’ll select “inline” and then we customize the information we want displayed. Let’s turn this option off. For a cleaner look, click the reverse interlinear button. This opens a small pane under our biblical text. As we click each word, Logos gives you the manuscript form of the word (or how the word appears in the Greek text), the lemma form (or how the word appears in an original language dictionary, called a lexicon), morphology of the word (or the details of the word, including parts of speech), and transliterations (or the Greek word transcribed using English letters so you can read it).

When we observe the text using the reverse interlinear, we notice that “word” in verse 4 is not the Greek word we might expect. The interlinear tells us this word is “rhema.” If you have some familiarity with Greek, you may have been expecting “logos,” another Greek word commonly translated “word.”

Bible Word Study

Now, let’s do a Bible Word Study to help us figure out why “rhema” appears here and not “logos.” There are two types of Bible Word Studies in Logos. One analyzes English words, the other analyzes words in the original languages of Scripture. Let’s start with the first. We’ll right click on “word” in verse 4, highlight “word,” and then choose Bible Word Study. Immediately we see helpful information like dictionary entries, the different Hebrew and Greek words that the ESV translates as “word,” and other phrases and textual searches related to our study. Notice that the two words most often translated “word” in the ESV New Testament are “logos” and rhema. If you click on each section of the ring you get the number of times that particular Greek word is translated as “word.”

Now, let’s try the second type of Bible Word Study, one that searches for a Greek word, not an English one. Let’s right click on “word” in Matthew 4:4 and choose lemma on the right: this is how we specify that we want to search for Greek, because a “lemma” is a Greek or Hebrew dictionary form. Now we’ll click Bible Word Study. We get links to our lexicons and a translation wheel. This helps us see how “rhema” differs from “logos.” If we run a Bible Word study on “logos” and compare it with a “rhema” study, we see that rhema is translated as “saying” a greater percentage of times than “logos” is. Why would Jesus use the word “rhema” when “logos” is more common, even more expected while talking about “the word of God”? “Word of God” in the New Testament is almost always “logos” of God in Greek.

Is the choice of “rhema,” then, significant for our understanding of Matthew 4?

The answer almost certainly lies in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. Notice that Jesus in Matthew 4:4 is quoting the Old Testament, specifically Deuteronomy 8:3. The Septuagint translation of that verse also uses “rhema.” Jesus could have translated Deuteronomy 8:3 himself, of course, but it appears he quoted the Greek translation most commonly used by his Jewish contemporaries. And it appears that his word choice, like that of the Septuagint translators, was purposeful. “Logos” and “rhema” can be used to point to the same concept: “word.” But they can also be used to refer to different concepts. “Logos” can mean “word” taken in a general way, like “Jesus...was a prophet mighty in deed and word” (Luke 24:19). Luke wasn’t speaking of an individual mighty word Jesus spoke, like “glory” or “kingdom.” He was talking about all of Jesus’ words. “Rhema” can mean the same thing, such as when the author of Hebrews speaks of tasting “the goodness of the word (rhema) of God.” But generally it refers to an individual saying or statement. Context will tell you which meaning is intended by a given usage.

The context of Matthew 4:4 points to the “individual saying” sense. Among other reasons this passage is here is so that Jesus can provide a model for how we are to respond in temptation. One of the main things Christians ought to do is pull out “individual sayings” of the Bible, ones that pertain to our situation, especially ones that highlight God’s provision. That’s just what Jesus does in this case. Let’s add a note about this to verse 4 by right clicking on it, choosing the reference, and adding a note to our Matthew 4 notes.

Assignments

Let’s dive into word studies with your assignments:

• Conduct both an English word study and a Greek word study on at least two significant words in Matthew 4, compare the English and Greek word studies of each word, and add any insights you find to your note file • Check two or three commentaries to see if they agree with your conclusion and add what they say to your clipping file

Keep going, you’re doing great. Tomorrow we start a series of videos that focuses on the grammar of the passage.

DAY 20

Research Words in the Original Languages: Senses

Step 7 (cont.): Look for and Study Important Words and Phrases and Connect Them to the Rest of Scripture

We’ve spent a good amount of time on the words of Matthew 4 already. Roy Zuck calls what we are doing, “grammatical interpretation.” He defines it as, “the process of seeking to determine [the] meaning [of a passage] by ascertaining four things: (a) the meaning of words (lexicology), (b) the form of words (morphology), (c) the function of words (parts of speech), and (d) the relationships of words (syntax).”

When he speaks about lexicology, or the study of the use and meaning of words, Zuck specifies four methods we can use to help clarify the meaning of a word, “(a) etymology—how words are derived and developed, (b) usage—how words are used by the same and other authors, (c) synonyms and antonyms—how similar and opposite words are used, and (d) context—how words are used in various contexts.”

A) Etymology can help us understand a word’s meaning, but it tends to be useful only if the other three methods for some reason aren’t available. Etymology, can often be more entertaining than it is helpful. Words don’t always mean that they used to mean in previous eras. Placing too much emphasis on a word’s etymology has led many a Christian to interpret passages incorrectly.

For instance, the Greek word translated “pinnacle” in Matthew 4: 5 comes from the Greek word for “wing.” The pinnacle of the temple is, like a wing, the extreme edge of something. But it would be wrong to say, “Where Satan took Jesus was actually to one wing of the temple, not to the pinnacle.” No, that word is consistently used to mean “pinnacle,” not “wing” (our modern use of the English word wing to refer to one side of a building is actually a different kind of metaphorical extension of the concept of a wing). Words don’t always mean what they used to mean: to think so is called the “etymological fallacy.” For more on the etymological fallacy, check out D.A. Carson’s chapter in Exegetical Fallacies on “Word-Study Fallacies.

One of the main ways we know that “pinnacle” is the appropriate translation in Matthew 4:5 and not “wing” is usage in context. Because what Satan says next doesn’t make sense unless Satan and Jesus are standing on a height: “Throw yourself down.” In other words, the usage of the word in the immediate context makes it difficult to see the word as denoting anything but a great height.

B) Several of the videos in this course have focused on examining usage. We’ve researched how words, phrases, and concepts are used by an individual author and in the rest of Scripture. Again, we must use caution with deriving too much meaning from other occurrences of the word, phrase, or concept, as the immediate context plays a far larger role than does usage in the word’s meaning. Information Panel and Lexicons

C) Synonyms and antonyms are a third helpful means for discovering what words mean in their contexts. They remind us that lexicons are helpful places for researching a word’s meaning. Most lexicons include synonyms and antonyms, but they also include definitions, discussions on word usage in the Bible and other contemporary literature, and surveys of etymology when relevant. If you aren’t using Logos, Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance and Lexicon is a great place to start. In Logos, our lexicons are easily accessible from the biblical text. If our information panel is still open from when we typed a passage into the Go Box, we are able to see a few definitions there. Additionally, we can simply right-click on any word, choose the lemma, and our lexicons will appear on the left side of the context menu. We can also access them from the Bible Word Study Guide. The “industry standard” lexicons are The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, often called HALOT, and A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, often called BDAG. If you are doing serious Bible study, you should really consider owning both of these resources. But there are many other lexicons in Logos. One of the best basic lexicons is the Dictionary of Biblical Languages. It is included in most every base package of Logos 6 and in every level of Logos Cloud.

Context, of course, is the most important element when we attempt to determine a word’s meaning. The authors of lexicons themselves observe the usage of words in many contexts to help determine meaning. When we try to figure out what a word means, using a combination of these sources of information along with a healthy emphasis on the immediate context will make our interpretation more accurate.

Bible Sense Lexicon

D) If the three most important things in real estate are location, location, location; the three most important words in biblical interpretation are context, context, context. Words have different meanings in different contexts. For example, the word “run” means something different when I say, “I am going to run to the store at the end of the street,” than when I say, “I run the store at the end of the street.” This example show two senses for the word “run.” The context is needed to understand the sense of the word intended by the writer or speaker.

Logos has categorized words by their senses so we can search for specific senses and find other verses that are categorized with the same sense we are studying. In Day 19, we mentioned the importance of distinguishing between a word and a concept. Searching for senses instead of words helps us keep those two related things appropriately distinct.

Let’s right-click on the word “glory” at the end of verse eight. We notice the sense information is included in our context menu. Let’s select it to run a search on just this sense of the word “glory” or to open the Bible Sense Lexicon. In the Bible Sense Lexicon, we notice Logos categorizes this instance of “glory” under the domain of “importance.” The devil was promising the greatness, importance, and influence of these nations to Jesus.

Senses Section We’ll return to the text and right-click on “glory” again. This time, we’ll select “doxa: lemma,” which is the dictionary form of the Greek word translated “glory.” And now we can run a Bible Word Study.

The Bible Word Study includes a section on senses. We find the sense of “glory” as “greatness” or “importance” is a minor use in the New Testament, while the use of doxa when it refers to “God’s glory” is a major use. Let’s click on the section that relates to the sense in Matthew 4. Logos scholars define this sense as, “the property possessed by something or someone of outstanding importance or eminence.”

What is interesting about the search results is something we discovered earlier when we searched for “kingdoms of the world.” In Revelation 21, the kings of the earth bring their glory into the New Jerusalem. Again Christ, pictured as the Lamb, receives what He was promised in the right way and in the right time. He resisted temptation so He could receive what was rightfully His from His Father. Let’s add this to our note about the glory of the Kingdoms of the world.

As you continue to study, look at other senses of doxa to find other insights.

Assignments

It’s your turn:

• Look at the other senses of doxa and add any insight you find to your note file • Research the meaning of two other words in Matthew 4 by looking into their etymology, usage, definition in a lexicon (including their synonyms and antonyms), and context

Tomorrow we’ll look at three other important areas of study for words and their meaning. See you then.

DAY 21

Research Words in the Original Languages: Grammatical and Semantic Roles

Step 7 (cont.): Look for and Study Important Words and Phrases and Connect Them to the Rest of Scripture

Yesterday, we highlighted Roy Zuck’s itemization of grammatical interpretation. He defines grammatical interpretation as, “the process of seeking to determine [a word’s] meaning by ascertaining four things: (a) the meaning of words (lexicology), (b) the form of words (morphology), (c) the function of words (parts of speech), and (d) the relationships of words (syntax).”

We covered the meaning of the words, or lexicology, yesterday. Let’s spend some time clarifying the last three. The study of a word’s form is called “morphology.” The letters in a word often change based on how the word is used in a sentence. For example, in English, we often add an “s” at the end of a noun to make it plural. Other words change entirely when they are plural, like “mice.” In Day 18, we used the Morph search to find where one Greek word is used in proximity to another Greek word. The Morph search can do much more advanced searching on the morphology of words, but you’ll typically need a semester or so of Greek or Hebrew study to use it comfortably.

Word Info and Exegetical Guide

By the very nature of their job, translators of Scripture take into account the form and function of words when they translate the text. Most translations of the Bible are very reliable when it comes to the morphology of words. And we can often identify the part of speech of a word from the translation itself. But, there will be times when a word’s morphology doesn’t translate fully into the English version.

If the morphology of a word is extremely significant to its interpretation or a word’s function is changed to smooth a translation, most commentaries will address the issue; so if you aren’t using Logos, commentaries, especially technical commentaries like the New International Commentary on the Old and New Testaments and the Word Biblical Commentary, will make you aware of important morphological issues.

If you are using Logos, you have the tools for the job of identifying the form and function of words in the original languages of the Bible: the Information panel and the Exegetical guide. When we typed a reference into the Go Box, both the Information panel and the Exegetical guide opened. When we hover over a word, the Information panel displays a section called “Word Info.” For example, let’s hover over “worship” in verse 10. From the Word Info section, we can launch a Bible Word Study, search for the root of the word in the Bible, and explore the morphology of the word among other things. Logos identifies the morphology of this word as “verb, future, active, indicative, second person singular.” If have trouble remembering high school or college English, we can hover over each term for a quick definition or click on any one of these terms to open the Glossary of Morpho-Syntactic Database Terminology to find more information. We find the same information for every word in our passage in the Word by Word section of the Exegetical guide.

Grammatical Roles

Let’s go a step further by looking at the grammatical relationships of words, or the syntax. In Matthew 4:10, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:13. He states a direct command from God that man is to only worship and serve God. We notice that “worship” is the verb, “you” is the subject of the sentence, and “Lord” is the object.

What if we wanted to find every time God is worshiped to gain a better understanding of what it looks like to worship Him? To do so, we can right-click on “worship” in verse 10. Select the lemma, or the dictionary form of the word, and run a Bible Word Study on the term. Let’s expand the Clause Participants section. The Clause Participants section shows how different nouns interact with the verb we are studying. At the top, we notice there are two options: Grammatical roles and Semantic roles. When Grammatical roles is selected, we see other subjects and objects used with the verb. We can explore the context of these verses and get a better appreciation for biblical worship. Let’s go even further with the Semantic roles option.

Semantic Roles

A semantic role is the real world relationship that nouns have with verbs, or the meaning that the grammatical structure is conveying. When we click the Semantic roles option, the results for the Greek word for worship include “Agent” and “Experiencer.”

If we are looking for who worships God in the Bible, then the worshiper’s semantic role is “agent” and God’s semantic role is “experiencer.” These semantic roles remain constant regardless of the grammatical construction of the sentence. For instance, God would still be the experiencer if He were the subject of a passive voice verb, “God was worshiped by the church,” or the object of an active voice verb, “The church worshipped God.”

Our search shows every person who worships anything in the New Testament. We can expand any of the agents to see where in the Bible they appear worshiping. We can also see who and what is worshiped. We notice that every instance of God not being worshiped is in a negative example except for one of Jesus’ stories in Matthew 18 where the king who represents God is the one being worshiped. In other words, worshiping anything or anyone other than God is sinful. The Case Frames section below is also helpful as it divides the instances where the experiencer is explicitly referenced, “Agent—Experiencer,” and when the experiencer is implied, “Agent— [Experiencer].”

When we follow the steps with the word “serve” in verse 10 and we will find similar results. In the Bible, only God is worshiped and served. What does this imply about Jesus? Jesus is worshiped on several occasions in the New Testament and does not turn it down as does the angel in Revelation 19. When we follow the steps with the word “serve” in verse 10 and we will find similar results. In the Bible, only God is worshiped and served. What does this imply about Jesus? Jesus is worshiped on several occasions in the New Testament and does not turn it down as does the angel in Revelation 19.

Assignments

Here are your assignments:

• Follow the same process for the equivalent words in the passage Jesus quotes, Deuteronomy 6:13, to find out who and what are worshiped in the Old Testament and create a passage list with the results • Research the differences between Deuteronomy 6:13 and Matthew 4:10 in one or two commentaries and add any insights you find to your clipping file

Today’s study was a bit technical. If you need more information on these concepts, Zuck’s work has much more information and it’s part of most Logos 6 base packages and Logos Cloud subscription plans. You can also contact a Logos Pro at [email protected] or ask your fellow students for help at the 30-Day Challenge Faithlife group. Tune in for tomorrow's lesson.

DAY 22

Research Words in the Original Languages: Grammatical Constructions

Step 7 (cont.): Look for and Study Important Words and Phrases and Connect Them to the Rest of Scripture

What do you think makes different languages distinct? When we read them, we recognize that the words and often the letters are different. When we hear them spoken, we notice the distinct sounds and tone. There is another level of difference, grammar. This is just as true for biblical Hebrew and Greek as it is for modern languages. Translating from Greek to English isn’t as simple as looking up a Greek word in lexicon, finding an English equivalent, and plugging that word into a sentence. Following this practice doesn’t take into account the unique grammar of each language. That’s exactly why Google Translate, while a modern technological marvel, isn’t more accurate than a first year language student.

Learning the grammar of a language takes time and exposure—there aren’t really any shortcuts. Yesterday we talked about looking at commentaries, especially technical commentaries, to find where the morphology of words in the passage we are studying stands out. The same practice is wise when we are looking for places where the grammar of a passage is important.

There’s another place to look. In my own practice of interpretation, I make it a habit to consult the indices of the Greek and Hebrew grammars I own. For instance, when I was studying to preach 1 Corinthians 10, I went to the index of my well-worn paper copy of Daniel Wallace’s classic, Greek Grammar beyond the Basics and found where Dr. Wallace used any of the verses in 1 Corinthians 10 as examples of the grammatical point he was making. If you have a grammar or two, I commend this practice to you, along with looking at how your commentaries talk about the grammar of the passage.

As you might expect, the process I just described is time consuming. I have to pull my grammars off the shelf, turn to the index, and then systematically work my way down the references, turning to the different sections of each grammar to see the discussion. Sometimes the results are rewarding, sometimes it’s not worth the time.

Logos makes this process so much simpler.

Grammars Section

Our Exegetical Guide should already be open from when we typed a reference in the Go Box. If it isn’t, we can use the Guide menu to access it. Let’s expand the Grammars section. The way our results look will depend on whether we have a subscription to Logos Now. Logos Now will arrange our results by grammatical categories like phonology, etymology, and morphology. Otherwise we’ll have a simple list. Regardless, the results are really helpful and Logos saves us time by opening our grammars to the exact spot with just a click. Here we have a list of places where the grammar of our passage was significant enough to be used as an illustration or extended discussion. For instance, under the “Three Uses of αὐτός,” Bill Mounce says that this Greek word can be used as a personal pronoun. This doesn’t really add any insight we couldn’t have found on our own by simply reading Matthew 4:5. If we had used a paper copy of Mounce’s book to find this instance, it wouldn’t have been worth our time. But with Logos, it was nearly instantaneous.

In his section on the “Accusative for Extent of Time,” Daniel Wallace comments on Matthew 4:2. “Had the evangelist said that Jesus was fasting forty days and forty nights with the genitive of time, it would have meant that he was fasting during that time period, but not necessarily for the whole of it. Indeed, the meaning might have been that he had fasted during the daytime, but ate at night.” In other words, Wallace believes the grammar of verse two indicates that Jesus did not eat or drink for the entire forty days.

In his section on “Examples of Προσκυνέω + the Dative,” Wallace states the grammar of verse nine implies that the devil was not simply asking Jesus to worship him, but to actually declare that Satan is God. He then states that in Jesus’ refusal to worship the devil, “it seems that a personal application of this text to the tempter is being made. Although only the Lord God is the true God, the devil will have no chance for a personal relation with him, though he does have an obligation.”

These are really great insights into the text that we wouldn’t necessarily get by reading a translation of the text. Let’s add these insights to our note file. If you’ve found this process extremely helpful and want to add close to a hundred resources related to the grammar of the Bible, check out the Grammars Collection at Logos.com.

Greek Grammatical Constructions

If we have a Logos Now or Cloud subscription, we will also see a section entitled “Grammatical Constructions.” For this feature, the scholars at Logos analyzed every biblical passage and noted where important grammatical constructions appear.

We can hover over each label to see a definition and example of the grammatical construction’s use—or click the label to read the article. Let’s look at the 1st and 3rd class condition sections. In verse three and six, the tempter uses a 1st class conditional statement. The label explains that a 1st class conditional statement “assumes a statement true for the sake of argument.” Thus Satan was saying, “assuming the fact you are the Son of God is true, do the following…” Satan was not affirming Christ’s deity, he was testing it.

We also notice Satan’s statement in verse nine is a different type of conditional statement. This 3rd class conditional statement involves “future potentiality.” Satan was making a promise, “you have the potential to have all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, if you will worship me.” Let’s add this to our notes.

With this information, we can better understand and communicate the intent of the passage. Next, let’s scroll down and notice the “Historical Present” section. The “historical present” is the use of a present tense verb to describe a past event. Similar constructions are often used when we tell stories in English. You may say something like, “I was at our church’s gathering yesterday, and Josh says to me, ‘Don’t forget our meeting this week!’” You just changed from the past tense to the present.

Greek Grammatical Constructions Search

Let’s click “Search for Historical Present” and change the search type to “Bible search.” Logos just found every instance of the historical present in the New Testament. When we choose to graph the results, we notice Matthew, Mark, and John use this rhetorical device to a much greater extent than does Luke in his Gospel and in Acts. Matthew, Mark, and John most likely used this style of writing to draw us into the story, where Luke used different rhetorical devices. This is interesting, so let’s add it to our notes file.

Assignments

Your assignments focus on the grammar of the passage:

• Use the Grammars section of the Exegetical guide to find other grammatically significant constructions and add any insights you find to your note file • If you have access to Logos Now or Cloud, use the Grammatical Constructions section to locate and research other grammatical constructions that appear in Matthew 4

You have probably heard about the thousands of manuscripts that validate the New Testament. You may have also heard that, because they were hand-copied, they differ from each other in places. Tomorrow we’ll look at the important work of textual criticism and how Logos gives us access to this scholarly discipline.

DAY 23

Research Words in the Original Languages: Textual Variants

Step 7 (cont.): Look for and Study Important Words and Phrases and Connect Them to the Rest of Scripture

After the ink dried on the last page of the last book of the New Testament, there was a period of fourteen centuries in which book-making technologies changed relatively little. The codex—the standard paper book—replaced the scroll fairly early on in that period, due in no small part to Christianity. But every book in Europe was still produced by the dip-scratch, dip-scratch of scribes hunched over writing desks with pens and inkwells.

Until Gutenberg introduced movable type printing to Europeans, the idea that scribes could make identical copies of any lengthy book was simply ludicrous. It could not be done. Printing made perfect textual accuracy possible, but it didn’t make it probable: the famous “Wicked Bible” of 1631 left out a key word in the seventh commandment, reading, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” Minor errors creep into any work done by the human hand—God promised in the garden after the fall that Adam would find frustration in his work, and it has ever been so.

The simple fact that no one can deny is that ancient manuscripts of the Bible differ. And all the “textual variants” between manuscripts (spelling changes, word order changes, missing or added words) can be traced to either finitude or fallenness: either people made mistakes or they made changes. You need no more evidence than you already have to believe that humans can make mistakes—you try copying a long document and see how you do. But to believe that they made purposeful changes—especially if you view those changes as somehow malevolent or self- serving—is to adopt something like a conspiracy theory mindset. Theologically motivated changes can occur—1 John 5:7 is an example—but simple human mistakes are a much easier explanation in the vast majority of cases.

The science of establishing which variant is original is called “textual criticism,” and it’s something of an advanced level topic, something you’ll want to do your own reading on. (David Alan Black has written one good introduction to the topic entitled New Testament Textual Criticism: A Concise Guide.) But a few points may be helpful here:

1. Think of what it would take for someone to “change the Bible.” He or she would have to foist that change successfully on a whole world full of Bibles in a day before car travel, let alone air travel. 2. The fact that we have so many biblical manuscripts, particularly of the New Testament, is comforting: they come from places all over Western Europe and the Middle East, from many different time periods, and there are excessively few substantial differences. 3. Many, many of the textual variants are tiny, not even showing up in translation. The tiny number of them which are substantial in the New Testament are John 7:53–8:11; 1 John 5:7; Mark 16:9–20. You can read about those in more detail in Black’s book.

Textual Variants Section The rest of the textual variants in the Bible are somewhere on that continuum in the middle— though they’re weighted toward the minor and insubstantial end. And one of them is in Matthew 4. It provides an excellent example of the type of textual variant that often occurs in the Gospels. It’s something that doesn’t affect the doctrinal teaching of the Bible in the least, but something you need to figure out if you’re going to study the passage in detail.

The variant shows up in Matthew 4:10. The majority of manuscripts in existence have Jesus telling the devil, “Get behind me, Satan!”

But the oldest manuscripts say, “Be gone, Satan!”

What did Matthew originally write? It’s possible that he wrote something entirely different, of course—but that’s excessively unlikely. There is no evidence anywhere ever discovered that he did. These are the two possibilities: “Be gone” or “Get behind me.”

Let’s use the “Textual Variants” section in Logos’ Exegetical Guide to help us explore this textual-critical issue. The Exegetical Guide is already open from when we used the Go Box to start our study on Matthew 4.

The Textual Variants Section alerts us when a passage we are studying is mentioned in textual commentaries available in our library. Take a look at the information provided. There’s 4:10, and it’s the only variant listed in the Lexham Textual Notes on the Bible, because it’s the only significant variant in the chapter.

But why is it here? If the words “Get behind me” aren’t original, where did they come from?

The answer is simple, it provides an example of something that happens repeatedly in textual criticism of the Gospels, and nobody could put it more expertly than Bruce Metzger in his useful Textual Commentary:

If the words ὀπίσω μου were originally in the text, no satisfactory reason can be found to account for their omission. On the other hand, if they were originally absent, copyists who recalled the words of Jesus to Peter, ὕπαγε ὀπίσω μου, Σατανᾶ [Get behind me, Satan], ... would have been likely to supply them here.

Let’s restate that just once: if “get behind me” were originally in the text, it’s unlikely the phrase was left out of all later copies. What obviously happened here was that a scribe who knew his New Testament got confused and—lacking Logos Bible Software to help him find out where the words “Get behind me” were supposed to be, namely Matthew 16:23—he figured someone else had made a mistake. The scribe then added the phrase he remembered from Matthew 16:23. It’s quite possible that more than one scribe across the ancient world made the same understandable mistake, and it got passed down to us.

If we know how to read a formal textual apparatus, or books that use a special coded system of symbols to record the differences between manuscripts, the “Apparatuses Section” of the Exegetical Guide will take us directly to apparatuses connected to the passage. The “Editions Section” links to each version of the Greek New Testament to which we have access and provides a helpful “text comparison” link. When we compare the versions of the Greek New Testament, we will see the Byzantine Text, often associated with the Majority Text, adds the words “opiso mou” or “behind me.” Let’s add this insight to our notes.

We can also compare the text to ancient translations such as the Latin Vulgate, and explore actual photographs of the ancient manuscripts. When we open the Tischendorfianus IV manuscript, you see a picture of a manuscript with the actual textual addition.

Another tool we can use is the New Testament Manuscript Explorer, accessible through our list of interactive resources as part of Logos Now. Here we can search for specific manuscripts by date, contents, text family, and more.

If textual criticism is a subject you are really interested in, the Textual Variants Collection offers you close to fifty essential works related to textual criticism.

Assignments

Here is your assignment:

• Use the Textual Variants section of the Exegetical guide to observe other textual variants that occur in Matthew 3-5

We are finally done with Step 7 in our Bible study method. Tomorrow we move on to the second and last step in the Interpretation stage. See you then!

DAY 24

Understand the Purpose in Structure

Step 8: Outline and Interpret the Passage and Check Your Interpretation with the Interpretation of Others

We spent the last eight days in Matthew 4 looking at the word and phrase level in order to find the author’s intended meaning. Today, we will outline the passage to see how going through this process helps us understand the meaning of the text.

This is part of the eighth step in our Bible study method: we will outline the passage and then come to a conclusion about its overall meaning. Then, we will check our interpretation with the interpretation of others.

The structure of a biblical passage communicates truth along with the individual words and sentences. The writers of Scripture, and the Spirit behind them, did not arrange what they wrote haphazardly. Part of good interpretation looks for this structure and takes what it implies to heart. In order to do so, a good practice is to outline the text based on that structure. This outline will not only help us understand the meaning of the passage, but it may also help us communicate the meaning of the passage to others.

To analyze the structure of a passage, all we really need are our notes from the observation and interpretation stages, a tool to write with, and the passage we are studying. So, if you aren’t using Logos, you could use a pencil and a pad of paper or a word processor. In this video, we’ll use Logos’ sentence diagramming tool.

Sentence Diagrams

From the Documents menu, let’s choose Sentence Diagram. The name of this tool may bring back unpleasant memories from high school English class, but let’s do our best to repress those memories and see how diagramming a passage can be helpful for interpretation.

We can certainly use the Sentence Diagramming tool to construct sentence diagrams, and we should, especially for long and complex sentences in the Bible, but let’s instead use it to build a block diagram. Block diagrams break a passage up into small units and then arrange these smaller units according to the relationship they with one another.

Let’s give our document a name and add the passage we are studying by clicking on “Insert passage” and typing our reference. We’ll press enter, choose the version of the Bible we prefer, and select “Text flow diagram.” (The “Line diagram” option is for traditional sentence diagramming.) We can also add other interlinear lines if we wish. Let’s click “Insert.”

Because we are familiar with this narrative from our previous study, we know there are three temptations, so let’s segment them out by clicking the first element of each temptation and dragging it. The first element may be a verse number or a word. There are five obvious breaks: verses 1, 3, 5, 8, and 11. I’ll label each break by clicking the large “T” in the tool selection bar and adding text to the side. Now we’ll begin to break the narrative down even further by sentences and clauses. We add a break where it makes sense to us. It will take some practice to feel comfortable doing this, but the more we do it, the more proficient we will become. There may not be one absolutely right answer, but generally the segments of a text are clear enough, as they are here.

As we observe the structure of the temptations, we notice that the intensity and tension escalates from the first to the third temptation. The first temptation tested whether Jesus would trust His Father for His sustenance and took place in the wilderness with no one around. The second temptation ups the intensity: would Jesus trust His Father’s presence and protection at the temple, the place that symbolized God’s presence with the nation of Israel? For the third temptation, the devil takes Him to a very high mountain. R.T. France in his highly rated volume in the New International Commentary on the New Testament makes the point that the escalation in geography pictures the escalation in intensity of the temptation. In this third test, the devil questions Jesus’ devotion to His Father as God and His Father’s promise of future glory. France states, “the more subtle suggestions of the first two proposals are succeeded by a blatant challenge to God’s authority when the devil ‘drops his disguise’ and the central issue is brought into the open…. The devil is trying to drive a wedge between the newly-declared Son and his Father.” Will Jesus worship the devil in order to get what He wants, or will he continue in His relationship of dependence on the Father?

Both the temptation narrative’s place after the baptism narrative and its structure are purposeful. God declared Jesus to be His Son at His baptism and the devil was now testing Jesus’ belief in this declaration. Matthew is showing us what this anointed King and beloved Son would choose to do under intense testing.

Let’s observe one more important thing related to the structure of Matthew 4:1–11. There is an interesting structural point in verse 11. This verse reverses the three temptations in a chiastic structure. Chiastic structure is common in the Bible and is a type of parallelism where the parallel elements radiate from the center. In this instance, the devil leaves Jesus which is the result of Christ’s words in the third temptation—He rejected the devil’s request in the most aggressive way by not only refusing to worship him, but by telling him to leave. The second phrase in verse 11 speaks of the angels’ arrival which corresponds to the temptation to force the angels to come rescue Him. The final words of verse 11 inform us that the angels ministered to Him, which is God’s provision for the hunger Jesus felt. At the center of this chiasm, and of the narrative itself, is Jesus’ powerful command and its result. “Be gone, Satan!...Then the devil left him.” Not only had Jesus passed the tests, He had triumphed over the devil. This not only foreshadows the victory Jesus would have over the devil at the cross and resurrection after which He claimed, “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” but a foreshadow of the victory Christ will have over the devil at the end of the age.

We’ll add these insights to our notes by right clicking on verse 11, choosing reference, and selecting “Add a note to Matthew 4 notes.”

Propositional Outlines Before ending this video, let’s look at one more tool for observing the structure of a passage we study. We’ll click on the Visual Filters icon and select “Propositional outlines.” The text of the Bible is now divided into clauses, or portions of sentences. The scholars at Logos tagged each clause with how it relates to the clauses around it. Most of the label meanings are intuitive, but we can hover over any label to get additional information.

Now, let’s open a second panel with the esv to see the entire passage. The labels indicate that there is an introduction, followed by the three temptations, and a conclusion. Each temptation follows a similar pattern: a location, a speech by Satan, and Jesus’ response of a quotation.

While outlining the passage ourselves is most beneficial because it forces us to think through the argument or storyline of the text, the propositional outlines visual filter is a helpful tool we can use to make sure we are understanding the structure of the text correctly.

Here’s another word of caution, the structure of a passage isn’t necessarily its meaning. It’s great if our outline of a passage is really close to the actual structure of the passage, but we must fight the urge that ascribes meaning to a passage based on structure alone. We still must take into account the literary, intertextual, historical, and cultural contexts of the passage. We don’t want to allow our analysis of the structure of a passage, and then our outline of the passage, to overshadow what the passage actually says. That’s exactly why the second part of step 8 exists. By checking our interpretation with the interpretation of other godly students of God’s Word, we’ll guard against coming to false conclusions.

Assignments

Here is your assignment:

• Construct your own block diagram of Matthew 4 and think through any other implications the structure of Matthew 4 has on its meaning

Today we outlined Matthew 4 to help us understand its meaning. It’s a practice I hope you will start using in your own Bible study. In one of the first videos of this course, we mentioned the benefit of slowing down our reading of Scripture. Outlining the structure of the passage does just that. See you tomorrow.

DAY 25

Summarize the Big Idea of the Text

Step 8: Outline and Interpret the Passage and Check Your Interpretation with the Interpretation of Others

Why did Matthew include the account of Jesus’ temptation in his treatment of Jesus’ life? Matthew may have had multiple intentions for including the narrative of the temptation in his gospel. He could have simply included it as a major event in Jesus’ life, a story that needed to be told in order for his work to be complete. He may have included it so that his readers would know how to fight temptation by observing how their Lord did.

Today we’ll try to answer that question by looking through the notes we’ve made throughout the course and by remembering what we learned from the structure of the passage. One of the most beneficial things we can do after we’ve done the work of observation and interpretation is to sum up the passage in one overarching statement. The statement should be general enough to encompass the themes of the passage, but specific enough for us to understand what the writer of the passage wanted to communicate.

Notes: Tagging and Searching

Over the last twenty-four days we’ve investigated Matthew 4:1–11 closely and found significant insight into the passage. Our text is full of note icons just from the insights from the videos. If you’ve also been doing the homework, you have even more notes. Your notes are organized by verse numbers, but it would help us understand the text better if we could organize our notes by major emphases. If you are using the pen and paper method, you can transfer your notes to note cards and begin organizing them. With Logos, we can use the tagging feature for our notes and clippings.

The first step we should take is to read through our notes and clippings. As we do so, we’ll look for central ideas. As I read through my notes and quotations, I found two main ideas. The first revolved around what Jesus was doing. The second revolved around how Jesus did what He was doing. I then tagged each of my notes and clippings with either “Mat4:What” or “Mat4:How” by hovering over the note, clicking on the drop down menu, and selecting “Add a tag.” I found a small number of notes that did not fit either category and did not constitute a central theme, so I left them untagged.

When we press Control “F,” or Command “F” on a Mac, Logos brings up a find box in our notes file. We can use this to search for our tags so that we can read through the ones we categorized with each tag.

Let’s summarize our results. First, a major part of our notes speak of Jesus passing the test, conquering the evil one, and fulfilling what Israel failed to do. Matthew’s account of Jesus’ early life and ministry followed Israel’s history. His experience in the wilderness mirrored theirs, yet, in the midst of severe testing, he obeyed where they failed. And, He used the Scripture that God had given Israel to fight the tempter. Jesus’ testing followed directly on the heels of God’s declaration of Jesus as His beloved Son. Satan took the opportunity in the wilderness both to test the truthfulness of this claim and the resolve of Jesus’ character. The genre of the Gospel of Matthew strengthens this idea. The Gospel of Matthew declares the good news that God was intervening into the affairs of man with Savior and King who was perfectly obedient in our place. With his ample quotations of Scripture, Matthew wanted to ensure that his listeners knew that their faith was firmly rooted in the Old Testament and that their hope in the victory of the returning Messiah was sure. The temptation narrative is nothing less than a power struggle, the culmination being Satan’s request to be worshiped as God. At the center of the structure of the passage is Jesus’ command, “Be gone, Satan” and Satan’s exit from the scene in defeat. Matthew clearly has the future victory over the evil one in focus.

Second, Matthew explores the nature of temptation and demonstrates how Jesus overcame it. Temptation is not simply an enticement toward evil, though, in this story, Jesus is certainly enticed to sin. Temptation also involves an element of testing. Satan was testing the freshly declared “beloved Son” of God as part of God’s will. We must also remember that it was the Spirit that led Jesus into the wilderness to be tested. Jesus overcame test through reliance on His Father. Jesus did not seek to provide for Himself apart from His Father, or force His Father’s hand to save Him, or acquire what He had been promised outside of the will of His Father. He simply recalled His Father’s commands and trusted. Even the “how” of Jesus’ victory points back to what He was doing.

So the meaning of Matthew 4:1–11 is Christological in nature. By that we mean that when Matthew included this story in his narrative, he wanted us to know something about Christ more than he wanted us to know anything else, including how to overcome temptation. As we’ve mentioned before, the purpose of this passage is to cause us to look to Jesus, not ourselves. He is the one who fulfilled the hope and destiny of the nation of Israel. He is the one who perfectly relied on the Father. He is the one who defeated Satan and sin on our behalf. In future videos we’ll talk about how to apply the passage, but the main application of this passage is faith. Faith in the perfectly obedient beloved Son of God. Faith in the victorious Lamb of God. Faith in the One who suffered and died for the sins we committed in our own temptation.

This is the message of Matthew 4:1–11: in the temptation, Jesus, the promised Messiah and beloved Son of God, victoriously triumphed over the evil one through reliance on His Father succeeding where Israel and the rest of humanity failed.

Assignments

Your assignments mirror the steps we took in this video:

• Go through your notes and clippings and identify central ideas • Tag your notes and clippings according to these central ideas • Write out a summary statement of the central meaning of Matthew 4:1–11 You’re doing great! Five more days and you’ll complete the challenge! Tomorrow we’ll compare our interpretation with that of others to make sure we haven’t missed anything or come to any wrong conclusions.

DAY 26

Check Commentaries for Interpretation

Step 8 (cont.): Outline and Interpret the Passage and Check Your Interpretation with the Interpretation of Others

We are nearing the end of the interpretive stage of our Bible study. We spent a lot of time observing and interpreting the text. We outlined the text and then did our best to encapsulate its meaning into one statement.

When we interpret the Bible, we have the potential of making mistakes. Sometimes we totally miss something in the text. More often, we have either a preconceived idea about what the text means or an interpretive axe to grind which causes us to ignore the intended meaning of the author. Many of us who communicate God’s Word to others can identify with this tendency because we feel we need to address the issues that we perceive are pertinent to our audience. It’s not a malicious mistake, but it’s still a mistake. The eighth step of our Bible study method includes a way to guard ourselves from making such mistakes: checking our conclusions against those of others.

There’s a healthy balance involved. We will benefit much more from Bible study if we do the work ourselves. Our understanding of God’s Word will only stand to gain when we invest the time to slowly read the text and make observations, to carefully research the context of the passage, and to identify important words and research them. That’s exactly why we’ve reserved this specific step of looking at commentaries for the end. Commentaries are an immense help and a true grace from God, but we should not allow them to short-circuit our Bible study. We’ve used commentaries in this study already for information on the different contexts of Matthew 4, but we haven’t really spent time looking at what they say about the interpretation of verses specifically. They should not be the first place we look, but they definitely should be a place we look—especially when we’ve developed our own conclusions about the passage.

In Ephesians 4, Paul speaks of the good gifts God has given to His Church, “And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.” In commentators, God has given us shepherds and teachers to guide us toward maturity in Christ.

The quality of commentaries varies. We’ve linked to some of the best commentaries on Matthew throughout this course, but the best person to provide commentary recommendations is someone you respect and who has taken the time to shepherd and teach you personally. If you have questions about a particular resource, you can also contact the Logos Pro team at [email protected] or ask a question in the Faithlife 30-Day Challenge group.

Commentaries Section The commentaries section of the Passage guide is our one-stop-shop for the commentaries in our library. We can always use paper commentaries, but flipping to the relevant parts of the commentary can be tedious and, if we have more than three or four, they will soon take up all of the space on our desk. If you use commentaries in Logos, the relevant information is one click away. And even better still, you can take all of your commentaries with you wherever you go. The order of the commentaries that shows up in the Passage guide depends on how you’ve prioritized your commentaries. To prioritize commentaries, we open our library, click prioritize, and drag the commentaries in the order we want. When we drag an individual commentary that is part of a larger series, Logos automatically prioritizes that whole commentary set. Let’s look at one main result.

Grant Osborne, in his excellent contribution to the Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament confirms our understanding of the passage, “Keener notes the three categories for interpreting this story: (1) a salvation-historical approach, with Jesus’ testing recalling that of Israel in the wilderness; (2) christological, affirming Jesus’ messiahship against current political expectations; (3) paraenetic, with Jesus a model for believers when they are tested. The best approach is to combine the first two, though I would alter the second to say Jesus proves himself to be Son of God by defeating Satan in the wilderness. The third is often misused in sermons, who take this story as showing that when we memorize Scripture we can defeat Satan every time. There is no hint in the context that Matthew is thinking of believers; it is christological from start to finish.”

We shouldn’t just rely on one commentary if we don’t have to, so our assignments will involve reading other commentaries.

Citations and Bibliographies

But before we get there, let’s quickly look at some of the most helpful features for transferring our study from Logos to a word processor. At any point during our research, we can transfer quotations from Logos to a different program. When we copy the text from the quotation we mentioned earlier and paste it into a Word document, Logos automatically includes a footnote with the bibliographical details. If we’re working on a research paper, this will save us a ton of time. We can choose the citation style by choosing “Program Settings” from the Tools menu and selecting our desired citation style.

Once we’ve finished our research, we can build a bibliography quickly from our clippings document. As long as we’ve added a clipping from each of the resources we want to cite, we can save it as a bibliography by opening our clippings file from the Documents menu, clicking on the panel menu, and selecting “Save as Bibliography.” After we’ve chosen the citation style, we can export it to our word processor.

Assignments

Here are your assignments: • Read the sections on Matthew 4:1–11 in at least three of your commentaries and add any insight you find to your clipping document • Create a bibliography with the resources from your clipping document on Matthew 4 and export it to a word processor

Great work! See you tomorrow when we finalize the interpretation stage by looking at the doctrinal implications of our passage.

DAY 27

Explore the Doctrinal Implications of the Passage

Step 8 (cont.): Outline and Interpret the Passage and Check Your Interpretation with the Interpretation of Others

A final step in the interpretation stage, though, by no means, an essential one, is to check for doctrinal implications in our passage. Ideally, Christian doctrine should primarily grow out of the biblical text. We should allow an unbiased interpretation of the biblical text to dictate what we believe. The problem we have, though, is that we are all biased to one degree or another. This shouldn’t discourage us from interpreting the Bible. It should encourage us to recognize our bias and do our best to counteract it with devotion to good interpretation—allowing the text to continually correct our bias as we study the Bible more.

That’s why it’s helpful to understand how different systems of theology, including our own, use the text. It gives us broader perspective of the interpretation of the passage and how it is used among the various strands of Christianity.

If you aren’t using Logos, you can use the indices of the systematic theologies or Bible doctrine resources you own to see if they discuss your passage. Systematic theologies organize the Bible and other sources of revelation into categories and typically reflect denominational beliefs. Systematic theologians answer the question, “What does the Bible teach about this particular topic?” Christians have been writing down what they believe since the days of the early church, so there are ample resources from which to choose.

Let’s look at two ways to use Logos to search for the doctrinal implications of Matthew 4.

Quick Collections

The first method we’ll use involves a feature called “quick collections.” Let’s highlight Matthew 4:1–11 in our Bible, right click, choose reference, and then search everything. When we do this, the results are overwhelming. We can limit our search by using quick collections. A quick collection is a way to limit what resources we are searching. In this case, we want to limit our search to our systematic theologies. To do so, we’ll click on “Everything” and enter “type:systematic theology” into the search box that appears. We’ll then select the option that tells us how many resources in our library are classified as “type:systematic theology.” We can find how Logos categorizes our resources by looking at the columns in our library. The “type” column is turned off by default, to make it visible, right click on the header row and choose “type.”

Logos returns every time Matthew 4:1–11 appears in one of our resources that is categorized as a systematic theology. Our results are easier to digest when we organize them by resource. Now we can sort through our favorite doctrinal resources to see where the passage as a whole is mentioned. If we want to find where both the passage and the individual verses of the passage appear, we’ll need to delete the equal sign from the search syntax. Systematic Theologies

Logos Now and Cloud make the process a little bit easier and the results more manageable. Let’s expand the Systematic Theologies section of the Passage Guide. Like our previous search, this section shows every time our passage is mentioned in the systematic theologies in our library. We can organize the results by subject or by resource. Let’s organize them by resource. This sorts our results by denomination primarily and then by doctrinal category.

Let’s expand the Baptist section.

Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology is popular in evangelical circles because of his gracious and clear approach to theology. We find that Grudem uses the temptation narrative as a key example of Jesus Christ’s humanity. His hunger demonstrated that He had a real human body.

Millard Erickson, another excellent theologian, broadens our understanding of the devil’s offer of the kingdoms of the world when he says, “Satan actually is the ruler of this domain. Thus Satan’s offering Jesus all the kingdoms of the world (Matt. 4:8–9) was not idle and exaggerated boasting. These kingdoms lie within his power, although they are not rightfully his and one day will be fully delivered from that control which he now exercises as a usurper.”

Under the Reformed section, Donald Bloesch uses Matthew 4 in his discussion on whether “dependence connotes subordination” in the relationship between the members of the trinity. How the members of the trinity relate to one another is an issue much discussed by theologians and Logos alerted us to the discussion.

Let’s add two notes of caution about using systematic theologies. First, be careful not to assume that a theologian’s personal view necessarily represents his denomination. We may just be observing a personal view, not a denominational one. We’ll have to do more reading from others in the same denomination before we come to any conclusions.

Secondly, we must be sure to read the context of our findings. If we don’t read the context of the search result we’ve found, we will surely misrepresent or misunderstand the author.

If you want to add close to two hundred theological works to your library, check out the Systematic Theologies Collection at Logos.com.

Assignment

Use the systematic theologies you own to complete the assignment:

• Continue to survey your results and add at least three significant theological insights that pertain to Matthew 4 to your clippings file

We are done with the interpretation stage. Tomorrow we jump into application. We’ll begin to answer the question, “What does this passage mean to me?”

Application DAY 28

Apply the Passage

Step 9: Apply the Passage

Application is the work of taking a universal principle from a passage and thinking through its relevance for contemporary situations. I purposefully used the word “work” in the last sentence. Application is hard work and takes time. The best practice is to pray for God’s help as we think through the passage and how it applies to our own life. Nothing can replace concentrated time spent in prayer and meditation with the truths we’ve gleaned from the passage. The reason we don’t go to other sources first for application is because we can apply the text to our situation better than most, because, after all, no one knows our own situation better than we do.

Personal application should be paramount when we do personal Bible study. Too often, our sinful hearts tend to think about how the text applies to others before we allow what the Spirit is teaching through the Word into our own hearts.

Duvall and Hays’ concept of finding the universal principle of the text and applying it to today’s situation is a helpful one. The universal principle is what the text addresses that applies to all of God’s people and should flow directly out of the author’s intended meaning. For some passages in the Bible identifying the universal principle is relatively simple. It’s pretty easy to identify the universal principle in Paul’s admonition to the Philippians in chapter 2, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.”

With other passages, it’s more difficult. The genre of a passage and its historical setting may make identifying a universal principle more difficult. For instance, what universal principle can we derive from the story of left-handed Ehud’s killing of Eglon in the book of Judges? The point I’m making isn’t that there isn’t a universal principle in this story, just that it will take more time to identify it than it will for other passages.

Let’s briefly begin the work of application for Matthew 4:1–11. We summarized the meaning as, in the temptation, Jesus, the promised Messiah and beloved Son of God, victoriously triumphed over the evil one through reliance on His Father succeeding where Israel and the rest of humanity failed. We also hinted at the universal principle for this passage: we must have faith in the perfectly obedient and victorious beloved Son of God. This principle applies as directly to Matthew’s original audience as it does to us.

We can now take this principle and begin to apply it to our own lives. There are two sets of questions we’ll ask to do so, one centering on Jesus’ perfect obedience, the other on Jesus’ victory over Satan in the temptation.

First, what part of our lives does not reflect faith in Jesus’ perfect obedience for us? In Matthew 3, God the Father’s voice comes out of heaven to affirm Jesus’ sonship. Immediately afterward, in Matthew 4, Satan tests that declaration in the first two temptations challenging Christ with the words, “If you are the son of God.” Jesus demonstrates that He truly is the Son of God, not by miraculous deeds in this case, but by obedience and reliance on His Father. Matthew is showing off Jesus: He is trustworthy. We can rely on His obedience. So, in what ways are we relying on our own obedience and performance to become or maintain our status as beloved children of God?

Next, what part of our lives does not reflect faith in Jesus’ complete victory over Satan? The account of the temptation escalates to the final and boldest demand from Satan, “Worship me.” Jesus confronts this bold demand with an even more powerful command, “Be gone, Satan.” This was the central part of the passage’s structure and a foreshadowing of Jesus’ ultimate victory. In what ways do we not trust Jesus’ absolute control of situations in our life, including the temptation we experience? Are we trusting Jesus for victory over our sin or are we trusting our own devices?

How we answer these questions depends on our individual situation, and we can make the application more specific the longer we think about them.

Sermons

There are, of course, other things we can take away from the passage. We want to make sure our main application comes from the author’s main intention, but there’s nothing wrong with looking for other ways to apply the passage. We’ll call these concepts “secondary applications.” For instance, Jesus’ reliance on the Spirit of God and the Word of God to overcome the temptation is evident from the passage. Jesus is not only our substitute and King, He is our example. We can learn from His example in our own temptation. Again, this isn’t the primary level of application, but it is a level of application.

We’ll want to make sure these applications don’t contradict Scripture. One way to safeguard our application and find further application is to look to the application made by pastors we respect. The Sermon section in the Sermon Starter Guide is perfect for this task. Let’s highlight the passage, right-click, choose reference, and select “Sermon Starter Guide.” We’ll expand the Sermons section to see if our library includes any sermons on this passage.

John Piper is a well-known and respected voice in evangelicalism. I find two sermons he’s preached on this passage. In his sermon entitled “You Shall Worship the Lord Your God,” Dr. Piper includes a piercing illustration that he then applies to us, we should take “cues from the King’s Son” and have a devotion to worship God the Father as Jesus did. Piper states, “Yes, worship is a must. But not THAT kind of must. Not the kind that says, ‘I don’t want to, but if I must, I will.’ That will not do in kissing, and it will not do in worshiping….There is no value in a kiss or an act of worship that does not come from the heart…. the duty to worship is a duty to become a new person, to get a new heart. If worship must come from within, and worship is our number one duty in all of life, and you don’t find it coming from within you, then you need to be born again. Hearken to the renewing Word of God!”

His sermon entitled “Man Shall Not Live on Bread Alone” applies the text to fasting. He says, “In other words Jesus’ fasting is part of his testing the way hunger was for the people of Israel in the wilderness. But that doesn’t mean fasting wasn’t a means of battling Satan. Because fasting reveals where the heart is. And when the heart proves to love God more than bread, Satan does not have the foothold he would if our heart was in love with the earthly things like bread.”

If you find the Sermons section valuable, consider adding over 17,000 sermons to your library with the Sermon Finder Collection.

Assignment

Your assignment is simple but not easy:

• Apply Matthew 4:1–11 to your situation and record your thoughts in your note file

Tomorrow we’ll find resources that will help us with applying the text. See you then.

DAY 29

Find Personal Application

Step 9 (cont.): Apply the Passage

We introduced the idea of finding help with application yesterday by locating a couple of sermons by John Piper that helped us apply the text. Besides sermons, where else can we look for help with application?

We’ve extolled the virtues of commentaries throughout this course—let’s do it one more time. Commentaries on the BIble often have application sections throughout. Some commentaries revolve around the concept of application, like the well-regarded New International Version Application Commentary. So if you aren’t using Logos, spend some time looking through the application sections in the commentaries you own.

Collections

We can do the same thing in Logos by going to the Commentaries section in the Passage guide and looking at each individual commentary. This is faster than the paper book method, but there’s even a faster way to find specific application for what we are studying.

One essential Logos skill is the ability to limit our search in order to find what we need. Because we have so many books in our library, sometimes search results are overwhelming. The “Collections” feature is an essential way to limit our searches. Here’s how to use it:

We’ll go to the Tools menu, select “Collections,” and give our collection a name. Next we will fill in the Rule box. Collection rules tell Logos what books to include in the collection. We can see the categories we can use to build collections by looking at the header row in the library. If we want to know what categories Logos puts our commentaries in, we can simply look up one of our commentaries and look at the information in each column. We can add further columns to the library window by right-clicking on the header row. Let’s add the subject column. This allows us to see the information we need in order to make our collection. In the collections search field, we simply type the column header name followed by a colon and then the category in the column we’re looking for. In this case we find that there is a subject category for commentaries on Matthew. Let’s enter “subject:Bible. n.t. Matthew--Commentaries” into the collections rule box. Logos lists all the commentaries in our library whose subject is the book of Matthew. We can add books that Logos didn’t find by dragging them from the library to the box in the collection panel that says “Plus these resources.” We can exclude books that Logos found by dragging them from the “Resulting Collection” list into the box that says “Minus these resources.”

Now we can search just the books in this collection.

We spoke yesterday about primary and secondary applications. Primary application follows the author’s main intended meaning in the text. Secondary applications are biblically true, but are either based on secondary intentions of the text or topics the text brings up. The main application of Matthew 4, we said, centered on Jesus as our substitute and King. But, we can also apply the text with Him as our example. We can also learn from how He resisted temptation—He did it with Scripture. Let’s try to find where else our commentators link Scripture and temptation. We’ll open a new search window and choose the Basic search. Let’s search All Text in our Commentaries on Matthew Collection. In the search box we’ll type “Scripture NEAR temptation.” Instead of getting over four-hundred results if I’d simply searched everything, I have a very manageable 14 resources to look through in my library including one from Mobile Ed.

Not surprisingly we have a result from the New International Version Application Commentary volume on Matthew. After comparing Jesus’ temptation to Adam and Eve’s temptation and 1 John 2:15–16, Michael Wilkins says, “Jesus succeeded under similar temptations where Adam and Eve failed, and the way he succeeded becomes the example for the way we can succeed under similar types of temptations. This is the powerful truth that has sustained Christians all through the ages under every type of temptation imaginable. We can summarize Jesus’ example like this: Resist the devil in the power of the Spirit through the guidance of the Word to accomplish the will of God.” He then delves further into this statement with helpful application. Notice what Wilkins does not say. He does not apply the text, as many people have, by promising victory over temptation through quoting applicable Scripture, however helpful that discipline is. Victory over Satan is never guaranteed by our own efforts. Victory over Satan is only guaranteed through Christ’s. This does not mean that we should not put forward effort to memorize Scripture for times when we are tempted. There are other passages of Scripture that encourage us to do so, like Psalm 119:9 and 11.

Ancient Literature

Let’s look at another place we can find commentary on both the interpretation and application of passages we study. In the Passage Guide there is a section called, “Ancient Literature.” This section links us directly to the works of the Apostolic Fathers, the Church Fathers, and many other works of literature from the ancient world. For the works that are part of our library, we can hover over the title and read a section of the text to see if it adds to our understanding of the text. I’ll show you a few references I found.

John Cassian connects Jesus’ temptation to Adam’s. Cassian labels the three temptations as gluttony, vainglory, and pride and shows how Adam was tempted in the same ways. Let’s add this section of text to our notes file by highlighting it, right-clicking, and selecting “Add a note to Matthew 4 Notes.” We’ll also edit the attachment points to connect it to Matthew 4 and Genesis 3. This will connect our Bible to this section in John Cassian. We can change the view to “Quotes” to see what we highlighted.

Gregory the Theologian applies the text masterfully when he says, “If after baptism the persecutor and tempter of the light assail you (for he assailed even the Word my God through the veil, the hidden Light through that which was manifested), you have the means to conquer him. Fear not the conflict; defend yourself with the Water; defend yourself with the Spirit, by Which all the fiery darts of the wicked shall be quenched…. If he assail you by your want (as he dared to assail Christ), and asks that stones should be made bread, do not be ignorant of his devices. Teach him what he has not learnt. Defend yourself with the Word of life, Who is the Bread sent down from heaven, and giving life to the world.” Let’s add this to our note file.

Augustine connects our passage to 1 John 2:16 when he says, “These three there are, and thou canst find nothing whereby human cupidity can be tempted, but either by the lust of the flesh, or the lust of the eyes, or the pride of life. By these three was the Lord tempted of the devil.” We’ll add this to our notes file and connect it to 1 John 2.16 and Matthew 4.

Without Logos, we would spend hours trying to locate where the Church Fathers talked about a passage of interest. Unlike most contemporary authors, ancient writers often did not organize their material in ways that are intuitive for our modern eyes. Logos not only gives us access to the works of these ancient writers, but helps us locate what we are looking for.

Passage Lists

While Scripture memory is not the main application of the passage, memorizing Scripture can only help when we fight temptation. Let’s add the verses Jesus quotes to a passage list and begin memorizing them. We’ll go back to Matthew 4:4 and then create a new passage list from the Documents menu. We’ll give the passage list a title, like “Passages for temptation.” Let’s add verses by typing their reference into the reference box. A passage list is a document we can create to store a list of Bible references for future use or reference. We can add verses manually as we are now, or send search results to a passage list as we did in Day 21. Let’s add verses 7, 10, and Psalm 119:9–11. We can begin memorizing these passages by clicking on “Memorize” in the upper right hand portion of the panel. There are a variety of settings we can change, like Bible version, memory method, and order.

Assignments

Here are your assignments:

• Use the commentaries collection to check the applications you made as part of yesterday’s assignment to see if you can find others who agree with how you’ve applied the text • Explore the ancient literature section for insight into the interpretation and application of Matthew 4 and record your insights • Create a passage list with at least five verses and begin memorizing them

Tomorrow is our last day in the challenge! We’ll think through how to apply the text to the lives of others and use one of Logos’ most exciting features to share the insights we’ve found with others.

DAY 30

Share Insight

Step 10: Share Insight

We’ll conclude this 30-Day Bible Study Challenge with a related challenge. Share. Your. Insight. If you are anything like me, spending so much time in Matthew 4 has lit a fire in my bones to share what I’ve learned. This forms the tenth and final step in our Bible study method. You may be sharing the insight you’ve gained with a church you preach or teach at, or with a small group you are a part of, or with a believing or unbelieving friend. Regardless of your audience, speaking the truth in love is a biblical imperative. We looked at Ephesians 4:11–14 in Day 26, let’s look at the rest of the passage. In verse 15, Paul continues, “Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”

9Marks Application Grid

We are including this biblical step in the application stage because part of sharing the insight you’ve gained is thinking through how the passage applies to the person or people to whom you are speaking. The best tool for this task I’ve found is the “Sermon Application Grid” that Mark Dever and 9Marks popularized. Michael Lawrence’s excellent Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church includes a quick summary of the application grid. The grid forces us to ask the following six questions about the passage:

• “Where is this passage located in redemption history and how does it relate to us? • What does this point mean for the non-Christian? • What does it mean for us as citizens, as employees, and so forth? • What does it teach us about Christ? • What does it mean for us as individual Christians? • What does it mean for our church as a whole?”

We can take the answers we come up with for these questions and communicate them to others.

Visual Copy

One of the best places to find help for application is typing a topic into the Go Box. We’ll do the same thing we did at the beginning of the challenge, type “temptation” into the Go Box. The Topic Guide includes a whole section on Illustrations. The Sermon Starter Guide includes a section called “Preaching Resources” that includes links to quotations related to the topic. Illustrations and quotations are helpful tools for communicating truth. We’ll expand the Thematic Outlines section of the Sermon Starter Guide. There’s an entire outline on resisting temptation including “encouragement to those facing temptation,” “finding in God and His word resources to overcome temptation,” and “practical suggestions for overcoming temptation.” I especially resonate with James 1:12. If we want to share this with our friends because we know many are struggling with temptation, we can right-click on the verse, select the reference, and choose visual copy. Logos displays a beautifully designed piece of art that we can share with our friends on social media or through email. We can also add it to presentation software if we are prepping for a Bible study.

We can share any one of the quotations we found while working through the Matthew 4. Let’s open our clippings file, open the resource with the quotation, highlight the quotation we want to share, right-click, choose selection, and select Visual Copy on the left. Logos just created a professionally designed slide and we can change the design with one click.

Next Step

After finishing the 30-Day Bible Study Challenge, you may be wondering what the next step is. It’s simple. Choose another passage of Scripture and follow the ten Bible study steps. You can reference the videos and transcripts in this course at any time through the process. Let me remind you of the steps.

The first stage was observation and it included six steps:

• Step 1: Read the passage in its context several times • Step 2: Identify important themes in the passage and connect them to the broad themes of the Bible • Step 3: Compare English translations • Step 4: Explore the passage’s literary and intertextual context • Step 5: Explore the passage’s historical and cultural context • Step 6: Pay special attention to the words and actions of the characters

The second stage was interpretation and it included two steps:

• Step 7: Look for and study important words and phrases and connect them to the rest of Scripture • Step 8: Outline and interpret the passage and check the interpretation with the interpretation of others

The third stage was application and it included two steps:

• Step 9: Apply the passage • Step 10: Share insight

Assignments

Here are your final assignments:

• Apply the main point of Matthew 4:1–11 to at least three groups of different people: your family, your church, and those who do not believe in Jesus • Use visual copy to share either a quote you have found during this course or Logos verse art via email or social media • Choose the passage you’ll study next

We are so glad that you’ve stuck with us all the way through this 30-day challenge. Even as you move on to the next challenge, we would love to hear your questions and stories; you can connect with us at [email protected], or through the 30 Day Challenge Faithlife group. It is our sincere hope that this method, and the tools in Logos Bible Software, will inspire and assist you in your continuing pursuit to grow in the light of the Bible. Application is the work of taking a universal principle from a passage and thinking through its relevance for contemporary situations. I purposefully used the word “work” in the last sentence. Application is hard work and takes time. The best practice is to pray for God’s help as we think through the passage and how it applies to our own life. Nothing can replace concentrated time spent in prayer and meditation with the truths we’ve gleaned from the passage. The reason we don’t go to other sources first for application is because we can apply the text to our situation better than most, because, after all, no one knows our own situation better than we do.

FAQ

30 Day Challenge Do I need to own Logos to take this course?

No. The course is designed to both teach Bible study methodology and how to use Logos 6. While you might not have the full experience, you will still learn a great deal about how to study the Bible and about Matthew 4.

I have a previous version of Logos. Do I need Logos 6?

No. But you will find it easier to navigate the software if you have Logos 6. You can always update your software to Logos 6 for free by going to the installation page here. If you’re interested in upgrading to a Logos 6 base package, you can find the option that best suites your needs here.

Why are my results different than those shown in the videos?

Your results may vary based on the resources you have in your library or specific settings in your program.

I missed the January 1st signup. Can I get the emails from the previous days?

While January 1st was the first day of the 30 Day Challenge, you don’t have to start on a specific day. You can begin the challenge whenever you want. Simply signup here and start receiving email reminders.

I’ve signed up for the challenge but haven’t received the first email.

You should expect the first email for the challenge to go out the day after you’ve signed up.

Why does the signup page say I’ve been banned?

At some point you’ve likely set your global preferences to not receive any marketing messaging from Faithlife. We’ll be happy to manually add you to the mailing list. Just contact us at [email protected].

Why haven’t I received today’s email?

Emails are currently sent around 8:00AM Pacific Time. We are looking to change this so you have your reminder email in your inbox before you start the day. It’s been several days and I still haven’t received my email. How can I make sure I’m getting the reminders?

It’s possible that your email has been caught by your spam filter. Make sure emails from [email protected] are not going to your spam folder. If you’re still having trouble, contact us at [email protected].

Can I download the videos to watch at a later date?

Currently, the videos are only available on our website. But don’t worry. They aren’t going anywhere. You can continue to come back to them day after day to brush up on demand.

Why am I having trouble viewing the videos?

Wistia is our video web hosting solution. To troubleshoot playback issues, please visiting their troubleshooting page here.

Are there any plans to put this course in Logos Bible Software?

Yes. Though we don’t have a ship date, we hope to make the 30 Day Challenge a permanent feature of the Logos 6 platform.

Why create the reading plan for the book of Matthew when the homework for Day 1 is to read Matthew 4?

While the homework is designed to give you a better grasp of Matthew 4, we’ve intended the reading plan to accompany you throughout the course. Gaining a better context of the entire book of Matthew in general will facilitate your understanding of Matthew 4 in particular.