Four Wrong Ways to Study the New Testament | Revolutionary Bible Study

No context, no understanding of why that was written, but we got a numbered sentence, and we underlined it, and that’s how we fulfill the demand made upon us by preachers that we get into the Word; that you can’t grow as a Christian spiritually…it’s the Word. It’s the Word of God. It’s the Bible. Study it, study it, study it.

Now, I’m going to confess something…for all of us. Paul’s epistles don’t make a bit of sense, but we study them, and we read them, and we underline them. Revolutionary Bible Study has changed all of that. You’re about to find the story. You’re going to discover the provocation for every way, reason, every context, every behind-the-scenes crisis that caused Paul to write each one of those letters. You put them in the order Paul wrote them, and they rise up and tell you the first-century story. By the way, that’s the fifth way to read the New Testament.

Now, it is my unhappy task to tell you that there is a fourth way. It was invented by a gentleman named John Darby, and it is the most popular way to study the New Testament. And if studying Paul’s letters by length was bizarre, wait till you see what John Nelson Darby did with the whole New Testament, which is really bizarre. I want to tell you that he lived around, oh, let’s just say around 1840. That’s a good midterm time for him. He probably would have been one of the great mathematical geniuses of all time.

He found something nobody had ever found in the Bible. He found seven dispensations, and within each, he found another seven elements. For instance, you and I live in the sixth dispensation, “the dispensation of the church”, but there are seven churches. The seventh is the church of Laodicea, the one God spewed out of His mouth. So, John Darby said God spewed the church; the church’s age is over. Forget the church. It’s irredeemable. And we all believed him, and it became very popular in the Bible schools, which were emerging from around 1850 to the 1930s. His writings were so popular.

That’s why you have heard it said the age of the apostles has passed. He “dispensationalized” the apostles out of existence. But Mr. John Darby, when you got rid of the apostles and the prophets, you forgot to tell us what was to take their place. You never told us, and so we have been lost, left without a ship, a compass, or a rudder. We’re floating around in the seventh dispensation without a church and with nothing but your writings to tell us what to do. And folks, what John Darby ended up doing was starting chapels where everyone could sit around and…hold your breath…study the writings of John Darby. So perhaps that was the will of God, to get rid of the church, and we’ll spend the rest of the time until Jesus comes studying the writings of John Darby.

Well, folks, believe it or not, almost everything that is preached today in a strong fundamental church has strong overtones of John Darby’s writings, and this is what I would like to say. John Darby knew absolutely nothing about the order in which Paul wrote those letters and had no historical context for any of them. Put those letters together, find out that they are filled with personal references, filled with surroundings, filled with context, and suddenly you’ve got a revolution on your hands.

So as you read the book, you’re going to find a context in which Paul was sitting in one place writing his letter to another place; why he was in that place; what caused him to pick up his pen and write that letter to those people, and what was happening later to those people at that moment. Suddenly, we begin to get names, and those names appear again, a little later and a little bit later, and suddenly, we find out Paul was training some workers.

We go ahead, and we add some dates, and we discover, oh my goodness, Paul was transient. He was constantly moving. He was starting churches. He rarely stayed longer than six months, and then he left those churches. Unbelievable. How could these things be?

Then we have some context not only about where Paul was and where he wrote and what was happening where he wrote and to where and what was happening to the churches he wrote to, but we also find out for the very first time that even the history of what was taking place, the events taking place in the Roman Empire at that very time, were playing major influential roles, in some cases, of what Paul said in those letters. When you finish, you’ll have a beautiful tapestry. It has a beginning and an end.

You’re not only going to discover where he wrote the letter, where he wrote the churches he wrote to, what was happening, but you’re also going to discover something else that’s been totally left out, and that was what was happening between those years when Paul wrote nothing at all. Such is the letter and the next letter and the next. And such is Revolutionary Bible Study.

And this is what I would like to say to you. We need an army of men and women who will begin teaching the New Testament in its sequence. I foresee a New Testament someday that, oh, this would be radical, wouldn’t it? It would blend Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, then continue with Acts, but then it would stop right there, where Paul wrote his very first letter, which was not Romans, but Galatians, and give a complete context of why he wrote that letter.

Then we’d continue reading Acts until we came to Paul’s next letter, 1 Thessalonians, and we’d be able to pinpoint the exact place where Paul wrote that letter. And Luke would be helping us a great deal. Remember, he read that letter long before he wrote Acts. It would continue until the year 70 A.D., and we would have a beautiful history, and voila, the New Testament would be so clear to us, and those letters would be so clear. We might even put other Bible teachers out of business. I’ll say one word briefly.