How to Read the Bible as an Orthodox Christian

Christ Is the personal word of God it's the word of God a Divine person now scripture is the written word of God the fathers of the church regularly refer to the scriptures as the word of God and what that means because Christ is the word of God and the Bible is the word of God it means that the Bible is a symbol or an expression of Christ [Music] [Music] hi everyone this is sarim Hamilton today I want to talk about what it means to study the Bible as an Orthodox Christian in the fifth century St John chrysostom encouraged his hearers to not only hear the Bible as it was read in the church but to study it for themselves and now in an age of universal literacy we as Orthodox Christians should consider it as part of our divine obligation to be studying the words of the Bible every day St Justin Popovich in more recent times calling the Bible the biography of God in the world encouraged all Orthodox Christians to read at least one chapter of the Old Testament and and one chapter of the New Testament every day becoming Orthodox should not mean stopping reading the Bible and beginning to read the church fathers instead rather it should mean that we follow the counil of the fathers and the tradition and study the scriptures day and night while of course also studying the tradition moreover being Orthodox Christians means that we have the keys we have the keys to interpreting scripture for all of its worth for deriving the full wealth of its meaning from its pages but just having those keys is not the same as using them just the fact that the Bible belongs to us doesn't mean that we are taking advantage of it in the way that God wishes so what is the Bible okay let's begin with its nature the Bible is first and foremost a lurgical text so the Divine Liturgy it's the consumation of our whole life it's where we find our meaning it's the culmination of God's grace through the human race for all creation it's the center of our Christian Life and the Bible is a lurgical text now I don't just mean that it's something which is read liturgically I mean that it's theology it's thematic Center is to be found in a specifically lurgical context now I want you to think about where we get the first books of the Bible in particular the foundation of the whole Old Testament and thus the whole Bible is the petuk the Torah the five books of Moses and the five books of Moses was given in the context of the gift of the Liturgy when Israel was redeemed from slavery in Egypt God came down in glory on Mount Si to speak to them and we usually think of Si as the place from which God gives the text of the Torah where God speaks to Moses but actually the central theme of the sin narrative in the Bible is that God gave to the people of Israel his own presence which they accessed liturgically in the Tabernacle you go to Exodus 19 Israel Sees God at the Holy Mountain and then the majority of what he gives on SI Exodus 25-31 tells us how they instruct a miniature Mount Si in the architecture of the Tabernacle now God's making himself available in worship and liturgy in fact is the driving force of the whole Exodus story to begin with I want you to think about what Moses said to Pharaoh when he went to him and asked for Israel to be released he did not in fact say Let My People Go permanently so they can go up to the land of Canaan and take the land of their inheritance rather he said let us go 3 days into the wilderness that we might offer sacrifice and hold a feast to the Lord Our God the impetus for The Exodus was liturgy was worship and when God comes down and meets Israel on sin in Exodus 24 that meal finally happens the Elders of Israel go up to SI and they saw the god of Israel they ate and drank in his presence Moses reads the book of the Torah to Israel and he sprinkles the blood of the Covenant on the people now that little phrase blood of the Covenant is the very phrase which our Lord uses in the gospel of Matthew when he institutes the Holy Eucharist The Exodus is the foundation of Israel's life and identity and when Jesus institutes the Eucharist giving the foundation of the church's life he refers back to this Central event at the hinge of Israel's early Story the rest of the book of Exodus after Exodus 24 is concerned with the exact instructions for how to Fashion the Tabernacle and set up its order of worship and at the end of the book of Exodus God's glory fills up the Tabernacle to its brim so that no one can enter into it God came down on Mount Si in glory Israel was afraid they drew back they sent Moses to mediate for them Exodus chapter 40 God comes in glory in the Tabernacle Moving Mount Si and again nobody can enter into it The Book of Leviticus answers the problem raised at the end of Exodus Exodus nobody can enter into the Tabernacle cuz God is there and God is so big and infinite and thick that you can't be in the same place as God unless he is inside of you Leviticus is almost entirely made up of word for word divine instruction on how to liturgically relate to God in that context so there's a problem God is here that means there's no room for us the answer is liturgy the answer is worship Moses the author of the first books of the Bible is significant in the whole human story because of how he was chosen to bring the divine presence into the world so that mankind could have a relationship with God in a lurgical context the Torah only makes sense in this context as a book about worship as a book about liturgy God makes his home with the people and because God's home is now the people's home because Israel is encamped with God at their Center the people have to learn to live in a new way it's like if you're adopted into a new family you got to learn the family culture you got to learn new habits of living it's a totally new situation it's the same for Israel but to an infinitely greater degree because we're dealing with an infinitely great God and what we find in the book of Deuteronomy and elsewhere is that the Torah itself is read in lurgical context it's at the great feasts of Israel where the people are going to come where we re hear the Torah read aloud in extensive passages and it's the tribe of Levi the Priestly tribe who's given the responsibility to teach the nation the way of God this is the fundamental Narrative of scripture scripture is about God's Divine indwelling of the world in the creation week God makes the world through the Divine word and then comes to rest or dwell in the world when we look at other scriptural texts using the language of divine rest Psalm 132 and elsewhere we we we read about it in the sense of God's coming to live in the cre as a sanctuary what the creation story is telling us is that God has built the world as a home for himself but because one's home isn't just one's individual home it's the home for one's family when God gives man ownership of the world that means that man is being created to be taken into God's own family and to be a member of someone's family means their life runs through you I got my life from my mom and my dad to be taken in to God's family means that we are taken into his kind of life we share in his life we share in his presence and thus we are able to exercise Dominion as his stewards and Regents he rules the world through human beings through us that's how the Bible is about Jesus Christ Jesus who is both God and man is the one in whom all of God's purpose concerning the world is fulfilled Jesus is both God coming to dwell in the world as God thereby fulfilling his intent to dwell in the creation and he's also man coming to Reign Over The World by God's glory as man fulfilling the human calling allowing us to be taken into his body and share in the Divine Life Through the spirit Jesus is the Messiah the whole Bible is about the Messianic hope and the most common use of the word messiah in the Bible is for anointed priests we often think of of the Messianic hope as principally a kingly task but really the word is more often used for Priestly aspects the priests bear the duty of carrying God's presence into the world that's why when a priest blesses you in the Bible it's God who's blessing you why the priests are wearing garments of glory and of beauty it's God who's glorious it's God who's beautiful and Priests are dressed up like God as it were their clothes are bright radiant with light richly colored and embroidered this is Jesus's Messianic task to fill the world with the divine presence that's what the prophets say that in the Messianic age the knowledge of the glory of God will be as the waters covering the sea moreover the preeminent context in which this is Manifest is a lurgical context it is in the Liturgy that God calls to us and we reply to him when we think about what happens in The Divine Liturgy this is what we see God speaks to us in the scriptures and we reply Allelujah Glory To Thee that's the Liturgy of the word the first part of the Liturgy ending with the reading of the gospel and the epistle and the sermon in the first part of the Liturgy God is a work comes to us comes to us at the door invites us into his home and we enter into the house of God and then the second part of the Liturgy we find the crown of our life in the second part of the Liturgy having been invited into the household of God we journey into his inner chamber and we sit down at his table and we eat a meal with him in the Eucharist now recognizing that the entire scriptural witness is about Jesus Christ in whom God dwells in the world and elevates man to stand in his presence that allows us to understand the various senses in which we read the scriptures the hymnography of the church is filmed with connections between scriptural narratives and theology that at first glance do not seem intuitive so for example does a ladder to heaven have to do with the Virgin Mary the lad to Heaven is given to in a vision to Jacob and it's read at almost all of our Maran feasts I'll talk about that in another video but it doesn't seem particularly intuitive it doesn't seem straightforward what is this have to do with that but the different senses of scripture they only make sense in the light of the person of Jesus Christ when we understand who Christ is and the way that God HS the world together through Jes Jesus Christ then we will understand how to read the Bible Christ Is the personal word of God it's the word of God a Divine person now scripture is the written word of God the fathers of the church regularly refer to the scriptures as the word of God and what that means because Christ is the word of God and the Bible is the word of God it means that the Bible is a symbol or an expression of Christ if you enjoy this content please consider supporting this channel as a patrion or paid substack subscriber I post Reflections on scripture six days a week and three of these posts are exclusive to those who are patrons or paid subscribers on 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highquality and original content thank you so much the entire world was created through the Eternal Word who is Incarnate in Jesus Christ because all things in creation were both made through him and sustained in their existence through him all things in creation will ultimately at the culmination of History find their perfect fulfillment in him and since we ourselves are created in His image the Divine word is is our model or standard of living it is in relation to him that we become truly ourselves now this is where all the senses of scripture come together so medieval interpreters often talked about there being four senses of scripture there's a literal sense an allegorical or symbolic sense there's a moral or tropological sense and then there's an anagogical or eschatological sense so let's take a look at these four senses in turn and I want look at them through the lens of one particular story Israel's Journey Through the Red Sea so if you spend much time in Orthodox lurgical context you're going to find something really interesting is that which is that we talk a lot about Israel's enemies the Egyptians being destroyed in the Red Sea we say a lot about it and people coming to the church for the first time might wonder well why why are you talking so much about Pharaoh in Egypt in Israel in the sea why aren't you talking more explicitly about Christ and so on well the answer comes in these senses of scripture so let's take a look at what the story tells us so in the book of Exodus we read that Israel was pursued by the army of pharaoh and the glory of God went both behind them and in front of them it both protected them from the Egyptian Army which was seeking their destruction and it led them forward it pointed them the way in which they should go leading them through the Red Sea which God divided miraculously into two by the hand of Moses now the literal sense of this story is its historical meaning around 1500 BC a real people made up of real historical persons called Israel really stood at the borders of Egypt and experienced the miraculous division of the sea into two and there really was a pharaoh and Egyptian Army who stood behind them seeking their destruction and they really were destroyed in the waters of the Red Sea and Israel really went to a real mountain Mount Si where they really received the the Tabernacle and the Torah the literal sense is the foundation of every everything else because Christ really does uphold the real true world it is precisely because of the historical reality of the biblical text that we even care about the other senses the allegorical sense of the story tells us the deeper meaning of the story but because the story really happened it tells us the deeper meaning of the world itself so whenever you hear hear anyone say well Orthodox Christians they don't they don't have to take the Bible historically because uh oh we read it allegorically read the church fathers the church fathers took scripture very seriously as an historical text um and there's actually a very good book I would just recommend to you guys called the Christians as the Romans saw them and that book shows how in the first three centuries of church history the historicity of the Bible was actually a flash point of Christian Pagan arguments it's not just a modern preoccupation people say oh it's just something the fundamentalists came up with I'm sorry it's not true the historicity of the Bible is always been important and it's very important for us as Orthodox Christians the allegorical sense of the story tells us what it means so the historical sense that's really happened in the real true World in which we live and move and breathe the allegorical sense tells us what that story means and what the world means so Israel passed through the Red Sea behind them was Egypt where they were enslaved and slavery meant that their physical energy their very life served a king who despised them and wanted them dead he's happy to use them he's happy to use their energy happy to use their motion but he's going to build what he wants to build and he doesn't care about the well-being of these slaves but the presence of God surrounds this people and he takes them through water and he brings them to a mountain where Heaven and Earth connect where they eat in God's presence and then they're taken to a land flowing with milk and with honey where they rejoice in serving God now the allegory here Works in two directions it works backwards back to the life of Abraham and it works forwards to the coming of Jesus Christ and our baptism into him so when Abraham comes into Canaan in Genesis 11-12 one of the first things that happens is that there's a famine in the land of Canaan and Abraham goes down to Egypt when he goes down to Egypt Pharaoh the king of Egypt takes his wife tries to take her into his heram God strikes pharaoh and the Egyptians with plagues we don't know what plagues they were but we're just told by Genesis 12 that Egypt was struck with plagues and so Pharaoh lets the bride go and Abraham leaves Egypt with much new wealth and he comes into the land of Canaan just as the same would happen to Israel later in in its history and Israel would come out of Egypt with great wealth and they used that wealth to build a tabernacle the connection between the Exodus and the life of Abraham tells us that Abraham's life comes to its fulfillment its greater meaning in The Exodus and then it looks forward to Jesus and our baptism in Christ so this link tells us that Abraham's story Finds Its fulfillment in The Exodus and that story and thus Abraham's story as well Finds Its fulfillment in the person of Jesus Christ when we're baptized we're coming through water but we're also surrounded Ed with God's presence we're taken out of our old self the old Humanity where our life and our energy and our work served the devil who's happy to use us but he hates us he wants us dead and then we are LED forward from our baptism to eat and drink the presence of God in the Holy Eucharist as Israel came to SI ate and drank as they saw the god of Israel and then God gives us the whole world as our inheritance when we're raised from the dead and the world to come we rejoice in all things because God is in all things and we bring joy to Creation this isn't just an arbitrary reading it's not a cutesy bit of metaphor the text itself points to this symbolic meaning so this is really important that you understand when we talk about an allegorical dimension of scripture we're not talking about reading something into scripture the allegorical Dimension is in the Bible to begin with the text itself gives us reason to interpret it in this way so for example early in the book of Exodus Moses fled from pharaoh and then in the very same context when Moses meets God at the burning bush God gives Moses a couple signs Moses's staff becomes a serpent and then we're told and Moses fled from it so Moses fled from Pharaoh he fled from the serpent later in the Bible Isaiah for example Pharaoh is described as a great Dragon a Great Serpent the connections here tell us that even if we didn't have the New Testament even if we didn't have the liturgics of the church Pharaoh is a sign of a greater and deeper enemy our true enemy the ancient serpent the devil so then there's the moral or tropological meaning of the story the story gives us an example of how to relate to God in our baptism and at turning points in our Christian life so notice how each of these meanings Builds on the other have the historical meaning Israel pass through the Red Sea 1500 BC then you have the allegorical meaning this points to our baptism into Christ that's what it's pointing towards that's what it means then you build on that the tropological or moral meaning okay if it's really about our baptism then that means something for us because we're baptized Christians and we can get lessons from it so let's think about it Pharaoh is closing in on Israel as they're about to Journey Through the Red Sea and they begin to suspect that perhaps God brought them out to kill us in the wilderness they said were there no graves in Egypt that you brought us out here to die in the wilderness this is the primordial lie what did the devil say to the woman in Genesis chapter 3 he said you won't die it's because you're going to be as Gods God is trying to hoard his own life his own glory for himself he's tricking you he doesn't have good intentions for you he wants your destruction that's what we call projection ladies and gentlemen that's what the devil wants and he projects it onto God and this is what Israel is beginning to think at the Red Sea they see Pharaoh and his armies coming towards them and they say this was all a trick none of this had any meaning God brought us out here to destroy us now what are the people enjoined to do in Exodus chapter 14 they are told to believe in the Lord and his servant Moses now in our baptism what we do is we trust that God is joining us to Jesus Christ and forgiving us all our transgressions when we confess to God We Trust he has forgiven us why because he's promised to do so even when we don't feel forgiven we believe that he is faithful to his promises which is that he has thrown our sins into the depths of the sea and so we follow Christ and are liberated from soulc consuming Despair and that is what we believe when we go to Holy Communion we trust that God has made us worthy to partake of his ho holy and perfect in life creating Mysteries the story tells us that what we see and what we feel might not be the same as what is real we know Reality by trusting the promises of God then there's the eschatological meaning or the anagogical meaning that's what the story tells us about the ultimate fulfillment of everything when Jesus appears in glory and transfigures the whole physical creation when he raises us from the dead when he gives the church the world as an inheritance here the meaning of the story of Israel's liberation of the Red Sea isn't just a story about The Liberation of people in the world it's a story about The Liberation of the world itself the creation is set free from its bondage to Decay and obtains the freedom of the glory of the children of God that's what St Paul says in Romans 8 now think about all that language in the exod Israel becomes the Son of God Exodus 4 says Israel is my son that's what God makes them in the Exodus they come out of the land of Egypt and they're led by God's glory to the promised land and in Romans 8 we read about Liberation from slavy to death and Decay we read about the freedom of the sons of God and we read about the Holy Spirit leading us through this present age into the life of the age to come in the crossing of the Red Sea Israel by faith followed God to the mountain filled with his presence we find elsewhere in the Bible that mountains symbolize the entire world United to God so Daniel 2 talks about a stone cut without hands which grows into a mountain which fills the whole creation the whole creation as it were becomes a mountain the whole creation is connected with God just like the top of Mount Si was connected with God we also find that Pharaoh representing the the devil and Pharaoh's armies representing all who follow the devil are drowned in the Red Sea now going to the Bottom of the Sea in scripture represents going down into the pit of death so uh we read about the heavens the Earth the waters under the Earth you're going down into death it means you're going underwater so when pharaoh and his those who follow him go deep under the Earth we're seeing a picture an allegory of the last judgment so we read in Revelation 20 both the devil and his angels and all who follow will go forever into the second death so sum up the Bible is about how God created the world to live in it as a home with us it's about how he fulfilled that purpose in Jesus Christ and in the church which is Christ's body and the crown of our relationship with God occurs in the Divine Liturgy where he personally comes down to us and we share a feast with him he dwells in us we dwell in him the rest of our spiritual life runs Downstream from the Liturgy within this context we can read the Bible as a text with many meanings but these meanings hold together they exist in harmony with each other and they make sense in view of each other and in view of Christ when we read the story of Israel's departure from Egypt we can derive at least four meanings first in the 15th century BC the people of Israel were liberated from slavery in Egypt by a stunning Miracle where the sea was divided Pharaoh was destroyed and Israel was saved that really happened second when we're baptized into Jesus Christ we are freed from sin and live to God by God's power being delivered from bondage to the devil third When sin encroaches on our life we are to trust God not believing the temptation to despair knowing that God loves us and wills our salvation and will do all in his power to bring it about fourth at the climax of human history Jesus Christ will Liberate the whole Cosmos From Slavery to death fill it with his glory permanently driving Satan and all who followed his will out of the world thank you very much are you looking to grow in your faith while earning your degree at St athania College you can complete a bachelor's in leadership and management or Theology and church ministry all taught by Orthodox instructors who share your faith our program is designed for working adults you'll take one course at a time with the classes and the evenings to fit your schedule new courses start every 5 weeks so you can join whenever you're ready use the code Hamilton 75 to wave your application fee and start completing your bachelor's degree today