 You're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit nakedbiblepodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on newstarthere at nakedbiblepodcast.com. Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, episode 204, Grammar and Bible Study with Steve Runge on the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. How are you, sir? Pretty good. Pretty good. I'm going to geek out a little bit today, but I think it'll be useful even for people who aren't geeks. Yeah. I am not going to lie that grammar is really not fun for me and my kids are just now getting to the point where they're going to start studying it in school and give me all the math homework. You get to help them with that. Give me all the science homework, but when it comes to English, grammar, I check out. Yeah. Well, that's where I checked in. I'm the exact opposite. God bless, there's people like you because when it comes to grammar, I'm out. Yeah. I didn't want to be confused by any numbers, so exact opposite. Yeah. I hear you. Well, I'm excited about this one because, as always, anytime you get into the nitty-gritty with textual criticism, grammar, and the Bible and what you do, I'm all about it and I think your audience is too. Yeah. This will be one of those where we just try to help people take a closer look at what they're reading. Well, we're happy to introduce Steve Rungy to our podcast, and this is going to be one of our episodes that really focuses on tools and techniques for Bible study, for more effective Bible study. We do this periodically. This seemed like a good time to do it, and Steve is right down the hall from me. He works at Faithlife, Logos Bible Software, but I'm going to let him introduce himself. He can do a better job of that than I can, and then we'll get into what we want to talk about today. So, Steve, who are you? That's a really good question. My background is actually in general contractor construction. I was one of those kids when I remember I was given a picnic table growing up. I mean, I was probably third grade or something, and I disassembled it because I actually wanted to build a tree fort and repurposed the lumber, but I got to see how things work. I was always interested in just kind of what's going on under the hood, not mechanical stuff so much, but just asking why. My dad was a research scientist, and he kind of really fostered that in me where I'd ask him a question, and he would answer my question with another question, well, what do you know to be true? What principles are involved here? And I can tell you, if the internet and the Discovery Channel were around, I probably would have spent a lot less time with my dad growing up, but he ended up basically just teaching me how to do research and how to think about things. But I always had a great love of comedy, Steve Martin, language use, telling a good joke. And as I got into seminary, I realized a lot of those skills and a lot of the interests that I had really would help me not just be able to tell a better joke, but actually preach a better sermon, do a better Bible study. And so I went to seminary at Trinity Western University and got a Master's in Biblical Languages and did that part-time while working almost full-time in construction, crammed a two-year degree into seven, and then did another repeat of that, basically a doctor of literature in Biblical Languages from the University of Stellenbosch, another basically two to three-year degree that I was able to cram into seven. And basically what that allowed me to do was develop a specialization with one-foot in Biblical Studies and one-foot in Linguistics. So I'm not really, I don't fit really well in either place. And the linguist folks look at me as a Biblical Studies person, the Biblical Studies people look at me as a linguist, so it's really kind of an odd place to be. But it's been really fruitful in terms of pursuing this question of what's going on under the hood with language and how can that then help us study the Bible better? Yeah, well, you're not going to say it, but I'm just going to interject it here. Steve has quietly, maybe not so quietly in some circles, established a reputation as sort of an up-and-coming grammarian. I mean, you're a little older to be up and coming, but you're up and coming in terms of your appearance sort of on the scene, and you're getting a lot of attention from sort of the old guard and the people who have perpetuated the old guard. So Steve's work has really penetrated into the academy for those who care about language analysis and Biblical exegesis. And he's not a mystery name to people who are in Greek grammar. Let's just put it that way. Yeah, it's strange thinking of myself as a Greek grammarian. Exactly. It's been strange to come out of construction and become a Greek grammarian. That's what I always aspire to be. But I would think of myself more as trying to be the Bill Nye of Greek grammar to make it fun. I even have a lab coat. And so when I do video podcasts or video casts online, I'll typically wear that lab coat just to make it fun and interesting because it should be. And grammar, grammar should be cool, just like science should with Bill Nye. Yeah, and he's not lying. He does have the lab coat. We've seen him in the office. And of course, you're going to be on Faithlife TV, too, with some of your stuff and on the website, too, and videos to market different things. But that's true. He does have a lab coat. It's not a rumor. No. But I guess the thing about language growing up, I mean, if I had to rank classes that I either was least interested in or thought would be least valuable when I graduated, English would rank, especially English grammar would rank up as one of those things. Because it was, it kind of felt like you have a lot of it dealt with correction and what I was doing incorrectly. And it just reminded me so much of my mom to some extent of like, but I can, you know, I'm communicating things. And so we, you know, so much of grammar or exposure to grammar is about how to do things correctly. And it's for the sake of doing them correctly. And what I was more interested in, again, is that why does it work? And why does it work that way? And why is it when I say it this way, it can make people laugh or it ends up offending someone by accident or something else? Like where it sounds like I'm saying that much the same thing or it leads to miscommunication. Why do things work the way they do? And how, how can I understand language better? And that's, that's really what my quest was about. It was specifically focused toward applying these ideas in biblical studies. But again, just telling a better joke, understanding why is I'm laughing at, you know, a redneck guy that's using these terms, even words I, you know, haven't heard before that make me laugh. Why, why do I laugh? Why do those terms work the way they do? And it turns out that linguists have essentially found that God has wired us to process language a certain way. And it's in there are idiosyncrasies between different languages. But there are also some, some pretty, pretty standard universals in terms of how information can be structured and how that affects our processing and how we expect, how our expectations play against different things. And, and so by understanding some of those kind of basic ground rules and those basic principles that can give us a framework then for being able to, to understand not only in English what's going on, but then some of the devices that the biblical writers use to, to structure the New Testament writings, to draw attention or to direct our attention to something, to connect things that maybe they thought we'd miss or to just say, Hey, this is super important. Pay attention. Yeah. And inside the building, I mean, this is, you know, when Steve started down this path, I mean, I can remember you, you know, showing up after one of the construction jobs, you know, at my desk and, and, you know, trying to essentially sell this idea that, Hey, you know, this is a important and be, you know, we can, we can actually translate this, you know, pun intended to people who don't have Greek or Hebrew. You know, if they understood how their own language works, you know, we can build some bridge to how, you know, the same thing that they're familiar with in English, even though they don't really think about it, we can build a bridge to those things in Greek and Hebrew and give them a different way rather than just pure, you know, this is a, you know, present active indicative, you know, just pure parsing or morphology. You can give them a different way to think about what the text is saying, even, even if it's only their English Bible. And so I can remember, you know, going to Bob and Dale at the time saying, you know, we probably ought to do this, you know, this is really worth, worth, you know, going down this road and they bought the pitch and the rest is sort of history. You know, Steve's had a long history of creating, you know, things for the company, you know, for the software that helped people do this. And what we want to do today is, is have him sort of walk us through, you know, some of, of the way that you can, really the way that you should be thinking about what you're reading. So a lot of this talk, and we can talk about discourse because that's usually the, the label that a lot of this goes, goes under, you know, this linguistic label, you know, discourse. We can talk about what the term means, but more importantly, you know, we want to talk about how a lot of this is really a matter of close reading and then thinking about what's actually going on. You know, it's sort of not just, not just words you're looking at, but sort of at a bit of a higher level, how, how these things work and why they work in a language. And these are things that we can apply to English, but you know, obviously we can do it with Greek and Hebrew. It's, as the linguists like to say, it's cross linguistic. There are certain things that just cross the lines of languages. Every language has, you know, is trying to accomplish similar purposes. And there's just different ways of doing that. So what we're going to talk about here again, is, is I hope going to be an assistance and aid to Bible study, even at the, the bottom level. That is, Hey, when I'm reading, I need to be thinking about certain questions or I need to ask intelligent questions about what I'm reading, but then even beyond that, maybe getting into some tools that will take you beyond things like Strong's numbers. You know, sort of these, these simple things that people, people who are serious about Bible study, they graduate from just reading to Strong's Concordance or, you know, maybe a study Bible or this or that commentary. This is another one of those things that you can, you can graduate to that will help you get more out of what you're doing. So you just, if you can, discourse, what, what does the term mean? Why shouldn't it scare us? Discourse studies is, it's a popular area in biblical studies that it seems like everyone is, wants to be involved in it. But fundamentally what it's talking, I mean, discourse studies is, is about looking at, at language above the sentence level. Most, most grammar, you're looking at things within a sentence, within a clause, but there are things, some things that, that operate above the clause level. For instance, therefore, a lot of time into the word therefore will be kind of introducing like a whole paragraph or making a reference from one big chunk of text to what precedes. And so we can talk about levels within a discourse, you know, sentence level being or clause level being like the lowest, but then you can kind of theoretically move your way on up. But it, the further up you go, the fuzzier it gets because it has more to do with how, how I've chosen to, and how I've interpreted the text and built my own mental representation of it. Because if I read through, say we're going to be looking at Ephesians two today, as I read through Ephesians two, when I leave the room, I don't have all of the words committed to memory. I've got a friend that does that. But, you know, I might have pieces of it, but when I'm, when I'm reading a verse right at the moment, I may remember most of the words, but the further I get away from that, there's this kind of shifting that happens where it goes from, you know, a word for word trend, you know, kind of memory of things just to kind of more like the gist of what it's about. And then it gets more and more generic. And that's why, you know, like with just memory, short term memory is far better than long term memory. And that affects then how, how we read and how we're building a representation of what we've read for, you know, for meditation or for preparing for a sermon or whatever it would be. Yes. So, so as we read, you know, we're, we're, we're again, building this picture of, oh, here's what he's talking about in our heads. Right. We have this, this mental representation of what, what this, this stuff that our eyes are running over or moving over. This is what it means. But then the writers will actually drop or use little things in the text as we read that will make us think about that bigger picture stuff or draw our attention to some specific point in it. And that's all that that's intentional. Right. From a discourse standpoint or a linguistic standpoint, we would look at, at the writers as and grammar as a way of signaling their intention. So if, if you come from an evangelical background and you have a doctrinal, you know, belief in your church about verbal plenary inspiration, meaning a word for, you know, a word for word, a full inspiration of the text. That should, this idea of looking at how the writers have signaled things and how they've chosen to shape and structure and organize things. Because the grammatical choices they've made are actually not for their sake, but for our sake. They're, they're making these decisions to guide and direct us as we build that mental representation, where to separate things off into a new chunk and when to join it together. So as an example, if you have little kids in your life, whether it's your children or grandchildren or nieces, nephews, a lot of times they'll come running in when they're excited and say, you know, Daddy, Daddy, guess what? This happened and this happened and this happened and this happened. And you have all of these sentences joined with and and it can make you feel like your brain's going to explode because it's all this data. And the reason why is because and tells you to join two things together because they're related. And we have this expectation that we need to break things into like bites basically like when we're eating, if you try to stuff down a whole hamburger, unless you're a hot dog like you're at Coney Island or something, but even then they'd show things up. But we have to do the same kinds of things as we're the same kind of thing as we're reading. And so the reason why that feels like just such an information overload is because the kids are kind of breaking a rule doesn't mean it's unintelligible, but it has this potentially unintended effect of making it sound like this is one hermangous piece that you need to digest all at once because they haven't given you any signals about where to break it up in smaller chunks. Yeah. So like, you know, adult English. So this is what you know, Mrs. Williams was trying to teach me to do. You use temporal adverbs, you know, things like then next after that, or you can use, you know, numbers like first, second, third, all of those are signals to say new chunk. It doesn't mean it's completely unrelated to what precedes, but it's it's just, it would be like taking a sheet of paper and kind of cutting it up with scissors into smaller, smaller strips. They still all go back and fit this and they form this one coherent discourse. Then this, you know, my story could be made up of several scenes or several different parts of it. But then those parts, if they if it's a really a coherent discourse, then can get just like Legos get built up into bigger and bigger and bigger pieces. And pretty soon you have, you know, you've completed the death star by doing each of the little different parts of the Lego thing, following directions, same kind of thing with language. For the sake of listeners, again, what we're saying is that this kind of construction, this kind of signalling, which I think is a really good word, you can, you just have to sort of be be trained, not necessarily to if it's English, I mean, you know what the words are already, okay, you're going to see them, but you have to sort of train yourself to stop and think about, okay, what does this word suggest? Like next is this linear sequence or and it's temporal, it has something to do. There was something that preceded something that's going to come after. So just to sort of stop and think a little more intelligently about what the what this word or these words actually are trying to accomplish and mean to kind of slow down become a more intelligent reader. But but Greek will do the same thing. Right. And and of course, the disconnect in all this is do our English translations, do they do a good job of communicating these sorts of things in the process of of giving, you know, a Greek text or a Hebrew text to us in English, do they do a good job of that or not, you know, and it's it's it's a difficult task. And it's it's it's almost an impossible task because you know, let's you in on a little secret, Greek is not English. It's like to have a different word for everything. As Steve Martin line. But the so depending on each of the different translations has a strength. So say NIV is trying to provide a readable something that sounds like natural English, where new American standard is trying to preserve as much of the kind of structuring of the structuring devices that you have in Greek. And that's why new American standard is you read it can kind of sound a little wooden and not sound like like it's very natural. Each of the different translations have been they each have a strength and they were designed with a purpose. But but Bible translation kind of no matter how you cut it, you're always making choices. And it's kind of like you can only take so many things in the life raft with you. And and so the translators are constantly having to decide that the great thing about something like logos, logos Bible software and some of these data sets, like the one that I worked on and that might help help get approved back in 2006 was basically the kinds of devices we're going to be talking about today can be overlaid on on any Bible translation virtually in logos. And it can be laid on the Greek text, especially for people who've learned Greek. But even people have studied advanced Greek won't have been exposed to a lot of these things, or they've been exposed to it with the with the purpose of translating it. But they still couldn't tell you why the writer did this or or what this signals as opposed to some other thing. So we're going to actually be talking a fair amount about English in terms of beginning there, because you know a lot more about how discourse works, just as an English speaker. And then we're going to come over and apply those principles then to to the text of Ephesians two. Well, let's jump in and give us, you know, either some examples or go right into Ephesians two, however you want to do it. Okay, what what will be the what will be the passage verse what are the verses in Ephesians two so people can either stop and look it up or remember and go back. Let's say Ephesians Ephesians two verses one through 10. Okay, turn in your Bibles. Yeah, if you've got that, because in in the Greek text, verses one through one through seven, basically are essentially a kind of a giant run on sentence. It doesn't mean that the Greeks would have, you know, a Greek speaker would have understood it that way. But Paul has has used devices to make this one large complex thought kind of like the Lego building of the Death Star. And we're going to look at different pieces of it, like you can assemble kind of preassemble this piece and then preassemble this piece. But he wants to get all of this, these kind of background ideas out so he can make one, one point at the end and that essentially where he's pounding the pulpit. So one of one of the, which means if we're interested in doing teaching or understanding where he's, where he's going understanding these things can then help us really be in step with with with Paul as we understand these devices. And to emphasize what he would have emphasized. Right. And for the same reasons, or maybe maybe the same, you know, be able to capture, you know, why he, you know, how he led up to this. And, you know, what he was trying to get people to think while he was on the way. Right. And it's not going to solve every theological question that people say, Dr. Rungy, I don't know how does this work? You know, give us a definitive answer. And it's like, well, I can, I can eliminate options and eliminate possibilities based on the way it's phrased. But there's, there's still flexibility for interpretations. So if you're looking for a silver bullet, I'm, I'm going to disappoint you, I can tell you that. But this will be something that again, will help us help us help sharpen our understanding. The first idea I want to talk about is backgrounding. Way back in high school, you probably, and maybe if you if you love English and are one of those people, remember the term participle, you know, it's basically the kind of noun verb hybrid generally ends in I and G like walking and singing. Participles are again, mostly verbs, but they're not like full fledged verbs. They don't, they don't stand on the same, same par as like I walked. If I say walking versus I walked, walking is kind of like left hanging. And that's why we have this, the phrase, one of the things you may have gotten yelled at about dangling participles, you've left this participle dangling, you haven't connected it to a, to a main clause. And that's because participle's purpose in life is to take something that could have been a separate main thought like I walked and to attach it to some other main idea. So again, kind of going back to that Lego's idea, let's say you have one of the big Lego blocks or some big assembly, I can use participles and, and make something more complex. So like a lot of times you'll hear this, like an announcer dribbling up the court, taking the pick from so-and-so he runs scores, you know, and you had the dribbling and passing. Those are not the main action. They're, they're kind of background pieces that lead up to it. And by using a participle, the way we would process that maybe, certainly not without even thinking about it, those ing verbs are telling us this, you know, these are not the droids you're looking for. This is not that main action. But this is something that, but the important thing is, is it's something that could have been, it could have been a main action. He dribbled up the court. He passed, you know, passed the ball and then, you know, did the lay-up or took the lay-up and scored. All of those could have been main actions, but the announcer or here, the biblical writer in Ephesians, Paul chose to use participles and that has effects, that has implications. And so what we're going to see is most of verses one through five are these backgrounded actions. You, you don't actually get to the main action until the last bit of verse five. What are some of the participles on? Like give us some examples because, you know, if you're looking at it in English, I can almost guarantee, I mean, I don't have a visual filter here turned on or anything, but, you know, you can almost guarantee that a lot, some of these participles are going to be translated like they are just normal verbs. So I'm going to go ahead and just kind of read it in a literal version that's not going to match up with anything you can read. But it would, it would be you being dead in your transgressions and sins in which you, in which you used to live. And then you have the next thought down in verse four, but God being great in love, who is rich in mercy. And then you have finally the main idea, which is made us alive with Christ. So all those other things are, are descriptive. They're participles and the one that's not has made us alive. Right. So that's your big idea. Where are you going to pound the pulpit? He's made us alive in Christ. And verse is, you know, one through four, even the first half of five, and actually verse, the beginning of verse five is being dead. And, you know, you are being dead in your trespasses. So you have kind of three backgrounded actions there. One, us being dead up in, in verse one, and then you have some, we're going to look at some other, again, dependent elements. You have verse two, but or verse four, I'm sorry, where you have but God being rich in mercy, which, and then it gets into some description about that. And then at the beginning of verse five, it switches back to us, which is being dead in our trespasses. What Paul has there is he's told us not once, but twice we're dead. And he's talking to believers here. So this isn't about telling them about what their status is now. It's about reminding them where they were. And then verse four, you have this but God and you have this contrasting picture of us being dead in our trespasses and God being rich in mercy because of this great love he has. So we've got those two things contrasted with each other kind of kind of in the back of our head and on the on the table or on the on the desktop, so to speak, that that's what we're thinking about. And that's how we're thinking about ourselves. That's how we're thinking about God before he finally comes down to the one big idea which he has is that he's the God has made us alive together with Christ. So would you say, would you say something like this? I mean, I'm not trying to provoke any specific debate here. But if someone comes up to you and says Steve, I think the main point of the first five verses of Ephesians two is that Paul wants us to really focus on on our deadness. Okay, that would that would be a misstatement. It's not to deny our deadness, but that's really not, you know, where Paul wants our thinking to sort of orient. Correct? Or at least it's not consistent with what he has done in terms of his grammatical choices. And that that's all I can't know what's in Paul's head. Sure. I mean, sure. Yeah, if I did, I could be writing, you know, books all over the place. But wouldn't we love that? But the point is, is that we can say, well, someone typically uses participles to do these kinds of things. And this, this is scholar speak, I'll grant that. But I mean, it's, it's saying they're typically used for this. They're used here in a way that's consistent with this. And basically what it what it how the way he's framed this is to basically do almost like a drum roll kind of a big build up. Because if someone was listening to this, or if I was telling you a story and saying, you know, going to the store parking my car, walking inside looking around behind me to make sure no one was coming, going into the entrance, heading back to the dairy aisle. Okay, it feels like a story that's kind of not gone anywhere. Or you're waiting for when all of a sudden, you know, that that it's it's a it can be built up, right? Because nothing has happened yet from a formal standpoint, even though I've been doing all of those actions, there hasn't been a grammatically speaking, there hasn't been a main action. And so you're waiting for like that shoe to drop. What is it? What is it? What's this going to be? And it's not just part of simple as it can do that, but there are lots of different it's a common strategy, though, of this hanging everything else on one thing in order to draw that one thing, you know, draw attention to the one thing. Yeah, that makes sense. Because you know, we've all you know, we've all read enough fiction where that's familiar to us. But you know, here we have a letter and nonfiction, but the same kinds of things are there even though we, you know, our senses really aren't tuned to it. So so as you think about, I mean, the great thing is you can kind of practice this by listening to someone who speaks well or listening to commercials. Basically, the so things like participles that create a dependent relationship on whatever the main action is, it does two things. One is at clusters, you know, you take that that participial action like the being dead and God being great in his love. Those two things could have been joint could have been independent main clauses and they weren't by putting them by joining them to the being made alive together with Christ in verse five. It one makes a complex action, but two, it makes that main action stand out all the more. It draws attention to it. So we can't really know what the motivation is. Is the motivation to background that action or is it to cluster it in the bottom is you you do one and you get the other for free. That's just how language language works in general, whether it's English or Greek or Hebrew, you'll find languages having this kind of strategy. But there are other ways of doing that same kind of connecting using subordinate conjunctions, another big word, but it's words like sense or because although if I was to say something like because you invited me on the show today and I stopped even if you didn't know the grammatical principle, you could say, yeah, where's the rest? Right. Or although I value you as a friend again. Yeah. I mean, you just again, I know this is intuitive, but I'm just saying, you know a ton about discourse studies and grammar. You just even if you can't use the words, you can sense those kinds of things because you're a user of the language. And these kinds of devices, another another device would be a relative pronoun. The who or whoever we actually have one of those in in Ephesians in Ephesians four Ephesians chapter two verse four, you have because of his why in verse verse four, you have but God, because it was great love for us, who is rich in mercy. This who is rich in mercy. It's that's technically a relative clause, who is a relative pronoun there. And and this is it's being used a lot of times relative pronouns are used to clarify which which widget am I talking about? I want you to grab the book which is on the table or that's on the table, as opposed to the book that's on the cough, you know, on the TV or on the floor. Well, we're not trying to figure out which God are we talking about? Oh, it's the God who's rich in mercy, not that other one who's not rich in mercy. It's not used to disambiguate. It's used to provide thematic information to shape how we think about God in this particular context as opposed to maybe thinking about God as as judge or as creator or, you know, as as the father. It would be easy to think of God as judge because of the trespasses and sin references. Exactly. But he's shifting here and you have God who's because of his great love for us, which is participle and who is being rich in mercy. All again, that's the context and you have this really cool comparison or juxtaposition there between what we where we used to be, regardless of where we are now, because remember, this is Paul talking primarily to believers. And basically what he's doing is taking us in the way back machine back to where we were before Christ to remind us of that and then compare it, you know, and then like going up to heaven to remind us of who God is and and his great love, his great mercy. So that when we're essentially going back and replaying that that home video of us coming to Christ and coming to know who he is of being being made alive together with Christ, we're reliving it in all of its glory, even if even if that that sense of thankfulness and that sense of the sin being washed away is kind of faded over time by going back and using the participles, using these backgrounded actions. It's basically taking us in the way back where you can kind of relive it just like looking at old photos. It's a way of reminding I remember when I was Oh, man, I can't remember I used to wear I had hair like that seriously. You know, seeing those photos evokes the memories in the same kind of way. Paul's going back and referencing these things that, you know, hopefully people have walked away from and not gone back to. But it's then to build this greater appreciation when he comes around to the main idea of being made alive together with Christ. It's kind of interesting. I'm looking at ESV. OK. And in verse two, it says, you know, when you were dead in trespasses, and that's verse one in which you once walked relative pronoun there. Yep. Right. Following the course of this world and following actually, I mean, you based upon what we're hearing, you think, oh, I wonder if that's participle. It's actually not. And the following one, following the prince of the power of the air is also not. So you have, you know, again, you what we would like people to do, you know, again, serious Bible students who want to graduate beyond not only reading and beyond Strong's numbers, when you get into grammar, these are not. These are not participle. So, you know, if you have a tool like an inner linear or something that you realize these are both prepositions. Right. So your translation sometimes I want to miss leading is too harsh of a term, but but in this case, I'm left behind. Yeah, I don't want to beat up the translation. It makes the preposition sound like an action, right, you know, in the way it's rendered. So what we would ideally want is for people to, you know, penetrate past the English and get to some of these, you know, awful grammatical terms that probably make them shudder because of their English class. But but what, you know, when you find one, when you see one, then how should I think about it? How shouldn't I think about it? What does it accomplish? What doesn't it accomplish? And you're trying to start thinking about these kind of questions when it comes to the Greek and not the English, but you can do it. As you're illustrating, you can do this with English, too. Right. Well, just just the repetition, kind of regardless of how it's been translated, not I mean, not completely regardless, but another another translation has according to the course of this world instead of following the course of this world. So according to again, it kind of creates a sense of walking along some kind of line. But just notice the repetition that you have, whether it's according to or following, you have following this following this. Let's just slow down and look at that restatement or is it a restatement because you have a pair of you have two parallel statements. They're not joined by and or but and typically when you have things like that, that kind of repetition, you're making a second pass, you're looping back over it to kind of peel off another layer. So you have according to the course of this world and then the second second peeling off the other layer is according to the ruler of the authority of the air and then you have another kind of restatement, a right dislocation. Basically, it's this extra expression that's not narrowing down which authority of the air or a ruler of the authority of the air we talking about. But if he says the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, that's referring back to whoever the prince of the power of the air is. And normally those kinds of alias expressions like that we use names or that kind of extra extra description again to narrow down who are we talking about. When I worked in construction, I rarely knew anyone's last name because we went by first names and there happened to be like four steves that worked at the same job site. I was Steve the framer, there was Steve the electrician, there was Steve the plumber and and that extra expression was there to clarify which Steve are we talking about. But here we don't even I Mike's probably I mean this is right up your alley of who is the prince of the power of the air in your opinion. Well, yeah, right. I don't know if we want to get into it, but no, I mean, yeah, I mean, you could I could identify. We'll just say, OK, that that's Satan, you know, we'll just say that. And then the spirit that works in the sons of disobedience, you know, it raises a question, will the Satan do that? Or why would it? You know, why would he be described that way? Right. But it's basically it's casting. It's providing well, it's shaping how we think about that individual rather than narrowing down what it is. And so this reminds me of my my doctorate was actually on referring expressions in Hebrew narrative. So I have a doctorate in name calling, basically. So like, how can this help me? Well, I mean, my mom used to used to say, well, the person who left the peanut butter out on the counter, please come down and put it away. She knew who left the peanut butter out. Right. I left. I knew who left the peanut butter out, and she could have said, Steve can put away the peanut butter. But she didn't. She would basically she told me label you. She told me how to think about myself or at least how she was thinking about me. I was the peanut butter lever outer. And ostensibly, that's something I didn't want to be. So I should come down and put it away and then like repent of my evil ways. Right. You know, that you've got the same kind of thing going on here, the prince of the power of the air again, assuming it's Satan. But again, it's looking at at who was he? You know, what was his role? Again, it's the one at work among the sons of disobedience, but it's looking at now where the previous sentence is kind of looking at at where they used to be, you know, you used to be doing this kind of thing. I'll tell you what this makes makes me think of because you don't have a connective here. You know, it is name calling. You know, the one the second part builds on the first part. Right. Spirit line, you know, qualifies the prince line. But I'll get questions and email like, hey, it looks to me and I want to know if you agree that we've got two different characters here. Right. You know, and no, we don't because if we did, we'd have a connective. Right. You know, and people will want to argue for certain, you know, points of their demonology or whatever ology. And and they think that that because the thought entered their head about the text, it's just as legitimate as any other thought. Right. Now that someone else, but it's not, you know, if the writer wanted you to think of them as two disparate or distinct entities, there's an easy way to do that, but he doesn't. Right. And and, you know, the comma there that you find in most translations is a really good way of doing that. And it doesn't mean you don't have common delimited lists. Like, I want you to bring apples, oranges, pears, those kinds of things. But when you have this kind of this amount of overlap between the two, it's difficult. I mean, potentially, there is a separate thing. You know, there is a separate person, but it's essentially ruled out because the amount of semantic overlap. But but ultimately, I mean, we talked about chaining things together to make one big complex idea. We basically have one idea in this first couple in these first couple verses. And you being well, you were dead in the trespasses and sins. Now it's a participle, but verse two begins with in which that's a relative that's a relative pronoun there, which which is so what that what verse two is doing is describing which trespasses and sins he's talking about. Again, it's not saying, oh, it's these, not those. Now I get it. It's making us think about those in a different way. And they're the ones you used to walk in, the ones that you used to follow according to the world. In fact, the ones at the prince of the power of the air was was leading you and now the sons of disobedience in. And then you have another chaining in verse three, another one of those relative pronoun to whom among whom connecting back to the sons of disobedience among those those folks that you used to, you know, you used to run with that was your crowd among whom and Paul now throws himself in. We all once lived in the passions. You know, so it's not just a you guys did this. He's placing himself there and saying, hey, we all did this. This is what we are characterized by. We once lived in the passion of our flesh. What does that look like? Another participle in verse three, carrying out the desires of the flesh in the mind. So again, these things are it's not like you're going to end up with a completely different translation or completely different idea. But but all of this has to do with structuring where verses one through three are one unit from a grammatical standpoint. And and ultimately just describing what sins and trespasses were like that you used to that you were dead in. Again, just like going back through a photo album and you're like, oh, right. Yeah. Ultimately, it's to build toward thankfulness and you know, and a commitment just just to, you know, stay away from those things because, you know, what is it? Distance makes the heart grow fonder or something or is it time? I don't remember which but any house. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. You have those things and you look back on, I remember in college that was, you know, you actually go back and look at the pictures and see the kinds of things you were doing is like, no, I don't want to go back to that. But you can kind of have this sense that, oh, it really wasn't that bad. It was actually it's actually kind of fun, you know, waking up on the floor and not knowing how I got there. You know, that that was funny but again, you look at it from a spiritual standpoint and it places a whole different light on things. OK, another way another device we can like it. So we've kind of looked at at backgrounding specifically with participles but then just more, more generally strategies for taking what could have been independent like series type things and make them into one complex thought. So versus one through three are not at one big, big thought. But then you have a Greek has the ability to change the word ordered basically a lot like Yoda. Yoda could almost be speaking Greek in some respects because he's using the same kinds of, you know, in much trouble you are where you can he'll front things for two reasons. You know, one would be for emphasis, much trouble you are where much trouble then has is is is part of the predicate part of what he's saying. But it's it happens to be the most important part. It's not just something is not just going to be in trouble, but in much trouble. Yes, it starts with that front right starts with that and not in every sentence. So go back and I mean, this is your homework here. You know, go go look for YouTube scripts of Yoda speaking and listen to them because he doesn't do it. And so it's not like it's it's that that that his speech has a completely different word order. He uses normal English order a bunch of the time until he doesn't. And when he doesn't, it's because there's a reason to do it. And again, that's very much like Greek. One of the reasons is for emphasis sake to basically make that word stand out because it's the most important in the sentence. Another reason is just simply to mark a switch like a meanwhile back at the ranch. And that's what we have in verse four is but God. And now in English, since we're required to have a subject at the beginning of the sentence, it's it's harder. We don't we can't change word order that much. In English, if we want to emphasize something, we will use what's called an it cleft construction. It was the Butler who did it in that kind of a sentence. It's assumed that someone did something. And the question is, who is it? And it's the Butler, not someone else. With with this switch, what I call in my Greek grammar book, a frame of reference. But the point is just to switch to something else. And we typically just do that with kind of a secondary intonation primary intonation for what's most important for emphasis, secondary intonation like but God, not but God, you know, unless we're doing it overly dramatically, you know, by grace, you've been saved down in verse five is another one of those examples of emphasis. It's by grace, not by something else. And when we come down to verses, you know, eight, we're going to have it have it again, you know, by grace you've been saved, not by something else. But here in verse four, it's just switching from you who were dead in your sins to but God. And again, it's it's switching to this other parallel scene not that we leave that one behind, but we're just going to set it aside like you're making a recipe and they say please combine these ingredients and then set aside for a moment and then you go over to, you know, your protein and you start slicing that up and browning or whatever it is you're supposed to do, because ultimately, we're going to pull this whole thing together into one recipe. So we've just set aside the you know, the vegetables and now we're going over to kind of the meat course about God being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us. Even when we were dead in our trespasses, that's describing which God he's talking about. And again, that's not to help us figure out, oh, it's that God, not some other one. But it's to shape how we think about God, just as my mom would have me think about me as myself as the guy who left the peanut butter out on the counter. And because this has been going on for so long, you know, it's such a complex thought. Look at the next line in verse five, it says, even while we were dead in our trespasses in in NIV or ESV, excuse me, that's almost a verbatim repetition. And in Greek, it is a verbatim repetition of where we began up in verse one, which is being dead in your trespasses. Yeah, in case you forgot that point after he piled all that other stuff into it, he brings it back. And what that's doing there is just like if you're if you're watching a TV show and, you know, West Wing was, you know, kind of this show that really pioneered this previously on the West Wing, and they show you like little five second clips of the previous episode. So it's enough to remind you, oh, yeah, I remember that was going on. But it's also kind of a way of signaling that that you're going back and picking that up or that left off because otherwise, why would they mention it? And it helps get you back into something when you've been out of it for whatever reason. With the TV shows, it's because it's been a week that's gone by or if you're on Netflix, it's because like two minutes has gone by or seconds because you're binge watching. But here it's more like that proverbial week going by on TV. This is like you can call it resumptive repetition. It's going back and looping back to remind you, oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, that he was talking about that because we're just about ready to have all of that stuff come together for the main course, which is made us alive together with Christ. Yeah, what's going through my head is like Iron Chef because they have an assessor and they have to do that all the time, you know. Yeah, they'll introduce one thing and then they'll throw off, you know, go off in all these different directions and they got to come back to this. Yeah. Well, and you can say like, OK, why does this matter? Well, just like with a recipe, I could take each of these different pieces and make it into a course, but it's not going to take taste the same as if if each of these ingredients because of the caramelizing of the onions and how the chemicals work together again as a whole. The synthesis of the whole does something that you just it's more than just the sum of the parts and and Paul could have given us. So, you know, what we've been looking at, we could contrast this with Paul just simply giving us a list. You were dead in your trespasses and sins. You used to walk in them following the course of this world and following the, you know, the Prince of Prince of the power of the air, the spirit or just and then say he was the spirit who's now at work and the sons of disobedience. You used to walk among them and we did too. When we were in the flesh, you carried out the desires of your mind, you know, of the body and mind. You were by nature children of wrath. All of those things sound like they're equally important because they're all main clauses. God is rich in mercy. You know, we could have just moved through all of those and made them all main clauses. If there if it was a bullet pointed list, you know, God, you know, being, you know, being rich. Well, if they were all in a bullet point, bullet pointed list, you couldn't really distinguish if one was preparatory or more important or, you know, you know, I mean, nothing would stand out. They're all the same. What would have any background? Exactly, right. They'd all be like symmetrical, you know, and how do I know what's the most important here or even where it's going? And again, we can talk about, oh, this is a perfect active participle and, you know, and have all the grammatical jargon and throw that on there. But like I said, I've run into students and even professors who couldn't tell you so what, you know, answer the question, so what? Why would he have done this and how does saying it this way as opposed to some other way make a difference? And here, again, it's the Lego's idea to me at least works really well, where he's building this complex Lego thing. And yeah, he may be building it one bit at a time because that's how we process language, just like the little kid that's in this happened and this happened and this happened and this happened. That's this undifferentiated fire hose chain of information. What Paul's doing is he's structuring it in bits, as preassembling bits to then connect into the next bit, which, which is here's where we used to be. And then meanwhile, back at the ranch at the same time, God is characterized by this. And then the the the connecting those two bits together is even even when we were dead in our trespasses, that's where the the previous bit was put together with the God bit. Then you finally have this. We even made a live together with Christ. And then you have this kind of parenthetical thought by grace you've been saved. And most of the Bible translations have an m dash there, basically, which means hold that thought like it's been inserted. Yeah, he has that. Yeah. And again, it's it's because you can do that in Greek and it's not a problem. These other translations will have parentheses sometimes. The point is that's that's kind of an interruption to make the point, but he's going to come back to it, which he does in verse eight. But to really capture, remember, he said versus one through seven are all one big complex idea. We've hit our first big idea in verse five, which is made alive together with Christ in Greek, the next these these main clauses, the main verbs all have the same preposition, the same kind of positional word with stuck on the front of them. They're prefixed to the front. So it would be something in English like with alive. You know, so we translate is made alive together because with alive doesn't make it doesn't make any sense in English. Yeah. But it kind of you end up kind of missing this this repetition of the with because then you have seated with or with seated is as Yoda might say and with raised in verse six. So you you have these three statements we've been made alive with we've been raised up with and we've been seated with and the same person is you know, and each of those three is Jesus. So instead of this being something that God has simply done for us where I'm the center of attention because God loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life. No, it's about inclusion into God's larger plan. And it's not because I've done anything grand. In fact, it's because I've done these horrible things. But God thankfully is rich in mercy and and because it was great love for us did these things even while I was dead chest passes. Now, this is interesting. So if you could, I mean, again, if you had an inner linear or even better something, you know, like I hate to keep referring back to the software, but I mean, something that you can present on a line view of this. And if you could actually look at it in Greek, you would see the the line of with this preposition. And of course, you know, Christ being attached to all of them. And again, if if you just had a way of looking at the text that way, that would be very striking. You know, it would be very noticeable. Like, like that must mean something because he's he's repeating this pattern. Right. And a lot of times if you're doing a Bible word study, you'll run into the another fancy grammar word, you'll run into a hapox legamina, meaning it's a word that only occurs once in, you know, in the New Testament or Old Testament, like it's this kind of anomaly. And so if you're trying to find, you know, as you do a word study, you try to find out how is this word used in other contexts and you're like, it's not no information. Well, part of the reason is because Paul made stuff up. I mean, he coined words not because they were they'd be unintelligible like Dr. Seuss and, you know, just making words up. But it's to create this with with with pattern that he essentially coined things. And it again, it works in Greek. There's there's creativity we can, you know, my middle school kids, coined words all the time, you know, stuff I don't know what it means, but based on the context, I can kind of figure it out. But here you have these the repetition here, building this together, even though they're all main clauses and theoretically could stand and they do stand on their own. It's a it's a compound clause just like that kid that came in a room. This happened and this happened and this happened. It's joined together to make one one big thought with verse seven purpose, the reason why the in order that statement in verse in verse seven or so that according to ESV, why did he do this? Is it because, you know, again, and I think in verses five to six is he's not made me alive together. You know, God hasn't made me just simply alive and simply raised me and simply put me in the heavenly places. It's about being joined with Christ. And this is about Christ being honored and Christ receiving the glory in Christ's position. I just get a ride on his coat tails and I just basically I'm only there because of God's rich mercy, not because of anything I've done. And it's because of what Christ has done that I essentially get to be with him and move with him through this process, being made alive, being raised and then finally being joined together with him. Why? Verse seven, in order that he might show in the ages to come, the surpassing riches of grace in his kindness upon us in Christ Jesus, that it's ultimately about God's plan, again, not God wanting to be nice to me or love me and wanting me to feel better about myself and my life and have an escape from my problems. It's about God's plan. And yeah, there may be these other derivative benefits, but it's ultimately Paul's reminding us about what the big picture is about here. So now we're at verse eight, which is the one everybody knows. Yeah, and that's the one we all have memorized. Just just a challenge for the listeners. How many of you can tell me a memory verse that doesn't begin with four? I mean, just think about that. I am thinking about it. Yeah, begin with four. John three, sixteen Ephesians two, eight and nine, you know, just for Galatians two, twenty, you know, yeah, verse after verse after verse begins with four. This is another one of those signal words. All the ones around T shirts, you know, they all begin with four. This this Greek word, I mean, it's almost always translated for sometimes it's left untranslated, but but this this Greek word gar most often translated for it's the one that's in front of almost every major memory verse signals that what comes after this is there to strengthen or support what immediately proceeds. In English, we don't really use four in that way anymore. We you go back and you read, you know, if you're reading Jane Austin or older, you know, older, older works, you'll you'll run into that quite frequently. I am going to the market for I'm out of for I'm out of milk. Alas, it's providing a reason and the motivation for doing that in in modern and I'll say American English, because we've destroyed the language in ways that make the British upset. The the we would more naturally do this kind of signaling of a reason using a rhetorical question, like why in what way how. And so if I'm preaching or teaching, and I come across a gar, typically, I'll just throw in a rhetorical question like, why? And then I can just actually read the verse for is by grace, you've been saved through faith. That's why or how so it's not always going to be the same question word. But those rhetorical questions are a more familiar way for a modern audience of flagging and signaling. This is here for, you know, that it's this for a reason. It's a basis for something it's providing support. And so ultimately, this isn't going going off and making some additional statement to those three with statements. It's actually bolstering it and not really advancing the discourse. So from a term that we talked about, what is discourse? And and all of those participial clauses and the the dependent clauses that are backgrounding and providing us a scene, it's more like packing your bags and getting ready to go. But you really haven't gone anywhere. Then you finally come to your main actions, which are being made alive with Christ, being raised with him, and then being seated with him. So those would be your three stages for you, maybe three steps, three steps forward. And then we come to this four statement in Ephesians two, two eight, that actually kind of continues in through verse 10. And that would be like kind of like going into a cul-de-sac. You're still kind of moving forward, but you're not actually making progress towards your goal. It's a side bar filling out information, telling you why we're doing this, or maybe it's pulling over to the side of the road to explain something before you actually get back on the road and keep going. And verse 11, where you have the therefore, in the Greek word theo, is the way of signaling, we're getting back on our journey again, and we're making progress toward that goal. And that's where you actually have this exhortation or a call to action. So remember, you used to be like this, but you don't want to be like that anymore. But let's go back up to verse eight. Why has God done this? For it's by grace you've been saved through faith. And then you have another thought joined to this, and this not of yourselves. It's the gift of God. We run into this, this not this, but this what what we formally call a counterpoint point set. You're told it's not this, but it's this other thing. Yeah, well, it's it's a different rhetorical. It answers a different rhetorical question. Right. So you seven we get this purpose in order that the coming ages he might show, you know, how much mercy he had or has the riches of his grace. And then why? Well, you know, it answers, you know, four answers a question, you know, for by or what's the reason well, it's for by grace been saved. And then then here it's not a it's not a why it's a how and and he's denying well it's not of your own doing. You know, right, it's the gift of God. So yeah, it answers two different questions. It's a second it's a second piece of support. It's a second reason you been saved is by grace your faith. And it's not of yourselves. It's a gift of God. When I was again, I don't mean to pick up my mom, but I mean, it's just great. I mean, just to say, mom's are all the daughter. Well, my mom used to say, I mean, I loved reading and and mom would say, you know, Steve, take out the garbage. I say, okay, you know, like, sure, I want to keep reading your book. And then it's like, Steve, take out the garbage. It's not a could you it's now a command, take out the garbage. I'm like, oh, yeah, okay. And then I knew that I was like beyond time. When it's like beyond late, I should have done that earlier. And that's Steve, stop sitting on the couch, get up and take out the garbage. So she was telling me what not to do. Basically, that's, that's, it creates this rhetorical void saying, well, gosh, mom, what should I be doing when in fact, I know exactly what she wanted me to be doing. But it's what's called a foil. It's a basis of comparison against which something that follows it is made to stand out, you know, stronger and kind of have more punch. And so by, you know, I could he could have simply said, and this is a gift of God, and left out that it's not from you and not from works. And it would have communicated the same basic content, right? But it wouldn't have had the same effect by having those counterpoints both before and after like bookends, those two negative statements. Again, that those negative statements create this question of well, what, what is it? And, and when, when you follow it again, it just kind of underscores, and it's not from this thing. And those are those are there in translation. But a lot of times we just kind of were so familiar. This is such a familiar device, we don't slow down and think about what would have happened if he had simply said it positively and left the negative things out. And that can be a way if you're reading along in your translation to say, what would that sound like? And what would be the difference of, of just doing the positive without the negative? Or just simply saying it's not of yourselves and not saying what the positive was? There's a little bit less information, but it changes how you think and process about it, process it. And again, what would what what would really be helpful is if we had some mechanism or some system or some tool and whatever, you know, whatever word is appropriate, you know, that would would help alert us to, okay, slow down. You're at this point, ask this question, you know, ask this interpretive question, think this thought, think about, you know, what would it look like if it was this and not that? You know, that that's what we have to sort of train ourselves to do, you know, to to read closely and think about what's here and, you know, why is that here and not something else? If we if we just disciplined ourselves to do that, or again, had a tool, you know, to to do that, you know, we would really become, you know, I think much better readers and better thinkers, better interpreters ultimately, because we're asking the right questions. I found, you know, this is just me now, but I found that one of the big hurdles, you know, I get this in distance and teaching a lot, but you get it in your Q&A or whatever. But it's, you know, what what's your advice for better Bible study, you know, and really, one of the big hurdles is just slowing down and asking good questions, right? Just asking good questions. That we're learning, what is that look like? Is it's tough? Like, where do you go to get a class on how to ask good questions, right? Or how to read more closely? Yeah, you know, slow down when you're reading. Okay, I can slow down and say it word by word. And they're saying more than that. But it's because people are trying to grasp and describe what it is that you need to do. And it's, it's essentially moving beyond just kind of the intuitive processing of what's there to kind of look under the hood and say, why did they do this? And the easiest way for me to think about that is what would have happened? Like, like, there's a special way of doing something to make, you know, signaling something to make it stand out. And then there's like the neutral, boring drab way, you know, and we can do that with intonation, you know, try being excited and then talk like Ben Stein, you know, the whole reason Ben Stein is funny is because it's it's the anti there's there's no, you know, nothing stands out. Or visually it's visually it's Bill Balachek, you know, that poster with 10 pictures of Balachek, they're all the same. And the many faces of Spock, I've been asking a t-shirt for my birthday for a while. But anyhow, what the resource that that I started working on when I started with with faith life is called the Lexham Greek, the Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament data set. So we talked about participles and the way they have the effective backgrounding. So all the places where you have regardless of how it's translated, where you have one of these participial clauses in in Greek, those have been represented both in the Greek text with this data set turned on or in your English translation in like a like a 50% gray scale. So it looks like it's grayed out, it's not it doesn't stand out as well. And then so what we've tried to do is provide a visual way for you. So when you're reading along in your Bible, you have that visual filter turned on, it's going to look at that and say, gosh, why is that not the same? It's gray instead of black. Or if it you know, if it's letters of red, you know, Jesus speaking in red, again, it's going to be this this grayed out text. It's to help you slow down and go, oh, this has been backgrounded. Why would they have backgrounded this and what is this? What is this connect over to? Or the not that, but this, those counterpoint point sets. I was trying to come up with some way to again be low profile, but make it stand out. We put X's on either side of the counterpoints and then checks on either sides of the point. So you can see that these two things that the X's and the checks go together with the check being the thing that they're drawing attention to. And so it lets you connect those two pieces and say, ah, there's a relationship here. Yeah, what Steve's talking about is to make these things evident to, you know, either somebody reading an interlinear reading their Greek New Testament or just reading their English translation, we had to come up with a set of icons essentially are symbols and and in some cases, actually playing with the color, you know, the gray scaling to alert people, alert readers that there's something here for you to think about. And, you know, at least in the software, you could hover over those things and get a brief explanation and what not. And so, yeah, that it was it was really a challenge. But before we talk more about that, why don't you mop up with verse 10 here? So we have another okay, we have another four statement. Yeah. So basically, we had that we remember we had like you're so metaphorically speaking, we could kind of summarize and say versus one through five a are kind of this, you know, packing your bags, you know, getting all of the stuff gathered up so he could have the these, you know, to get ready for this, this, you know, kind of moving our way through the discourse, the first step of that of that movement through the discourse and would be the main idea and in verse five B, which is the being made alive together with Christ and the next step is being raised together third step seated together. Why you have the purpose there in verse seven in order that he might show in the ages to come, Mr. passing riches of his grace. Why reason is given in verse eight for despite grace, you been saved through faith. Second reason in verse B, and this is not of yourselves. It's a gift of God. Verse nine is that kind of cycling back through that same thought, but providing kind of a parallel, not of works, still having the positive correlate of it's still a gift, not of works purpose in order that you don't boast. Then verse 10, you have another reason, you know, why has God done this? What's his motivation or his goal and objective? The reason of verse 10 is for we we are his creation created in Christ Jesus for good works. And then you have another relative clause there in the next part of verse 10, which God prepared beforehand. So this is describing the works. And again, it's not saying, oh, it's these good works, not these other ones. But this you get this picture of God has has redeemed us. He's seated us with Christ, raised us with Christ so that we could walk in these good works. And it's not specific good works as opposed to these other ones. It's it's the ones that were created beforehand. So it's more like God saved us so that he could get us on the path to do what he made us and what he foreordained for us to do in the first place that we'd walk in them. So it's in this kind of this picture of God taking us off this old path, the simple path, putting us on a new one that he's prepared for us and cleared off for us that we just we just walk in them. Yeah, he had something in mind and this is like God created us and he did all this stuff because he wanted his creations to not waste the life that they'd been given. It's that's kind of a neat neat summary there. I mean, he really does love us and have a wonderful plan for his life. If we just get a clue and walk in it instead of going off on the other stuff. I mean, it's that that's kind of the metaphor here. And then the the therefore in verse eleven is signaling because we've said we've had a couple of these reason statements ultimately versus well, verses seven through through ten are are hanging on those three big ideas of verses five, six or five and six of those three with statements. And then verses one through five, a are are hanging off the front end of those things. So what you really have is just one complex idea, one. I mean, it's it's three parts in terms of those big ideas, but versus one through ten make a really tight unit. So if we're teaching this or trying to do a Bible study, we really want to make sure that we get all of the pieces or if you have to slow down and to make sure we recognize how the pieces fit together. Yeah, well, I mean, I think this is a good example because you have familiar stuff in here. But I mean, look at all the other things, you know, all the other things around it. Plus, you know, as familiar as it is, I mean, we've just spent a good chunk of time talking about how you can think about this familiar thing in so many different ways. So, you know, this this is a good example of a familiar passage, people who are listening have probably heard this preached, I don't know, five, ten times. You know, if they're well, I don't believe you. Yeah, memorize parts of it. But there's just a lot to there's a lot to notice here that, again, unless you have some means to have your attention drawn to certain things that you're alerted, you know, that there's there's something really worth thinking about here. You're you're you're just you're kind of going to blow right over it. So let's let's before we wrap up, I do want to, you know, go back to the, you know, the thing that we've been, you know, you've been trying to create, you know, in the building and have really spent years, you know, doing it, you know, again, I remember the old days when it was, you know, sort of in its infancy and how do we how do we make this useful to somebody who doesn't do Greek or Hebrew and just with the English Bible and whatnot. So, you know, we've probably done on in the history of the podcast maybe four or five of these kinds of episodes where they're really about tools or about Bible study or techniques or something like that. And and, you know, this is another one of those like I announced at the beginning and, you know, folks, you know, I often get asked the question, well, what's your advice, you know, for for doing better Bible study, you know, for getting more out of my Bible. Hey, this is one of them, you know, to have, again, tools that will not just be something that you can sort of pull out and use for a few seconds and reference something. But this is the kind of tool that will actually change the way you read, you know, just just alert you to things. So let's talk just for a couple of minutes more about, you know, how this works and how people might be able to, you know, to get it, you know, if they're interested in a good Bible study tool. The challenge with language with language, especially if you're a native speaker, you may have heard people say, you know, native speakers have the hardest time explaining language to someone that's that's learning the language because the native speaker doesn't know why, you know, we just do it that way. That's just that's the way it is. Yeah. But we had the examples of like me just saying, because I'm on the show, or although, you know, partly intonation is another way of signaling that something more is coming, but to slow down and start thinking about how language as signals and nouns, content words, nouns and verbs who are not so much talking about here, but we're talking about conjunctions and verb forms and and all that stuff that just made your eyes glaze over in high school. Made my eyes glaze over too. I can tell you, Mrs. Williams would be having a cow if she knew I was a grammarian and encouraging people to think more carefully about how they speak and why. But I can tell you, it's completely transformed how I think about scripture. And I've had stories from like an ESL teacher that's used this resource to help students slow down because it explains why we do things. So for instance, you know, think about a coach saying, all right, listen up, or this student, you know, sometimes it's it's because the players weren't really listening, but sometimes they were listening and and it's just again to tell them something important is about to come. And or you're telling this story to your friends and say, we are going along and you'll never guess what happened. They never guess what happened. You're not asking them to add to answer. What you're doing is you're signaling that what I'm about to tell you is really important or unexpected. And I want you to know that I could have just gone ahead and told them, you know, whatever it was, but I want to make sure that they're listening or again, sometimes a good storyteller will will quiet their voice, you know. There are I mean, the the resource that Mike was talking about, there's an introduction and a glossary where I use examples from from just regular English. I don't think I talk about my mom so much there, but I do another another book. But again, it's just you do this all the time you do this every day. It's simply a matter of slowing down and one, recognizing it to kind of getting a sense of why did I do that? And then the great thing is you can be practicing not just when you're reading your Bible, but when you're listening to radio programs and and to to advertisements on TV order before midnight tonight. But wait, there's more, you know, the but wait, there's more is a way of connecting the two things together, you know, that more is doing that and but wait. But it's it's slowing down. And generally, I mean, is what's going to be the less important or the less surprising? What's what's already been before or what comes after the but wait, there's more, you know, generally, that's where they tell you order in the next 30 minutes and we'll double your order, right? All of that is there to signal. And the signaling is to get you to get your wallet out and get on the phone and order or get online and order whatever it is. There's they're using those signals to communicate to you to shape how you think and what you want to do. The biblical writers are doing the very same thing, but it's not going to cost you money. It's going to be to help you slow down. And again, like we saw with verses one to five to think back about where you used to be so that you don't forget about that. And he's not trying to get you to dwell there and think, oh, I'm a horrible person and do warm warm theology. But it's it's to put it in the context, especially for older believers to remember, this is where you came from. This is where we came from verse verse five so that we can appreciate what it is that God has done for us and how great his love for us is. Other things. Idea called a, you know, a meta comment where you stop saying what you say, what you're saying and start and make a comment about what what what you're about to say. So all of Paul's statements about, I don't want you to be uninformed or don't you remember that he could have just told you what he wanted you to remember. But instead he stopped and told you, you know, that I'm going to be reminding you about something. Those kinds of statements, if you're in biblical studies, you'll inform criticism. There's a whole wing of study about labeling these things and the labels are, you know, they're kind of cool. It's a disclosure formula. But why would someone want to use a disclosure formula? And again, this is where discourse studies can come in and say it's to get your attention to tell you that what's what's what's about to follow is surprising or important. So pay attention. Yeah, it's a speed bump. Yeah, I like the signaling, you know, metaphor. What the writers are doing in the text is they're signaling things to you all the time. And they, you know, again, to take your attention in certain directions, forward, backward, you know, whatever, this is how we need to start thinking about what we're reading, you know, in this thing we call the Bible, you know, that that there's there's something intelligent going on. Yeah, it's not it's not written like Ben Stein speaks. It's it's it's got texture and depth and and the writers are very motivated to affect our hearing and to affect our behavior. And so they've pulled out all the stops to do that. It's just a matter of us, you know, moving beyond that familiarity and slowing down and especially you can even have all these devices going on. But if they're familiar verses, you're just rereading the familiar and just like us for it is by grace, you've been saved through faith and it is by, you know, it's by grace, you know, it's a gift of God, it's not of yourselves. You know, that's actually formally marked in English as being for emphasis. It is a gift of God. It's an it cleft construction. You know, that's everything you do, but because it's so familiar, you can still just kind of gloss over it. But Mobile Ed course as well, kind of teaching through some of this stuff, if you're not afraid of Greek or if you've had Greek and you kind of viewed it as this hazing thing that was like, oh, I'm so glad when I got out, but you feel guilty. Like I wish I could use more. This is this resource was specifically designed for what I'll call the rusty pastor, the rusty Greek person who took Greek somewhere back in the wood pie somewhere back there. There's pieces of it. And this resource can really help you get some of those skills back. Or if you've been learning Greek and you've been doing, you know, like like Mike's Learn to Use series, if you've used something like that, this would be a great next step to to be digging in deeper. You don't have to understand all the words. You don't have to understand all the forms. It's just looking at these grammatical markers, getting a sense of how they work. And then if you don't remember what the symbols mean, that's great. You just get a hover, hover over it and you get a pop up glossary that describes those things. And you can move through the text, doesn't tell you what to think about the text. It just says the writers used a meta comment here. Meta comments are typically used for this kind of thing. And then it's up to you to say, why would Paul have used this here? Why would Jesus have used the truly, truly I say to you, another meta comment, doesn't mean before he was speaking falsely, falsely, falsely, I was saying, but truly, truly I say now. No, it's like that coach getting your attention. And but it's just one of those kind of King Jamesy things that we're like, oh, yeah, just read over top of it. But it's one of those signals. Yeah. Well, what we'll do is is I'll I will give Trey some links to some specific things that you've mentioned and probably mix in a few, a few videos that you've done, you know, to illustrate some of these things. But again, the purpose of the episode and having Steve on because this is Steve's bread and butter. I mean, he's just lived here for years. I don't think that's going to be a surprise to anybody. You know, this is, you know, really what you know, I mean, I've I like to think of myself as, you know, essentially, providentially prepared to do certain kinds of things, you know, to sort of live somewhere, camp out somewhere and make a contribution to biblical studies and, you know, always with the layperson in mind, Steve's the same way. So again, this is where he's, you know, been, you know, prepared, you know, by the Lord, and you get a little little glimpse of his, his little biographical sketch, you know, it's kind of the way he was taught brought up and then taught to think, you know, this is the outcome of it. And it has a lot of application, again, to just helping people whether you've had biblical language or not, just to be able to think about the text in a different way, and in a meaningful way, develop the sort of the mental muscle, mental muscles, you know, in in in your mind that you have to just ask good questions and just think about in more careful ways what it is you're reading or what it is you're hearing, you know, over the pulpit. It's just a it's a good it's a good practice. It's a good discipline. It's going to have payoff again, if you devote enough time to it, it'll it'll take you to the next level in your Bible study. So there's more, you'll learn how to tell a better story and better jokes. Yeah, there you go. Or at least you'll you'll never be able to listen to commercials the same way again. Listen to sermons because the pastors do this stuff all the time. They don't know why. So anyhow. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. Well, thanks for thanks for spending a part of your afternoon with us. And yeah, I think I think again, this will be this will be useful to people who take advantage of it. And even for people who don't, hey, at least you learned the lesson that there's a lot to think about and even a very really familiar passage. There's a lot that's going on here. And like I said, the writers are actually doing something intelligent. It's not passive. It's not, you know, some kind of mental brain download. And the writers weren't engaged at all. This is it's intelligent. It's deliberate. It's designed, you know, for the reader or the hearer or not just doing it for themselves, but it's for the people who are going to be listening and listening to or reading their words. So yeah, thanks for thanks for spending the time with us. Thank you. All right, Mike, as always another great episode. Hopefully our audience is getting the tools that they need to better dive deeper into the Bible and scripture. So yeah, yeah, we don't wait. You know, the goal here is not to have people be dependent on the podcast. Obviously, we want people to listen to the podcast over and over and over again and tell their friends. But, you know, ultimately we want people to be able to do study on their own. So that's why we do episodes like this one. Absolutely. Teaching people how to fish. Maybe that's what we should do. That's a good name for a podcast, actually. So anybody out there wants to start another podcast, teach a lot of fish. Just give me props, please. Yeah, there you go. All right, Michael, that was a great conversation. And next week, we're going to have an interview with Mr. Burnett again. David Burnett will be back on the show. All right, well, we'll be looking forward to that. Again, we want to thank Steve Runge for coming on the show and want to thank everybody else for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. God bless. Thanks for listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, visit www.nakedbibleblog.com. To learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs, go to www. Dr. M.S.H. .com.