Chapter 1: What are the five tips for hearing God's voice in Scripture?
Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Bible in a Year podcast, where we encounter God's voice and live life through the lens of Scripture. This is not a day in which we are going to be reading from Scripture, but it's a day we're going to be talking about Scripture. In fact, we're going to be looking at how do I hear God's voice in Scripture?
What are the ways in which any person can actually pick up the Bible and not just get the story, not just understand the stories, but really hear God's voice, like really know what it is we're listening to, who it is that we're listening to, because the Bible is not only a document, the Bible is a living thing, and it's God's living voice continuing to speak to us now. Here's some tips.
Three, five little tips, five tips on how to hear God's voice. And I want to start out with the first one. The first one is know what you're reading. What I mean by know what you're reading is a couple of things. First thing is know that the Bible is not necessarily sometimes we approach the Bible like it's a magic eight ball, right?
Kind of like just look for an answer or we approach the Bible like it's a book of inspiring quotes. So we just look for inspiration. We look for like some up being uplifted and then we read some stories and that we're going to get into the stories as we go through this Bible in a year plan. And like, wait, that was not inspirational.
And that does not provide me with a lot of direction for my life. So you need to know what you're reading. What I mean by that is we need to know that there are many genres. There are 73 books in the Old Testament and New Testament, 73 books in the canon of Scripture. And they are a mix of literary genres. And so I need to approach them like, okay, this is not all inspiration.
This is not all edifying. This is not all uplifting. This is not all those things that we like to think of when we hear Bible stories. The Bible, though, is a mix. Yep, some of the books are historical. Some of the books have a narrative that we follow. That's one of the things we're going to do by following the Great Adventure Bible Timeline.
We follow the narratives, but also there's some books that are legal. There's a legal book like Leviticus. There are stories that are retelling the same story. Like, for example, Genesis chapter one and Genesis chapter two tell the same story, but in two different perspectives. We also have things like Exodus and then Numbers that will tell a lot of the same stories.
So sometimes we have that happening when we're reading the Bible. We have to understand, okay, that's that. Also, there's things like Proverbs, which are wise sayings that belong to the wisdom books or Psalms, same kind of thing that belongs to the wisdom books. And it has like these collection of prayers. Then we have the gospels. And not only do we have the gospels that are,
like basically a history, but kind of like a biography, but kind of not like a biography of Jesus, a unique kind of biography. But even in the gospels, there are genres like parables, where Jesus tells a parable, which is not meant necessarily to be taken literally or not necessarily meant to be taken as, how would you say it, universally applicable.
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Chapter 2: How can knowing what you're reading enhance your Bible study?
And so they ask the wise ones, give us some of your oil. And the wise ones say, no, get your own oil. And if that were to be a universally applicable kind of a parable, you'd say, well, I guess we aren't supposed to share. But that's not what that parable is about.
so we have a lot of different genres one of the first tips to hearing god's voice is know what you're reading pay attention to the genre um another thing to be able to do is recognize that when we're reading the bible we are reading the word of god expressed in the words of human beings this is very very important for us the catechism reveals this to us that um throughout all the words of sacred scripture god speaks only one single word his one utterance in whom he expresses himself completely that's a quote from script from a
the Catechism, paragraph 102. But right before that, right before that, we have Catechism 101, because that's how numbers work.
And it says that in order to reveal himself to men in the condescension of his goodness, God speaks to them in human words. So in order to reveal himself, he can condescends to us and he speaks to us in human words.
In fact, the quote is indeed the words of God expressed in the words of men are in every way like human language, just as the word of the eternal father, when he took on himself, the flesh of human weakness became like men. One of the, one of the things that means is that, um,
The Lord God used the human authors of sacred scripture as true authors, making use of their time, their place, making use of their minds and their ways of seeing things in order to communicate the truth that he wanted to communicate. And so one of the things we have to understand is when it comes to
listening to the word of God or reading the word of God is that this is going to be the word of God, God's words, um, through the words of human beings. And we, when we realize that we can understand how we're going to continue to read, which means, um, the interpretation of scripture. How do we enter this number two, to have a grasp on interpreting scripture.
So the Catechism, again, so good, gives us the fact that the Holy Spirit is the interpreter of Scripture. But there are four kind of ways in which to interpret Scripture correctly. We have to be attentive to these four things. Number one. We have to be attentive to the sacred author's intention.
We have to be attentive to the sacred author's intention, which means we must take into account the conditions of the time, culture, literary genres and use, modes of feeling or speaking, narrating that was current then. So one of the one of the realities is if you were to visit another culture, another country or another language, you visited a language.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of understanding literary genres in the Bible?
And so I was regularly told almost every day when I was down in St. Vincent, you're so dumb. Um, there was, there was by teenagers. So you give them a break, but they were like, you're so dumb. Like, well, I guess, I mean, I get it, but why, um, And the reason why is because I didn't get their jokes.
And I probably came across as kind of being really boring because I didn't make a lot of jokes because we had a different cultural context. Okay. How does this apply right now?
It applies right now because we have to discover the sacred author's intention, which means that we have to do some scripture study that are some, you know, study of the culture and study of like, okay, here's what it means to me right now to read these words. but what did Matthew actually mean when he wrote these words?
Or this is what it means to me as a 21st century American, but what did this mean to Moses as he wrote the first books of Moses like 4,000 years ago? So it's important to understand, number one, to try to discover the sacred author's intention. Number two, and when it comes to interpreting scripture, we need to, Goya Catechism says, to be especially attentive to the content and unity of scripture.
What that means is, there are 73 books. They're all different. They're all different genres, but they will not contradict each other, but they rather inform each other. And so if in one portion of the Bible, it seems like, wow, God is really unjust. For example, one of the first books we're going to look at in this Bible in a year podcast is the book of Job.
And you can look at this and say, wow, did God just like visit all this destruction upon Job for no reason? Is God evil? Is God cruel? And because there's not really an answer to that question, In the book of Job. But there is an answer to that question in the rest of the Bible where God is like, absolutely not. I am not cruel. I am not vindictive.
I do not visit punishment needlessly upon anybody. He is a God of justice and goodness and love and life. And that's all he gives or the things that lead to justice and goodness and love and life. We only know that if we look at the scripture as a whole.
Again, even though there are 73 different books by many, many different authors, we read every text in context and in light of the rest of the Bible. Number three, so number one, sacred author's intention.
uh especially attentive to the content unity of scripture number three we read scripture within the living tradition of the whole church which means to say that we um pay attention to what the uh the church has said about certain topics certain scriptures um we are attentive to the fact that not only is there sacred scripture there's also sacred tradition
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